Candace de Russy’s January 7 post here, “Hate-America Sociology,” understandably attracted a lot of attention. It cited a 10-question Soc 101 quiz at an unnamed eastern college, complete with accusatory leftish questions and some simple-minded answers by a student who drew a mark of 100 for agreeing with the politics of his professor. A few […]
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A Chicago study on “Assessing the Impact of Eliminating Affirmative Action in Higher Education” comes to this conclusion: black and Hispanic representation at all 4-year colleges is predicted to decline modestly—by 2%—if race-neutral college admissions policies are mandated nationwide. However, race-neutral admissions are predicted to decrease minority representation at the most selective 4-year institutions by […]
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In an unintentional, if powerful, commentary on the grip that groupthink has on some quarters of the economy, LeMoyne professor Dolores Byrnes informed readers of the NEA’s Thought & Action that “some professors of education recently told me during a department retreat: ‘We are all Marxist, it doesn’t even need to be said.’” No wonder […]
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KC Johnson beat me to the punch in registering doubts and concerns about the letter University of Minnesota General Counsel Mark B. Rotenberg has written to Adam Kissel at FIRE regarding the education department’s review of the curriculum. Kissel and FIRE are to be praised for having wrought out of the university a letter assuring […]
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At InsideHigherEd.com, Richard Whitmire has an interesting discussion entitled “Soon-to-Be Open Secret” on the delicacies of the “boy problem” on college campuses. The problem itself is simple. An achievement gap between male and female high school students has opened, and it’s pushing college enrollments nationally toward 60-40 proportions (in many schools and systems, women already […]
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KC Johnson has spoken well of the Minnesota teacher education initiative, and his analysis of the op-ed by the dean of the College of Education, Jean Quam, identified the thorough disregard of claims of indoctrination made by columnist Katherine Kersten in the Star-Tribune. Quam’s defense is so feeble and misleading, in fact, that it deserves […]
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Last Sunday, the New York Times’ “Ethicist” column featured a letter from a lawyer loath to hire internship applicants that belonged to the Federalist society. Randy Cohen, the “Ethicist” suggested that disqualification on the grounds of their membership was unfair. The lawyer went ahead and rejected all applicants who were members anyway. Ilya Somin, at […]
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While this year has become best known as the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock, it was also forty years ago that the first African-American Studies department was established, at San Francisco State University. Forty-one fall semesters later, there are hundreds of such departments. Has what they teach evolved with the march of time? What should the […]
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Illinois, the state where Senate seats are sometimes sold, has now scandalized higher education with the revelation that hundreds of applicants to the University of Illinois were placed on a special “clout” list, many receiving favorable treatment. According to a series of investigative reports by The Chicago Tribune, state legislators, university trustees, and former Gov. […]
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By John McWhorter Debra Dickerson said of the Cornell students who took over Willard Straight Hall at Cornell in 1969, “What they actually wanted was beyond the white man’s power to bestow.” Even after they were granted a Black Studies department as they demanded, a core of black students remained infuriated at Cornell as still […]
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This is a letter to the editor of the Cornell Daily Sun, responding to a Sun report today about a campus Christian group apparently violating anti-discrimination rules by not allowing a gay student to become a leader. To the Editor: Alex Berg (“Outcry Erupts from Alleged Homophobia” April 23) seems to think the Chris Donohoe […]
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Several years ago, in a seminal Chronicle of Higher Education essay, Mark Bauerlein lamented a campus in which “the simple trappings of deliberation make academics think that they’ve reached an opinion through reasoned debate—instead of, in part, through an irrational social dynamic. The opinion takes on the status of a norm. Extreme views appear to […]
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The Kellogg Foundation is funding a survey of four college campuses by Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute and the Educational Testing Service to examine how students of color’s experiences on college campuses impact the notorious black-white achievement gap. Namely, it will examine how the students feel “welcome and unwelcome, respected and disrespected, supported and unsupported, […]
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Whenever David Horowitz issues a broadside against leftwing bias in higher education, academics have a ready reply. He packs his sallies with pointed illustrations but the record is feeble, they say. He cherry-picks evidence and magnifies a few bad cases into an epidemic of malfeasance. He relies on indirect documents (for instance, course descriptions) but […]
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By Anonymous In March 2008 I reluctantly made the decision to leave academia. After six years in graduate school and three years as a professor, it was clear to me that the discrimination I faced was so pervasive that there would be no escaping it in the years ahead. Don’t misunderstand what I write in […]
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In every discussion of left-wing bias on college campuses, a good portion of faculty defenders come to the table with a blunt contention. There is NO bias, they insist. Sure, most humanities and social science faculty register Democrat, but it doesn’t much affect teaching, and besides, campuses have their fair share of conservatism and libertarianism […]
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Aggressive diversity programs on campus now come with harmless-sounding names such as “sustainability,” “social justice” and the need for good “dispositions.” The latest in this series is “intergroup dialogue.” Who can oppose “intergroup dialogue”? Many of us, if the real meaning of the term is excavated. “Intergroup dialogue” is the new euphemism for the oppression […]
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As Charlotte Allen points out here, required summer reading for college freshmen is often highly politicized. That goes double for freshmen introductory writing courses and textbooks. Teaching composition to new students ought to be an ideology-free effort, but for many years on many campuses it hasn’t been. For example, take Ways of Reading: an Anthology […]
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Several years ago a Korean-American student in one of my politics classes at Princeton described the reaction of his Asian classmates in the California private school he attended when the college acceptance and rejection letters arrived in the mail the spring of their senior year. A female Black student, he explained, had applied to more […]
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Substantial opposition to the proposed new version of the University of Delaware indoctrination program turned up at Monday’s meeting of the faculty senate. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the senate will take up the issue again next week and the indoctrinators may still win. Professor Jan Blits of the Delaware affiliate of […]
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The creators of the notorious indoctrination program at the University of Delaware are back with a new version of their astonishingly coercive plan. Call it Indoctrination II. This time around, they pose as respectful and hovering parental substitutes, promising to do something about student homesickness, offering helpful advice on how to study for final exams, […]
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Don’t miss Peter Wood’s remarkable speech on the crisis in the universities, delivered April 19 to the National Association of Scholars affiliate in Minnesota. The speech is featured above in commentary. Wood, NAS executive director, neatly encapsulates the crisis in a single sentence, discussing “how higher education one ordered by a small number of abiding […]
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Last night the Manhattan Institute sponsored a screening of Evan Coyne Maloney’s brilliant documentary, Indoctrinate U. Some 400-500 people attended, laughing in all the right places. (It’s hard to explain why a film about campus repression is so funny, but it is.) Not one campus administrator (on or off camera) even tries to answer any […]
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The Chronicle of Higher Education began a recent report on perceptions of politics in the academy “the older Americans are, and the less time they have spent on a college campus, the more likely they are to believe that professors are politically biased.” This framing minimized the subsequent revelation that 29 percent of respondents aged […]
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The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the National Association of Scholars (NAS), two groups conspicuously devoted to protecting traditional freedom on campus, have both come under attack as right-wing organizations. The criticism of FIRE came in a distorted entry on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. The Wikipedia entry, which has since been corrected, […]
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In recent years, conservative critics of academia have had few better friends than Ward Churchill, the Group of 88, MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins (who fled Larry Summers talk about variations in intelligence between genders), and a few other hot-headed leftists on campus who made headlines. They proved the point about ideological bias every time […]
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In 2005 Columbia University came under fire over allegations of anti-Israel bias among professors teaching in its Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department. Columbia’s response was to set up… yet another department that already seems tilted in the direction of anti-Israel bias. According to the New York Sun, Columbia appointed as new director […]
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[Indoctrinate U, a documentary by Evan Coyne Maloney on the state of intellectual freedom at American universities, premiered at the Kennedy Center in September 2007 and has screened in multiple locations since. Peter Berkowitz, writing in The Wall Street Journal, called Indoctrinate U a “riveting documentary about the war on free speech and individual rights […]
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Against repeated accusations of leftwing bias on campus, professors have mounted many rejoinders disputing one or another item in the indictment. They claim that the disproportion isn’t as high as reports say. Or that reports focus on small pockets (women’s studies, etc.). Or that party registration is a crude indicator. Or that conservatives are too […]
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Nestled away in the heart of one of the most conservative Midwestern states is a publicly funded university radically at odds with its surroundings. Universities are in theory, marketplaces for ideas and ideologies; centers for free expression as well as vigorous and informed debate; refuges for free and independent thought. But if the taxpayers who […]
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