Which is it? Do universities these days want to be zones where no one will ever get offended, or do they want to promote free speech and academic freedom with all their attendant risks and discomforts? The University of Massachusetts Amherst is just one place that can’t make up its mind. For years now it […]
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From supporting shout-downs and intimidation of conservative speakers to denying due process to students accused of sexual assault, stories regularly emerge that chronicle the liberal lopsidedness and lack of true viewpoint diversity among campus administrators. It is widely known that these omnipresent administrators – mid-tier staffers who occupy dozens of offices including diversity and inclusion, […]
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The English departments of Cornell and Harvard have dropped the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) requirement for graduate applicants—a noteworthy move that amounts to a setback for the quality of education and a win for diversity and lower standards. Insidehighered.com reports the Cornell development and includes a link to a candid statement from the English department […]
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While one kind of diversity is mandated by our governments, educational and scientific agencies, colleges and universities, and industries, three other kinds of diversity are forbidden. The mandated diversity is defined in “social justice” ideology as the diversities of race, gender, sexuality, economic class, and ethnicity. “Social justice” is alleged to be equal representation of […]
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Should conservatives establish a new university of, by, and for conservatives? The idea has been relaunched about as many times as the Starship Enterprise. I first heard it in the 1990s, but doubtless, it is older. Most recently Frederick Hess and Brendan Bell at the American Enterprise Institute cast the vision in “An Ivory Tower […]
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It is getting awfully hard to be a humanities professor. Or rather, it’s getting hard to be a humanities professor and still maintain the heady confidence in the fields that the faculty had 20 years ago. The daily grind of teaching, research, and service haven’t much changed, especially for tenured professors who aren’t touched by […]
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A recent article in Real Clear Investigations reported on a decision by the University of California, Los Angeles to require all professors applying for a tenure-track position — as well as any seeking promotion — to submit an “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” statement as part of their portfolio. Guidance from UCLA’s Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion is […]
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DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) is on everyone’s short list as a primary building block of any possible compromise between President Trump and the Democrats on immigration. Thus, it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the striking similarities between the debate over that issue and the equally contentious debate over affirmative […]
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Heather Mac Donald’s book The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture, was published more than four months ago, but I just checked Amazon, and it still stands impressively among all book sales at #798. It ranks #1 in two sub-categories of education. She appeared on Tucker Carlson’s […]
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The question of whether, or to what degree, applicants are admitted or hired because they are black or Hispanic (or American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (NHPI)) is a central and indeed indispensable component of the ongoing debate over affirmative action. Now, if a recent Classics meeting in San Diego is any indication, […]
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There they go again. Inside Higher Ed reports on a new handwringing study lamenting the “underrepresentation” of members of various “Underrepresented Racial and Ethnic Groups” (URGs) among engineering students. The study by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, funded by the National Science Foundation, found, as all such studies always find, that “Hispanic and […]
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Jason Riley, one of my favorite writers, is black and opposes racial preferences (for all groups) on the grounds that they don’t solve underlying problems, sow discord, and become a source of political chicanery. A few years back, he wrote a very illuminating book entitled, Please Stop Helping Us in which he explained why the […]
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What if the Supreme Court rules decisively against Harvard in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College? Will racial preferences fade into history as has Prohibition? Or will universities employ legally safe proxies such as social class to admit less qualified minorities? Let me suggest one resistance tactic not yet on the agenda but, rest […]
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Sometimes the utter intellectual hollowness of a program is most clearly revealed by its unctuous but unwitting advocates. A perfect example is “Fostering Diversity on Campus to Strengthen Maine’s Healthcare System,” which the University of New England actually paid to have published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The advertorial begins with a profile of Samuel Acha, […]
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}In the U.S., coastal progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans from “fly-over country,” are at each other’s throats. At least half of Americans despise their politically incorrect President. The results of elections are no longer accepted; “resistance” is proclaimed, and the aim is to overthrow those who have been elected, along with the Constitution and the […]
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The coverage of Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard College reveals as much about the state of “diversity” in the press, especially the specialized education industry press, as the trial itself does about Harvard’s practices. Inside Higher Ed I have criticized the bias of Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed’s editor and one of its three […]
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This is an edited selection of recent correspondence between Stuart Taylor, Jr., an author and expert on the Supreme Court, and John S. ROSENBERG, a lapsed historian who blogs at Discriminations. ROSENBERG’s article, “Harvard’s Strip Tease About Wealth and Race,” was published on Minding The Campus October 22nd . Stuart Taylor, Jr., is co-author of […]
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Civil rights leaders once dreamed of a day when Americans would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, but today a different message is being spread at the University of Texas and other college campuses. “Diversity” means singling out certain races for special treatment. UT’s extensive diversity bureaucracy […]
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Anyone who believes that the hard sciences could never capitulate to identity politics in the way the humanities and softer sciences have should not read Heather MacDonald’s report just posted at City Journal. It’s too infuriating, and the impacts could be devastating. MacDonald surveys the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and accrediting organizations […]
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If you’re white, you’re a blight. This past winter Yale University became the latest of dozens of colleges across the country to roll out a course aiming to teach undergraduates how to understand and counteract “whiteness”—a sinister force that, according to its official description, is “a culturally constructed and economically incorporated entity, which touches upon […]
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California voters made racial preferences illegal by passing Proposition 209 in 1996, but many university officials have ignored the law, especially at the state’s top law schools. Among such officials, it is a deeply ingrained belief that social justice demands measures to close statistical gaps between “underrepresented” groups (particularly blacks and Hispanics) and “overrepresented” groups […]
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Last year, Jordan Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto, made news when he refused to use the invented pronouns of the transgender movement as prescribed by Canadian law (see chart). Pronouns these days are a new battleground, as recommendations admonish us all that the standard English pronouns, which traditionally distinguish she from he, […]
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Colleges are now increasingly busy herding faculty members into racial equity training seminars where they are urged to examine and eliminate their white privilege, implicit bias, and role in maintaining institutional racism. It’s as though Mao’s Cultural Revolution has come to campuses everywhere. One such effort recently erupted into bitter dissension at Duke Divinity School […]
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Harvey Mudd College has been roiled by a self-study, informally titled the Wabash report, that referred to some anonymous faculty declaring that efforts to promote diversity in the student body had lowered the quality of the school. At first, the school tried to block publication or censor parts of the report, completed in 2015, but […]
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When I was nearing the end of my Ph.D. studies in politics at Princeton University in 2006, I was invited to interview for a job at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Midway through the interview process, I was asked by graduate students how I would change my curricula to “accommodate the needs of […]
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The College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR) has just published an extensive research report on pay and representation of racial and ethnic minorities in higher education administrative positions that ought to be a bombshell, documenting as it does widespread pay discrimination on the basis of race. The devotion to “diversity” that pervades […]
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Academe these days is full of code words. Diversity is one of the most popular, and has increasingly become an article of faith at American colleges. Its usefulness depends on ambiguity. While the public and media may believe it means openness to previously excluded students and studies, the reality is that “diversity” is a brazen […]
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Within our privileged, cosseted circles we have gotten used to not only thinking that we are right, but that we are obviously so. By putting down “straight white men” with gleeful impunity, we gave poor white voters everything to apologize for, and nothing to believe in…. Nowhere has this benevolent but ultimately self-defeating myopia been more pronounced […]
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Harvard has just launched a University-wide Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging. “Inclusion” is a solidly established campus buzzword. But until now, Harvard’s overseers and sprawling diversity bureaucracy have not thought it necessary to put the feel-good word “belonging” in the title. Harvard President Drew G. Faust has convened the Task Force to examine ways to help […]
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There was a time, within living memory, when the term multiculturalism was hardly known. More than twenty years ago, Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and in late July speaker at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, wrote a book with fellow Stanford alum David Sacks called The Diversity Myth: ‘Multiculturalism’ and the Politics of Intolerance […]
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