As the twelve-year tenure of popular President Timothy Sullivan drew to a close in the Spring of 2005, the search for his successor was well underway. Under the direction of the Rector of the College’s governing Board of Visitors, Susan Magill, a political appointee whose day job was chief of staff for Virginia Senator John […]
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The overwhelming majority of American catholic colleges won’t be honoring public figures that flout church teaching at this year’s commencement exercises, according to the Cardinal Newman Society, the conservative Catholic watchdog group. Of the hundreds of men and women who will be awarded honorary degrees by the nation’s 225 Catholic universities this month, the Society […]
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The Faculty Senate at the University of Delaware is meeting later today to discuss approving the controversial Residence Life (ResLife) proposal for educational programming in the residence halls. The faculty should approve the proposal, partly because it’s a good idea, but primarily because academic freedom is endangered whenever voluntary educational programs are banned. Conservative critics […]
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[Read John K. Wilson’s defense of Delaware ResLife here] The University of Delaware Office of Residence Life has tricked another outsider, John K. Wilson, into believing that its proposal to run a highly politicized indoctrination program for over 7,000 students in the school’s residence halls is actually just a free exploration of diverse views in […]
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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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The punditocracy has offered up a wide range of answers to the question of what should be done about former Department of Justice legal counsel and author of the infamous “torture memos,” John Yoo. Suggestions have included indictment, professional discipline or even disbarment, and termination from his tenured position at the University of California-Berkeley’s Boalt […]
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Feminists Say The Darndest Things, Mike Adams, Sentinel, February 2008 Mike Adams, Professor of Criminology at the University of North Carolina – Wilmington, is nothing if not a provocateur; few other impulses can explain a book entitled Feminists Say The Darndest Things. Adams, as the title amply demonstrates, has an eristic disposition massively ill-suited for the […]
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The Moving Picture Institute and MindingTheCampus.com invite you to a public screening of Indoctrinate U on Monday April 14, 2008 from 6:00-8:00 PM. The screening will be held at the Directors Guild of America Theater and will be followed by a discussion featuring MindingTheCampus.com editor John Leo and David DesRosiers, executive director of the VERITAS […]
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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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[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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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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The Columbia Spectator, an accomplished publication by collegiate standards, reliably features the wackiest student op-ed pieces I see anywhere. They’re holding their end up with Tuesday’s “Is Professor Constantine Guilty of Plagiarism.” Guilty? Couldn’t be. The piece has been attracting a fair amount of incredulous attention; it’s not especially surprising; it’s another in a string […]
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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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Trustees face a quandary in trying to figure out their role in academic governance. As a matter of law, institutional responsibility is squarely in their hands. On the other hand, while few challenge their oversight in matters managerial and financial, they are routinely warned that when it comes to intellectual content, the heart of university […]
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FIRE is launching a new Campus Freedom Network site, to enable “students and faculty to communicate quickly and effectively both with each other and with FIRE in order to defend liberty on their campuses.” The press release details an impressive range of resouces: Drawing from FIRE’s vast library of educational resources, the CFN will empower […]
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Changing the course of American Universities is no easy task, concluded a panel “Liberal Bias on Campus: The Challenge To Restore Balance to Our Universities” organized by the Manhattan Institute at last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference. David Horowitz observed that “ever major university has been taken over by a chiliastic religious sect.” Samatha Harris, […]
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Rhode Island College received national attention recently when the student newspaper published a cartoon depicting Jesus as the perfect roommate complete with smelly feet, turning water into wine like a card-trick at the weekly keg party. Many people objected but the College was correct to say that they wouldn’t restrict the student’s first amendment rights. […]
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It is slowly dawning on the public that fake hate crimes, like the one just perpetrated by Princeton student Francisco Nava, are quite common on college campuses. Perhaps some aspiring academic, casting about for a PhD. thesis, will try to explain why these hoaxes – mostly imaginary rapes or fake attacks on black students – […]
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Consider the unbelievable obtuseness of Lawrence Bacow, president of Tufts University. Bacow talks endlessly about how he and Tufts revere the principle of free speech. Last spring someone at Tufts apparently induced New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in his commencement speech, to congratulate the university for its fierce protection of free expression. Yet that […]
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The National Association of Scholars has a question: “How many Delawares are there?” The reference is to the indoctrination scandal at the University of Delaware, which is very likely not an isolated case. NAS executive director Peter Wood has announced an investigation to see whether Delaware’s “education program” in student residence halls (in plain English […]
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In my last essay for Minding the Campus, I discussed how faculty indifference may have contributed indirectly to the establishment of the University of Delaware’s now notorious residence hall re-education program. If so, we should consider this a crime of omission rather than a crime of commission. This perspective on the problem either differs from […]
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Dartmouth trustee Todd Zywicki made several clumsy remarks in an otherwise good speech about campus orthodoxy. Speaking at a conference at the John William Pope Center, Zywicki compared faculty pressure to oust Harvard president Lawrence Summers to the Spanish Inquisition, called former Dartmouth president James Freedman a “truly evil man,” and said those who control […]
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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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Here are links for the majority of papers from the American Enterprise Institute’s “Reforming The Politically Correct University” conference on November 14. Do take a look; there’s much of worth here: – “The American University: Yesterday, Today – and Tomorrow” James Piereson – “By the Numbers: The Ideological Profile of Professors” Daniel Klein & Charlotta […]
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A lot has been written about the details of the residential life program at the University of Delaware, and the ways in which it has bullied students and residential assistants to accept regnant orthodoxy. The nation’s collective hat should go off to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for exposing this program, and for […]
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Yesterday I attended a fine conference at the American Enterprise Institute, “Reforming The Politically Correct University.” AEI commissioned papers on various aspects of the PC university from Peter Wood, Steve Balch, Greg Lukianoff, John Agresto, John McWhorter, and many others. They’re to appear in book form next summer, but many are available now at the […]
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Stuart Taylor’s brilliant rant in this week’s National Journal (“Academia’s Pervasive PC Rot”) says “the cancerous spread of ideologically eccentric, intellectually shoddy, phony-diversity-obsessed fanaticism among university faculties and administrators is far, far worse and more inexorable than most alumni, parents, and trustees suspect.” There’s an obvious explanation of why so many university watchers don’t seem […]
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At a conference on November 14, the American Enterprise Institute released two important new studies by Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University. Their research, part of a forthcoming book titled Reforming the Politically Correct University, verifies even further that liberals and progressives outnumber conservatives and libertarians on campuses, overwhelmingly […]
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More on indoctrination at the University Of Delaware. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) sent Patrick Harker, the president of the University, a voluminous set of papers on how their residence life program was run. “Hundreds of pages, without exception, are about how to indoctrinate students,” school of education professor Jan Blits told […]
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Sharad Karkhanis, professor emeritus at Kingsborough Community College, is a vitriolic critic of the faculty union at the City University of New York. He’s accused Susan O’Malley, another professor at Kingsborough, of seeking to “recruit terrorists” to teach at CUNY. O’Malley has responded with a two million dollar libel suit, reports the New York Post: […]
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