journal

A Modest Proposal to Promote Intellectual Diversity

July 10, 2012
By Robert Weissberg

As one who has spent nearly four decades in the academy, let me confirm what outsiders often suspect: the left has almost a complete headlock on the publication of serious (peer reviewed) research in journals and scholarly books. It is not that heretical ideas are forever buried. They can be expressed in popular magazines, op-eds […]

Academic Articles–Expensive and Mostly Unread

December 2, 2011
By Mark Bauerlein

At research universities and many liberal arts colleges, too, it is universally assumed that research is an unadulterated good. Research keeps professors fresh in their fields, makes them better teachers, and raises intellectual standards for departments. Who would disagree? In conversations about research in my world of the humanities, though, one doesn’t often hear about one […]

What’s the Point of Academic Conferences?

June 16, 2011
By Mark Bauerlein

At research universities in the United States, most departments in the humanities have a travel budget that supports professional activities for their faculty members. Most of it goes to help professors attend academic conferences and deliver a paper to colleagues and attend sessions as an audience member as well. For a department of 30 people, the amount […]

What Else Do Professors Do? They Teach.

January 23, 2011
By Jonathan Imber

Teaching periodically reaches the public’s attention, as in a recent statement by a group of scientists about the failure of research universities to train their students to be good teachers. The New York Times ran a report on a study published in Science that led its lead researcher to contend: “I think that learning is […]

The Big, Bad, “Right Wing”

December 14, 2010
By KC Johnson

Each fall, the NEA comes out with Thought & Action, the union’s higher education journal. (The 2010 edition is not yet online.) The publication functions as a clearinghouse for defenders of the academic status quo; safe from their position of dominance within the academy, they rail against their imagined oppressors. This year’s edition includes defenses […]

Let’s Pretend This Is Research

June 16, 2010
By John Leo

The “Cry Wolf” project, launched by a group of academics, plans to pay for research papers useful for liberal causes. That sounds harmless, but as KC Johnson argued in his posts here on the project, it boils down to commissioning scholarly work meant to reach a pre-determined result. Before any evidence is gathered, both the […]

The Wolfers and Bastardizing Academic Freedom

June 10, 2010
By KC Johnson

Academic freedom carries with it rights as well as responsibilities. The concept derives from the belief that academics, because of specialized training in their subject matter, have earned the right to teach their areas of expertise and to follow their research questions as the evidence dictates—free from political pressure from the government. Indeed, only through […]

Another Dubious Academic Project?

June 9, 2010
By John Leo

The indispensable Erin O’Connor, writing this morning on her web site, Critical Mass, discusses an astonishing memo from Peter Dreier of Occidental College and two other progressives seeking “paid academic research” that can “serve in the battle with conservative ideas.” The project, sponsored by the Center on Policy Initiatives in San Diego, will pay fifty […]

You, Too, Can Turn in Your Classmate

The campus police of the University of Illinois have issued calls for students to report “acts of intolerance” to the schools Bias Assessment and Response Team. It said, “acts of intolerance create an unsafe and unwelcoming environment for campus community members. Please let us know if you feel unsafe.” According to BART, bias is defined as “actions or expressions that are motivated at least in part by prejudice against or hostility toward a person or group because of that person or group’s perceived age, disability, status, ethnicity, gender, identity-expression, national origin, race, religion/ spirituality, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, etc.” Those reported to BART may be required to participate in mediation or other educational conservations.

More Evidence of Professorial Political Bias

University of North Carolina business professor Michael Jacobs polled 40 Republican students at his school and found that all but two believed they would be penalized for not expressing the professor's politics in a test answer. The professor claimed that faculty should pledge to respect ideological diversity and that chancellors who are too afraid to promote tolerance for ideological diversity should be fired. “One of my top MBA students, who I would categorize as moderate, recently told me that she will no longer participate in class discussions that involve social or political issues for fear of being branded by the ‘progressive police,’” the professor said. Read the story at Campus Reform.

More Risible News From Yale

As you recall, the campus exploded in outrage in 2015 when Prof. Erika Christakis challenged a Yale diktat warning students not to wear offensive costumes for Halloween. (“If you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away,” she wrote in a campus-wide email. Her husband Prof. Nicholas Christakis, threatened by a group of offended students, quit as master of Silliman House after getting zero backing from Yale. In a review of The Coddling of the American Mind in the American Interest, writer Aaron Sibarium says Christakis' successor at Silliman, psychology professor Laurie Santos, has a program for happiness that includes this advice:

Avoid binding attachments and obligations; these will stress you out and make you sad.
Focus on cultivating your own mind and mental habits so that you can be happy regardless of your external conditions, a self-reliant ray of sunshine.
Prioritize instrumental knowledge that helps to achieve your goals; in particular, learn how to manipulate others to your advantage.

Columbia’s Comedy of Errors

A comedy act by a former member of Saturday Night Live was shut down in mid-performance at Columbia University Friday night because students felt the humor was racist and anti-gay and made them feel unsafe. Nimesh Patel was performing for the campus Asian American Alliance’s charity event. One joke referred to being black and gay as a double vulnerability. So, a complaining student wrote in the Columbia Spectator, “If you’re black and gay, you don’t need a straight South Asian guy to point out that your life is hard because you’re black and gay.” You can read more at Reason.com.

Duping Kids With an Easy 'A'

“Only about a third of high school seniors are academically prepared for higher education,” according to the National Assessment on Educational Progress. Yet, their high school GPA scores would make one think they’re shoe-ins for Harvard. The “easy A” is trending in secondary schools, partly because the 10 percent rule has been implemented in many states, like Texas. That rule guarantees the top 10 percent of graduates of all public high schools automatic entry to the state university school system. Sounds good, but inflated numbers can backfire on the very students they’re designed to help. An article in Accuracy in Academy quotes Bailey Cato Czupryk, a partner at The New Teacher Project: “The kids are suffering because they fundamentally believe the signals that we as grownups are sending them about how ready they are (for college).”

In response to "Gillette on the Razor’s Edge After Airing Toxic Ad Against Men"

Men are fools. Men are buffoons. Men are fat, ineffectual, clueless baboons led about by their gonadal imperatives, slaving helplessly before even the slightest hint of female sexuality. We can only say, “Thank God for women and gay men” — who else would tell us what to do, and how do dress, and how to act, and what to think??!!

But wait. Men are also rapists. Men are bastards. Men are bullies. Men are violent, brawling, misogynistic, bloody beasts — eager to hurt and abuse the weak, the small, the helpless, and of course all women (“in numbers too big to ignore,” as Helen Reddy might remind us). Fortunately, here, too we have women and gay men, and now — per the commercial — many righteous Black men available to tell us once again what to do, and how to act, and what to think.

In fact, what we see is that White Men are Conveniently Rotten Stereotypes per the exceedingly racist Gillette. It would be ludicrous if it weren’t so deadly serious and weren’t so universally applied as Woke Truths to 150 million men and masculinity as a whole.

In the end what is left is outrage.

No, that is not me; that is not my brother, my father, my grandfathers, or my sons. That is not us. We are not the pathetic woebegone, looking sadly and shamefully into our mirrors, filled with angst and self-disgust at who we are and evidently – per Gillette and 4th Wave Feminism — have always been. What Gillette has produced with its 2-minute scold is misandric propaganda.

Tom Horrell, Kansas City, Missouri