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 […]

Angry Georgetown Prof Wants to Castrate Men

The feminist Georgetown professor who tweeted that white male Republicans who voted to confirm Justice Kavanaugh should die miserable deaths and then be castrated has paid a price, but so far, only to Twitter, which suspended her account. Georgetown gave her the rest of the term off, but in a limp statement defending free speech and criticizing unkind remarks, the president of Georgetown didn’t even name the professor—Christine Fair. Fair tweeted this statement: “Look [this] chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”

‘Accidental’ Loss for Yale Conservative?

James Kirchick, a conservative anti-PC journalist, has been running for a seat on the Yale University Board of Trustees and counting heavily on the class notes section of the alumni magazine to boost the effort and attract endorsements. Imagine his surprise when the magazine ‘accidentally’ dropped the class notes from the Oct.-Nov. issue. Now he must gather 2000 more endorsements by midnight tonight, October 1. The College Fix says, “Kirchick is campaigning on a free-speech platform that aims to rein in the Ivy League school’s ‘busybody’ bureaucrats, trigger warnings and ‘mob’ justice.”

Surprise! College Faculties Are Mostly Democrats

Mitchell Langbert, an associate professor of business at Brooklyn College, published a study of the political affiliations of faculty members at 51 of the 66 liberal-arts colleges ranked highest by U.S. News in 2017. Commenting at Bloomberg this week, Democratic stalwart Cass Sunstein called the findings “eye-popping (even if they do not come as a great surprise to many people in academia).”

Democrats dominate most fields. In religion, Langbert’s survey found that the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is 70 to 1. In music, it is 33 to 1. In biology, it is 21 to 1. In philosophy, history and psychology, it is 17 to 1. In political science, it is 8 to 1.

The gap is narrower in science and engineering. In physics, economics and mathematics, the ratio is about 6 to 1. In chemistry, it is 5 to 1, and in engineering, it is just 1.6 to 1. Still, Lambert found no field in which Republicans are more numerous than Democrats.

The faculties of Wellesley, Williams and Swarthmore are overwhelmingly Democratic, with ratios at or above 120 to 1. At Harvey Mudd and Lafayette, the ratios are 6 to 1. At the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, it is 2.3 to 1; it is just 1.3 to 1 at West Point.

For two reasons, these numbers are genuinely disturbing, Sunstein wrote.

“The first involves potential discrimination on the part of educational institutions. Some departments might be disinclined to hire potential faculty members based on their political convictions. Such discrimination might take the form of unconscious devaluation of people whose views do not fit with the dominant perspective.

“The second reason is that students are less likely to get a good education, and faculty members are likely to learn less from one another if there is a prevailing political orthodoxy.”

It is far too simple, of course, to say that professors of history, political science, philosophy and the like should “look like America” in political terms. What matters is that they are experts in their fields, able to convey what they know. In faculty hiring, affirmative action for those with conservative political positions is not likely to serve anyone well.

Nonetheless, the current numbers make two points unmistakably clear.

First, those who teach in departments lacking ideological diversity have an obligation to offer competing views and to present them fairly and with respect. A political philosopher who leans left should be willing and able to ask students to think about the force of the argument for free markets, even if they produce a lot of inequality.

The Men's Rights Movement at Yale

It was bound to happen. Last May, a 30-year-old Ph.D. student has accused the University of Southern California and Yale of creating a toxic environment for male students. Kursat Christoff Pekgoz, a member of the National Coalition for Men, is partly basing his claim on data that shows 56% of all college students are women, and 42% are men. He filed a “Dear Colleague” letter, a Guide to Abolishing Affirmative Action for Women explaining how to file a Title IX complaint. Now, some of those complaints are being investigated. According to The Wall Street Journal, “The government dismissed parts of Mr. Pekgoz’s complaints, including concerns about Yale Women in Business and USC’s Gender Studies Program and its Center for Feminist Research, after finding that they don’t exclude or discriminate against men. But it will investigate Yale’s Women Faculty Forum, Yale Women Innovators and five other groups or programs at that school. It is also looking into USC scholarships and fellowships that are advertised as being open only to females, and a Women in Science and Engineering group that excludes males.”

‘Slap a Zionist’ at Vassar

Some 400 students at Vassar received email copies of “The Vassar College Disorientation Guide” to offset the impact of the annual Orientation Guide. Much of the text was either anti-Israel or anti-Semitic, including the advice to “Slap a Zionist.”

In response to Ending Anti-Asian Discrimination at Harvard: Plan B

Hilarious! As a graduate of UCLA in prehistoric 1967, I missed all the cool intersectionality studies—hell, they hadn’t even invented the word “intersectionality” yet!—and the fun victimization/ marginalization programs that sprang up after I left. Yes, I got to march against the Vietnam War and protest against the “establishment,” but it was so intellectually primitive.

We didn't have departments devoted to studying the oppression of women, blacks, Latinos, gays, or transgenders—hell, we didn’t even have transgenders yet! But we were forced to study the dregs of western imperialism, like Shakespeare, Newton, Milton, and Copernicus. We didn’t see how it was all connected in a vast hurricane of power, privilege, colonialism, imperialism, and cisgenderism ( which hadn’t been invented yet!).

Thanks to Harvard and the Ivies, now we deeply understand how the world really works. Whew! I missed so much!

Les Hardie - Calabasas, CA