Amid the tidal wave of sexual abuse allegations against powerful individuals in politics, sports, the media, the entertainment industry, and in academia, one stands out because it has not inspired the kind of collective outrage that the others have. Ithaca College’s new President, Shirley M. Collado, was accused—and convicted—of sexually abusing a female patient in […]
Read More
Already suffering from white privilege and white fragility, some of America’s 260 million white people picked up The Wall St. Journal yesterday and discovered they were suffering from yet another unsuspected ailment—civility. As explained in a Journal op-ed by journalism professor Steve Salerno, “whiteness informed civility” gives whites the impression that they can conduct conversations […]
Read More
More than forty years ago, sociologist Robert Merton called attention to an emerging “Black Insider Doctrine” within sociology, the viewing of white sociologists as “outsiders,” incapable of understanding or conducting research on matters concerning blacks. Groups in conflict in 1972 wanted to make their own interpretation of reality the prevailing one. Over the years, as […]
Read More
Evergreen State College Biology professor Bret Weinstein is surprised. Indignant. Alarmed. Weinstein is the new Allison Stanger—the progressive Middlebury professor still suffering a concussion from the attack by the masked anti-Charles Murray rioters on March 2. Weinstein is also the new Laura Kipnis, the progressive Northwestern professor hauled up on Title IX charges in 2015 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
Democratic pundits are calling on their party to court working-class and non-coastal whites in the wake of November’s electoral rout. But the Democratic Party is now dominated by identity politics, which defines whites, particularly heterosexual males, as oppressors of every other population in the U.S. Why should the targets of such thinking embrace an ideology […]
Read More
The Knight Foundation survey, conducted by Gallup, of where the First Amendment stands among college students and U.S. adults has several interesting findings. One of them cuts to the heart of all the other issues of the First Amendment on campus today: There is a real perception that campuses are not fully open environments. A slight […]
Read More
What’s going on when a public university feels entitled to ask potential faculty members questions clearly aimed at ferreting out their political and social commitments? Such questions, reminiscent of loyalty oaths and the demands of totalitarian regimes would seem to have no place in an educational institution in modern-day America. But for some years now, […]
Read More
In my research as a labor economist, I discovered that the Lawton program, offering aid exclusively to minority and disadvantaged students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is operating illegally—Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits Federal aid going to members of certain racial and ethnic groups, and not others, as Lawton does. That […]
Read More
Several years ago a Korean student in one of my precept classes at Princeton told me of the shock and anger among Asian students at his expensive California private high school when college acceptance letters arrived in late spring. What really stoked the anger of many of his Asian classmates, he said, was the fact […]
Read More