Academic left
December 18, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Conservative Students "Swatted" In Firearms Hoax
At St. Olaf College in Minnesota, a set of dorm rooms occupied by a group of mostly-conservative students was raided on Sunday by Public Safety officers in search of firearms. The College Fix reports: Several conservative students at St. Olaf College had their lives turned upside down Sunday after a false report that alleged that they had guns and ammunition in their dorm prompted campus public safety officers to enter »
Once upon a time, Stanley Fish was a state of the art radical professor — "a scrappy advocate of multiculturalism, affirmative-action hiring quotas, campus speech codes and openly subversive strains of post-structuralist critical theory," to quote the view attributed to his critics by the New York Times. Fish transformed the Duke University English department into a bastion of "deconstructionism" — the view that literary texts acquire meaning only as a »
Why Do So Many Young People Vote Left?
Here are a couple of data points that suggest part of the answer, at least, is that they are remarkably ill-informed. First, a video in which students are asked whether they favor Medicare for all. Of course they do! Then they are told a few basic facts about the Sanders proposal, now widely adopted by Democratic politicians, all of which come as a surprise. ("What, you have to pay for »
"The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics"
Is this the dumbest thing I have ever read? It definitely is a contender: "Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics." The link goes to an abstract of an article that was published by the University of Chicago–God help us!–by one Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Department of Women's and Gender Studies University of New Hampshire. You »
December 3, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Divest from Everything!
It is commonplace now for the wokerati on campuses to demand that colleges and universities divest their endowments of any holdings in fossil fuel energy companies, but now they are also demanding that colleges divest from any companies that do business with Israel. That's not how the wokesters put it, but when Brown University's "Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Practices" votes to recommend that the University divest from »
December 3, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Law professors on parade, a guide
In his impeachment preview, Scott notes that on Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee will begin its hearings by taking testimony from four law professors: Pam Karlan, Noah Feldman, Michael Gerhardt, and Jonathan Turley. It's easy to ridicule leading off with law professors, and it's true that doing so isn't the best way to capture the public's interest. Logically, however, it makes sense to begin the hearings by discussing the standard »
November 28, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Thanksgiving? College Students Say It's Unacceptable
On behalf of the College Fix, my friend Kyle Hooten went to Macalester College in St. Paul to interview students on the subject of Thanksgiving. Is it acceptable to celebrate the holiday? The students' answers validate the adage that however bad you think America's universities are, they are worse. »
November 23, 2019 — Steven Hayward
This Week in Kampus Krazy
A few days ago we noted how the mild-mannered Arthur Laffer was shouted down and prevented from speaking at SUNY Binghamton, which gives the lie to the frequent complaint of the kampus klan that "if only you right-wingers wouldn't invite provocateurs like Milo and Ann Coulter to campus there'd be less trouble." But it is getting hard to keep up, as college campuses seem to be locked in competition with »
Kampus Krazy Dialed up to 11
Back in the sixties, and today, the left likes to refer to "AmeriKKKa." But increasingly it appears that the actual Klan-like organizations are . . . college campuses. It's one thing when sensitive campus leftists go krazy over provocateurs like Milo or Ann Coulter. But this week students at SUNY Binghamton shut down a talk from . . . Arthur Laffer. Seriously. A gentle gnome of a man who talks »
Northwestern to Williams: Hold My Beer
The other day we noted how Williams College was attempting to take the crown as the most infantile leftist college. (Evergreen State is permanently disqualified, because who can compete with that?) But Northwestern University is not taking the challenge lying down. Northwestern has one of the most highly regarded journalism schools in the country (though that is obviously a mark against it), and yesterday the Daily Northwestern student newspaper issued »
November 7, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Williams College Beclowns Itself Again
When last we checked in on Williams College a year ago, a group of students had issued a petition opposing a call for Williams to adopt the free speech/free expression statement of the University of Chicago. The petition was so bad that, as I said at the time, "you have to read it, not to believe it." It contains such gems as: "Free Speech," as a term, has been co-opted »
October 17, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Princeton today
Four years ago, we published an article by a distinguished alum of Princeton University. He documented the leftist takeover of Princeton, tracing it back to the late 1960s and the rise of William Bowen and Shirley Tilghman. He wrote: Over the years, beginning as early as the 1960s and 1970s, Princeton loaded up its faculty with liberals, socialists, Marxists, and other fellow travellers, and more recently, with people like Paul »
Attacks on Orthodox Jews spike; mainstream Jewish groups seem indifferent
Recently, attacks against Jews have sharply increased in New York City. According to a report published in May by the New York Police Department, from January through May of this year, New York City experienced an 83 percent rise in hate crimes. Fifty-nine percent of hate crimes in the city are directed against Jews, and anti-Semitic attacks have risen by 90 percent in the past year. On September 22, a »
August 22, 2019 — Steven Hayward
The Collapse of English Lit at Columbia
Scenes from the higher education apocalypse: I don't know whether Columbia University's graduate program in English literature is as premier in the field as it was back in the glory days of Lionel Trilling, but yesterday the Chronicle of Higher Education reported this: Columbia Had Little Success Placing English Ph.Ds on Tenure Track. "Alarm" Followed, and the University Responded The story is unfortunately behind the Chronicle's paywall, but when you »
August 6, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Mandatory Ethnic Studies Too Much Even for the LA Times
No one objects in principle to a serious ethnic studies program, just as sensible people support "multicultural" perspectives rightly understood. The trouble with a lot of multiculturalist projects and various identity-studies programs in schools today is that they are highly politicized and ideological. This attracts some students, but it understandably turns off many students—perhaps a large majority. Hence the demand of zealous advocates for ethnic studies to make their subject »
It's Official: Philosophy Is Lost
Has academic philosophy become as hopelessly politicized as other humanities? That's a question treated in a forthcoming paper in Philosophical Psychology entitled "Ideological Diversity, Hostility, and Discrimination in Philosophy." From the abstract: "We found that survey participants clearly leaned left (75%), while right-leaning individuals (14%) and moderates (11%) were underrepresented. Moreover, and strikingly, across the political spectrum, from very left- leaning individuals and moderates to very right-leaning individuals, participants reported experiencing »
July 9, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Who Needs Wokileaks?
I got a large response from my latest whimsical Tweet yesterday: But who needs it, since most of the scandals of higher education today are out in plain sight? Such as this announcement for a brand new "Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Minor" at the University of Denver, which reads like a parody: The new Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) minor brings together the best of what the University has to »
New Social Science of Note