Academic left
December 1, 2025 — John Hinderaker
This is the abstract of a paper published in the journal of Humanities and Social Science Communications, part of the once-respected Nature family of publications: 🚨BREAKING: @Nature has just published one of the most insane papers imaginable. In woke studies, “feminist queer crip theory” leads the pack in terms of derangement. But Nature has now embraced it, publishing an autoethnographic paper about “crip guts,” “queer stoma pride,” the… pic.twitter.com/MdprVLEMzR —
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November 21, 2025 — John Hinderaker
The Texas A&M University student newspaper published an op-ed by an anonymous teacher that is described by the College Fix: “The professor’s 1,000-plus word op-ed defends woke faculty and DEI-related issues, and urges students to organize against conservative political interference allegedly undermining academic freedom.” That op-ed drew a response by a student named Justino Russell. The student paper wouldn’t print Russell’s response, but here it is. This kid has a
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November 17, 2025 — John Hinderaker
America’s universities have gone around the bend. This video is parody, but is it, really?
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July 12, 2025 — John Hinderaker
Harvard University has been negotiating with the Trump administration over various issues, including foreign students. How those negotiations are going varies depending on who is being quoted. As part of its effort to mollify the administration, Harvard reportedly is considering opening a conservative center on campus: Harvard is considering creating a centre for conservative scholarship as it seeks to end its months-long dispute with Donald Trump. America’s oldest university is
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May 23, 2025 — John Hinderaker
The Trump administration has more or less declared war on Harvard University. Its most recent attack is the Department of Homeland Security’s revoking Harvard’s participation in F-1 and J-1 visa programs, under which foreign students attend Harvard. If that revocation stands up, it means that Harvard will not have any foreign students. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem wielded the hatchet in this case. This DHS press release describes Noem’s letter “demanding
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May 16, 2025 — John Hinderaker
In recent years, supposedly elite universities have been exposed as hotbeds of anti-Semitism. Some of them, at least, have been backpedaling, trying to restore their reputations. New York University may be in this category. But NYU experienced another setback at graduation, when a student named Logan Rozos turned his speech into a pro-Hamas rant. As usual with such poseurs, he pretended to be acting out of moral compulsion: Rozos started
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May 15, 2025 — John Hinderaker
The controversy over Qatar’s gift of an airplane to the Department of Defense strikes me as a teapot tempest–one more sign of how out of ammunition the Democrats are when it comes to serious issues. What concerns me much more than a $400 million airplane is the billions of dollars the government of Qatar has given to American universities in order to influence academia. I talked about this with Seth
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May 9, 2025 — John Hinderaker
I don’t think we have said much about the latest round of rioting at Columbia. Here are a couple of brief videos of the criminals at work: View this post on Instagram A post shared by AJC Global (@ajc.global) View this post on Instagram A post shared by @sabrasoulx These are some of the worst people in the world. Anyone who would riot and commit vandalism to advance the causes
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April 24, 2025 — John Hinderaker
A more or less open state of war exists between President Trump and academia. Opening shots have been fired, most notably by Harvard in its lawsuit seeking to restore funding that the administration has frozen. As I wrote here, I expect that Harvard will win that case. But that is a battle, not the war. At Legal Insurrection, my friend Louis Bonham lays out a strategy that seems promising. It
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March 29, 2025 — John Hinderaker
Universities, especially “elite” universities, are under attack for systemic leftism, anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. When it comes to anti-Semitism, Columbia has been the eye of the hurricane, with buildings occupied and vandalized, illegal encampments allowed to persist, Jewish students bullied and harassed. Columbia’s Interim President Katrina Armstrong, who ran Columbia during the riots in support of Hamas’s October 7 massacre, resigned a few days ago. I am not sure why. She
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March 23, 2025 — John Hinderaker
This story is so dumb it makes my head hurt: “Cambridge causes bitter row by linking Stephen Hawking to slavery.” Cambridge University has become embroiled in a row over claims that scientists including the late Professor Stephen Hawking benefited from slavery. The university’s Fitzwilliam Museum is holding an exhibition titled Rise Up, which covers abolition movements, rebellions and modern-day “racist injustices”. *** A catalogue that accompanies the exhibition also states
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March 21, 2025 — John Hinderaker
Money talks, even when you have a $15 billion endowment. So Columbia has acceded to the Trump administration’s demands to get back the $400 million in federal funding that Trump revoked over the university’s anti-Semitism. The liberal Wall Street Journal reports, sympathetically: Columbia agreed to ban masks, empower 36 campus police officers with new powers to arrest students and appoint a senior vice provost with broad authority to oversee the
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March 15, 2025 — John Hinderaker
They may be if they don’t change their ways, Victor Davis Hanson argues. He recites the familiar litany of how such universities have veered radically to the left, adopting DEI, gender, and anti-Semitic theories and practices that represent distinctly minority views. He then describes the hammers being wielded by the Trump administration: [T]here was bound to be a public reckoning. And now it has arrived. Congress will soon pass legislation
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March 10, 2025 — John Hinderaker
The Trump administration’s pulling of $400 million in grants and contracts has reverberated through the world of higher education. Harvard has announced a hiring freeze, although they don’t quite call it that. The language is turgid, but the point comes through: Universities throughout the nation face substantial financial uncertainties driven by rapidly shifting federal policies. Yes, we now have an administration that is opposed to anti-Semitism. Effective immediately, Harvard will
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March 7, 2025 — John Hinderaker
Maybe it was the outrage at Barnard or maybe it was already in the works: Trump administration yanks $400M in grants, contracts from Columbia University over antisemitism on campus. A federal antisemitism task force — convened by President Trump and including the Departments of Justice, Health and Human Services (HHS), and Education as well as the General Services Administration (GSA) — announced the barring of US taxpayers’ money from funding
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February 25, 2025 — John Hinderaker
Last week, I received the email below from Gale Primary Sources, acting on behalf of the University of California’s Center for Right-Wing Studies. It sought permission to digitize and disseminate materials created by my organization, Center of the American Experiment. These materials would be part of an archive that Berkeley will “publish and commercially distribute,” for the purposes of academic research and education on the “Right Wing.” I noticed that,
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February 1, 2025 — Steven Hayward
Well, well, well: We have reported previously about the race-hustling academic fraud Ibram X. Kendi (here and here, for starters), whose lavishly funded Center for Anti-Racist Research at Boston University came under scrutiny for not producing any research, and being mismanaged in the extreme leading to massive staff layoffs. An audit by Boston University found “no wrongdoing,” though it is hard to resist the ironic suspicion that this was a
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