Academic left
May 4, 2024 — Steven Hayward
It is tempting to quip that Columbia University has succeeded splendidly in bring ‘Colombia’ to its campus. But that is an injustice to Colombia, which has largely rooted out its corruption, unlike Columbia University. In any case, I got to reflecting on how perceptive leftists understood the previous iteration of the meltdown at Columbia University back in 1968. Not long after the police cleared out the campus back then, Columbia
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May 4, 2024 — Steven Hayward
“Lucretia,” our “International Woman of Mystery” on the 3WHH podcast, is not our only academic friend who needs to proceed pseudonymously from time to time so as to avoid a struggle session with our sub-moronic college administrator class. A loyal Power Line reader of some academic prominence who goes by the name “Norm D. Ploom” sends along the following query about yet another double-standard in play in the current campus
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May 1, 2024 — Steven Hayward
It is hard to single out the worst appeaser among the university presidents currently cowering before anti-Semitic mobs on campus, and trying to defuse the situation through negotiations with people who have no interest in negotiating. But I think we have a winner. Yesterday, Carol Folt, president of the University of Southern California, tweeted out this: I had a second meeting today with the same group from the encampment. We
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May 1, 2024 — Steven Hayward
I keep getting ads like these turning up in my social media feeds: I especially like the Yale person saying they read applicant essays “very carefully.” Probably almost as carefully as Stanford: Student gets into Stanford after writing #BlackLivesMatter on application 100 times CNN — If you’re applying to college, you can spend hours crafting the perfect admissions essay. Or you can just write the same word 100 times. It worked for
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April 29, 2024 — Steven Hayward
As I write, a little before 3 pm eastern time, it appears the letter from Columbia University’s leadership calling for a peaceful resolution of the situation, released on Friday, that Scott posted this morning is, to borrow the legendary phrase of Ron Ziegler, “inoperative.” That letter represented a de facto capitulation, and was, as Scott notes, playing for time, hoping the end of the school year would yield a dissolution
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April 27, 2024 — Steven Hayward
A lot of young conservatives today like to disparage “Zombie Reaganism,” without actually knowing very much about him. But is there any political leader right now speaking as clearly as this? There is NOTHING better to watch today than THIS ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/IGr1F2mAmq — miha schwartzenberg (@mihaschw) April 27, 2024 Though I’ll my mischievous suggestion for the day:
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April 27, 2024 — John Hinderaker
The kill-the-Jews rallies going on across America have resulted in casualties, including the leader of Columbia’s protests, now banned from the campus although it doesn’t appear that he has been expelled. Here in Minnesota, we have the entertaining spectacle of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion officer at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health being fired, and subsequently starting a lawsuit. On to that in a moment, but first,
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April 25, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The Atlantic today has posted up an article from George Packer that, as John Podhoretz noted on Twitter, you could have read in Commentary at any point for the last 35 years. The fact that this is appearing in The Atlantic perhaps marks a turning point in established liberal opinion, but will college administrators and trustees take note and do anything about it? It’s a long piece, but here are
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April 18, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Yesterday we noted the exchange in the House hearing with Columbia University president Minouche Shafik in which she was asked about the use of the term “folx” in Columbia University’s School of Social Work. President Shafik professed ignorance of the term, but this is very likely an outright lie, as the term has been catching on in academia for a long time, like “Latinx.” Here, perhaps, is a clue to
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April 11, 2024 — Steven Hayward
It is hard to know which ivy league university is the most pathetic, but Yale always has a strong entry in the weekly sweepstakes. At first I thought this demand letter from Yale students to the administration was a fine effort at droll satire (it’s the bit about carbon emissions from the Gaza war on page 2 that made me think this was an attempt at comedy writing), but I
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April 6, 2024 — John Hinderaker
On Thursday evening, a malevolent crowd at a public forum at Rutgers threatened Jewish students and drove the university’s president from the room. The Free Beacon reports: A Rutgers University town hall descended into anarchy Thursday evening as anti-Israel students chanted demands to “globalize the intifada”… “Globalize the intifada” means that no Jew should ever be able to live in safety, anywhere in the world. …hurled anti-Semitic insults at Jewish
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April 2, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Randall Kennedy of Harvard Law School is one of the progenitors of Critical Legal Theory (CLT) back in the late 1980s and 1990s. It was an early postmodern expression of the view that language itself—and therefore law expressed in language (because try expressing law through interpretive dance sometime)—is merely a subjective tool of power. It was a precursor to Critical Race Theory (CRT), which is a key component of the
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March 17, 2024 — Steven Hayward
In its typically clueless way, The New Yorker is hot on the topic of whether the liberal arts—and especially classical education—have gone conservative. (The article is titled, “Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?”) Better break out the smelling salts. You’d think this is an easy question. The left have attacked or hollowed out the liberal arts on campus, and the only people who take the classics seriously, and on their
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March 3, 2024 — Steven Hayward
I’ve been quipping for a while that it must be awfully depressing these days for the climate cultists heading out to block a road or yell at some politician, only to find the pro-Hamas anti-Semites got up earlier than they did and beat them to it. But some climatistas are not taking this lying down—that is until someone makes them lie down, as in this clip from Harvard: BREAKING: we
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March 1, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Bryan Caplan, professor of economics in George Mason University’s excellent economics department, has a long article out today with the James Martin Center about the attempt to impose a mandatory “Just Societies” course for all students at George Mason starting next fall, and the course is a total ideological DEI wokefest. He also has a separate Substack article that goes into lengthy detail. Partly because Caplan blew the whistle on
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February 29, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Liberals really are extremely fragile people. This helps explain why they need “safe spaces” with cuddly stuffed animals, grief counselors, and warning labels against “microaggressions.” The latest evidence is a completely unironic and totally un-self-aware piece in the New York Times about the anguish of liberal law professors having to teach constitutional law at a time when the Supreme Court leans right. It’s so upsetting that some professors are moved
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February 27, 2024 — Steven Hayward
This fall will mark the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the famous “free speech” movement at UC Berkeley. You can find my account of it, written in the aftermath of the Milo Yiannopoulos riot of February, 2017, which I was present for, at this link. The Yiannopoulos riot was bad enough, but last night there was a sequel at Berkeley. As loyal readers may know, I am not around
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