Education
March 9, 2013 — Steven Hayward
This weekend’s installment in the Power Line 100 Best Professors in America series is Diana Schaub, who teaches in the political science department at Loyola College in Maryland. She was appointed by President Bush in 2006 to the President’s Council on Bioethics, and serves also on the Hoover Institution’s Task Force on the Virtues of a Free Society. I should also mention that she teaches in the Ashbrook Center’s summer
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March 4, 2013 — Steven Hayward
John H. Cochrane of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business is high on the Power Line Best Professors in America list, but his article on the interest rate risk to our economy in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Treasury Needs a Better Long Game,” makes it timely to notice him this morning. Cochrane is the AQR Capital Management Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the Booth School. But if
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March 3, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Well what the heck, we may as well make this a Power Line symposium, like Commentary does from time to time. Paul and John’s posts are right down my alley just at this moment, as I’ve been in the throes of the University of Colorado business for the last several weeks. (Concerning which, see the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley and James Freeman discuss the issue—and mention me—in this video;
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March 3, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
I agree with John’s contention, sparked by an editorial in the Harvard Crimson, that populist anti-intellectualism isn’t a wise approach for conservatives to adopt. But I want to add that the editorial in question doesn’t show that the conservative critique of Harvard rests on populist anti-intellectualism. The Crimson cites three conservative “attacks” on Harvard. The first came from Ted Cruz, who complained that, during his time at Harvard Law School,
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March 1, 2013 — Steven Hayward
We had the great Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo high on our list for the Power Line 100 Best Professors in America even before many of you wrote to suggest him, and as Allen made a tiny bit of news this week (along with a timely poem—who knew?) his early inclusion became obvious. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce III professor of the Civil War at Gettysburg College who first burst
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February 25, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Coincident with my mid-career semi-shift back to academia, the Power Line editorial board has been pondering a new feature that will highlight the best 100 college professors in America: the Power Line 100. And we might as well begin today. We’ll concentrate on tenured faculty only, since an approving nod from Power Line could well end the career of any untenured professor who is unlucky enough to be spotted by
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February 23, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
The Dartmouth Review, a publication with a proud conservative tradition, recently produced a list of “what we need from President Hanlon,” the College’s new president. It included items like restoring pre-matriculation AP credits, improving the pricing system used by the dining services, pushing back against the town police, ending the ban on kegs, doing a better job of monitoring of frat parties, and so forth. The list contained no suggestions
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February 22, 2013 — Steven Hayward
One of the more interesting exchanges I had with a faculty member in Boulder last week came over my offhand remark during questioning that I, and most conservative academics I know, tend never to use the term so common to academia in the social sciences: “normative.” I think my interlocutor wondered whether I was going to repair to some kind of antediluvian challenge of the infamous “fact-value” distinction that is
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February 17, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Special thanks and a shout out are owed this morning to the several Power Line readers who turned up Friday afternoon at the University of Colorado, Boulder for my lecture on “Is ‘Conservative Environmentalist’ an Oxymoron?” And kudos also to the university administration. There had been rumors that two different student groups were thinking about protesting my appearance, and perhaps disrupting it. I was fully prepared for the pie-in-the-face treatment—this
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February 14, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Last night, during a time-out in the Wizards-Pistons game (that’s NBA basketball, albeit at a low level), I heard Bill O’Reilly agree with one of Fox News’ house liberals that all of the small-ball programs advocated by President Obama is his SOTU address are worthwhile, assuming we could afford them. O’Reilly’s comment confirms that he isn’t a conservative. But it also helps show that conservatives are unwise if they laugh
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February 8, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
From Joe Asch comes word that the Dartmouth campus police are, in the words of the College’s Media Relations department, “on the hunt for a student who allegedly verbally harassed two students.” The object of this manhunt stands accused of speaking faux-Chinese to two Chinese students. If captured, what will happen to the lout? According to the Media Relations Department, he could face expulsion. Other penalties could “include a mandatory
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February 4, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
I am against Black History Month because, as argued here, it presents impressionable young students with a distorted, negative view of American History. The following tale is “illustrative” (as Chuck Hagel might say) of that effect and how I once tried, in a very limited way, to counter it. By the time my older daughter Laura reached Sixth Grade, she was on at least her sixth Black History Month. The
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February 4, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
February is Black History Month, as everyone with school-age children must know. Charles Cooke at NRO makes a strong case against having such a month. I concur. In my view, Black History Month operates to warp students’ understanding of American History and to assist those who wish to demonize America. I also believe these effects are intended by many of those who have foisted the present incarnation of this event
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January 29, 2013 — John Hinderaker
When I was young, a school sex scandal was when someone got some. Times evidently have changed, as reflected by two stories currently in the news. In New York, there has been an uproar over a former music teacher who has been in the “rubber room” for 13 years. (In New York, teachers who deserve to be fired, but can’t be because of union rules, are barred from the classroom
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January 12, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I’m late in offering notice of the passing on Wednesday of James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize in economics for his development of public choice theory. I was fortunate to meet Buchanan on a couple of occasions (usually Mont Pelerin Society meetings overseas), and long profited from deploying public choice analysis of nanny state madness. Public choice theory can be summarized in a number of fairly simple ways, such
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January 6, 2013 — Scott Johnson
In “The bubble at the University of Minnesota” I took note of Charles Lane’s Washington Post column based on the reporting of the Wall Street Journal. The Journal reported startling data suggesting the incredible administrative bloat at the University of Minnesota. The Minneapolis Star Tribune republished Lane’s column with these choice facts and figures plucked from the Journal article: At the University of Minnesota, the number of employees with “human
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January 3, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The Minnesota media usually luxuriate in national attention directed to local institutions or figures. Not so with the December 28 Wall Street Journal article (behind the Journal subscription paywall) highlighting the University of Minnesota as Exhibit A for the administrative bloat fostered by the higher education bubble. The silence is, as they say, deafening. The Washington Post’s Charles Lane picked up on the Journal article for a column of his
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