Education
May 18, 2013 — Steven Hayward
It’s about time we start turning our attention to law professors who belong on the Power Line 100 list, and we’ve got a long list of them. As with the rest of the field of finalists, there is no particular order, so we’ll start with Jonathan Adler, the well-known interior designer whose baubles you can find at Bed, Bath & Beyond—no, wait, not that Jonathan Adler! We mean the Jonathan
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May 15, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Hadley Arkes of Amherst College (since 1966!) would make the top of the Power Line 100 Best Professors list if we went either by alphabetical order or any kind of semi-objective scoring system. Hadley is the Edward Ney Professor of American Institutions at Amherst, and is also affiliated with our friends at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the Jurisprudence of the Natural Law, whose fine blog, right-reason.org, is worth bookmarking.
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May 5, 2013 — Steven Hayward
One of our regrets here on the Power Line 100 selection committee is that we didn’t get Yale’s Donald Kagan into our sequence soon enough to feature him before his recent retirement, which Scott noted here the other day. So we don’t want to slip up by letting the same thing occur with Pamela K. Jensen, professor of political science at Kenyon College, who has retired as a full-time instructor
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May 3, 2013 — Steven Hayward
One of my favorite scenes from Dirty Harry (the first film to “talk back to liberalism,” as the late, great Richard Grenier put it) is when Clint Eastwood’s Inspector Callahan meets his new and unwanted partner, Chico Gonzales: Callahan: “You from around here?” Gonzales: “Yeah, but I went to school at San Jose State.” Callahan: “Just what I need, a college boy. . . Get your degree?” Gonzales: “Sociology.” Callahan:
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April 21, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Herewith a second installment of my recent interview with Peter Schramm of the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, where he discusses the extraordinary effect of Harry Jaffa, how students should be approached and regarded in the classroom, and the Bowdoin report. About 7 minutes long.
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April 17, 2013 — Steven Hayward
It’s long past time to get to Peter Schramm’s place (not to say ranking, which we don’t have anyway) on the Power Line 100 Best Professors in America roster. Schramm, born in Hungary, emigrated to the United States in the aftermath of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 because, his father told him at the time, “We were born American–just in the wrong place.” You can read his account of the
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April 13, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Scott has done an outstanding job of covering the story arising from the NAS report by Peter Wood and Michael Toscano on Bowdoin College called What Does Bowdoin Teach? In his most recent post, for example, Scott provides valuable links and commentary. I agree with Stanley Kurtz that there is nothing quite like What Does Bowdoin Teach? Why? Because, as Kurtz says, (1) no one until now has exposed the
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April 11, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Have left-liberals killed liberal education? I’ve come to think so, and recent developments at Vassar and Bowdoin help confirm my fear. The indispensable Stanley Kurtz is on top of both stories. At Vassar, the subject of this post, he reports on attempts to block a speech by Alex Epstein, a proponent and defender of America’s conventional energy industries. Epstein was invited to speak by Vassar’s Moderate, Independent, Conservative Alliance (MICA).
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April 3, 2013 — Steven Hayward
The National Association of Scholars is out today with a lengthy (359 pages and 1,159 footnotes) report about the leftward decay—“decay” is perhaps a mild word—of liberal arts at Bowdoin College in Maine. There’s a backstory here, involving the relentlessly mediocre political correctness of Bowdoin’s president, Barry Mills, and how he caricatured a golf outing with Thomas Klingenstein (chairman of the Claremont Institute) in order to reinforce his comfortable stereotype
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March 27, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Many of you probably have heard about the shocking case of Ryan Rotela, a devout Mormon student at Florida Atlantic University, who along with his classmates, was assigned by his professor to write the name JESUS in big letters on a piece of paper and then step on the paper. When Rotela complained about the assignment, the college charged him with violating the student code of conduct and ordered not
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March 24, 2013 — Steven Hayward
The Power Line 100 Best Professors in America roster is necessarily going to tend toward the humanities, because it’s closer to our knowledge base and the humanities are more accessible to the general public as well as closer to the political issues that are the lifeblood of this site. But we certainly want to sweep up distinguished professors in the sciences and technical fields, too. A reader tip directs me
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March 23, 2013 — Steven Hayward
So, it turns out even Jay Leno has taken note of my forthcoming sojourn at the University of Colorado. But his job description isn’t quite right. In loco parentis is one thing, but it’s really not my thing. Still, next stop The Daily Show?
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March 17, 2013 — Scott Johnson
On Twitter via John Podhoretz, I see that Kay Hymovitz points to the demographic breakdown of the entering freshman class at Stuyvesant High School. Stuyvesant is one of New York’s specialized public high schools where entrance is determined solely by Specialized High School Admission Test scores: —Stuyvesant offered admission to 9 black students; 24 Latino students; 177 white students; and 620 students who identify as Asian. Hymowitz just says “wow,”
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March 16, 2013 — Steven Hayward
We’ve neglected great professors of English literature in the Power Line Best 100 Professors roster so far, but our first selection in the field, Paul Cantor, the Clifton Walker Barrett Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is so intellectually peripatetic that it risks an injustice to call him merely an “English professor.” Narrowly you might consider him a Shakespeare specialist, but once you begin to pull back your
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March 15, 2013 — Steven Hayward
My old pal James Huffman, the Dean emeritus of Lewis and Clark Law School, weighs in today in the Daily Caller about my University of Colorado appointment, with similar thoughts expressed also by Peter Lawler and Max Boot. It is an understandable confusion from the way this project unfolded, however, it bears pointing out that the university agreed with my insistence that they not set up a separate “conservative studies”
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March 13, 2013 — Steven Hayward
The news is official this morning: I’ve accepted the appointment to be the first “visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy” at the University of Colorado, Boulder for the academic year starting next fall. It was a long and arduous process with lots of uncertainty along the way about how such a project would work best. There has been a lot of criticism of CU for years for lacking any
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March 10, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Jeff Sessions, the Senate’s indispensable man, delivered the Republicans’ radio address yesterday. In it, he focused on one of his favorite themes: it is conservative policies, not liberal ones, that are compassionate toward the poor, the disadvantaged, the downtrodden. Sessions argues that conservatives need to push back harder against the smug assurance of liberals that their policies are good for people, even as they keep people dependent, deprive them of
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