Academic left
January 19, 2022 — Steven Hayward
The latest fad in college campus virtue-signaling is an “indigenous land acknowledgment,” in which a speaker or writer will preface a statement (though typically after declaring their pronouns—got to have the priorities in the correct hierarchy) with “We acknowledge that this university sits on the un-ceded land of the [fill in the local Indian tribe name here].” It has gone beyond pro-forma public announcements in many places, with faculty encouraged
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January 10, 2022 — Steven Hayward
It is hard to know which is the best descriptor of university “diversity, equity, and inclusion” enforcers: is DEI best thought of as an ideological protection racket, or as the campus equivalent of the Stasi? Gangsters or commissars? I suppose we should embrace the power of and here, and not think these descriptions are mutually exclusive. “Nice little academic career you have here Comrade Rubashov. Shame if anything should happen
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December 17, 2021 — Steven Hayward
One reason the left hates the American Constitution, and wishes to replace it, is that its embedded principles along with much of its explicit text is foursquare against the two main purposes of the left: class struggle and race struggle. Never mind the drive to abolish the electoral college, or the Senate, or admit new states to increase the odds of Democratic election victories. Just take in how the left
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December 15, 2021 — Steven Hayward
As we have seen, the left is in a linguistic crisis as the evidence builds that actual Hispanics in the real world hate the faculty room term “Latinx,” and you can sense that the left is trying to figure out how to abandon the term with a minimum of embarrassment. But wait—there’s more! BIPOC—the term of art that has been around for a while but which really took off with
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December 11, 2021 — Steven Hayward
One of the big stories in college sports at the moment is Lia Thomas, a trans-woman swimmer who is smashing women’s records as a woman on the Penn women’s swim team after being a second-tier male swimmer last year. It seems many—perhaps most—women on the team aren’t happy about it. OutKick reports: Even after a Wednesday team meeting where a source says Penn administration “strongly advised” its swimmers to avoid
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December 11, 2021 — Steven Hayward
I think we can now confidently declare that Yale is the most disgraceful major university in America. On top of the shameful behavior of Yale Law’s Stasi-like diversicrats in the now famous “Trap House” student email, we have recently learned of the fuss about a lecture from Dr. Sally Satel to Yale’s School of Medicine several months ago, based on her extended time living in Ohio and studying the opioid
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December 1, 2021 — Steven Hayward
The Chronicle of Higher Education today reports on the study I flagged here on Monday as a certain hoax and fraud. One of the authors, remaining behind a pseudonym, has come clean: Among the glaring issues with the Higher Education Quarterly paper is that the authors are not affiliated with the University of California at Los Angeles, as they are listed. . . The editors of the journal did not
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November 29, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Ever since Alan Sokal hoaxed Social Text more than 20 years ago, and Peter Boghossian and his two compatriots punked several postmodern journals with total gibberish just a couple years back, you’d think academic journal editors and reviewers would be on guard against similar hoaxes. But apparently not Higher Education Quarterly (a Wiley publication) which is just out with a howler entitled “Donor money and the academy: Perceptions of undue donor
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November 28, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Cast your mind back to 2014 for a moment, when the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper canceled George Will’s column because of this passage: Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges,
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November 22, 2021 — John Hinderaker
One of the dumbest aspects of today’s academia is the “trigger warning,” where students are alerted to the possibility that what they are about to read may be traumatic. Traumatic, I take it, to people who are pathologically unable to cope, which evidently is the standard in today’s universities. But now England’s Warwick University has gone one better. It has stopped using the phrase “trigger warning” because triggers are…triggering: A
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November 21, 2021 — John Hinderaker
From Canada comes this ridiculous story about an academic grant to study pre-scientific methods of preventing cancer. One could say that the only important thing in this story is the dollar figure: $1.2 million. Academic institutions exist in large part as slush funds to funnel cash into the hands of liberal constituencies. I am pretty sure that any humor in what follows is unintentional: A Lakehead University professor and her
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November 17, 2021 — Steven Hayward
The latest news out of Yale is that the ratio of administrative staff to students is now 1:1, where, as the Free Beacon‘s Aaron Sibarium reported earlier this week, two minority students are suing the “diversity” staff at the law school for attempting to coerce them into defaming Prof. Amy Chu because Yale’s bigots want to fire the overachieving Asian from their faculty. Because “justice” or something. (These are the
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November 15, 2021 — Steven Hayward
At first glance, it might seem the Daily Mail is going into competition with the Babylon Bee, but I think this is a straight news story, and at this point nothing would surprise me in these crooked times: Would you buy a political correctness police-bot? ‘Trigger warning’ device for classrooms and parties sounds alarm when it detects offensive language or jokes A new trigger-warning detector which sound alarms when it
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October 18, 2021 — Steven Hayward
We’re covered the disgrace that is Oberlin College repeatedly (here, here, here, and here, for starters), but there’s a fresh embarrassment to pass along. From the Oberlin Review student paper—one of those “you have to read it, not to believe it” stories: Male Workers Allowed Into Baldwin, Unsettling Residents Peter Fray-Witzer On Oct. 7, residents of Baldwin Cottage received an email from Josh Matos, the area coordinator for Multicultural and
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October 17, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Provoked by Charles Murray’s laid-back admiration of Harvard Professor Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit, I touched on the issues that seem to be raised by Sandel’s book in “The merit of meritocracy.” Sandel’s book is now out in paperback and the Washington Free Beacon has just published Peter Berkowitz’s review of Sandel’s book. Placing the book in the context of Sandel’s career and the tradition of political philosophy, Berkowitz’s
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October 14, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Scott has written already about the disgrace at Yale Law School (“Getting Minds Right at Yale“), but the story is worth a footnote. Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, who is a reliable weathervane of banal liberal conventional wisdom, wrote about the Yale matter in her Post column today, and apparently some things are even too much for Post liberals: Maoist reeducation camps have nothing on Yale Law School. . .
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September 11, 2021 — Steven Hayward
The left (i.e., the Biden Administration and the media) like to say that the greatest threat to America today is internal. They may ironically be correct about this. I’ve been wondering or expecting that we’d hear from Ward Churchill in the New York Review of Books or somewhere today, but it seems we’ve found a worthy successor for the fake indian: Will it surprise anyone to learn that Jackson is
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