Academic left
May 11, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Partly because COVID led many graduating high school students to defer applying to college last year, this year’s college application numbers set a record. This may turn out to be a last hurrah for the old college model, however, as colleges are on the brink of a demographic cliff. The decline in the U.S. birth rate that accelerated during the housing finance crash of 2008 is expected to diminish the
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May 3, 2021 — Steven Hayward
This is the most sublime 70 seconds of video you’re likely to see today: And Democrats wonder why Trump increased his share of the minority vote last fall. (Aside: while the initial speculation was that Trump’s increased share of the Hispanic vote came from “macho” Hispanic men, the data show he actually increased his vote share more among Hispanic women.) Meanwhile, an update on our previous story about Braden Ellis,
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April 29, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Power Line doesn’t actually have—yet—an official Hero of the Week, but if we did, it would have to start with Braden Ellis, a student at Cypress College in southern California, who had the temerity to stick up for the police in a class presentation, indeed, suggesting police officers deserve to be regarded as heroes. His professor then spouts the ignorant nonsense that policing began and grew out of slave patrols,
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April 27, 2021 — Steven Hayward
I’ve been working up to a long piece here about the extraordinary political scene, starting with the premise that it’s one thing for Progressive Twitter to run the New York Times, and quite another when Progressive Twitter runs the entire Democratic Party. But that’s where we are. (P)resident Joe Biden has sold out wholly to the Progressive mob, full stop. Biden won the presidency (yes, I know—if he won) by
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April 21, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth yesterday at the announcement that Howard University (Vice President Harris’s alma mater) is closing up it Classics department. Cornel West and Jeremy Tate took to the op-ed page of the Washington Post to call the decision “a spiritual catastrophe.” West and Tate remind us: Long after [Frederick] Douglass’s encounters with these ancient thinkers, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be similarly galvanized
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April 20, 2021 — Steven Hayward
It has been suggested that “cancel culture” won’t end until it comes for enough liberals, though I am doubtful. In any case, it is bemusing to see that the latest victim of cancel culture is the aggressively atheist and hyper-Darwinian Richard Dawkins, who has had his “Humanist of the Year Award” from 1996 rescinded by the American Humanist Association. Why, you ask? Here’s the AHA statement: Regrettably, Richard Dawkins has
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March 29, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Oxford University reportedly is under pressure to stop, or at least curtail, the teaching of sheet music, musical notation, and even the classical music that was scored upon it. The rationale is that all of this is “too colonial,” and that Beethoven, Mozart, and music in general are “complicit in white supremacy.” It’s not just students and BLM groups that are pushing this insanity. In fact, professors seem to be
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March 1, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Lots of interesting developments in the world of the woke today—too much for one post. If you have access to the Wall Street Journal, don’t miss Eric Kaufmann’s article, “Academic Freedom Is Withering,” in which he reports on an extensive survey of American, Canadian, and British universities about aspects of the cancel culture they have unleashed upon the world beyond the campus. For those without access to the Journal, some
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February 24, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Up to now, the coveted title of “Worst College President in America” belonged without question to George Bridges of Evergreen State College in Washington, as we noted here back in 2018. But a new challenger has arisen, and has wrested the title from Bridges: Kathleen McCartney of Smith College. We wrote here last week (in “The Disgrace of Smith College“) about the case of Jodi Shaw, the Smith College staff
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February 21, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Yes, that is a ridiculous headline. And yet, as we noted here last week, what does it tell us about the present condition of America that the president of France, Emanuel Macron, has a better grasp of perversity and danger of our “woke” culture than the President of the United States? The New York Times has followed up on its first startling account with a report this week on steps
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February 19, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Back in November I made brief mention of the case of Jodi Shaw, a student life coordinator at Smith College, the fancy women’s college in Massachusetts that counts among its alumna Nancy Reagan. Shaw, a Smith graduate herself who is a self-described liberal, got in trouble with the Smith College administration when she went public on YouTube with complaints about the blatantly racist so-called “anti-racism” programs and campus atmosphere that have
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February 12, 2021 — Steven Hayward
The liberal wunderkind Ezra Klein has recently become a regular contributor to the New York Times, which will broaden the Times‘ range of perspectives from A to A. Still, it is fun to see Klein note the obvious—that if California is the Progressive model of governance for the nation, the results are . . . really bad. In “California Is Making Liberals Squirm,” he notes: California has the highest poverty
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January 18, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
George Will sees a relationship between Donald Trump’s lack of regard for the truth and the left’s post-modern lack of regard for the notion of objective truth. Of Trump, Will writes: He began his political career spouting birtherism and concluded it — he will not be back; like vaudeville, he is yesterday’s entertainment — raving about an election-rigging conspiracy so vast that it involved legions in many states, and so
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January 12, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
America’s institutions are using the invasion of the Capitol building by a relatively small number of extremists as a pretext for carrying out a purge of conservatives that they have long desired. The barons of the social media world are leading the charge, but others are following. The latest conservative victim of the purge is Rep. Elise Stefanik, a member of Congress. Harvard has removed her from the Kennedy School’s
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December 24, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Eventually I’m going to get around to thinking through and writing up my view that while misguided Millennials lean heavily progressive at the moment, the next generation of young people is going to swing sharply to the right out of rebellion against the stifling conformity of the progressive left that went into hyperdrive this year. In part I’m taking in the lessons of M. Stanton Evans’s first book in 1961,
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December 22, 2020 — Steven Hayward
It’s official at Nature magazine: if a published study goes against the diversity narrative and hurts someone’s feelings, it needs to be retracted. Last month Nature Communications published a deep-dive analysis of statistical differences in the academic careers of female scientists who had female mentors versus male mentors. Alas for the study, it found better outcomes for female scientists who had male mentors. The study was conducted by three Arab
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December 19, 2020 — John Hinderaker
For the short 2020 season, major league baseball adopted a rule providing that in extra innings, each team would start the inning with a runner on second base. Weird, I thought. But stranger still, starting at second base has come to our nation’s colleges. St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, from which two of my kids graduated, is passing out a flyer with helpful suggestions on how to avoid covid
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