Academic left
January 30, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Sometime back around 1990, I was privileged to get to spend some time with Jaime Escalante (d. 2010), the Bolivian-born high school math teacher whose compelling story was made into a feature film, Stand and Deliver, which featured Edward James Olmos playing Escalante. Escalante had become nationally famous in the 1980s when 18 of his hispanic students from a low-income east Los Angeles neighborhood scored highly on the AP calculus
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January 28, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Several years ago, I saw a cartoon that went something like this: a liberal college administrator tells a conservative speaker that his event is being canceled because there have been threats of violence. The conservative asks, who are the threats coming from? and the liberal administrator answers, “Us.” This is, in fact, one of the Left’s favorite ploys to shut down conservative speech. It happened at Florida’s New College last
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January 24, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Matthew M. Wielicki, professor of geosciences at the University of Alabama, has announced in a Twitter thread that he has decided to leave the university, and some of his reasons are becoming depressingly frequent in the sciences: Why I am leaving the University of Alabama: Some internet sleuths have discovered that I will be leaving my faculty position in the Department of Geological Sciences after this semester so I thought
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January 18, 2023 — Steven Hayward
News item: Stanford University withdraws its “Harmful Language” list after it received widespread publicity—and universal ridicule. But other universities are quietly imposing similar “language guidance” albeit without high-profile master lists that would expose them to the withering laughter and contempt they deserve. News item: The Biden Administration rushes to reassure Americans that there is “no plan” to ban natural gas stoves. This is a lie, of course. Lots of progressive
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December 23, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Stanford has issued a 75-page report on its discrimination against Jews in the 1950s. The report resulted in an apology for its past practices by University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne. In a terrific Minding the Campus article, John Rosenberg, who writes at Discriminations, asks how much things at Stanford have really changed: Someone should ask him why he believes the policy of restricting the number of Jews was wrong. Does he
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December 20, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Perhaps you’ve seen the story on the Wall Street Journal editorial page today (or in some other outlet where it is booming this morning) about Stanford University’s “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative,” which reads like a parody of our idiotic woke university culture today. But no—Stanford employed a task force that worked for months to advocate that no one on campus use the word “American” because “This term often refers
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December 14, 2022 — Steven Hayward
I’ve written at some length about the suicide of academic history (which I’m going to expand and turn into a longer journal article eventually), but for now take in the latest grim statistics from the latest issue of the Middle West Review, where editor-in-chief John Lauck fills in some of the numbers in “The Ongoing History Crisis“: Around the Midwest, the news from history departments is grim, even at larger
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November 28, 2022 — Steven Hayward
The woke diversicrats at the University of Massachusetts Boston have issued drafts of a new “mission statement” and “vision statement” for the campus (because why just limit yourself to a mission statement when you can have a vision statement too). They are as follows: Mission statement draft: As an academic community of global and local citizens, we are committed to becoming an anti-racist and health-promoting institution that honors and uplifts
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October 1, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Normally we’ll just run The Daily Chart on weekdays, but the chart that the Wall Street Journal includes in today’s feature article “Where Democrats’ Grip on Minority Voters Could Slip in Midterm Elections” ought to be giving Democrats nightmares and thus deserves a special notice today. It is happening with Asian voters, too:
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September 30, 2022 — Scott Johnson
NRO’s Nate Hochman obtained a copy of Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho’s keynote address to the Kentucky Chapters Conference of the Federalist Society and reports on it in “Federal Judge Vows to Stop Hiring Law Clerks from Yale Law School.” Judge Ho’s address — “Agreeing to Disagree — Restoring America by Resisting Cancel Culture” — cited a number of high-profile examples of speakers being shouted down or otherwise censored at
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September 26, 2022 — Steven Hayward
If you thought the whole idea of “race science” went out of fashion with eugenics, you’d be wrong. The University of California at Santa Cruz (where Angela Davis remains a tenured professor) is currently looking to hire a professor of “Critical Race Science,” which is no doubt the best kind. Here’s some of the job listing: Critical Race and Ethnic Studies: Assistant or Associate Professor Critical Race Science and Technology
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September 25, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Next year Duke University Press is scheduled to publish Marx For Cats: A Radical Bestiary, by Leigh Claire La Berge, who teaches at Free University of Berlin. Here’s a sample from the introduction (which you can access here if you are a glutton): Like any text in the Marxist tradition, Marx for Cats gestures in two directions at once. In asking how our society is structured and for whom, Marxism turns toward
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September 21, 2022 — Steven Hayward
In my review last spring of Glenn Ellmers’ The Soul of Politics, I included this passage about the Leo Strauss Dissertation Award that the American Political Science Association (APSA) gives out each year: One last stark example of [Harry Jaffa’s] vindication in the controversies that are at the root of the rancor associated with his name is his attack, in the mid-1970s, on the American Political Science Association’s establishment of
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September 20, 2022 — Steven Hayward
One of the definitions in Power Line’s lexicon of modern leftist terms is “Diversity: Where everyone looks different, but thinks the same.” Virtually every office of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is a Soviet-style ideological enforcement bureau, a campus Stasi. And now the New York Times has made it official: “diversity” is a synonym for “leftism.” Britain’s new prime minister, Liz Truss, has appointed a cabinet without a single white male.
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September 15, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Apparently there could be. Herewith the opening of an article just out in Nature magazine: The fraught quest to account for sex in biology research In 2016, pharmacologist Susan Howlett wrote up a study on how hormone levels during pregnancy affect heart function and sent it off to a journal. When the reviewers’ comments came back, two of the three had asked an unexpected question: where were the tissues from male
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September 13, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Brian Stelter was fired by CNN as part of the network’s effort to shift its image away from far left commentary and toward mainstream news coverage. While at CNN, Stelter used his platform to aggressively promote Democratic Party themes, and in particular to make war on CNN’s more successful rival, Fox News. But Stelter has landed on his feet: he is going to Harvard. Stelter broke the news on social
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September 12, 2022 — Steven Hayward
In response to my latest Loose Ends item that mentions that the Harvard faculty self-reports to be 80 percent liberal (an underestimate in reality), a commenter suggests: “No guarantee, of course. But if you want to find a conservative professor, search out the Finance Department or equivalent.” Well, bad news I’m afraid. From the Summer 2021 edition of Academic Questions, the quarterly journal of the National Association of Scholars: Even
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