Academic left
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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September 9, 2022 — Steven Hayward
It was a given that the media would not like Britain’s new prime minister Liz Truss, given her clear Thatcherite disposition. But I hadn’t expected the New York Times to beclown themselves with this self-own headline: Britain’s new prime minister, Liz Truss, has recruited cabinet members from diverse backgrounds, though her inner circle retains a hard Conservative edge. So in other words, sort of like a college faculty. Or the
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September 6, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Leftists in the academy get very defensive when you charge them with killing the liberal arts, but today the Washington Post provides fairly damning evidence that this proposition is true. The subhed to their story on the “most-regretted majors” of college graduates, drawn from a Federal Reserve study, is: “Almost half of humanities and arts majors regret their choice — and enrollment in those disciplines is shrinking rapidly.” Who dominates
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August 30, 2022 — Steven Hayward
As regular readers know, Gibson’s Bakery in Oberlin, Ohio, won a $36 million libel case against Oberlin College after Oberlin students, with the assistance of a super-woke senior Oberlin College administrator, organized protests accusing Gibson’s of racism for the perfectly proper arrest of shoplifters. Oberlin dug in its heels, and has appealed the verdict, withholding payment of the judgment (although it had to put up a bond pending final disposition).
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August 30, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Yes, I know, “leftist universities” in the headline is redundant. . . That our colleges and universities are slowly committing suicide by various means that are, for now, mitigated and numbed by things like student loan debt forgiveness, is a thesis I’ve been working on for a while. I think I may have spotted the next shiny thing that may push them into oblivion. A few days ago Inside Higher
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August 22, 2022 — Steven Hayward
I recall reading some time ago that administrative personnel at Yale University had come to outnumber faculty. I don’t know if this is true, but here’s some relevant data: A 2018 Chronicle [of Higher Education] report showing that Yale has the fifth-highest ratio of administrators to students in the country, and the highest in the Ivy League (for comparison, peer institutions like Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford were 24th, 35th, and
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August 21, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Henry Ford is reported to have said, “History is bunk.” When Henry Ford died in 1947, the legendary historian Arnold Toynbee is reported to have said, “Henry Ford is history.” Who knows whether either quip is authentic. This exchange comes to mind in following the latest sequel to the disgrace in academic history that we have covered here and here over the last few days. As noted in our last
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August 19, 2022 — Steven Hayward
In yesterday’s post about the entirely reasonable article by James Sweet on “Is History History?”, I ended with “Cue Prof. Sweet’s apology tour (and perhaps the removal of the article) in three, two. . .” It didn’t even take 24 hours. This from Prof. Sweet today: Message from James H. Sweet (August 2022) Aug 19, 2022 – My September Perspectives on History column has generated anger and dismay among many
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August 18, 2022 — Steven Hayward
“Is History History?” is the title of an essay out yesterday from the current president of the American Historical Association (AHA), James H. Sweet, who is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Before turning to the essay, let us stipulate starting out that academic history has almost fully surrendered to the worst excesses of leftism and identity politics, and the result is that the number of students
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August 13, 2022 — John Hinderaker
NBC News reports that college attendance is dropping: A little-understood backlash… Little-understood by them. …against higher education is driving an unprecedented decline in enrollment that experts now warn is likely to diminish people’s quality of life and the nation’s economic competitiveness, especially in places where the slide is most severe. I sincerely doubt that. These are the numbers: There are 4 million fewer students in college now than there were
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