Academic left
September 14, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Colleges and universities are working extra hard to disgrace themselves this week, and four efforts in particular stand out. • What’s this? Another white woman claiming to be black? Inside Higher Ed reports: Historian Jessica Krug, who last week admitted to being white and faking being Black for her entire career, resigned from her associate professorship at George Washington University, effective immediately, the institution announcedWednesday. But on the heels of
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September 9, 2020 — Steven Hayward
I’m starting to think that the left might be partially right with this whole “white privilege” thing. After all, we can see from a lot of videos that a large portion—the majority in some cases—of Black Lives Matter protests consist mainly of white people. No wonder no one is getting arrested or charged. It is time to end this white privilege from criminal prosecution now. And if the left is
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August 24, 2020 — Steven Hayward
“Liberal education,” Leo Strauss reminds us in Liberalism Ancient and Modern, “is not the opposite of conservative education, but of illiberal education.” Illiberal education is that which imposes and enforces an orthodoxy, whereas genuine liberal education necessarily involves an openness to and consideration of a wide spectrum of different and often conflicting points of view. Liberal education in this sense has been dying at universities for decades now, but nowhere
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August 21, 2020 — Steven Hayward
I have previously referred to Kurt Vonnegut’s famous 1961 short story “Harrison Bergeron,” which is a mordant satire of the tyrannical world of perfect equality. If you’ve never read it, here’s the first paragraph: THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody
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August 10, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Experience shows that if you are 25 years old or younger, the Wuhan virus is less deadly than the average seasonal flu. (If you didn’t already know that, watch this.) And how many young people die of the seasonal flu? Virtually none. So it is hard to say why primary and secondary schools and colleges are not opening for business this fall. In the case of K-12, there is an
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August 8, 2020 — John Hinderaker
…says a professor whose salary is paid mostly by Republicans. Campus Reform reports on Professor Bart Knijnenburg of Clemson University, who apparently hates Republicans: Clemson School of Computing Assistant Professor Bart Knijnenburg took to Facebook in July and wrote, “Trump is xenophobic and racist. Trump’s administration is xenophobic and racist. The Republican Party is xenophobic and racist.” He continued on to say that, “anyone who voted Republican in 2016 is
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August 5, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Prof. Josh Dunn of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs brought my attention to a nasty review of Thomas Sowell’s 2010 book Intellectuals and Society by Aidan Byrne, a Senior Lecturer in English and Media/Cultural Studies at Wolverhampton University in Britain. It was published online in 2012 on a well-read site of the London School of Economics. Byrne didn’t like Sowell’s arguments at all. According to Byrne it suffers from “a
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August 1, 2020 — Steven Hayward
I’m starting to come to the view that having K-12 education and colleges and universities shrink because of COVID-19 might be one of the bits of good news arising out of the pandemic. Our universities are the principal source of the noxious ideas that are plaguing the country right now, and decades of conservative attempts to reverse this slide or reform campuses have proven largely unavailing. An article by Arthur Milikh
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July 29, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Here are two good opportunities for readers to express themselves in meaningful ways against the craziness of the moment. First, for our Seattle area readers, next Monday the Seattle Commissars City Council will vote on defunding the police, which could result in reducing the number of officers by as many as 800. What a great idea!/sarc. There is an online petition you can sign to express your opposition to this madness.
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July 18, 2020 — Steven Hayward
For our 200th podcast (!!!), we assembled all four Power Line Beatles, John, Paul, George and Ringo Scott and me, to kick around various current topics, including my own experience with cancel culture, the state of the presidential race, whether the United States might actually break up after this election regardless of who wins, and above all some reflections on 18 years of Power Line, where we have (according to our
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July 16, 2020 — Steven Hayward
While the left identitarians went hard after many of the signers of the Harper’s “Letter on Justice and Open Debate” a few days ago (especially Potter-purveyor J.K. Rowling), one prominent lefty name that escaped wrath was Noam Chomsky, though his presence on the list of signers did raise a lot of eyebrows. Maybe it’s because he hasn’t said anything crossways about trans-identity dogma that denies anatomy, physiology, and genetics, though
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July 10, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Some conservatives tend to say, “Sure the colleges and universities are bad, but…” There is no but. With rare exceptions, they are worse than you can imagine. Unless they are studying to be an engineer or a doctor, most people would be better off to avoid college altogether, learn a trade, and read books on their own. Which is the way it used to be. For a window into the
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July 10, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Do you recall the anti-George W. Bush petition that generated scads of mock signatories such as Hugh G. Reckshun? James Taranto delighted in chronicling the signatures daily in his online Best of the Web column for the Wall Street Journal. More recently, The Open Letter from Yale Law Students, Alumni, and Educators Regarding Brett Kavanaugh attracted one such signatory: “Charles U Farley, YLS ‘04.” Now, Charles Glasser observed, that’s a
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July 9, 2020 — Scott Johnson
After receiving a copy of the message/statement from Marquette University president Mike Lovell that John has parsed in the adjacent post, I wrote senior director of university communications Lynn Griffith at the address indicated in the message: Dear Ms. Griffith: I am one of four partners in and contributors to the site Power Line. We have received a copy of the statement sent out by President Lovell to the board
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July 9, 2020 — John Hinderaker
For background on this post, read this one about Samantha Pfefferle, an incoming freshman at Marquette who made a pro-Trump TikTok video that caused her to be reviled and threatened by other Marquette students. Marquette administrators then called her to talk about her political views and, she told the College Fix, suggested that her admission as a freshman was not yet final and was “currently being decided by the administration.”
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July 8, 2020 — John Hinderaker
I wrote yesterday about Samantha Pfefferle, an incoming freshman at Marquette University who made a Til-Tok video that showed she is a Trump supporter. In response, Marquette threatened to revoke her acceptance, even though she had paid for housing, had been assigned roommates, and had been given a complete class schedule. Today I got an email from a Marquette official asking me to update my post to say that Samantha’s
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July 8, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
On July 4, a group of more than 400 Princeton faculty members and (from the look of it) hangers-on sent a letter to the university’s president and other leaders on the subject of “anti-black racism.” After a few perfunctory and unsupported allegations about this phenomenon, the authors proceed to the business at hand. They present several dozen “demands.” Each demand seems more outlandish than the last until, finally, we get
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