Academic left
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
»
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
»
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. . .
»
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
»
September 8, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Peter Boghossian is (actually, after today, was) a professor of philosophy at Portland State University, and although he has always considered himself a progressive liberal, he has become completely alienated from our university culture today. His resignation letter to Portland State Provost Susan Jeffords is up at Bari Weiss’s popular Substack channel, and I encourage you to read the whole thing if you have time. I am glad to see
»
September 7, 2021 — Steven Hayward
The Wall Street Journal has a long feature up today on the fact that in larger and larger numbers men have decided not to go to college. But despite its length and depth, the story is too chicken to investigate what may be the leading cause of this trend. Let’s take in some excerpts: Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by
»
September 3, 2021 — Steven Hayward
I’ve been arguing for a while that private liberal arts colleges often exhibit much more extreme wokism that public universities, so we shouldn’t be surprised that Princeton is giving Mount Royal University a run for its money. On Wednesday, the New York Post ran an article from two Princeton faculty, John Londregan of the politics and international affairs department, and Sergiu Klainerman of mathematics, on the insidious racial slurs of
»
September 2, 2021 — Steven Hayward
I know there’s a live argument over the Oxford comma, and whether to use one or two spaces after a period. But these are so 20-teens: did you know that capitalization is—somehow—oppressive? That’s what we’re told by Dr. Linda Manyguns, I mean, dr. linda manyguns, who is “associate vice president of indigenization and decolonization” at Mount Royal University in Alberta. Here’s the proclamation: this is a beginning effort at describing
»
September 1, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Surely, you must think in sober moments, the left (especially the environmental left) doesn’t literally want to take us back to living primitive existence in caves and such? You wouldn’t think so, but then you run into a purportedly serious article that is so mind-numbingly stupid that you wonder if someone is pulling your leg. Such as an article currently up at Aeon, under the title, “How Equality Slipped Away.”
»
August 29, 2021 — Steven Hayward
A little more than a year ago I wrote at length here about the mandatory freshman course on racism adopted at the University of Pittsburgh that, judging from the detailed syllabus posted online, was being taught from a very narrow, far-leftist perspective. (No readings, for example, from Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King Jr, James Baldwin, Richard Wright—not even Malcolm X, and not even Ta Nehesi Coates! Forget the
»
August 8, 2021 — John Hinderaker
This is the kind of story that you wish was satire: The University of Wisconsin removed a controversial boulder from its Madison campus Friday after the Black Student Union and other activists objected to its description nearly 100 years ago with a racial slur. Chamberlin Rock, which rests atop Observatory Hill, is named after a 19th Century geologist and former university president, Thomas Crowder Chamberlin, whose work centered on glacial
»
July 5, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Liberals get very testy when you suggest they lack patriotism, or worse, that they are ashamed of or actually hate the country deep down inside. But even the New York Times can’t conceal this any longer: A Fourth of July Symbol of Unity That May No Longer Unite Politicians of both parties have long sought to wrap themselves in the flag. But something may be changing: Today, flying the flag
»
June 7, 2021 — Steven Hayward
First up, Washington and Lee University in Virginia has decided, after a long and stupid debate, not to change its name because, you know, Robert E. Lee, who as president of Washington College after the Civil War, rescued the institution from bankruptcy, whereupon the faculty had moved to have his name added to the institution. That was then, and this is now, to naturally the imperatives of the wokerati had
»
June 6, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Once again Bill Maher went off the liberal script and attacked universities in his closing monologue in his latest Friday night HBO show, and if you look past his gratuitous insults of Florida, Republicans, etc., it is striking how much he sounds like someone who reads City Journal. I do notice that audience reaction to this one is noticeably more tepid than some of his other recent attacks on the
»
June 5, 2021 — John Hinderaker
It is no wonder that Yale doesn’t want to risk having any independent members on its Board of Trustees. There are still quite a few sane alumni, and if they got to vote for a candidate of their choice, you never know what might happen. This observation is prompted by the fact that on April 6, Yale’s School of Medicine sponsored a talk by a psychiatrist–God help us!–named Aruna Khilanani,
»
May 20, 2021 — John Hinderaker
At a few schools, it is certainly possible. Hillsdale and Liberty. Also at some lesser-known colleges, no doubt. (No slight intended, it is probably a badge of honor these days.) And presumably at a smattering of Southern colleges and universities. But, can a Republican be a president of a major university or university system outside the South? Mark Kennedy’s experience at the University of Colorado suggests that it may not
»
May 17, 2021 — Steven Hayward
In recent weeks we’ve seen the announcement that certain Virginia public school districts (and others elsewhere in the country) will discontinue advanced math classes, because “equity,” and the University of California will permanently discontinue using the SAT for admission purposes. If you want to know why the left is doing this, have a close look at this chart: If there’s one thing the left can’t abide at the moment, it
»
