Academic left
February 24, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Heather Mac Donald is one of America’s great heroines. For no reason other than love of her country, Western civilization and common sense, she ventures repeatedly into the bizarre and hostile world of America’s colleges and universities. If students listened to her, they would learn a lot. Alas, most of them are not up to that task. Heather has often been subjected not just to rudeness, but to threats of
»
February 11, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Steve’s latest “Power Line Show” features my friend Stanley Kurtz discussing his new book, The Lost History of Western Civilization. Steve’s discussion with Stanley is well worth checking out. I also recommend this post by Stanley at NRO’s Corner. In addition to announcing the publication of The Lost History of Western Civilization, it provides an excellent analysis of what’s at stake in the academic dispute over Western Civilization. Stanley argues:
»
February 9, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Last week Paul wrote about the gallant efforts of Stanley Kurtz to fight the continuing death spiral of our universities, and now just in time for your Sunday afternoon walk or Monday morning commute, Stanley joins the Power Line podcast to talk about his terrific new report for the National Association of Scholars entitled The Lost History of Western Civilization. The broad outlines of this story are generally well known, but
»
February 1, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Crazy academic job advertisements are a dime a dozen these days, which is one reason I’ve stopped covering them closely. But sometimes an institution goes the extra mile, such as Champlain College in Vermont, where this job ad sounds like it was written by the Bernie Sanders campaign: Champlain College invites applications for a full-time faculty at the rank of Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies to begin August 2020. We
»
December 18, 2019 — John Hinderaker
At St. Olaf College in Minnesota, a set of dorm rooms occupied by a group of mostly-conservative students was raided on Sunday by Public Safety officers in search of firearms. The College Fix reports: Several conservative students at St. Olaf College had their lives turned upside down Sunday after a false report that alleged that they had guns and ammunition in their dorm prompted campus public safety officers to enter
»
December 12, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Once upon a time, Stanley Fish was a state of the art radical professor — “a scrappy advocate of multiculturalism, affirmative-action hiring quotas, campus speech codes and openly subversive strains of post-structuralist critical theory,” to quote the view attributed to his critics by the New York Times. Fish transformed the Duke University English department into a bastion of “deconstructionism” — the view that literary texts acquire meaning only as a
»
December 11, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Here are a couple of data points that suggest part of the answer, at least, is that they are remarkably ill-informed. First, a video in which students are asked whether they favor Medicare for all. Of course they do! Then they are told a few basic facts about the Sanders proposal, now widely adopted by Democratic politicians, all of which come as a surprise. (“What, you have to pay for
»
December 10, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Is this the dumbest thing I have ever read? It definitely is a contender: “Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics.” The link goes to an abstract of an article that was published by the University of Chicago–God help us!–by one Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Department of Women’s and Gender Studies University of New Hampshire. You
»
December 3, 2019 — Steven Hayward
It is commonplace now for the wokerati on campuses to demand that colleges and universities divest their endowments of any holdings in fossil fuel energy companies, but now they are also demanding that colleges divest from any companies that do business with Israel. That’s not how the wokesters put it, but when Brown University’s “Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Practices” votes to recommend that the University divest from
»
December 3, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
In his impeachment preview, Scott notes that on Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee will begin its hearings by taking testimony from four law professors: Pam Karlan, Noah Feldman, Michael Gerhardt, and Jonathan Turley. It’s easy to ridicule leading off with law professors, and it’s true that doing so isn’t the best way to capture the public’s interest. Logically, however, it makes sense to begin the hearings by discussing the standard
»
November 28, 2019 — John Hinderaker
On behalf of the College Fix, my friend Kyle Hooten went to Macalester College in St. Paul to interview students on the subject of Thanksgiving. Is it acceptable to celebrate the holiday? The students’ answers validate the adage that however bad you think America’s universities are, they are worse.
»
November 23, 2019 — Steven Hayward
A few days ago we noted how the mild-mannered Arthur Laffer was shouted down and prevented from speaking at SUNY Binghamton, which gives the lie to the frequent complaint of the kampus klan that “if only you right-wingers wouldn’t invite provocateurs like Milo and Ann Coulter to campus there’d be less trouble.” But it is getting hard to keep up, as college campuses seem to be locked in competition with
»
November 20, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Back in the sixties, and today, the left likes to refer to “AmeriKKKa.” But increasingly it appears that the actual Klan-like organizations are . . . college campuses. It’s one thing when sensitive campus leftists go krazy over provocateurs like Milo or Ann Coulter. But this week students at SUNY Binghamton shut down a talk from . . . Arthur Laffer. Seriously. A gentle gnome of a man who talks
»
November 11, 2019 — Steven Hayward
The other day we noted how Williams College was attempting to take the crown as the most infantile leftist college. (Evergreen State is permanently disqualified, because who can compete with that?) But Northwestern University is not taking the challenge lying down. Northwestern has one of the most highly regarded journalism schools in the country (though that is obviously a mark against it), and yesterday the Daily Northwestern student newspaper issued
»
November 7, 2019 — Steven Hayward
When last we checked in on Williams College a year ago, a group of students had issued a petition opposing a call for Williams to adopt the free speech/free expression statement of the University of Chicago. The petition was so bad that, as I said at the time, “you have to read it, not to believe it.” It contains such gems as: “Free Speech,” as a term, has been co-opted
»
October 17, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Four years ago, we published an article by a distinguished alum of Princeton University. He documented the leftist takeover of Princeton, tracing it back to the late 1960s and the rise of William Bowen and Shirley Tilghman. He wrote: Over the years, beginning as early as the 1960s and 1970s, Princeton loaded up its faculty with liberals, socialists, Marxists, and other fellow travellers, and more recently, with people like Paul
»
October 10, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Recently, attacks against Jews have sharply increased in New York City. According to a report published in May by the New York Police Department, from January through May of this year, New York City experienced an 83 percent rise in hate crimes. Fifty-nine percent of hate crimes in the city are directed against Jews, and anti-Semitic attacks have risen by 90 percent in the past year. On September 22, a
»
