Academic left
June 24, 2019 — John Hinderaker
South Dakota’s legislature is considering a bill that would require the state’s universities to protect free speech and intellectual diversity. In that connection, some lawmakers have taken aim at the diversity industry: Several Republican lawmakers who were behind a bill to require the state’s university system to promote intellectual diversity are questioning the size, role and cost of diversity offices. The lawmakers, which include the House and Senate leadership, sent
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June 15, 2019 — Steven Hayward
I wondered on Thursday whether Oberlin would learn its lesson from the $33 million defamation verdict against the college, and explained why the answer was almost certainly No. You can strike “almost.” Today the New York Times reports that Oberlin’s president has confirmed that they are determined not to learn anything from the verdict: In an email to the Oberlin community on Friday, Carmen Twillie Ambar, the college president, said
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June 14, 2019 — John Hinderaker
This is a screen shot of Oberlin’s Twitter account. I assume that the account has been taken private within the last few days as a result of reaction Oberlin was getting to the jury verdicts against it in the Gibson’s case. Click to enlarge: There is a certain irony in the text: “Think one person can change the world? So do we. Maintained by the Oberlin College Office of Communications.”
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June 14, 2019 — Steven Hayward
While I’m still enjoying the schadenfreudey yumminess of Oberlin’s comeuppance, worth catching up with the latest news from Harvard. You may have followed the story of how Harvard recently removed law professor Ronald Sullivan and his wife (also a law professor) Stephanie Robinson, as deans of the undergraduate Winthrop House at Harvard. The campus wokerati targeted Sullivan for the sin of joining Harvey Weinstein’s defense team, which he did on
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June 13, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Short answer: No, they won’t. Longer answer: Check out the dean of students (and also assistant to the president for equity, diversity, and inclusion!) Meredith Raimondo, who was near the center of the Gibson’s Bakery case for collaborating with students to harass Gibson’s Bakery. Raimondo came to the deanship from Oberlin’s department of “Comparative American Studies,” which, Oberlin’s website informs us, was “newly formed” around 2003. I’ll bet it was
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June 13, 2019 — John Hinderaker
We wrote here about the lawsuit against Oberlin by a local store, Gibson’s, that alleged it was defamed by the college and its Dean of Students. Among other facts in the case, student protesters, accompanied by the Dean, handed out leaflets accusing Gibson’s of being “racist” because the store’s employees caught an African-American Oberlin student shoplifting a bottle of wine. Does that make sense to you? It didn’t make sense
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June 8, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Dartmouth News reports that the college is celebrating an event that happened 50 years ago, on June 7, 1969: As part of the yearlong 250th anniversary commemoration, Dartmouth is revisiting various turning points in its history. On Friday, the clock turns back 50 years to the afternoon of May 7, 1969, when students who opposed the Vietnam War occupied the Parkhurst administration building. Paul and I, both Communists at the
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June 8, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Oberlin College in Ohio may be one of the most egregious politically correct campuses in the nation. Back in 2013, the campus closed down for a day of “racial sensitivity training” despite the fact that the administration knew that the supposed “racial incident” that prompted this “crisis” (someone spotted wearing Klan robes on campus) was a hoax. Then in 2016, Black Lives Matter and a number of super-woke Oberlin students
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May 21, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Another one of the left’s favorite totems these days is “patriarchy,” along with “toxic masculinity,” in which women are “objectified” and “commodified,” kept in subjugation by “violence.” For example, Corey Robin’s attack on conservatives, The Reactionary Mind, dwells in its opening pages on the assertion that the subjugation of women is part and parcel of the central conservative principle (so Robin thinks) of maintaining power over women and minorities at
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May 16, 2019 — Steven Hayward
News items about outrageous events at college campuses have been coming in so fast the last couple weeks that it is impossible to keep up. At this point I’m starting to think Sir Roger Scruton is right that we should just “get rid of universities altogether.” There are a couple of stories I’m watching right now that I intend to find time to analyze in depth, but for the moment,
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May 16, 2019 — Steven Hayward
If you are a glutton for punishment like me and you read a lot of leftist academic journals (but I repeat myself. . .), you discover quickly that for the left, everything is violence. Literally violence, especially free speech, but also capitalism of course. Violence is the instrument of racism and domination. Another peculiar feature of leftist academic jargon today is to talk about “bodies”—especially “black and brown bodies,” which
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April 24, 2019 — Steven Hayward
I have heard a number of left-leaning professors dismiss tales of ideological craziness and extremism on campus as just “isolated incidents”—mere anecdotes to be dismissed as little more than a craze that will pass like the Hula-Hoop. But at some point, the plural of anecdote is “data,” and I wonder just how many “anecdotes” of campus insanity are necessary before the “pattern recognition” of social science or anthropology kicks in.
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April 20, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Recently I had a conversation with a prominent political scientist from one of our most elite universities—I won’t name either since I haven’t been able to verify what he told me—who said that last year this particular university graduated only two majors in English literature. Not two graduate students—just two majors in the entire undergraduate senior class. (I’ll only go so far as to say that this particular university is
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April 16, 2019 — Steven Hayward
This news today from the University of Tulsa, by way of Yascha Mounk: I’m sure lumping things under a “Humanities and Social Justice” banner will do the trick. But perhaps we should applaud this as truth-in-advertising—social “science” is dropping its pretensions as a science, and admitting that it’s an advocacy program. Then there’s this from the Library Journal: Surely, I thought, this has to be another hoax from the brilliant
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April 15, 2019 — Steven Hayward
I have thought from time to time of walking through Sproul Plaza at Berkeley with Harvey Mansfleld’s book Manliness tucked conspicuously under my arm, just to see what might happen. Because Manliness is an ode to “toxic masculinity” don’t you just know. I think I have a clue how it might go, because Mansfield has been disinvited from giving the commencement address at Concordia University in Montreal, as he explains
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March 20, 2019 — John Hinderaker
We wrote last June about New Yorker fact-checker Talia Lavin, who falsely accused a disabled veteran of being a “Nazi” because she misinterpreted his military tattoo. It made quite a stir at the time, and the New Yorker fired Lavin. Her libel of the amputee veteran wasn’t a one-off; she hates Republicans, or suspected Republicans, in general: The truth of the matter is that anyone who willingly declares themselves [sic]
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March 1, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Readers will likely recall my note here last week about the person working a table at Sproul Plaza at Berkeley was assaulted. I received this notification a few hours ago from the administration: Community: Update on Sproul Plaza Assault Case Dear Steven Hayward, Today, an Alameda County Superior Court Judge issued a warrant for the arrest of the suspect in the matter involving a February 19 assault on Sproul Plaza.
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