Academic left
November 15, 2020 — Steven Hayward
It is slowly dawning on some Democrats that their uncritical embrace of identity politics and mindless slogans like “defund the police” cost them in this election. Mark Lilla has been trying to warn Democrats about this since Trump won four years ago, though it resulted in Lilla (a committed liberal Democrat) being called a “white supremacist” by several of his Columbia University faculty colleagues. His most recent piece, “When Will
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October 27, 2020 — John Hinderaker
The Department of Education has completed an investigation into American universities’ compliance with federal law relating to reporting of foreign gifts and contracts. As you might expect, our universities believe that laws are for the little guys: American Universities failed to report $6.5 billion in foreign gifts and contracts, an investigation by the Department of Education found. Federal law requires schools to disclose substantial foreign gifts and contracts to the
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October 21, 2020 — Steven Hayward
As I’ve long joked, I think truth in advertising for college presidencies would require the job qualification clause, “Spinal removal surgery necessary.” And among university presidents I have regarded suspiciously (which is nearly all of them) is Northwestern’s Morton Schapiro. I may need to rethink my attitude about Shapiro. Unsurprisingly there is a critical mass of radical students and leftist hangers-on who are demanding that Northwestern University abolish its campus
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October 20, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Forget court-packing, abolishing the electoral college, or adding Puerto Rico and DC as states to provide more Democrats in the Senate (which they’d like to abolish in any case if they could): their real target is the Constitution itself. Apparently it isn’t “living” enough for the left, so they want to kill it completely. The New Republic magazine makes this abundantly clear in an article just out called “The Constitution
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October 8, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Today in cancel culture we return to the story of Bruce Gilley, a political scientist at Portland State University who has committed the heresy of saying some favorable things about colonialism. I wrote here in 2017 about the uproar over his academic journal article “The Case for Colonialism,” which a journal had to retract after it received death threats, among other things. I met Gilley for lunch shortly after that
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September 30, 2020 — John Hinderaker
I am not sure who said it first, but it’s true: America’s colleges and universities are islands of repression in a sea of freedom. The invaluable FIRE–Foundation for Individual Rights in Education–has ranked 55 “top colleges” with respect to tolerance for freedom of speech. A summary of FIRE’s findings is here. The rankings seem to be pretty rigorous, based on input from 20,000 students, with five elements considered: This overall
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September 29, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Every day brings news of another racially-inflected instance of someone being canceled or otherwise denounced, like evolutionist Richard Dawkins being disinvited from a lecture at Trinity College, Dublin, because someone discovered that he says harsh things about Islam (as a militant atheist, he says harsh things about Christianity, too, but that has never been a bar to his appearing on a campus for some strange reason), or the National Gallery
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September 29, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Liberal Harvard law professor Noah Feldman probably expected plenty of abuse from the left for writing a glowing assessment of Judge Amy Coney Barrett. However, I’m not sure he expected anything quite like this nasty tweet storm from a Stanford law professor. Steve has noted one passage from professor Michele Dauber’s rant — her reference to Feldman as a “worthless shitty white man.” Dauber also claimed that Feldman was unqualified
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September 27, 2020 — Steven Hayward
So as we know, the left is having a collective freakout over the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, and they seem to be in competition to see who can disgrace themselves the most, with the Barrett-Is-a-Racist-Because-She-Adopted-Black-Kids caucus off to a strong early lead. And the left is extra mad at Harvard’s Noah Feldman, otherwise a liberal, for publicly praising Barrett. For this sin, Stanford Law Professor
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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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