Academic left
August 1, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Today in the annals of white liberal guilt are two stories that are beyond the satirical genius of Tom Wolfe. First, from Swarthmore, where the Swarthmore Anti-Capitalist Collective (SACC) has disbanded because it was too white and middle class. Campus Reform noted that SACC’s now-dormant Facebook page agonized that “SACC’s fundamental failure” was that “at its formation, it was made up of entirely white, with the exception of one person of
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July 16, 2017 — John Hinderaker
The bizarre corners of academia are usually Steve’s beat, but a reader sent me a link to an article about a paper published in Gender, Place & Culture, a Journal of Feminist Geography. The paper, by Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne, is titled “Citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement.’” It urges academics working in the field of geography not to cite works by
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July 9, 2017 — Steven Hayward
The great Andrew Klavan directs our attention to this old story at EverydayFeminism, which we’ll pick up in the middle after this headline: My Partner Came Out as a Man—And I Struggled With Losing My Lesbian Identity . . . Imagine the seismic shift in my identity then when Amy sat down one night after a therapy session and told me that she was transgender. To be fair, this wasn’t
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June 28, 2017 — Steven Hayward
I didn’t think it was possible to write a better satire of postmodernism as applied to the hard sciences than Alan Sokal’s great hoax on Social Text 20 years ago. But I have found a contender . . . Wait a minute. I think this article is for real, in Ethnic and Racial Studies: Racial physics or a theory for everything that happened Marcus Anthony Hunter [Sociologist—natch—at UCLA] Abstract This political
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June 21, 2017 — Steven Hayward
The Daily Bulletin newspaper (based in Ontario, CA) reported yesterday that six students at Claremont McKenna College are facing disciplinary proceedings for their role in disrupting Heather Mac Donald’s appearance back in April—perhaps resulting in expulsion and, in the case of three students who just graduated, having their degrees revoked. It appears that even CMC’s spineless president Hiram Chodosh has come to perceive that he needs to do something to get
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June 16, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Michael Moynihan ventured to Evergreen State College for Vice News and produced this seven-minute video that is all you need to see to grasp how fully the place has fallen into the nihilist abyss (as if you needed persuading). Language warning (as if you didn’t know that). But do stick around for the antidote below!
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June 14, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Back in January I reported here on social science research that concluded that conservative politicians are better looking than liberal politicians, but do you really need social science to prove this? Here’s one data set: However, while conservative politicians may be better looking, there’s new social science that concludes liberal thinkers and writers are better looking than conservative thinkers and writers. Here’s a news summary: Lönnqvist’s team of researchers looked
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June 13, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Colleges are all about teaching “critical thinking,” though in most places that is a mere euphemism for teaching “critical theory,” which is not the same thing. Quite the opposite: “critical theory” is the highly ideologized core of the academic left. And it shows. News item: Exclusive Test Data: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills By Douglas Belkin Freshmen and seniors at about 200 colleges across the U.S. take a
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June 7, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Journalists like to talk about “evergreen” topics, and is there anything more evergreen right now than the anarchy at Evergreen State College? The college is back up and running again, but not until after a student mob took it upon themselves to roam the campus with baseball bats smashing windows of science buildings, because science, with its dedication to objectivity and standards and all, is oppressive. Meanwhile, someone put up
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June 5, 2017 — Steven Hayward
“Men without chests” is C.S. Lewis’s great description in The Abolition of Man of the type of human soul that modern relativism would produce. The complete quote is: “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” Right now this applies to the increasing number of liberals who are wringing their hands over the
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June 1, 2017 — John Hinderaker
Evergreen State College in Washington has been in the news, due to left-wing agitation directed largely against a professor who suggested that it wasn’t appropriate to demand that all white students leave the campus for a day. Scott had a roundup of Evergreen news here. Evergreen is one of those left-wing institutions that have gone around the bend, but things took a turn for the worse today when the school
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May 31, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Everyone will recall that Franklin Roosevelt’s first act as president in 1933 was to close the nation’s banks to prevent a full-scale panic and a collapse of the banking system. It was called a “bank holiday,” probably because the legal basis was more than a bit shaky: it was based on the “Trading with the Enemy Act” of 1917. Recognizing that this legal basis was ridiculous, FDR prevailed on Congress
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May 30, 2017 — Steven Hayward
We’ve had occasion many times before to mention the case of physicist Alan Sokal, who hoaxed the postmodern journal Social Text into publishing an article that argued that even physics was “socially constructed,” and just two weeks ago we noted a new hoax about the “socially-constructed penis” and how it is responsible for climate change. Well, file this next one under the heading of articles that prove it is impossible
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May 19, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Just about every time I post an Academic Absurdity here, commenters rightly think it has to be a hoax, and refer back to the ur-hoax of all time, the Alan Sokal Social Text article of 20 years ago that said even physics was “socially constructed.” A very sensible reaction, but in fact all of the ones I have posted are real. Now I have a real hoax to report in
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May 13, 2017 — Steven Hayward
We noted here a week ago the tepid reaction of Claremont McKenna College to the violent disruption of Heather Mac Donald’s appearance there a few weeks ago, printing the entirety of Dean Peter Uvin’s lugubrious memo to the faculty that outlined how to let off the offending students. Now comes word out of Middlebury College about the punishment to be meted out to the students who violently assaulted Charles Murray
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May 8, 2017 — Steven Hayward
How’s this for some really squirrelly scholarship, from Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography: When ‘Angelino’ squirrels don’t eat nuts: a feminist posthumanist politics of consumption across southern California Teresa Lloro-Bidart Abstract Eastern fox squirrels (Sciurus niger), reddish-brown tree squirrels native to the eastern and southeastern United States, were introduced to and now thrive in suburban/urban California. As a result, many residents in the greater Los Angeles
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May 8, 2017 — Steven Hayward
You would think that after the fiasco of the fake rape case against the Duke lacrosse team that Duke University would behave itself with more rectitude. But no. Rod Dreher reports over at The American Conservative of a brave professor at Duke Divinity School, Paul Griffiths, who is resisting a typically tendentious Maoist-style re-education camp. And naturally for this he is being branded a—wait for it!—racist, sexist, bigot. The entire
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