Academic left
July 10, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Some conservatives tend to say, “Sure the colleges and universities are bad, but…” There is no but. With rare exceptions, they are worse than you can imagine. Unless they are studying to be an engineer or a doctor, most people would be better off to avoid college altogether, learn a trade, and read books on their own. Which is the way it used to be. For a window into the
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July 10, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Do you recall the anti-George W. Bush petition that generated scads of mock signatories such as Hugh G. Reckshun? James Taranto delighted in chronicling the signatures daily in his online Best of the Web column for the Wall Street Journal. More recently, The Open Letter from Yale Law Students, Alumni, and Educators Regarding Brett Kavanaugh attracted one such signatory: “Charles U Farley, YLS ‘04.” Now, Charles Glasser observed, that’s a
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July 9, 2020 — Scott Johnson
After receiving a copy of the message/statement from Marquette University president Mike Lovell that John has parsed in the adjacent post, I wrote senior director of university communications Lynn Griffith at the address indicated in the message: Dear Ms. Griffith: I am one of four partners in and contributors to the site Power Line. We have received a copy of the statement sent out by President Lovell to the board
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July 9, 2020 — John Hinderaker
For background on this post, read this one about Samantha Pfefferle, an incoming freshman at Marquette who made a pro-Trump TikTok video that caused her to be reviled and threatened by other Marquette students. Marquette administrators then called her to talk about her political views and, she told the College Fix, suggested that her admission as a freshman was not yet final and was “currently being decided by the administration.”
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July 8, 2020 — John Hinderaker
I wrote yesterday about Samantha Pfefferle, an incoming freshman at Marquette University who made a Til-Tok video that showed she is a Trump supporter. In response, Marquette threatened to revoke her acceptance, even though she had paid for housing, had been assigned roommates, and had been given a complete class schedule. Today I got an email from a Marquette official asking me to update my post to say that Samantha’s
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July 8, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
On July 4, a group of more than 400 Princeton faculty members and (from the look of it) hangers-on sent a letter to the university’s president and other leaders on the subject of “anti-black racism.” After a few perfunctory and unsupported allegations about this phenomenon, the authors proceed to the business at hand. They present several dozen “demands.” Each demand seems more outlandish than the last until, finally, we get
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July 8, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Jonathan Holloway is the new president of Rutgers University. Insofar as one can tell from the quotes in Amanda Hoover’s NJ.com profile of Holloway — “Rutgers is named for a slave owner, but school’s first Black president says the name will stay” — his views resemble those of a conventional academic bureaucrat except in one respect. Holloway asserts that the university’s name isn’t up for changing even though it honors
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July 7, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Marquette University is a ridiculously left-wing institution, but this, from the College Fix, is appalling. An incoming freshman may have her acceptance revoked because she is a Trump supporter: Soon to be Marquette University freshman Samantha Pfefferle has yet to even step foot on campus, yet she said she is already facing possible dismissal from the school. The threat to cancel Pfefferle’s admission came after she posted a video to
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June 29, 2020 — Steven Hayward
My nomination for the most Orwellian phrase of the moment is, “We need to have a conversation about X [race, class, gender, policing, inequality—fill in the blank].” What “we need a conversation” means in practice is, “You shut up and agree with the left.” It seems the (checks notes) Harvard Business Review agrees, in an article titled, “Academia Isn’t a Safe Haven for Conversations About Race and Racism.” The interesting
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June 28, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Before the George Floyd’s death a month ago perhaps the leading story in race relations was the growing momentum in California to roll back the voter-approved prohibition on racial preferences in public contracting and university admissions. The University of California has taken the first step with its decision to abolish the SAT and ACT tests for admission purposes (against the recommendation of the faculty, incidentally), with the substitute screens for admission
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June 28, 2020 — Steven Hayward
It has now been over a month since the killing of George Floyd, and still Yale University has yet to say anything about a process to strip the painful memory of its slave-trader namesake Elihu Yale. Not even a committee to think about a process to come up with a consultation for concepts and ideas about a new name paradigm. Yale’s administrators are failing even to rise to the level
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June 27, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Yesterday while out on a walk I was inspired to post this Tweet: Well, today comes this announcement from the president of Princeton, which has decided to strip Woodrow Wilson’s name from everything: To the Princeton community: When I wrote to you on Monday morning, I noted that the Princeton University Board of Trustees was discussing how the University could oppose racism and would soon convene a special meeting on
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June 24, 2020 — Steven Hayward
There’s an interesting line in Tim Alberta’s Politico story linked in our “Picks” section today about the attitudes of black voters: “Biden choosing a woman of color might actually irritate, not appease, Black voters.” I’ve been wondering if this kind of sentiment might be much deeper and more widespread than this comment indicates. Talk is cheap. Action is another matter. It is not news that virtually every institution of higher
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June 23, 2020 — Steven Hayward
The craziness of our moment shows no sign of abating. In fact it appears to be settling down for another long march/stomping of our institutions. Here are some to today’s crazy highlights: • Someone—perhaps not students since campus is closed—toppled the statue of George Washington at George Washington University. Meanwhile, down in Nashville, the prestigious Harpeth Hall prep school has announced that it will do away with its annual George
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June 19, 2020 — Steven Hayward
I’m actually pretty busy at the moment, even though school is over for the summer, so I’m having trouble keeping up with the tsunami of craziness washing over the land. But I’ll try to continue this chronicle of the most egregious and significant events. • Who would have thought that sense and resolve against statue-toppling repudiation would come from the president of France, Emmanuel Macron. The Daily Wire reports: “We
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June 18, 2020 — Steven Hayward
As has been noted here already, there is a huge rush to issue conformist statements adhering the the party line about BLM, white supremacy, and the rest of the Woke Catechism. Nowhere more so than on college campuses. Peter Wood notes in his fine piece “The Mandatory Banality of College Presidents” that: The statements from the college presidents individually do not mean much, but taken as a whole, they testify to
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June 12, 2020 — Steven Hayward
One of the most discouraging things about the present moment is how few Republican leaders are speaking out forcefully against the central point of the current protests and wave of ill-liberalism it has unleashed, namely, that George Floyd’s death is proof of America’s essential racist and evil character. Instead, most Republicans are talking policy, police reform ideas, reforming qualified immunity, and the like. The parallel conversation among shell-shocked liberals on
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