Academic left
August 12, 2018 — Steven Hayward
I wrote here a couple weeks ago about my running theme (perhaps to be a book) about what I’m calling the “suicide of the university,” where declining enrollment and the excessive politicization of the social sciences and humanities will destroy many smaller and second-tier schools. My most recent post looked at politically-correct Earlham College, which is slowly eating its endowment to keep going, along with the data of the plummeting
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August 8, 2018 — Steven Hayward
I know the job market is red hot right now, and even universities are hiring! Several job ads for tenure-track positions in political science have come my way, and they all have one thing in common. I’ll bet you can guess what it is. Let’s start with the University of Minnesota/Twin Cities department of political science, which wants to hire two professors in political theory. The wanted ad begins with
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August 1, 2018 — Steven Hayward
I’ve written before here and elsewhere that the humanities are dying by suicide at American universities, and that colleges and universities will begin a de facto division into science and tech institutions with a rump of dwindling and politicized humanities and social science fields at the margins. The humanities are dying at most colleges and universities, or to be more accurate, they are committing suicide with their complete embrace of
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July 11, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Do you recall the anti-George W. Bush petition that generated scads of fictitious but laughable signatories such as Hugh G. Reckshun? James Taranto (not Panero! sorry) delighted in chronicling the signatures daily in his online Best of the Web column for the Wall Street Journal. The Open Letter from Yale Law Students, Alumni, and Educators Regarding Brett Kavanaugh (noted yesterday by Glenn Reynolds here and by Steve Hayward here) has
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July 10, 2018 — Steven Hayward
This didn’t take long. The beginning of an “Open Letter” petition: Open Letter from Yale Law Students, Alumni, and Educators Regarding Brett Kavanaugh *Please sign below. Additional signatories will be added regularly* July 10, 2018 To Dean Gerken and the Yale Law School leadership, We write today as Yale Law students, alumni, and educators ashamed of our alma mater. Within an hour of Donald Trump’s announcement that he would nominate
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June 30, 2018 — Steven Hayward
I let my previous regular notices of “Academic Absurdity of the Week” go dormant quite a while ago, because it was just too easy, and was also getting redundant. And repetitive. And tedious. But a news item out the last few days compels a brief revival, with an academic absurdity to end all absurdities. In my regular scan for headlines for the Saturday Week in Pictures gallery, I came across
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May 22, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Today’s higher education implosion news comes from my graduate alma mater, Claremont Graduate University, which emailed everyone yesterday about the imminent closure of its graduate program in philosophy. I’ll update this if I get any better inside information, but I suspect declining enrollment is the main cause, though I hear many programs at CGU are running deeply in the red, so this may be just the first program to go
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May 21, 2018 — Steven Hayward
When last we checked in on the unassisted suicide-in-progress of American universities, we noted that Hiram College in Ohio is eliminating several departments in the humanities and social sciences, following the similar announcement of a University of Wisconsin branch campus. Today’s humanities demolition derby is occurring at Rider University in New Jersey, as reported this morning in the Wall Street Journal. This news is upsetting the faculty! Cue the world’s smallest
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May 16, 2018 — Steven Hayward
The suicide of the university proceeds apace: —Item 1 comes from Hiram College in Ohio, which may—gasp!—shrink some tenured faculty positions: Last December, Hiram College wrote to alumni to assure them that an ongoing academic redesign of the 168-year-old liberal arts college, led by President Lori Varlotta, would proceed in an orderly fashion. Foreign language, philosophy and religious studies programs may take the worst hits. “Everybody is scared to death,” one
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May 3, 2018 — Steven Hayward
It’s apparently big news that it now costs more to house a prisoner in California than it does to send someone to Harvard for a year. From the Los Angeles Times: The cost of imprisoning each of California’s 130,000 inmates is expected to reach a record $75,560 in the next year. That’s enough to cover the annual cost of attending Harvard University and still have plenty left over for pizza
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April 18, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Today’s installment of our Civil War on the Left series notes two recent incidents on campus that should fuel a big bump in popcorn futures prices in the commodity pits. First, at the University of Texas at Austin, a leftist professor who checks all the right boxes is nonetheless in hot water because he stumbled over one of the advanced feminist borders. From The American Spectator: An Antifa group at
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April 16, 2018 — Steven Hayward
One of the best explanations for why colleges and universities seem so insane these days is offered indirectly by one of the smartest left-leaning academics of our time—Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School. An interesting old article of Sunstein’s entitled “The Law of Group Polarization,” he explains how homogenous groups of people will become more extreme the more they deliberate together, and paradoxically degrade deliberation. And there are few groups
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April 15, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Edna St. Vincent-Millay is reported to have quipped that history isn’t one damn thing after another—it’s the same damn thing over and over again. I’ve never verified this quotation, but in any case it seems congruent with Yogi Berra’s similar quip about “déjà vu all over again.” I say this because lately I’ve been reading some old essays from the late John P. Roche, who taught for years at Brandeis University
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April 14, 2018 — Steven Hayward
The great Christina Hoff Sommers is just out with another of her splendid “Factual Feminist” videos on the crisis of free speech on college campuses. As it happens, I got together with Christina recently and taped an interview for the Power Line podcast. I’ve got quite a backlog of interviews in the can right now, but I’ll try to move hers up in the queue. In the meantime, it’s totally
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April 12, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Following up on Tuesday’s dispatch about the recent disgrace at Beloit College, today comes news of an even more disgraceful outrage at CUNY Law School. Josh Blackman of South Texas College of Law, a fine legal mind and author of many excellent legal articles as well as cogent popular articles for National Review Online and elsewhere, was invited by the CUNY Federalist Society chapter to speak on free speech. The
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April 10, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Not long ago, the political science department at Beloit College posted the following job opening: College of Liberal Arts, Department of Political Science, Tenure-Track Position Opening POSITION: Assistant Professor of Political Science (Political Theory) Beloit College, a selective liberal arts college with a proud tradition of innovation, seeks an energetic teacher-scholar for a replacement position of five courses per year. The successful candidate will be responsible for introductory courses in
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April 1, 2018 — Steven Hayward
I know I’ve made the point before, but there is fresh evidence in recent weeks of how much the left today hates western civilization and human excellence in general. Once again the left is determined to flunk what I’ve long called “the Churchill test.” Once upon a time leading liberals loved Churchill. Think of Isaiah Berlin’s great 1949 Atlantic Monthly essay, “Churchill in 1940,” or how much Arthur Schlesinger loved
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