Academic left
January 27, 2025 — Steven Hayward
The Wall Street Journal Monday carried a blockbuster op-ed from John Sailer of the Manhattan Institute and Louis Galarowicz of the National Association of Scholars on rampant (and illegal) race-based hiring at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where as many readers know I was an inmate for a year back in 2013-14. (And I’ll be visiting in April for their annual Conference on World Affairs as a speaker.) Their findings
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January 22, 2025 — Steven Hayward
I have a daily file where I add news items on the downward spiral of higher education, usually intending to do a roundup or commentary on some of it, but the problem is that the daily flood of evidence is simply too much to keep up with and synthesize. But one news item today is worth noting: Sonoma State University in California, facing a growing budget deficit that stands currently
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January 14, 2025 — Steven Hayward
The left is really losing it right now. Tidings: • Let’s start with the University of Idaho, which has closed its cultural centers (that is, leftist ideological pods) following a long overdue directive from the State Board of Education to close down DEI programs (though of course some programs will be renamed and staff shuffled around, so there will need to be a second phase of DEI-hunting). Inside Higher Education
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January 8, 2025 — Steven Hayward
It’s amazing what one shocking election will do. DEI is dying fast—even at McDonald’s! (Which never needed it in the first place, but never mind.) And then someone woke up (irony alert!) and noticed that Trump carried 65% of the votes of Native Americans, who I am sure Trump will refer to as Indians, to the delight of a majority of native Americans who wanted to keep “Redskins” as the
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December 15, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Someone recently suggested that as Artificial Intelligence progresses, it may well put a lot of postmodern college professors and other abstruse theorists out of business. Forget the ancient debate about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie (it is, of course); our pal Josh Dunn of the University of Tennessee decided to test this proposition by asking ChatGPT to produce a plot summary of Die Hard as written by PoMo
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December 4, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The Stanford Review, the conservative student newspaper that Peter Thiel and others founded back in the 1980s, managed to persuade Stanford’s new president, economist Jonathan Levin, to sit down for an interview. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but in short the Stanford Review did a great job of putting Levin on the hot seat. Some excerpts, starting with the one that is getting the most attention on social media
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November 21, 2024 — Steven Hayward
With colleges and universities continuing to turn a blind eye toward the sources of anti-Semitism on campus (hint: it’s your faculty and radical curriculum, both of which need to be dismissed), it may be a sign of encouragement that students who put up “Wanted” posters of University of Rochester faculty who support Israel are being hit with criminal charges: U of Rochester Students Arraigned on Charges Related to ‘Wanted’ Posters
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November 17, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Sometimes I think the mainstream media has taken up writing droll satire. Like this headline in The Hill: Schools, colleges brace for ‘a much more threatening political environment’ Educators and university leaders are on the edge of their seats as President-elect Trump makes his return to office with an aggressive posture toward K-12 and higher education. Trump has threatened multiple times to take away funding from schools if they do
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November 15, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Another of my suggestions for Trump’s Day One has become a prophecy. To refresh your memory: Following Saul Alinsky’s advice to make your opponents live by their own rules, install an acting deputy secretary for civil rights in the Department of Education on January 20 (I nominate Edward Blum). Have that person send a “Dear Colleague” letter (similar to how the Obama and Biden Administrations imposed their Title IX rules)
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November 14, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Elections have consequences, as Barack Obama is supposed to have said to John McCain. And were starting to see some. The day after the election, Laura Helmuth, the editor who took (Un-)Scientific American sharply to the left in recent years, posted these tweets: Today it appears Helmuth has been fired (don’t be fooled by her supposed decision to “leave” the magazine): Lo and behold, it appears AOC has removed her
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November 1, 2024 — John Hinderaker
The House Committee on Education and the Workforce has released a report titled “Antisemitism On College Campuses Exposed.” At 122 pages, plus a much longer appendix, I haven’t had time to read it all. I want to call attention to one section of the report that describes the reaction of some educators and politicians to the scrutiny that universities received in the wake of widespread anti-Semitic activity on their campuses.
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October 13, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Several news items of note on campus protests and general leftism. Last Monday, October 7, a group of pro-Hamas students at Pomona College occupied the main administration building (Carnegie Hall—I had some graduate classes in that building way back when, and it is often used in Hollywood movies when they want an exterior that looks like an Ivy League college), expelled its workers and injured a public safety officer, and
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September 26, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Next week will see the 60th anniversary of the inception of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, which became one of the milestones of the radical student movement of the 1960s. Berkeley is very proud of that legacy. Two weeks ago Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and former ACLU executive director Nadine Strossen appeared at a campus forum championing free speech and rejecting the “heckler’s veto” over unpopular views and
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September 25, 2024 — Steven Hayward
To no one’s astonishment, Penn has reprimanded Prof. Amy Wax for her crime of disagreeing with campus woke orthodoxy. Prof. Wax will be suspended for the next academic year, her salary cut in half, and stripped of her title as the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law. This outcome was foreordained from the beginning of the witch hunt several years ago, and it is a near certainty that Wax would have
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September 20, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Robert Pondisco of the American Enterprise Institute responded to a query on Twitter/X yesterday on the question of why academic writing is so awful. His pithy answer: The opacity of academic prose arises from the epistemological imperative to operationalize disciplinary jargon, facilitating intra-specialized discourse while obfuscating heterogenous interpretive accessibility and perpetuating a recursive dialectic of erudition and exclusion. Yup, that pretty much nails it. My young philosopher pal Spencer Case
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September 14, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Former Attorney General Bill Barr is a Columbia graduate. At the Free Press, he considers that university’s descent into anti-Semitism: Reading the report issued last month by Columbia University’s Task Force on Antisemitism, one could be forgiven for thinking that it describes the University of Heidelberg circa 1933. It contains accounts of observant Jews being harassed and assaulted, and open calls for the murder of Jews. But no, this is
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September 1, 2024 — Steven Hayward
There has been some salutary progress in recent months shutting down the divisive “diversity, equity, and inclusion” rackets on college campuses in many red states, but after the job of ridding us of the scourge of DEI attention needs to be turned to admissions offices. Thesis: Most admissions offices should be purged wholesale. Not only are most of them likely still violating civil rights law in the aftermath of the
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