Academic left

The Right to Privacy at Columbia

Featured image Earlier today, students at Columbia University walked out on a two-hour lecture by Hillary Clinton. I can’t blame them for that, although I admire Hillary’s stamina. But the students walked out for a different reason than I would have: Thirty students walked out of Hillary Clinton’s class at Columbia University to “shame” the Ivy League school for how they perceive it allowed its students who signed an anti-Israel statement to »

Big Law Drops a Big Foot: Will Law Schools Listen?

Featured image Yesterday I spotted on social media the letter shown below from two dozen top law firms (“big law,” as they are sometimes called) addressed to law school deans telling them to get a grip on the anti-Semitism that they have let run rampant at their schools. I was not able to verify its authenticity so I refrained from posting it, but the New York Times reports on it this morning, »

Arrest In Cornell Case

Featured image As you probably have read, viciously anti-Semitic threats were made against Jewish students at Cornell by an anonymous person. The apparent perpetrator has now been arrested: Patrick Dai, of Pittsford, posted threats to shoot up a multicultural dining room on campus to an online discussion site, prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of New York said in a news release. *** Dai, a junior, also called »

Harvard Vows to Do Better on Anti-Semitism

Featured image On Friday evening, Harvard President Claudine Gay gave a speech to Harvard Hillel that was adapted in Forward. Gay forthrightly admitted that Harvard has an anti-Semitism problem: Here in the U.S., we are witnessing a surge in anti-Jewish incidents and rhetoric across the nation — and on our own campus. The ancient specter of antisemitism, that persistent and corrosive hatred, has returned with renewed force. A recent ADL report found »

On Scene at the Pro-Hamas Campus “Walkout”

Featured image As noted earlier in the week, I was on campus at Berkeley yesterday to host a guest lecture at the law school from Hadley Arkes about his latest book Mere Natural Law (podcast forthcoming), but yesterday happened to coincide with the “National Walkout” in favor of Hamas called for on college campuses nationwide. I decided to take in some of the scene down at Sproul Plaza, the main site for »

Why Are Our Universities Anti-Semitic Cesspools?

Featured image Students at George Washington University, one of the most expensive in the country (tuition: $64,000, not including room and board, so add another 20K at least) have started projecting their support of Hamas on the library building of the campus: I’m sure GWU’s office of diversity, equity and inclusion will get right on this. How do the students at our campuses end up like this? Maybe this set of recent »

Really It’s the Wuhan Institute of Virology, But….

Featured image This short clip by Bill Maher, via InstaPundit, is great. If you want to know who is OK with burning babies alive, gang rape and mass murder, look no further than America’s “elite” institutions. The good news is that pretty much everyone is on to them: “If ignorance is a disease, Harvard Yard in the Wuhan wet market” – @BillMaher #RealTime pic.twitter.com/ReozVvO4NY — Brent Baker 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 (@BrentHBaker) October 21, »

Evil People Self-Identify

Featured image My opinion of leftists is so low that I am hard to disappoint. But I admit to being shocked by the reaction of many leftists and liberals to the Gazan invasion of Israel. In many instances, they feel no obligation even to disavow the Gazans’ mass murder, gang rapes, kidnappings and beheadings of infants. They go straight to denouncing Israel for imagined crimes and, in some instances, attacking anticipated actions »

Universities: Maybe We Should Just Shut Up?

Featured image The moral nihilism and leftist willfulness of American higher education have finally been exposed by the harsh light of the Hamas barbarism, and for a change there are consequences. When a squishy, status-conscious centrist like Jon Huntsman tells the University of Pennsylvania that his “checkbook is closed” to further donations (Huntsman’s family has given tens of millions to Penn over the years) because Penn is “deeply adrift in ways that »

It Has Come to This: The Hamas Lockdown

Featured image On Friday Stanford Law School canceled in-person classes and moved all classes back to Zoom as they did during the COVID lockdown. Late last week Columbia University announced that it would limit campus access to student and staff ID holders only, after a Jewish student was beaten by a stick-wielding assailant. Elsewhere we have seen scenes of students and, at the University of Michigan, one faculty member, tearing down flyers »

Harvard Sticks Up For Free Speech

Featured image Harvard’s President Claudine Gay has rejected calls to name the university’s pro-terrorism students: Harvard president Claudine Gay pushed back on attempts to name students who signed a letter blaming Israel for the massacres committed by Hamas amid mounting criticism of her handling of the crisis. Gay said the Ivy League school “embraces a commitment to free expression” in a video released Thursday night — her latest attempt to quell outrage »

A Clarifying Moment

Featured image Floyd Mayweather is one of the greatest fighters of all time, but he has never claimed to be a moral paragon. Still, he knows where he stands on decapitating babies: God bless Floyd Mayweather pic.twitter.com/X9IaE5jzRO — Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) October 11, 2023 You have to be much, much smarter than a mere boxer to contemplate gang rape, mass murder of men, women and children, taking of hostages, spitting on »

Playboy > Harvard

Featured image I’m so old, I can remember when it would have been shocking to suggest that Playboy Magazine has more moral sense than Harvard University. Nowadays, maybe that doesn’t come as a surprise. In any event, it’s true. When former porn performer Mia Khalifa tweeted her support for Hamas’s mass murderers and suggested that the killers should film their deeds horizontally so she could see them better, Playboy promptly cashiered her: »

Time to Close Harvard?

Featured image One of the lingering controversies over here in Hungary is the actions Prime Minister Viktor Orban took several years ago to kick Central European University (CEU) out of the country. CEU was founded by George Soros in the early 1990s. As The Atlantic described it, “Soros had conceived the school during the dying days of communism to train a generation of technocrats who would write new constitutions, privatize state enterprises, »

Why Are Universities So Left?

Featured image It’s a total mystery why universities are so left wing. Or maybe it’s this: A provost, dean, or even a college president with one partially functioning vertebrae could put a stop to this. But they don’t, and won’t. Chaser: Degree in magic to be offered at University of Exeter A degree in magic being offered in 2024 will be one of the first in the UK, the University of Exeter »

No Sex Please—We’re Anthropologists!

Featured image With apologies to the old British farce “No Sex Please—We’re British!”, apparently academic anthropology wants to do a humorless remake. (Did I even need to include “humorless” after “academic anthropology”?) I would have thought that case studies in sex lives was a rather integral part of anthropology, at least it seemed that way when Margaret Mead was the hot anthropologist of her day, a forerunner of the over-rated Jared Diamond. »

Kendi Kar Krash

Featured image Ibram X. Kendi, ne Ibram Henry Rogers, is this generation’s Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton on steroids: race hustling shakedowns perfected. His target has been universities, which have been content to shower him with money, the most recent being Boston University, which lured him and his Center for Antiracist Research away from American University several years ago. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey gave Kendi a $10 million unrestricted grant, among other »