Academic left
October 13, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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October 12, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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October 11, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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:
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October 9, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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,
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October 4, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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
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September 27, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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.
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September 20, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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
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August 18, 2023 — John Hinderaker
It is an inconvenient truth that various ethnic groups do not, on average, perform equally well on objective measures of intellectual accomplishment. Mathematics is particularly problematic, in that results are hard to fudge–basically, answers are either right or wrong. Liberals have responded to this conundrum by dumbing down one discipline after another. Their theory is that if they lower standards far enough, they will arrive at a point where racial
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August 16, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Whenever I am down in the LA area, as I am today, my mind runs to ordering French fries “animal style” from In-n-Out burgers. (IYKYK.) But today, opening up the Washington Post, I discover the origins of a possible new sect of conservatism: Animal-House conservatives, who naturally do things “animal-style.” Yes, the Post really does suggest that the 1978 comedy blockbuster Animal House bears some responsibility for the Reagan era
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August 13, 2023 — John Hinderaker
In the U.S., college admissions have become a political battleground. In the wake of the Harvard and UNC decisions, many schools–probably most–have vowed to do away with all objective test requirements so that they can continue engaging in race discrimination. What will the consequences be for the quality of post-secondary education? A clue comes from the U.K., where a much less severe erosion of meritocracy has had malign consequences, as
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August 9, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Under Ron DeSantis’s leadership, Florida has attained the enviable status of the state that liberals most like to hate, and to denigrate irrationally. Thus it is no surprise to see this headline: Pro-woke professors leave Florida universities in protest. The Tampa Bay Times reported on a July meeting of the Florida Board of Governors. During the meeting, a number of professors expressed concern about the political climate in Florida. Professors
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August 9, 2023 — Steven Hayward
There are hundreds of jargon-filled academic articles published every day, and as such are not worth noting. But once in a while a special effort at ideological academic babble deserves notice when it is indistinguishable from parody. Such is this article from Ethnos, an anthropological journal, published yesterday: That Which They Will Not See: Climate Denial as a Vector of Epistemological Crisis in the Contemporary United States Susannah Crockford, University
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July 30, 2023 — Steven Hayward
I am intermittently a member of the American Political Science Association (APSA), and attend its large annual meeting when it is convenient or otherwise useful, such as when held in San Francisco or Washington DC, as it often is. Some years back the APSA moved its long-scheduled annual meeting from San Francisco to Seattle because there was a pending strike of hotel workers in San Francisco, and for the oh-so-sensitive
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July 21, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Last fall there was a considerable controversy about whether, as the student banners held, “Stanford hates fun.” Among other things, Stanford requires that student parties have to be registered and cleared with the campus administration. This is having a chilling effect on student life, as the Stanford Daily student paper reports: There were just 45 parties registered on campus during the first four weeks of the fall quarter, compared with
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July 15, 2023 — John Hinderaker
It pays to be a minority, especially a Native American. That is the only possible explanation why so many people, especially academics, adopt fake Indian identities. There is even a word for it: Pretendian. And it seems as though the more militant the academic, the more likely he actually isn’t Native at all. One more case in point: University of Kansas professor Kent Blansett. The Dakota Scout reports: University of
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June 14, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Yesterday we reported on how Johns Hopkins University had erased the existence of women by defining lesbians as “non-men.” To refresh your memory, here’s part of JHU’s “glossary” of terms: This absurdity got wide coverage beyond Power Line, and evidently Johns Hopkins was embarrassed. Today Johns Hopkins removed the glossary entirely, and now has this in its place: Even this got modified later in the day to this: In other
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June 13, 2023 — Steven Hayward
This news item caught my eye: Secretary Cardona cancels UW commencement speech amid researchers strike Hours before he was scheduled to give the commencement speech to the University of Washington’s graduating class of students, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona canceled his appearance, citing a strike by graduate and postdoctoral researchers. “Secretary Cardona will not cross the picket line to give the commencement address,” a spokesperson for Cardona said in
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