Academic left
October 29, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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October 26, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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
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October 25, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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
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October 21, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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,
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October 19, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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October 17, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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
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October 15, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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
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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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