Academic left
March 22, 2023 — Steven Hayward
This afternoon Dean Jenny Martinez of Stanford Law School released a 10-page memorandum about the shameful Judge Duncan affair laying out the “next steps” regarding protests and freedom of speech. It is not until page 8 that we learn the most significant news—that “Associate Dean Tirien Steinbach is currently on leave.” Hopefully this is a prelude to her dismissal not only for her role in this specific matter, but for
»
March 19, 2023 — Steven Hayward
English majors are fast disappearing from our colleges and universities, and with good reason. Here’s a current summer course offering from Johns Hopkins University: Climate Fiction and Capitalist Accumulation – AS.060.186 This course will examine the relationship between capitalist accumulation, the climate crisis, and contemporary climate fiction. What is capitalist accumulation? How has this process led to the contemporary climate crisis? What ideas constitute its ideological apparatus? How do contemporary
»
March 11, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium covers the plight of free speech in higher education. He contacted Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan after he was made the object of the Two Minutes Hate at Stanford Law School with the support of one Tirien Steinbach, the law school’s associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion. As Steve Hayward noted in “Stanford University disgraces itself,” Judge Duncan was beyond inclusion. His inclusion
»
March 10, 2023 — Steven Hayward
I didn’t think it was possible for Stanford University to sink any lower into the woke abyss, but they have found a way. This week the Stanford Law Federalist Society invited Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan to speak. A mob of students decided to heckle him such that he could not speak. Judge Duncan requested that an administrator come and address the situation, and hence arrived Tirien Steinbach, Stanford’s Associate Dean of
»
March 5, 2023 — Steven Hayward
So when is Bill Maher going to get wise and just admit that he’s going to vote Republican and maybe even come out of the closet as a conservative (or at least a libertarian)? This week’s show ended with a typical Maher rant about “trigger warnings” (though this seems a somewhat stale topic—mocking trigger warnings is so 2018), which he correctly attributes as a product of universities. Someday he’ll connect
»
February 26, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Angela Davis’s ancestors may be of interest, as PBS reported last week, but it’s her own back pages that deserve a deep dive. I don’t think anyone has done so with greater penetration than the historian Ronald Radosh. Ron is the author of books including the invaluable The Rosenberg File (with Joyce Milton) as well as the classic memoir Commies, the critically important Red Star Over Hollywood, and, most recently
»
February 25, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Students of ancient history may think of Angela Davis as the Communist murderer who was the second black woman to make the FBI”s 10 Most Wanted List. She earned that distinction as a fugitive wanted on murder and kidnapping charges stemming from her role in a notorious attack on a Marin County courtroom. Her back pages are usually obscured by reference to her as a “radical” or “activist” or some
»
February 21, 2023 — John Hinderaker
David Horowitz comments on the recent mayhem in Austin, Texas: In the news reports about the anti-police mayhem by young people in Austin Texas, one common element is missing: the obvious fact that Austin is a college town, home to one of America’s once-great educational institutions. This fact is not peripheral to the outbreak of lawlessness that tore apart Austin that night but central. Like virtually every major academic institution
»
February 13, 2023 — John Hinderaker
I saw that headline and thought I should look into it. Is there an epidemic of anti-gay violence at my old law school? Just kidding. This is the Harvard Crimson story: A Harvard Law School student was arrested after allegedly assaulting a fellow HLS student in a homophobic attack last month, according to a Harvard University Police report. According to the report, HLS student Naod N. Nega approached another student
»
January 30, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Sometime back around 1990, I was privileged to get to spend some time with Jaime Escalante (d. 2010), the Bolivian-born high school math teacher whose compelling story was made into a feature film, Stand and Deliver, which featured Edward James Olmos playing Escalante. Escalante had become nationally famous in the 1980s when 18 of his hispanic students from a low-income east Los Angeles neighborhood scored highly on the AP calculus
»
January 28, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Several years ago, I saw a cartoon that went something like this: a liberal college administrator tells a conservative speaker that his event is being canceled because there have been threats of violence. The conservative asks, who are the threats coming from? and the liberal administrator answers, “Us.” This is, in fact, one of the Left’s favorite ploys to shut down conservative speech. It happened at Florida’s New College last
»
January 24, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Matthew M. Wielicki, professor of geosciences at the University of Alabama, has announced in a Twitter thread that he has decided to leave the university, and some of his reasons are becoming depressingly frequent in the sciences: Why I am leaving the University of Alabama: Some internet sleuths have discovered that I will be leaving my faculty position in the Department of Geological Sciences after this semester so I thought
»
January 18, 2023 — Steven Hayward
News item: Stanford University withdraws its “Harmful Language” list after it received widespread publicity—and universal ridicule. But other universities are quietly imposing similar “language guidance” albeit without high-profile master lists that would expose them to the withering laughter and contempt they deserve. News item: The Biden Administration rushes to reassure Americans that there is “no plan” to ban natural gas stoves. This is a lie, of course. Lots of progressive
»
December 23, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Stanford has issued a 75-page report on its discrimination against Jews in the 1950s. The report resulted in an apology for its past practices by University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne. In a terrific Minding the Campus article, John Rosenberg, who writes at Discriminations, asks how much things at Stanford have really changed: Someone should ask him why he believes the policy of restricting the number of Jews was wrong. Does he
»
December 20, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Perhaps you’ve seen the story on the Wall Street Journal editorial page today (or in some other outlet where it is booming this morning) about Stanford University’s “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative,” which reads like a parody of our idiotic woke university culture today. But no—Stanford employed a task force that worked for months to advocate that no one on campus use the word “American” because “This term often refers
»
December 14, 2022 — Steven Hayward
I’ve written at some length about the suicide of academic history (which I’m going to expand and turn into a longer journal article eventually), but for now take in the latest grim statistics from the latest issue of the Middle West Review, where editor-in-chief John Lauck fills in some of the numbers in “The Ongoing History Crisis“: Around the Midwest, the news from history departments is grim, even at larger
»
November 28, 2022 — Steven Hayward
The woke diversicrats at the University of Massachusetts Boston have issued drafts of a new “mission statement” and “vision statement” for the campus (because why just limit yourself to a mission statement when you can have a vision statement too). They are as follows: Mission statement draft: As an academic community of global and local citizens, we are committed to becoming an anti-racist and health-promoting institution that honors and uplifts
»
