Academic left
March 23, 2025 — John Hinderaker
This story is so dumb it makes my head hurt: “Cambridge causes bitter row by linking Stephen Hawking to slavery.” Cambridge University has become embroiled in a row over claims that scientists including the late Professor Stephen Hawking benefited from slavery. The university’s Fitzwilliam Museum is holding an exhibition titled Rise Up, which covers abolition movements, rebellions and modern-day “racist injustices”. *** A catalogue that accompanies the exhibition also states
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March 21, 2025 — John Hinderaker
Money talks, even when you have a $15 billion endowment. So Columbia has acceded to the Trump administration’s demands to get back the $400 million in federal funding that Trump revoked over the university’s anti-Semitism. The liberal Wall Street Journal reports, sympathetically: Columbia agreed to ban masks, empower 36 campus police officers with new powers to arrest students and appoint a senior vice provost with broad authority to oversee the
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March 15, 2025 — John Hinderaker
They may be if they don’t change their ways, Victor Davis Hanson argues. He recites the familiar litany of how such universities have veered radically to the left, adopting DEI, gender, and anti-Semitic theories and practices that represent distinctly minority views. He then describes the hammers being wielded by the Trump administration: [T]here was bound to be a public reckoning. And now it has arrived. Congress will soon pass legislation
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March 10, 2025 — John Hinderaker
The Trump administration’s pulling of $400 million in grants and contracts has reverberated through the world of higher education. Harvard has announced a hiring freeze, although they don’t quite call it that. The language is turgid, but the point comes through: Universities throughout the nation face substantial financial uncertainties driven by rapidly shifting federal policies. Yes, we now have an administration that is opposed to anti-Semitism. Effective immediately, Harvard will
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March 7, 2025 — John Hinderaker
Maybe it was the outrage at Barnard or maybe it was already in the works: Trump administration yanks $400M in grants, contracts from Columbia University over antisemitism on campus. A federal antisemitism task force — convened by President Trump and including the Departments of Justice, Health and Human Services (HHS), and Education as well as the General Services Administration (GSA) — announced the barring of US taxpayers’ money from funding
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February 25, 2025 — John Hinderaker
Last week, I received the email below from Gale Primary Sources, acting on behalf of the University of California’s Center for Right-Wing Studies. It sought permission to digitize and disseminate materials created by my organization, Center of the American Experiment. These materials would be part of an archive that Berkeley will “publish and commercially distribute,” for the purposes of academic research and education on the “Right Wing.” I noticed that,
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February 1, 2025 — Steven Hayward
Well, well, well: We have reported previously about the race-hustling academic fraud Ibram X. Kendi (here and here, for starters), whose lavishly funded Center for Anti-Racist Research at Boston University came under scrutiny for not producing any research, and being mismanaged in the extreme leading to massive staff layoffs. An audit by Boston University found “no wrongdoing,” though it is hard to resist the ironic suspicion that this was a
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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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