Power Line 100
December 8, 2015 — Steven Hayward
The Power Line 100 Best Professors in America series went dormant a while back during my own full immersion into the professoriate, and while I’ll eventually get back to that project in a new fashion, it behooves us to take note of the retirement of Emory University historian Harvey Klehr, who today delivered his last lecture at Emory on the subject of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. (Klehr would rank high
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October 31, 2014 — Steven Hayward
I tended to let the Power Line 100 Best Professors in America series go dormant last academic year while I served out my time as an inmate at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and it is past time to bring it back. And who better to inaugurate the revival of this series than NYU’s Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind. He is not only tall, but his name
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October 5, 2014 — Steven Hayward
Richard Morgan, that’s who. Morgan is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of constitutional and international law at Bowdoin College in Maine, where he is that rarity in higher education today—he teaches undergraduates about the Constitution. One of the untold scandals/travesties of higher education today is how fast constitutional law for undergraduates is disappearing from most political science curricula. (There was even a panel on the problem at this year’s American
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December 8, 2013 — Steven Hayward
In a lecture a few months back I observed that you generally find very few conservatives in philosophy departments at American colleges and universities (as opposed to political philosophy in political science departments, where you tend to find conservatives much better represented). There are, however, two notable and interesting exceptions to this general rule: when you do find a conservative academic philosopher, he or she (but much more often a
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August 25, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I’d not paid close attention to Mike Adams, professor of criminology at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, until the following account came to my attention courtesy of CollegeInsurrection.com, but after you take this in you’ll see why he belongs on the Power Line 100. Among other things (like high ratings on RateMyProfessor.com), he’s the author of Feminists Say the Darndest Things: A Politically-Incorrect Professor Confronts “Womyn” on Campus. I
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August 16, 2013 — Steven Hayward
With all of my moving I’ve fallen behind on keeping up the process of vetting professors for the Power Line 100 roster, but this week’s correspondence with Stephen Knott about the passing of Bill (“Judge”) Clark prompted me to return to my list, and lo and behold, guess who has risen to the top of it. Stephen Knott! He is not a stranger to Power Line readers, of course. Steve
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July 14, 2013 — Steven Hayward
It was big news last fall when Baylor University’s honors program hired Alan Jacobs away from Wheaton College, where Jacobs had been a prominent fixture as the Clyde Kilby Professor of English for nearly 30 years. (Check out his useful home page here.) Jacobs is much in the mold of C.S. Lewis, combining a grounding in classical thought and literature with an interest in modern writers and contemporary perspectives (especially
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June 30, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Last night here in Ashland, Ohio (where I’m team-teaching an intensive one-week masters degree course on the Cold War with Stephen Tootle), we held a great sendoff for Peter Schramm, stepping down as director of the Ashbrook Center after two decades, and handing off the reins to the supra-capable Roger Beckett. (We highlighted Peter in the Power Line 100 series previously.) We held an old fashioned Dean Martin-style roast, featuring
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June 9, 2013 — Steven Hayward
This installment departs a little from the usual criteria for induction into the Power Line 100 Best Professors in America roster, in that we cast our spotlight on Ben Sasse, the president of Midland University in Nebraska. Or perhaps I should say, the Weekly Standard’s Mark Hemingway casts his spotlight on Sasse, whom somehow I had never heard of before Mark’s terrifically interesting profile in this week’s issue. Some of
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June 4, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Obviously Princeton’s Robert P. George was going to end up on the Power Line 100, but this seems like the ideal week to do it, since he’s in New Jersey and . . . well, there’s this U.S. Senate seat suddenly open, and if Gov. Chris Christie really wants to send an interesting message that he isn’t about politics as usual, he’d think about sending Robbie to Washington for a
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June 2, 2013 — Steven Hayward
A reader tip brings Gary Saul Morson of Northwestern University to the list of candidates for the Power Line 100 Best Professors roster. Morson is the Frances Hooper Professor of the Arts and Humanities and professor of Slavic languages and literature at Northwestern University, where, according to one recent profile, he is considered “a throwback,” because “he believes his most important job is to teach undergraduates. His Introduction to Russian
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May 18, 2013 — Steven Hayward
It’s about time we start turning our attention to law professors who belong on the Power Line 100 list, and we’ve got a long list of them. As with the rest of the field of finalists, there is no particular order, so we’ll start with Jonathan Adler, the well-known interior designer whose baubles you can find at Bed, Bath & Beyond—no, wait, not that Jonathan Adler! We mean the Jonathan
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May 15, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Hadley Arkes of Amherst College (since 1966!) would make the top of the Power Line 100 Best Professors list if we went either by alphabetical order or any kind of semi-objective scoring system. Hadley is the Edward Ney Professor of American Institutions at Amherst, and is also affiliated with our friends at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the Jurisprudence of the Natural Law, whose fine blog, right-reason.org, is worth bookmarking.
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May 5, 2013 — Steven Hayward
One of our regrets here on the Power Line 100 selection committee is that we didn’t get Yale’s Donald Kagan into our sequence soon enough to feature him before his recent retirement, which Scott noted here the other day. So we don’t want to slip up by letting the same thing occur with Pamela K. Jensen, professor of political science at Kenyon College, who has retired as a full-time instructor
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April 21, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Herewith a second installment of my recent interview with Peter Schramm of the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, where he discusses the extraordinary effect of Harry Jaffa, how students should be approached and regarded in the classroom, and the Bowdoin report. About 7 minutes long.
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April 17, 2013 — Steven Hayward
It’s long past time to get to Peter Schramm’s place (not to say ranking, which we don’t have anyway) on the Power Line 100 Best Professors in America roster. Schramm, born in Hungary, emigrated to the United States in the aftermath of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 because, his father told him at the time, “We were born American–just in the wrong place.” You can read his account of the
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April 3, 2013 — Steven Hayward
The National Association of Scholars is out today with a lengthy (359 pages and 1,159 footnotes) report about the leftward decay—“decay” is perhaps a mild word—of liberal arts at Bowdoin College in Maine. There’s a backstory here, involving the relentlessly mediocre political correctness of Bowdoin’s president, Barry Mills, and how he caricatured a golf outing with Thomas Klingenstein (chairman of the Claremont Institute) in order to reinforce his comfortable stereotype
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