Higher education

Annals of Failed Intelligence

Featured image The Wall Street Journal has a feature news story in today’s edition detailing a fact long known about the success Cuban intelligence has enjoyed penetrating American government over the years, in particular their sophisticated and widespread recruitment efforts. “Cuba has ‘the best damn intelligence service in the world’ for cultivating agents, said Brian Latell, a former CIA analyst who led the agency’s Latin America division,” the story notes. There is »

The Liberal Arts Are a Right-Wing Plot!

Featured image In its typically clueless way, The New Yorker is hot on the topic of whether the liberal arts—and especially classical education—have gone conservative. (The article is titled, “Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?”) Better break out the smelling salts. You’d think this is an easy question. The left have attacked or hollowed out the liberal arts on campus, and the only people who take the classics seriously, and on their »

The trouble with Dennis Ross

Featured image Dennis Ross is a scholar and diplomat of unmatched experience in the vagaries of “the peace process.” His 2005 memoir The Missing Peace: Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace runs to 880 closely printed pages. He served in both the Bush (41) and Clinton administrations. He also served as special assistant to President Obama and worked on National Security Council in both the Reagan and Obama administrations. »

Why he was fired from Harvard

Featured image The great Dr. Jay Bhattacharya hosts the Illusion of Consensus podcast. I have embedded his most recent episode below via X. In this episode he speaks with Martin Kulldorff. Please check it out in its native habitat here and help Dr. Bhattacharya extend his reach to other platforms. Dr. Bhattacharya’s introduction to the podcast notes that “in this critical conversation we discuss a number of hot topics, most crucially Martin’s »

The ordeal of Martin Kulldorff

Featured image According to his Martin Kulldorff bio, Ph.D., Dr.h.c., is an epidemiologist, a biostatistician, and a founding fellow at Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom. He was a Professor of Medicine at Harvard University for thirteen years. Dr. Kulldorff’s research centers on developing and applying new disease surveillance methods for post-market drug and vaccine safety surveillance and for the early detection and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks. In October 2020, »

The takeover

Featured image In her February 26 Tablet column “The takeover,” Neetu Arnold traces the relationship among international student recruitment, DEI policies, and left-wing activism on American campuses. It is a long column that is full of information and data. This is how it opens: Something new and peculiar stands out about the wave of anti-Israel student activism that has rocked American university campuses since October: There is a visibly more radical element »

After the treason of the intellectuals

Featured image Niall Ferguson must be one of the three most prominent historians writing in English today. He is the author of 16 books. Late last year he wrote the timely and trenchant essay “Treason of the Intellectuals.” Now he follows up that essay with the lecture “After the Treason of the Intellectuals” at the University of Austin, where he is Founding Trustee. With Ferguson’s invocation of Max Weber, the lecture put »

Death to DEI

Featured image Bryan Caplan, professor of economics in George Mason University’s excellent economics department, has a long article out today with the James Martin Center about the attempt to impose a mandatory “Just Societies” course for all students at George Mason starting next fall, and the course is a total ideological DEI wokefest. He also has a separate Substack article that goes into lengthy detail. Partly because Caplan blew the whistle on »

Can we be saved from SAVE?

Featured image The Biden administration has fashioned another program of student debt relief forgiveness. The so-called SAVE plan was promulgated by regulation last year. It takes the load off the fanny of beneficiaries of certain federal college loan programs and puts it right on the back of taxpayers. Politico reports that Biden is emailing 153,000 student loan borrowers that he’s canceling their debt. “I hope this relief gives you a little more »

American Miseducation

Featured image The Free Press has just posted the 20-minute documentary American Miseducation (video below). The documentary is reported by the Free Press’s Oliva Reingold, who provides background on it here. The video is posted on YouTube with this explanation: In October last year, when Hamas attacked Israel, a new form of violent antisemitism instantly exploded onto American streets. This newest strain of the oldest hatred comes not from far-right extremists, but »

Wanted: A Real Consumer Guide to College

Featured image It’s clearly good news that the DEI jackboots are getting the boot in a lot of places, and that Ivy League presidents are being shown the door for their moral turpitude. But as everyone knows, these improvements are marginal, as the inmates (faculty and administrators alike) are still fully in charge of the asylum. Even without the DEI thought police, you still have to contend with faculty such as this »

Treason of the intellectuals, American edition

Featured image Reading the eminent historian Niall Ferguson’s great Free Press column “The treason of the intellectuals” last month, I was struck by this passage: It might be thought extraordinary that the most prestigious universities in the world should have been infected so rapidly with a politics imbued with antisemitism. Yet exactly the same thing has happened before. A hundred years ago, in the 1920s, by far the best universities in the »

The deep meaning of DEI

Featured image James Piereson contributes to understanding the deep meaning of Claudine Gay and the regime of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in his New Criterion column “DEI boomerang.” The title does not do it justice. Here is the concluding chunk: College presidents, if they are not members of the Democratic Party, invariably come into office pledging to enlarge the diversity regime, which further cements the party–academic alliance. College faculties are overwhelmingly Democratic »

Legislatures Are Coming For DEI

Featured image It is slowly dawning on liberals across America that DEI is, in most contexts, illegal. The whole point of DEI is to discriminate against disfavored groups, and in favor of preferred groups. Liberals have a hard time understanding that there is anything wrong with this, but the courts–most notably, recently, in the Harvard and UNC cases–are beginning to set them straight. In many states, legislators aren’t waiting for litigation to »

The Grievance Studies Project revisited

Featured image Peter Boghossian thinks the time is ripe to revisit the investigation of academic grievance studies that he conducted in 2017 and 2018 with his fellow iconoclasts James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose. For background read the New Discourses post “The Grievance Studies Project.” Check out Boghossian’s current set of linked tweets beginning with the one below by clicking on the time/date. Several of the tweets include a video excerpt from the »

Better Late Than Never

Featured image Bill Ackman is the wealthy Harvard alumnus who has taken the lead in trying to reform that institution. In the wake of Claudine Gay’s self-destruction, he wrote this lengthy Twitter post in which he diagnoses the sickness of institutions like Harvard. It is very good, and appropriately uncompromising in its denunciation of the totalitarian DEI culture that prevails on campuses and elsewhere. Money quote: DEI is inherently a racist and »

Exit Claudine Gay

Featured image If Claudine Gay’s transgressions were reasonably defensible, she would remain as Harvard’s president in good standing. She would continue to wield her authority to enforce the dictates of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (and to include you out). The university bought her the best lawyers money could buy to help fashion her congressional testimony on campus anti-Semitism. The university went to the well again for her when the New York Post »