Higher education
April 19, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Current events at Columbia may call to mind events at Columbia circa 1968. Before matriculating at Dartmouth in the fall of 1969, I joined a group of incoming freshmen who met to discuss Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul On Ice and Columbia undergrad James Simon Kunen’s just-published The Strawberry Statement. We didn’t take Cleaver’s book particularly seriously and Eric Hoffer even less so. He caustically mocked it as Soul On Horse Manure.
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April 18, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Ilhan Omar elicited the testimony of Columbia President Minouche Shafik at the House Education Committee hearing yesterday that she had seen no “protests” at Columbia “saying we are against Jewish people.” See the video below at 0:40. Omar also regurgitated the canard that students had been attacked by “a toxic chemical substance.” That appears not to be the case. I think it might more accurately be deemed the raspberry statement.
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April 18, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Columbia University President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik skipped the December 5 House Education Committee Hearing on anti-Semitism at their institutions that disgraced the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT. President Shafik was invited to the hearing, but she was otherwise engaged. She was speaking at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai. Some might say that she sensed stormy weather. Yesterday the committee reconvened to hear from President Shafik and
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March 24, 2024 — John Hinderaker
There are several answers to that question, but start with the fact that it is mostly the “elite” universities, and to some extent the larger ones, that have seen severe outbreaks of anti-Semitism. What is different about these institutions? For one thing, they have large numbers of foreign students, many of them from the Middle East and China. This has become a financial racket: the top universities post sky-high sticker
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March 18, 2024 — Steven Hayward
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
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March 17, 2024 — Steven Hayward
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
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March 14, 2024 — Scott Johnson
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.
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March 13, 2024 — Scott Johnson
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
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March 12, 2024 — Scott Johnson
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,
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March 3, 2024 — Scott Johnson
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
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March 3, 2024 — Scott Johnson
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
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March 1, 2024 — Steven Hayward
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
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February 23, 2024 — Scott Johnson
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
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January 31, 2024 — Scott Johnson
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
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January 27, 2024 — Steven Hayward
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
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January 25, 2024 — Scott Johnson
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
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January 20, 2024 — Scott Johnson
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
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