Higher education
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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January 17, 2024 — John Hinderaker
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
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January 9, 2024 — Scott Johnson
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
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January 3, 2024 — John Hinderaker
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
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January 2, 2024 — Scott Johnson
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
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January 2, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Someone or other continues the examination of Claudine Gay’s scholarly output prior to her accession to the Harvard presidency — some 17 articles in all. The Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium reports that six new instances of plagiarism have been cited in the complaint filed with Harvard yesterday. Sibarium reviews the record to date along with the new allegations: Seven of Gay’s 17 published works have already been impacted by
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December 23, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Students of ancient history may recall that Harvard President Claudine Gay’s plagiarism scandal began with a late October inquiry by the New York Post to Gay and Harvard specifying incidents of what we have come to know as “inadequate citation” in Gay’s work. The Post submitted its inquiry and awaited their response. Harvard deceitfully asked the Post for more time to respond. The response was a 15-page letter from the
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December 21, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The case of Harvard President Claudine Gay persists. It represents the multifaceted and overdetermined disgrace of Harvard. Today, for example, Ryan Mills and Zach Kessel report at NRO that “Scholars Say They Were Plagiarized by Claudine Gay, Ignored by Harvard Investigation.” It’s an excellent story, though it is behind NRO’s paywall. Today Jennifer Schuessler delivers the sad news to readers of the New York Times in “Harvard Finds More Instances
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December 20, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Peter Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars and former Boston University professor of anthropology. At BU he also held a variety of administrative positions, including associate provost and president’s chief of staff. In his December 15 Spectator column “Claudine Gay’s way with words” (behind the Spectator paywall), Wood draws on his experience in academia to examine the case of the Harvard president: Gay made a practice of
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December 13, 2023 — Scott Johnson
In its statement vowing to back Harvard President Claudine Gay today, tomorrow, and forever, the Harvard Fellows took up the issue of Gay’s plagiarism. The Fellows asserted that Gay “is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.” I translated “proactively” as meaning “when she was caught.” I stand by my translation. The statement dated Gay’s proactive voyage
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