Higher education
June 13, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday in “For what it’s worth” I took the case of the eight indicted “pro-Palestinian” defendants associated with the University of Michigan as illustrative. A reader kindly wrote to remind me: Those are (some of) the students that Professor Derek Peterson praised at the University of Michigan’s commencement this year. “Sing for the pro-Palestinian student activists, who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and
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June 7, 2026 — Scott Johnson
At my oldest kids’ primary school in the 1990s, study of the Yanomamö bushmen permeated the curriculum. By the time my oldest daughter moved on from the school to seventh grade, I believe she “knew” — much of what she was taught isn’t true — more about the Yanomamö than she did about American history. I should have been paying more attention, but I had other battles to fight with
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May 28, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Jeffrey Hart taught English at Dartmouth College from 1963 to 1993. During most of those years and after Professor Hart also served as a senior editor of National Review. I was his student for four of those years. The memories have come flooding back as I have been rereading Gulliver’s Travels over the past several weeks, a book I first read in Professor Hart’s course on the era of Dryen
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May 15, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Andrew Stiles reminds me at the end of his weekly Stiles Section column this week. I meant to call a timeout for the commencement speech Eric Church gave at UNC-Chapel Hill this past weekend after I read Dante the Don’s testimonial to it on X. Church is the highly successful country music singer singer/songwriter. As the powers-that-be at UNC-Chapel Hill explain, Church delivered a commencement speech structured on the six
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May 4, 2026 — Scott Johnson
The Washington Free Beacon notes this unlikely story with an Ivy League twist in the “additional reading” conclusion of its Morning Beacon newsletter: Anti-Israel students at Cornell followed the university’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, to his car after a “debate over the war in Gaza” and surrounded it as he attempted to leave. Kotlikoff just kept on reversing, “brushing” into one student before his car “accelerates and bumps into the student,”
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April 24, 2026 — Scott Johnson
The Free Beacon’s Jessica Costescu draws attention to the recent speaker (via video) at Berkeley Law School: The University of California Berkeley law school’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter hosted a convicted Palestinian terrorist who detonated a car bomb that burned an Israeli police officer, an event a spokesman for the school told the Washington Free Beacon is “Constitutionally protected expression.” Israa Jaabis, who was freed from prison
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April 2, 2026 — Scott Johnson
In our Picks I will be posting essays and review from the forthcoming issue of the Claremont Review of Books as the editors make them available online. However, having noted the publication of the awesome two-volume history The Golden Thread in this post, I want to highlight Spencer Klavan’s review of the books in “The Renegade Academy.” In my comments I confined myself to noting what the two volumes had
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March 31, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Mosaic senior editor Andrew Koss highlights the saga of Canadian Professor Paul Finlayson in the publication’s daily newsletter this morning. Koss quotes from Professor Finlayson’s account of his ordeal at Finlayson’s own Freedom To Offend site. Koss writes (the links are in the Mosaic newsletter): * * * * * Paul Finlayson was, for fifteen years, a beloved professor of marketing at the University of Guelph-Humber, a small institution in
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February 2, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Something has happened to the Department of History at Harvard. The former chairman of Harvard’s history department is boasting that he helped transform the faculty from a “white male affinity group” into a more globally diverse operation. In an opinion piece for the Harvard Crimson, the professor, Sidney Chalhoub, characterized the department of the early 1990s as insular and exclusionary and lauded its evolution into a faculty that’s now drawn
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January 17, 2026 — Scott Johnson
A wave of unemployment appears to have hit Amherst College in the wake of the Free Beacon’s coverage of the sexual extravaganza that played at the school’s chapel. Amherst student Jeb Allen bravely stepped forward to tell the story to the world beyond the Amherst asylum. Then Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium followed up with a sequel in which Amherst unsuccessfully implored the Free Beacon to tone it down. See
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January 13, 2026 — Scott Johnson
When we visited Amherst College with one of my kids some 20 years ago, we took a tour conducted by a student from Minnesota. He was a hockey player who looked like a handsome all-American. Discussing the coed dormitories and coed bathrooms, he explained that the coed bathrooms bothered him at first, but he got over it. That seemed to be the point — to break down the natural inhibitions
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December 6, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Readers may recall the case of the the rat-hunting Harvard Law School professor and gun-control activist arrested for firing a pellet gun outside a Brookline synagogue on the eve of Yom Kippur. I wrote about it in “Hunting rats in Brookline” and in “Green hills of Brookline.” The hunter was Professor Carlos Portugal Gouvea. He has now agreed to self-deport. I doubted the veracity of of Professor Gouvea’s denials that
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December 1, 2025 — Scott Johnson
The Buckley Institute at Yale has just released its 2025 Faculty Political Diversity Report, finding a more than 36 to 1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans across all of Yale’s undergraduate departments, the Yale Law School, and the Yale School of Management. The email announcement of the report’s publication today includes this summary (links and emphasis omitted): “For the third year in a row, our research has highlighted the significant
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November 20, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Palestinan Authority President-For-Life Mahmoud Abbas has long rewarded the murder of Israelis with the pay-for-slay program administered by the PA’s so-called Martyrs Fund. The fund paid regular stipends to families of terrorists imprisoned or killed by the Israel Defense Forces for their acts. “Martyrdom” by the killing of innocent Israelis was to be rewarded. The payments were supposedly terminated earlier this yeaar, but I would subject that supposition in this
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October 20, 2025 — Scott Johnson
I took an outstanding Latin course on Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses from Dartmouth Classics Professor Edward Bradley in the winter of 1970 — that’s me with my old copy of the Metamorphoses in the photo with Professor Bradley at the left. Forty-two years later — in the fall of 2012 — my youngest daughter took introductory Latin with none other than Professor Bradley. Hearing my daughter talk about Professor Bradley
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October 6, 2025 — Scott Johnson
I wouldn’t be aware of the story of visiting Harvard Law professor Carlos Portugal Gouvea if it weren’t for the post below on X. It’s almost unbelievable and the gist of it is in fact disputed by the perpetrator. Carlos Portugal Gouvea, a visiting Harvard Law professor, was arrested in Brookline, MA for firing a pellet gun at Temple Beth Zion on Yom Kippur. Read that again – a Harvard
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October 4, 2025 — Scott Johnson
On Thursday the New York Post reported that Harvard has hired drag queen LaWhore Vagistan as a visiting professor. On Friday Post columnist Kirsten Fleming reiterated the story with an attitude “When it comes to ‘LaWhore Vagistan’ at Harvard, I’m not even outraged — it’s hilarious.” Over the past two years Harvard has spinelessly tolerated the tormenting of its Jewish students by Hamas supporters on campus. It deserves to be
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