Earlier this summer, Harvard dean Lawrence Bobo wrote an essay for the Harvard Crimson that provoked a chorus of criticism, much of it justified. Reflecting on the post-October 7 turmoil … Continue reading “Academic Freedom Doesn’t Mean Grandstanding”
It is hard to fathom the extent to which American colleges and universities have been taken over by Critical Theory, race-based or not. One good indication is that French and … Continue reading “Sensitivity by Proxy”
An unfolding case at Smith College shows how the obsession with race can blind administrators to facts and lead them to act in ways that harm innocent people. In 2018, … Continue reading “The Appalling Smith College Case—Race Tramples on Truth and Justice”
“People that work at universities and newspapers should be the most intellectually free people in the world.” Few would vocally disagree with these words recently said by former New York … Continue reading “Where Did ‘Cancel Culture’ Come From?”
At this year’s Association of American Colleges and Universities meeting, held in late January in San Francisco, a sense of misgiving filled the conference hall. Panelists raised, implicitly, the question … Continue reading “No Lessons Learned: Campus Intolerance Intensifies in the Trump Era”
Honest reporters and editors have asked a hard question since Election Day: How could we have been so staggeringly wrong about so much in 2016? On December 8, Dean Baquet, … Continue reading “What’s Wrong with Our Journalism Departments?”
On December 19, the U.S. Department of Education announced that as of the end of the year, it would no longer allow students to use federal aid money at the … Continue reading “No More Federal Student Aid Money for Charlotte School of Law”
American college students have taken to saying that they need “safe spaces” on campus. They really don’t, since all they’re after is “safety” from ideas they dislike. But if they … Continue reading “Students Need Much Better Counseling Before Going Into Debt for College”
In 2006, I clipped a “Non Sequitur” cartoon that captured perfectly the mystique that surrounds our nation’s universities. The cartoon pictured a professor ensconced in a cubicle surrounded by an … Continue reading “The Modern University’s Greatest Failing”
Famed literary critic George Steiner once said that cultural knowledge allows one to “resist” and that “no one can make a zombie of you if you carry [cultural knowledge] inside … Continue reading “The High Cost of Cultural Amnesia”