Did You Know? Two British Reforms America Should Copy
Two recent British policy briefs on academic freedom and university reforms provide some broad suggestions applicable to colleges, British or otherwise. Policy Exchange, a center-right think tank, published “Academic Freedom…
How to Renew Traditional Historical Study in Graduate Schools
I’m sometimes asked why it is so difficult for PhD students of a conservative bent to survive and flourish in history graduate programs these days. It’s not enough to say…
Did You Know? Students, Faculty Punished for Speech on Social Media
Fordham University student Austin Tong has found himself in hot water over a protest picture on Instagram. In it, he posed with a gun to commemorate the 31st anniversary of…
An Open Letter to Duke President Price about Anti-Racism
Dear President Price: On June 17, you published a 1,400-word “Statement to the Community Regarding Anti-Racism.” The document contains many expressions of concern, fully in tune with the current national…
UNC’s Attempt to Grapple with ‘History of Racism and Oppression’
On June 8, interim UNC system president William Roper and chairman of the Board of Governors Randy Ramsey announced the establishment of a race and equity task force. The announcement…
Universities Appease China, Ignore Human Rights Abuses
Long the vanguard of liberal change, the American university now leads the appeasement of a hardened authoritarian China. The interest in promoting a broader community of scholars has given way…
UCLA’s Discrimination Office Targeting Professor Threatens Academic Freedom
When a political science lecturer at UCLA read to his class Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and showed clips from a documentary on racism, he found…
Higher Ed Is Stoking the Flames of the War on History
On July 4 at Mt. Rushmore, President Trump praised Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Louis Armstrong; it was a significant political and cultural speech, comparable to Trump’s speech extolling Western…
Misusing Editorial Power to Censor Unpopular Research
Academic freedom is under assault by people who want to control research and speech. One of their strategies exploits the gatekeeping functions of journal editors to censor unpopular ideas. The…
The Unbearable Whiteness of Being
If you had told me a couple of years ago that a book like Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism would…