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…
UNC-Chapel Hill Officially Teaches What to Think, Not How to Think
When the University of North Carolina leadership and the state’s legislators capitulated to the frenzied mob that toppled a statue of a Confederate Army soldier at the entrance to the…
Did You Know? The Decline of Free Speech Zones
The term “free speech zone” can be misleading. While the name implies a policy that promotes free expression, free speech zones do the opposite. They confine political demonstrations to a…
Activist Academics Threaten the Integrity of Higher Ed
The rise of activist professors has shaped the culture in higher ed for decades. As activists have become more prominent, a familiar process has changed academic departments, pushing scholars out…
Why Students Have Turned Away from History
I taught history from 1976 through 2013 at Harvard, Carnegie-Mellon, the Naval War College, and Williams College. The 37 years of my career coincided with a drastic change in the…
A War Against ‘Normal’
A question of power is at the heart of the new and interesting book by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. The Anglo-American liberal duo did a tremendous service to the…