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…
New Title IX Regulations Restore Due Process–But There’s a Battle Ahead
In the latest case where a male student sued his college over the unfair procedures it used to expel him, Colgate University in New York will go to trial. So…
The Academic and Social Benefits of Homeschooling
Homeschooling works. The roughly 2 million children who currently learn at home join a millennia-old practice supported by many government officials, scholars, college officials, and employers. While mainstream America has…