Loyalty Oaths Return with Faculty “Diversity Statements”
One of the worst features of America in the 1940s and 50s was the persistent demand for national loyalty oaths. In those days, people were expected to declare their support…
Wake Forest Faculty Attempt to Undermine Koch-Funded Campus Institute
The Faculty Senate at Wake Forest University made headlines last week when it demanded that the university reject a $3.69 million grant from the Charles Koch Foundation. Such a stance…
Why College Graduates Still Can’t Think
More than six years have passed since Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa rocked the academic world with their landmark book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Their study of more…
Beyond Ideology: Poetry and the Conservative Mind
The Ideologues Genius of Burke! forgive the pen seduced/ by specious wonders – William Wordsworth Conservatives today seem to be pretty good at winning elections. They also seem to be…
Bias Response Teams Chill Free Speech and Miseducate Students
In their Atlantic article, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukainoff identified a troubling development on American campuses. They wrote, “A movement is arising, undirected and…
The Middlebury Mob Shows How Thin the Veneer of Our Civilization Is
On March 2, there was one of those oh-so-revealing events that makes people realize that very bad trends are at work in America, trends that are corroding the essence of…
Five Questions to Ask Future UNC Board Members
Since 2010, the UNC system’s Board of Governors has become somewhat more conservative and more interested in serious educational reforms. Members of the Board have professed interest in decreasing costs,…
How Academe Helped to Elect Trump
President Trump scares academe. Many feel threatened, under siege, rejected, aghast. Eric Klineberg, professor of sociology at New York University, summed up this anxiety a few days after the election:…
Sweeping Change at the Office for Civil Rights Is Imperative
Nowhere is the adage “personnel is policy” truer than in the federal education bureaucracy. With nothing more than a few Dear Colleague letters meant to provide “guidance” to nearly all…
A Small College Is Suffering from Self-inflicted Wounds
Recently, one of my neighbors saw students from Elizabethtown College, where I taught for many years, walking down the street wearing what looked like the puzzle pieces featured as symbols…