The Spread of “New Civics” Is Cause for Alarm
One of the ways the college curriculum has changed for the worse in recent decades is the rise of what David Randall terms “the New Civics” in a hefty report…
No Lessons Learned: Campus Intolerance Intensifies in the Trump Era
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…
Academics and the Reproduction of Cultural Hegemony
Much as Martin Center readers may disparage Marxism, there is one author who deserves our attention. Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist who lived and wrote around the turn of…
Starving the Beast Prompts Choleric Call to Fatten a Sacred Cow
Listening to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill law professor Gene Nichol’s radical riff ripping trustees and the UNC system’s Board of Governors as cowards, and Republican lawmakers as…
The Campus Free Speech Act: A Way to Restore the Marketplace of Ideas
Between the rise of safe spaces, trigger warnings, speaker disinvitations, and the often illiberal conduct of campus demonstrators over the past few years, it’s clear that the core constitutional value…
A Letter to Conservatives: You Need College and College Definitely Needs You
Dear conservative parents and students, First, I would like to address conservative parents. Lately, I hear many of you questioning whether you should send your kids to college. Maybe they…
Either Support Our Politics or Find Another Field
The authoritarianism that increasingly characterizes the American professoriate is on full display in a case involving the master’s program in social work at Rhode Island College (RIC). A student who…
Shouldn’t an Entire Campus Be a Free Speech Zone—Not Just .02 Percent of It?
(Editor’s note: This article first appeared on Forbes.com.) Hostility to free speech has become a salient characteristic of American college campuses. Speech codes that make it dangerous for students (or…
A Tweet Too Far
When Drexel University political science professor George Ciccariello-Maher tweeted “All I want for Christmas is white genocide” on Christmas Eve, he handed the Philadelphia school an opportunity to play an…
American Studies: A Sad Tale of Academic Decline
My academic field, American Studies, is the interdisciplinary study of American cultures, past and present. Once it was a vibrant and useful discipline. Today, I’m sad to report, it is…