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…
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…