This essay is based on a talk given by Professor Munger at a Martin Center luncheon on July 15, 2021. What is academic freedom, and who has it? The question is raised by the recent controversy sparked by a process that is usually boring and bureaucratic: an academic tenure case. Nikole Hannah-Jones, Hussman School of … Continue reading “Academic Freedom and Tenure: It’s More Complicated Than People Think”
Hillsdale College has published a gigantic collection of reading materials and curriculum of nearly 2,500 pages, which it has termed the 1776 curriculum collection. It is available and free for anyone to access. The curriculum, which includes primary source documents on the nation’s founding, can be used for a number of purposes: as a resource … Continue reading “Did you Know? A Comprehensive “1776 Curriculum” is Released”
Michelle Goldberg complains in the pages of The New York Times about how it is the left wing that is currently a victim of cancel culture—thanks to the right, which is trying to destroy “critical race theory.” Sounding alarm at the global counter-movement, she writes that Critical race theory, the intellectual tradition undergirding concepts like white privilege … Continue reading “The Backlash to Critical Race Theory Is on The Way”
Last week, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees came under fire for “viewpoint discrimination” over its decision not to offer tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, who will join UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism in July. An anonymous source reported that the decision was “a very political thing.” But politics needn’t have come into … Continue reading “It’s Not About ‘Politics’—The Brouhaha over Nikole Hannah-Jones”
The recent hiring of New York Times columnist Nikole Hannah-Jones as a faculty member in UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism raises serious red flags about how the university is being run. Last week, the Martin Center’s Jay Schalin reported on Hannah-Jones’s appointment to the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at UNC. Hannah-Jones … Continue reading “UNC’s 1619 Project Hire: A Case Study of Failed University Governance”
UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media recently announced a heralded addition to their faculty. Nikole Hannah-Jones has agreed to accept a Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism in July. According to a press release issued by the school, Hannah-Jones is a “Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant” recipient who … Continue reading “School of Journalism—or Ministry of Propaganda?”
Over the past decade, American moral culture has changed. The evidence of those changes has been especially apparent on college campuses, where new concepts such as microaggressions, safe spaces, trigger warnings, and bias response teams were first tested. But this new “victimhood culture” is devastating to its adherents, disempowering them and dooming them to disappointment. … Continue reading “1776 Unites: An Alternative to Campus Victimhood Culture”
The Legal Insurrection Foundation, of which I am the president, has launched a website, criticalrace.org, to provide resources to parents and students regarding Critical Race Training in higher education. The main feature of the website is a database of how Critical Race Theory is put into action on campuses, presented in the form of an … Continue reading “Exposing Critical Race Training in Higher Education”
A short-lived report quickly torched by the new Biden administration provides a pathway for those who seek to return to a classical structure of higher education. The report, titled the 1776 Report, by President Trump’s appointees in the 1776 commission, called for a “return to the unifying ideals stated in the Declaration of Independence,” according … Continue reading “Did You Know? The 1776 Report—a Half-Done Project”
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 academy in 2018 by hoaxing several “grievance studies” journals that publish shoddy activist scholarship. Their book, “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, … Continue reading “A War Against ‘Normal’”