Many, perhaps most, Americans are just now waking up to the meaning of “woke.” What does “woke” have to do with looting, bricks, fires, and blood in Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis? One asks oneself, “Am I woke (good)? Or not woke (evil)? How woke is woke, how much wokeness is enough, and who decides?” In … Continue reading “Woke Me When It’s Over”
Two recent stories that dominated academic Twitter were the cancellation of the Western Art History course at Yale and the incorporation of the 1619 Project in the school curricula in Buffalo, New York and Washington DC. Though political centrists on Twitter were outraged, no one noted that those two incidents are thematically similar. Without understanding … Continue reading “The Philosophical Force Driving the Fight to Rewrite History”
New improvements in the College Scorecard data from the U.S. Department of Education have shown some of the specifics for how well degrees pay off. With those improvements, the public can see the median debt totals as well as the median earnings after a graduate’s first year in the labor force. Since 2008, for instance, … Continue reading “Did You Know? The Law Schools That Pay Off for Graduates”
Philip Hamburger recently published a piece in the Wall Street Journal arguing that Congress should control administrative bloat by limiting student loan funds given to colleges with too many administrators. He is dead right about the vast increase in non-faculty bureaucracy in recent decades and the need to reduce it. But the sources of the … Continue reading “Administrative Bloat: Where Does It Come From and What Is It Doing?”
Academic postmodernism is no stranger to the idea that classical Enlightenment values such as reason, equal treatment, and individual agency should be cast aside for the sake of racial and sexual grievances. We should denounce reason and science as the legacy of “dead white men”—or so we are told. Western academia has become both ideologized … Continue reading “Identity Politics Versus Basic Logic: Should Colleges Offer Affirmative Action for the Female Majority?”