Professor John Ellis has served on college faculties since 1963 and is now an emeritus professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz. He has witnessed enormous changes in higher education over his years and he finds those changes to be deplorable. In his new book The Breakdown of Higher Education, Ellis explains how our system … Continue reading “A Scholar’s Lament”
Suffering from self-inflicted wounds, the University of Tulsa is sick and getting sicker. This is a case study in how “progressive” academic leadership can wreck a once-excellent university. Last April 11, the university’s administration rolled out “True Commitment,” a radical restructuring that gutted the liberal arts, raised course loads, dissolved academic departments, and effectively turned … Continue reading “How Tulsa University Was Turned into Toxic University”
Elizabeth Loftus is perhaps one of the world’s most renowned cognitive psychologists. She is a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California-Irvine where she lectures about the cognitive sciences and in the law school. She has influenced the field with decades of research focusing on the malleability of memory. She has written 23 … Continue reading “After Renowned Psychologist Testifies at Weinstein Trial, NYU Revokes Invitation”
What do conservatives want to conserve? Clearly, conservatives everywhere desire the preservation and maintenance of the good things belonging to their various cultures that have been passed down from previous generations to their present time. That desire also implies conservatives wish to continue their cultural inheritance by passing these benefits on to their children and … Continue reading “Why Art Matters”
In the spring of 2019, three professors at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill conducted a study to understand free speech and constructive dialogue on campus. The study invited UNC students to complete a survey and attend focus group interviews with members of three different politically involved student organizations. From the data, professors Jennifer Larson, … Continue reading “Did You Know? At UNC-Chapel Hill, About 19% of Liberals and 3% of Moderates and Conservatives Would Block Controversial Speaker”
In yet another window into the country’s polarized political environment, in 2017 the Pew Research Center surveyed Americans regarding their views of major civic institutions. While there were divisions in how Republicans and Democrats viewed churches, banks, and labor unions, the largest gap was reserved for “colleges and universities,” with 72 percent of Democrats viewing … Continue reading “College Climate Surveys Needed to Understand Free Expression on Campus”
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”
For most of the past century, the United States was the pre-eminent nation in science and technology. The evidence for that is beyond dispute: Since 1901, American researchers have won more Nobel prizes in medicine, chemistry, and physics than any other nation. Given our history of discovery, innovation, and success, it is not surprising that … Continue reading “The Intellectual and Moral Decline in Academic Research”
The idea of a campus “safe space”—a university-sanctioned oasis where students can go to destress and feel at ease—has had its share of ridicule. And it’s not hard to see why: It is often hard to distinguish between a college safe space and a preschool daycare. For example, in April 2019, the University of North … Continue reading “The New American Academy: Break Out the Crayons and Play-Doh”
After years of expansion, Communist Party-funded Confucius Institutes have seen the tide turn against them at American colleges. The Institutes, controlled by the Chinese government, were created to teach Chinese language, culture, and history. Colleges quickly embraced them because they were cheap, easy sources of pride to claim that the school educated its students for … Continue reading “Did You Know? Confucius Institutes Disappearing from American Campuses”