Stanley Kurtz ranks as one of this country’s most insightful critics of higher education. The National Association of Scholars chose wisely in commissioning him to write a report on what has happened to the teaching of Western civilization on the postmodern campus. For those worried about the future of the republic, The Lost History of … Continue reading “Whatever Happened to the Teaching of Western Civilization?”
Historians tend to be skeptical about the influence of books and ideas upon important historical developments, preferring to draw upon material or broadly social and cultural causes as the best explanations of large-scale change. But it would be a grave mistake to neglect the singular influence that a single 1980 book, Howard Zinn’s A People’s … Continue reading “A Radical Pseudo-historian Meets His Match”
People like to tell a few stories about academic conservatives. Within the progressive left, one story is about the influence of corporate interests and “neoliberalism” on the university. In their view, academia is consumed by market forces. That view, in my opinion, is vastly mistaken. Universities rely on a combination of tuition, state funding, and … Continue reading “Credentials, But Not Community, for Conservatives in the Academy”
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”