Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a December 6 speech at an event hosted by the National Association of Scholars and the Martin Center on social justice and identity in American higher education. Social justice activists say they want to bring about a golden age. The road to the golden city always requires more … Continue reading “The Continual Creep of Social Justice into Higher Education”
As education goes, so goes nearly everything else: politics, culture, and social cohesion. And those who form the minds of teachers—who, in turn, instruct young minds—arguably wield even greater influence. It is unsurprising, then, that schools of education, where teachers receive their training, are at the epicenter of ongoing ideological battles. As the Martin Center’s … Continue reading “Battling the Red Guards of Red Pedagogy”
Are conservatives against the campus diversity administrative machine or are they opposed to diversity itself? The argument in favor of the former seems like an easy one. Ever since debates over affirmative action heated up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, conservative groups and publications—this Center included—have marshalled an impressive array of data, stories, and philosophical … Continue reading “A Conservative Definition of Diversity”
In recent years, psychology has dealt with a legitimacy crisis. Many influential psychological studies could not be reproduced by other psychologists, discrediting some key insights and weakening academic faith in the entire field. Nutrition science has a similar problem. The loudest critics argue that the methodologies relied on by researchers give bad data that are … Continue reading “The Credibility Issue in Nutrition Science Is a Sign for All of Higher Ed”
We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. —Abraham Lincoln A certain degree of polarization is a natural consequence of political discourse. The … Continue reading “Healing Civic Culture One Conversation at a Time”
Universities may not target unpopular speech on campus often, but when they fail to protect it, the results are similar to officially silencing speech. A recent example of this lack of effort to protect comes from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where an anti-socialism display was destroyed on campus within a day after … Continue reading “Students Tear Down Anti-Socialism Display at UNC Charlotte”
Scholars gathered October 24 and 25 at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro to discuss free speech—and focused on its alleged pernicious effects. The conference’s takeaway was that the problem with free speech in the public sphere is not one of inadequacy, but rather one of overabundance. The conference, “Finding Expression in Contested Public … Continue reading “An Anti-Free Speech Conference in Greensboro”
The social sciences have a problem: If their scholars think too much alike, they will be blinded to the flaws and gaps in their research. Rather than explaining how individuals in society act and think, academics can sometimes slip blinders on themselves and the public. Polling shows broad agreement within some disciplines. For instance, recent … Continue reading “Blinding Themselves: The Cost of Groupthink in Social Psychology”
As academia becomes increasingly political and some professors call for an activist academy, some critics have questioned the impact of “cultural studies” and critical theory on the quality of research in the humanities. Academics Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian have led the reaction against scholarship-as-activism with their famous “grievance studies” hoax. The three … Continue reading “Did You Know? Grievance Studies in the UNC System”
Until 2015, I believed that the Obama administration’s “Dear Colleague” letter, which called for universities to significantly broaden their interpretation of Title IX protections, was merely a way to address the so-called “rape crisis” on American campuses. I doubted the narrative that colleges had rates of sexual assaults that were comparable with warzones, but this … Continue reading “The Totalitarian Impulse in the Title IX Racket”