Jonathan Marks is a professor of politics at Ursinus College who writes about higher education, academic culture, and intellectual life. He contributed essays and commentary to The Weekly Standard over nearly two decades, frequently examining campus politics, teaching, and the state of the humanities. His work often brought a scholarly yet accessible perspective to debates about universities and liberal education.
There is nothing natural about tolerating the views of others. If someone stands, as today’s righteous say, on “the wrong side of history,” why refrain from shutting him up? Yes, Justice Holmes warned against “attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught…
We will soon, TED talks promise, travel to the beach in driverless cars, where our artificial blood cells will enable us to stay underwater for hours. But we may prefer the virtual reality we will be able to inhabit thanks to direct brain implants, which will have replaced unfashionable headsets.…
We will soon, TED talks promise, travel to the beach in driverless cars, where our artificial blood cells will enable us to stay underwater for hours. But we may prefer the virtual reality we will be able to inhabit thanks to direct brain implants, which will have replaced unfashionable headsets.…
Moira Weigel opens with the man she was seeing when she began her investigation into courtship: "For weeks he had been trying to break off our thing in order to commit to another, longer-standing thing with an ex-ex he had started to call his girlfriend again, and then changing his mind. He wanted…
Moira Weigel opens with the man she was seeing when she began her investigation into courtship: “For weeks he had been trying to break off our thing in order to commit to another, longer-standing thing with an ex-ex he had started to call his girlfriend again, and then changing his mind. He wanted…
Among several things Alexander Astin’s impassioned new study sets in italics is this disconcerting observation: "Most of the students who end up in college are [about] average or even below average." That is, the main business of most colleges and universities is educating average or below average…
If I were dismissed from my college faculty for writing for The Weekly Standard, the American Association of University Professors, founded in 1915, would be on my side. It wouldn’t matter that, as seems likely, many of its 45,000 members loathe TWS and all that it stands for. After all, the AAUP…
Last century, American professors accomplished a miracle. In a nation not known for its love of intellectuals, the American Association of University Professors declared, in 1915, that they were more than employees. Their relationship to trustees, who are legally responsible for governing…
Late each summer, soon after excited new students arrive at four-year colleges across the country, deans try to sober them up. Some warn that successful students spend “three hours studying outside of class for each hour spent in class.” For at least one moment, students get the impression that…
Recently National Journal’s Ron Fournier published this story, “Why Benjamin Netanyahu Should Be Very, Very Worried.” Fournier’s strange line is that the Israelis until recently enjoyed a “near-monopoly” over “the mind share of public-opinion elites.” Partly because those elites “embraced and…
Cortney Munna must be one of America’s most famous young debtors. A religious and women’s studies graduate of New York University, she was working as a photography assistant when the New York Times discovered her. Munna was 26 and still $97,000 in debt for her bachelor of arts degree. She became a…
'That will never work,” one cannot help thinking, as the late Earl Shorris retells the story of the first Clemente Course in the Humanities, or in “the study of human constructs and concerns,” such as political philosophy, history, literature, art, and logic.
The Death of Character