Mark Bauerlein

Sandra Day O’Connor envisioned a deadline for racial preferences.

If you work for the companies that produce standardized tests, as I have done for many years (creating and evaluating exams in the area of English and reading), you will eventually identify a significant flaw in our nation’s meritocratic system of higher education and in the highest-ranked schools…

Twenty years ago, a New York Times editor phoned Stanley Fish and asked for a column. “About what?" he replied. "Anything you like," she said. Fish came up with "How the Right Hijacked the Magic Words" (August 13, 1995), which argued that conservatives had seized the liberal lexicon of equal…

On a cold February night in 2009, a turboprop commuter plane out of Newark was only a few miles from Buffalo when the “stick shaker” suddenly triggered. The plane had slowed to 135 knots after the crew had lowered the landing gear and extended the flaps, and the plane threatened to enter an…

Everyone’s angry at American colleges. Parents groan about tuition, students pile up debt and can’t find work, employers gripe that graduates lack job skills, conservatives decry liberal bias, Ph.D.s without a regular post become bitter transient adjuncts, and politicians suspect that tax dollars…

Neil Gross is a sociologist at the University of British Columbia who previously held posts at the University of Southern California and Harvard, has a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, and received undergraduate training at Berkeley. He edits Sociological Theory and has written a book on…

In academia, few sins are as grave and unforgivable as criticizing the “studies” programs. Journalist/author Naomi Schaefer Riley found that out this past spring when she wrote a blog post for the Chronicle of Higher Education website describing Black Studies as “left-wing victimization claptrap.”  

Back in 1915, when the American Association of University Professors issued the founding statement of academic freedom in the United States, it singled out three threats to the search for truth. Religious authorities, founders and donors, and public opinion each constrained the free pursuit of…

Soldier's Heart

The students take their seats, pull out their pencils, and open their books as they would in any college classroom in America. Here, though, they show up in gray cadet uniforms, gleaming black shoes, and closely cropped hair, not the hip-hugger jeans and baseball caps so popular on other campuses.…

LAST MARCH, when the University of Georgia decided to revive race in the admissions process, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution hailed the move as sound education policy. "Diversity holds rewards for all students," the editors assured their readers. Set aside talk about remedies for past…

Cities of Words

JUST OVER a quarter of a century ago, the Bakke decision sparked an intellectual quest: How could proponents of affirmative action justify the use of racial preferences in college admissions on educational grounds? Last year, the culmination of that quest was enshrined, fittingly, in another…