Academia

But that’s what happens when scholars elevate the “grievance industry.”

It's not that I agreed with their ideas. It's that they encouraged me to think.

A few months ago in these pages, our Ethan Epstein rhapsodized about his alma mater, Reed College (“My Old School,” November 10). He praised its rigorous academics and one particular course, the decades-old mandatory freshman humanities class that covers ancient Greece, Rome, and the Bible. Because…

I’m a former English professor, so I’m familiar with the jargon literary theorists often use—aporia, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and the French différance, a favorite word of the impenetrable Jacques Derrida—but in a recent book review I came upon an academic-sounding word that I had never seen…

What does it do to casually assumed theories of cultural equality if a civilization is founded on the idea that the gods require the ritualized butchering of human beings? When Mel Gibson released his twilight-of-the-Maya epic Apocalypto in 2006, some scholars of Mayan culture felt that the film’s…

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Kurt Andersen may be right in supposing that what looks like Americans’ increasing inability to distinguish fantasy from reality is the big topic of our times, and there are at least 2 or 3 of his 46 chapters in Fantasyland in which he does justice to his subject. His rapid tour d’ horizon on New…

When I read that Montclair State University in New Jersey had removed shooting-obsessed adjunct professor Kevin Allred from its course roster, my first thought was: Now who’s gonna teach “Policitizing Beyoncé”?

As readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD know, Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, got quite a bit of nasty backlash from her peers in university perches over an article titled "In Defense of Transracialism" that appeared the most recent issue of Hypatia, an…

Political scientist and law professor Carol Swain retired from academia just when some of her research had become remarkably relevant. She doesn't see it quite that way, though. Swain prophesied the rise of the alt-right 15 years ago, but she won't call Donald Trump's election victory a vindication…

Political scientist and law professor Carol Swain retired from academia just when some of her research had become remarkably relevant. She doesn't see it quite that way, though. Swain prophesied the rise of the alt-right 15 years ago, but she won't call Donald Trump's election victory a vindication…

The left has had a narrative, going back to the beginning of Donald Trump’s campaign, that has only intensified in the months since his election. The theory goes like this: The current president is a force so pestilential that he brings out the hate in otherwise decent people. And now they claim to…

The response from Trump supporters, both in the media and in the wild, to Sean Spicer's Saturday press conference were instructive. It basically boiled down to:

Nothing rings my Schadenfreude chimes louder than a tale of a trendy-liberal professor teaching at a fancy college getting...royally hosed by another trendy-liberal professor teaching at a fancy college. Especially when the scene of the liberal-on-liberal hosing is California, home of likely the…

The University of California in Berkeley has brought back a student-led course on "Palestinian history" that had been condemned as anti-Zionist and biased against the state of Israel. The course, worth one academic credit, advocates a "decolonial alternative" for the region and had previously been…

What exactly is the ideology that dominates American campuses today, and is increasingly influential off campus? This ideology is clearly intolerant of dissent, but what it actually affirms is so unclear that administrators, faculty, students, and outside speakers are often taken by surprise when…

The Washington Post is excited by a new poll of economists got up by the National Association for Business Economics. It shows, says the Post, "overwhelming support" for Hillary Clinton. "Overwhelming" might be a slight exaggeration on the Post's part—Clinton had 55 percent support, meaning that 45…

You might have mixed feelings if you heard the news from the Charleston Post and Courier the other day. Either a hero has exposed his feet o' clay, or a wronged man is getting his comeuppance.

There are two rival bills in Congress addressing campus sexual assault. A nominally bipartisan bill spearheaded by Democrats Claire McCaskill and Mark Warner focuses on heaping more requirements on schools to turn their disciplinary systems into witch-hunts. Republicans in the House of…

The Caitlyn (née Bruce) Jenner case has engendered if not a new subject at least a newly publicized and sensationalized one. For an old-timer like myself, transgenderism is reminiscent of the postmodernism that swept the universities several decades ago. Indeed, transgenderism now looks like a more…

At last, a little good news from the academy. Oberlin College has a sense of humor -- or at least its choir does. I don’t know that the subversive (by Oberlin standards!) song they've perormed has a title, but it might well be “Please Don’t Put Me In the Real World.”

The clamor for “trigger warnings” has, predictably, spread to the Classics. This isn’t particularly surprising: From Herodotus to Livy to Tacitus, the body of literature that used to be called the Canon is chock-full of violence, sadism, and what would now be considered racism.

Why were the words of Fouad Ajami “never welcomed in the cultural salons of Beirut and Cairo?” asks Samuel Tadros in Tablet magazine. And why are they now “unfashionable … in the halls of power in Washington?” Because “instead of following the herd and blaming the ills of the region on the…

Martin Gross, a trustee on the Brandeis board, responds to the faculty outrage over Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

On May 18, Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, will be Barnard College's commencement speaker and will receive the Barnard medal of distinction, the college’s highest honor.

President Obama traveled to Wisconsin yesterday and engaged in a tasteless bit of anti-intellectualism. “A lot of young people no longer see the trades and skilled manufacturing as a viable career,” he told an audience in Waukesha, “but I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with…

At its annual conference on Thursday, the Modern Language Association (MLA) will hold a kangaroo-court panel discussion called, “Academic Boycotts: A Conversation about Israel and Palestine.” A few days later the MLA will vote on an anti-Israel resolution that would condemn Israel for the…

“Have we indeed sinned more than any other nation?”

Hardly an academic semester goes by without a high-profile opportunity arising for the right to address pervasive, perennial anti-conservative animus on the American college campus. And hardly an academic semester goes by without the right, reflexively blinded by righteous indignation, blowing an…

Academic and activist Cornel West blasts Barack Obama, just days after the first black president's reelection.

In noting the death last week in London of Eric Hobsbawm, The Scrapbook observed its usual doctrine of de mortuis nil nisi bonum. But then our attention was drawn to his New York Times obituary, which blandly explained that Hobsbawm’s “three-volume economic history of the rise of industrial…

Modern academics are not celebrated for the clarity and felicity of their writing. One of the most important lessons a postgraduate student can learn—and if he doesn’t learn it soon, he’s doomed—is that academics generally do not write books and articles for the purpose of expressing their ideas as…

In addition to remembrances of James Q. Wilson written by Christopher DeMuth, Harvey Mansfield, Jeremy Rabkin, and the boss, we recommend reading this one, by James Piereson in the New Criterion: