Is there anything left to be learned about the mating habits of college students? For years, we have been subjected to a barrage of books about the rituals of drunken sex. In addition to Hooking Up and American Hook-up, there’s the recent Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus…
Robert Skidelsky, whose biography of John Maynard Keynes is unlikely ever to be surpassed, judged that his subject “never needed a Jehovah, because he had never experienced despair.” Skidelsky was speaking of religion and morals, a department where Keynes was a typical Bloomsbury hedonist. In…
In the unpredictable and often baffling way that hip, new meaning can glom onto even the stuffiest of words, “curating” has emerged in recent years as a ubiquitous cultural tag for fashion, groceries, Instagram posts, Pinterest accounts, and much else. Grammy winner Usher “curated” a July 4…
In 1637, René Descartes recounted a “fable” of how he came to think well. From his youth, he had read the books of the ancients, exercised his rhetorical skills, and observed the debates of philosophers and theologians. But in all this learning he found no rest or certainty, only endless disputes…
Meet Scott Yenor.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on September 22 formally rescinded the Obama administration’s commands that universities use unfair rules in sexual-misconduct investigations—rules that had the effect of finding more students guilty of sexual assault. And she appears also to be preparing for far…
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on September 22 formally rescinded the Obama administration’s commands that universities use unfair rules in sexual-misconduct investigations—rules that had the effect of finding more students guilty of sexual assault. And she appears also to be preparing for far…
How bad is grade inflation in the humanities? So bad that when U.S. News & World Report issued its annual college rankings last week, it gave more credit to schools for graduating students in math and the hard sciences than it did in other disciplines. According to the publication’s press release:…
How bad is grade inflation in the humanities? So bad that when U.S. News & World Report issued its annual college rankings last week, it gave more credit to schools for graduating students in math and the hard sciences than it did in other disciplines. According to the publication’s press release:…
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…
So the eminent author and social scientist Charles Murray gave a speech at Harvard last week. Ordinarily that wouldn’t be terribly newsworthy—eminent authors give speeches at distinguished universities every day of the week and sometimes even on weekends.
The publication of a new translation of the Aeneid by poet David Ferry at the age of 93 is an outstanding achievement. Having also translated Virgil’s other masterpieces, the Eclogues and Georgics, Ferry has spent two decades in the company of this great Roman poet.
In mid-October 1956 I became a visitor to the Middle Ages: I matriculated at Oxford. Robed in gown and white tie (mysteriously called “sub-fusc"), I stood with other freshmen before the celebrated classicist Sir Maurice Bowra, who intoned ritual sentences of Anglo-Latin (no broad "A"s) and we…
A number of U.S. universities are giving students ample room to grieve in the wake of Donald Trump's election victory Wednesday.
In his convocation address on Monday, Northwestern University president Morton Schapiro told wide-eyed freshmen that anyone who dares oppose trigger warnings, or who belittles the pain of those microaggressed, is an "idiot" and a "lunatic."
The Scrapbook noted a few weeks ago that several brave students at Stanford University, affiliated with the Stanford Review, were pushing to reinstate Western Civilization courses into the elite college's core curriculum via a student referendum. Sadly, today comes news that the measure was voted…
The latest Conversations With Bill Kristol features former Harvard president Larry Summers:
As college campuses shut down for winter break, the Maoist insanity that gripped American higher education this fall hit a new high-water mark. At Harvard, little laminated posters began appearing in the student dining halls with instructions on how students should discuss sensitive political…
In this week's magazine, I have a long piece about the campus protests that engulfed colleges across the country this fall. The story is by turns absurd, comedic, and worrisome.
At the University of Missouri, feminist professor Melissa Click cried out “I need some muscle over here!” to expel a reporter from the Concerned Student 1950 protest in a public quad. A more apt encapsulation of what conservatives feel ails academia—identity obsession, rights-curbing,…
Next month the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Abigail Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, one of the most important cases this term. In 2008 Fisher, a white high school senior in Texas, applied for admission to the university and was turned down. She sued the school, claiming that its…
The Obama administration—easily the most ideologically progressive in modern American history—has been accompanied by both liberal triumphalism and liberal outrage.
We have yet to find a term for the student protests going on across the country that beats Mona Charen’s “snowflake fascists” and last week the precious little Maoists at Princeton got the biggest scalp since Tim Wolfe: They brought down Woodrow Wilson himself.
For decades, the American university system has been creeping towards both moral and intellectual bankruptcy. But the events last week at Yale and the University of Missouri suggest we are reaching a tipping point, and that campus culture is transitioning from painfully idiotic to wantonly…
Every few years in the Northeast, biologist John Cooley gets famous—because he’s the man who discovered the mating secrets of one of the insect world’s weirdest and most-publicized species: Magicicada septendecim, the 17-year cicada. True to their name, and unlike the bottle-green “annual” cicadas…
Nearly everyone recognizes that student debt has risen to a level that will be difficult to sustain, given the nation’s slow-growing economy and the sagging incomes of too many college-educated Americans. Nearly 40 million Americans carry some form of student debt; more than 7 million are in…
Peter Jacobs of Business Insider reports:
Every spring, thousands of American higher learning institutions and tens of thousands of high schools send their graduates off with a commencement ceremony. A centerpiece of the event, as old as American education itself, is the commencement speech. At their best, these speeches furnish students…
Start with those old enough to be graduating from law school. The law business ain’t exactly what it used to be -- so hungry for new lawyers that anyone with a law degree could find work and earn enough to start chipping away at his or her student loan, unless responding to government incentives to…
If anyone was unsure of the veracity of Rolling Stone's account of an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity, the final nail is now in the story's coffin. Sunday night, the Columbia School of Journalism released its much anticipated blistering report on the magazine's November…
Less than four months ago, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Department of Justice had concluded that the transgendered are among the classes of persons protected, unbeknownst to the framers of the legislation at the time, by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Tuesday's press…
A Jewish fraternity at Vanderbilt University has been the target of apparent anti-Semitic vandalism. The Vanderbilt Hustler reports:
Scott Walker has proposed higher education budget reforms and many people in higher education are unhappy.
The president is proposing more higher education (at the community college level) as a cure for our economic woes. Along with some substantial tax increases, of course. But is more college the answer? Or should we, perhaps, be concerned about the quality of the college we already have when, as…
Previewing an item from his upcoming State of the Union address, President Obama announced a "Free Community College" plan Thursday evening for "anyone who's willing to work for it":
The Council of the Princeton University Community voted on Monday to gut due process for students accused of sexual misconduct. The week before last it was the turn of the faculty to genuflect as the hearse bearing the remains of due process rolled past. This unsavory episode highlights two parlous…
The Factual Feminist warns that a “little army of junior assistant deans and harassment apparatchiks are quietly repealing the free speech protections of the First Amendment.”
Former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm is lined up, as Derek Draplin of the College Fix reports, to teach:
Jeffrey Herf, writing for The American Interest:
Florida Polytechnic “University” (it isn’t accredited) is making headlines this week by opening a bookless library. Instead of checking out traditional codex books, students will be forced to read class material on tablets, e-readers, and/or laptops. According to the middle-aged librarians and…
A senior at the University of Buffalo in New York called the $275,000 speaking fee the school paid to Hillary Clinton last year "ridiculous." Local TV station WVIB reported on the former secretary of state's appearance and the fee, which amounted to about 30 percent of the university's $900,000…
Peter Berkowitz, writing in RealClearPolitics:
Hillary Clinton will be getting $225,000 to speak at a university fundraiser later this year. Students at the same school, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, have recently been outraged that the institution is raising tuition by a staggering 17 percent.
The University of Colorado’s Colorado Springs campus has decided it won’t be involved in the White Privilege Conference anymore. Since 2007 the campus’s Matrix Center for Social Equity and Inclusion, directed by UCCS sociology professor Abby Ferber, had lent the controversial conference some…
Support for the decision of Brandeis University not to award Ayaan Hirsi Ali an honorary degree, after previously announcing it would do so, has coalesced around the notion that while Islamic radicalism can be criticized, even condemned, one cannot criticize Islam itself. By condemning both, and…
The distinguished intellectual historian Jeffrey Herf, whose Ph.D. is from Brandeis, has written an eloquent and powerful letter to Brandeis president Fred Lawrence. Prof. Herf concludes:
Jay Bergman, an alumnus of Brandeis University, forwards us the letter he sent to the president of his alma mater regarding the disgraceful Ayaan Hirsi Ali episode:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has just released this statement in response to Brandeis University's decision to rescind her invitation to receive an honorary degree:
As Lori Lowenthal Marcus notes, Brandeis University has in recent years bestowed an honorary degree on Tony Kushner, who called the creation of Israel as a Jewish state “a mistake” and who attacked Israel for ethnic cleansing and for causing “terrible peril in the world.” Brandeis has also…
Princeton University is restoring ties with Navy ROTC (NROTC). Starting this fall, students will be able to participate in a cross-town program with Rutgers University, itself established only recently, in March 2012.
According to the University of Maryland student newspaper The Diamondback, the university’s student health insurance plan is considering requiring coverage of sex change operations.
One year after renewing its ties with Naval ROTC, Columbia University held a welcome ceremony for its returning midshipmen yesterday afternoon.
As a “millennial” (i.e. one born between 1980 and 2000), I’ve grown used to reading descriptions of myself – written, always, by those much older than I – that I don’t recognize. It’s a bit like hearing my voice on tape – can that really be me? So take, for example, the trendy idea that people my…
Harvey Mansfield, writing for the Claremont Review of Books:
Student loan debt runs to about $30,000 per graduate of the class of 2013, as Phil Izzo writes in the Wall Street Journal. And the total amount of student loans outstanding runs to almost a trillion dollars: more than either credit card balances or automobile loans. More than any form of consumer…
In a commencement address at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, President Barack Obama recalls Jim Crow laws and racism of the 40s and 50s. Morehouse College is a historically black college.
After the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) student government failed to silence the campus pro-life group, a newly formed pro-choice organization intends to target those students with harassment charges—while taking off their shirts in protest.
The reaction of most Americans to the tragedy in Boston was typical: We came together as a nation, mourned our fallen, and applauded our newest heroes. The sight of first-responders running to the sound of danger within mere seconds of the explosions, not away from disaster as human instinct might…
The Johns Hopkins University office of institutional equity has determined that pro-life students who want to conduct sidewalk counseling outside of a Baltimore abortion clinic are not engaging in harassment under university policies.
A year at Columbia University's journalism school will set you back nearly $84,000.
David Plouffe, a former advisor to President Barack Obama, tells a student newspaper at the University of Chicago that one need not be college educated to do politics. Plouffe states, though, that he thinks "everybody should have a college degree."
Omaha, Nebraska
Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts has banned a Christian group from campus because the group requires student leaders to adhere to "basic biblical truths of Christianity." The decision to ban the group, called the Tufts Christian Fellowship, was made by officials from the university's…
The president’s sycophants have seized on an excuse for why their candidate was stammering and incoherent last night: Barack Obama is just too darn “professorial.” The Huffington Post lamented Obama’s “professorial demeanor.” A New York Times editorial bemoaned the fact that the president chose to…
Amy Lutz, commenting on grade inflation
Members of Tufts University's men's crew team have been suspended for wearing what some are calling an inappropriate T-shirts to an annual school function, Spring Fling, an end of year school wide concert.
Lawrence Pitts, provost of the University of California, writes this letter to the editor in response to Charlotte Allen's “Boondoggle U.,” which appeared in the most recent issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD:
Every time trouble has erupted in Iran against the regime—1999, 2003, and, most recently, 2009—university students have been at the forefront of protests. This is partly why Iran’s current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has been battling over control of Iran’s biggest institution of higher…
As his 80th birthday approaches, TWS contributor and friend (and my teacher) Harvey Mansfield is profiled in the Harvard Crimson. It's a perceptive and fair article, and provides further evidence for the hopeful view that today's students are surprisingly open-minded and intelligent despite—or…
The radicals have won at Brown University. Even as other elite schools are welcoming ROTC back, the corporation, the University’s highest governing body, has affirmed President Ruth Simmons’s recommendation to maintain its campus ban on ROTC.
ROTC will not be returning to Brown University if the corporation, the university’s highest governing body, follows the recommendation just released by President Ruth J. Simmons.
One would not expect that college campuses would go out of their way to accommodate the habits of the Republican speaker of the House, John Boehner. But how respectful are colleges of the current occupant of the White House? Not very, it would seem.
The mission of the modern university professor is not merely “forming competent and efficient professionals capable of satisfying the demand for labor,” Pope Benedict XVI said in a speech in Madrid on Friday. Instead, professors and students should be “looking for something more lofty and capable…
Yale University has now canceled the Yale Initiative for the Study of Antisemitism (YIISA), the only such program in the country. The New York Post reports that the reason for the program's termination was not lack of interest, but, likely, the program's insistence on covering all forms of…
University of Illinois at Chicago professors Barbara Risman, William Bridges, and Anthony M. Orum write this letter to the editor in response to “Fat City: Thank you, Illinois taxpayers, for my cushy life,” which appeared in a recent issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD:
The ROTC is booming, writes the Los Angeles Times. Not only have several elite schools ended their Vietnam-era bans on the program – with Yale, most recently, establishing the only Naval ROTC program in the entire state of Connecticut on its campus – participation has increased by 27 percent…
After 34 years of teaching sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I recently retired at age 64 at 80 percent of my pay for life. This calculation was based on a salary spiked by summer teaching, and since I no longer pay into the retirement fund, I now receive significantly more than…
Professor John Michael Bailey’s course on human sexuality has been dropped from Northwestern University’s offerings in psychology for next year. The publicity surrounding an optional after-class live demonstration of a motorized sex toy apparently had a sobering effect in the hallowed halls.
As expected, the Yale College faculty voted Thursday to remove all obstacles to hosting an on-campus ROTC program. The Yale Daily News reported a “significant majority” in favor. According to a source, support was so strong a simple show of hands was enough to decide the issue; no ballots…
Andrew Ferguson, author of Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College, sat down with Peter Robinson to discuss his book on Uncommon Knowledge:
Andrew Ferguson, author of Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College, had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on the college admissions process:
The university senate at Columbia just passed a resolution, 51-17-1, expressing support for inviting the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps back to campus.
George Will devoted his Sunday column to Andrew Ferguson's latest book, Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College:
Andrew Ferguson's latest book, Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College , was reviewed in the Boston Globe:
Harvard President Drew Faust and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus just signed the agreement officially welcoming ROTC back on Harvard grounds.
Andrew Ferguson (with his son Gillum) was on Fox News's "Red Eye" earlier this week to discuss his latest book, Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College:
Columbia University’s Task Force on Military Engagement just released its full report on ROTC. As previously reported, the student survey went in favor of bringing ROTC back to campus: Sixty percent of students approved restoring the program. A quick look at some of the findings:
New York Times book critic Dwight Garner reviews Andrew Ferguson's latest, Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College:
A group of faculty members at Columbia and Barnard have issued a statement opposing ROTC's return to campus. The statement isn't terribly noteworthy in itself—except that one of the signatories taking issue with the potential "militarization" of the university is Rashid Khalidi, activist Middle…
Andrew Ferguson's forthcoming book, Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College, is reviewed in Sunday's Washington Post. "In 'Crazy U,' Ferguson invites you to join him on the dream-mare that he and his son endured," reviewer Steven Levingston writes. "The book is both a…
Over at CNAS, Andrew Exum has a somewhat different take on President Obama's ROTC shout-out in the State of the Union speech. He writes:
Attention Columbia, Yale, Stanford, and all the other elite schools dragging their feet on ROTC: President Obama will reaffirm his support for ROTC in tonight's State of the Union. The relevant excerpt [emphasis added]:
It’s disappointing that Princeton University remains unwilling to consider ROTC courses for academic credit, particularly after student calls for the university to reevaluate its relationship to ROTC pending the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
With the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, elite colleges now have a chance to make good on their promises and bring the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) back to campus.
For what it's worth: When I saw Colman McCarthy's anti-ROTC Washington Post op-ed online Wednesday evening, I e-mailed it to a few friends with the subject line, "it's helpful to have opponents like this." Allahpundit had a similar thought, and has developed it with characteristic wit and verve:
With the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, elite colleges now have a chance to make good on their promises and bring the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) back to campus.
Jerry Bowyer on 'the coming college education bubble' in Forbes: