Is this a great country…
…or what?
Continue reading →Category Archives: Academia
Don’t mess with Thomas Klingenstein
As Barry Mills, president of Bowdoin College, learned: One day in the summer of 2010, Barry Mills, the president of Bowdoin College, a respected liberal-arts school in Brunswick, Maine, met investor and philanthropist Thomas Klingenstein for a round of golf … Continue reading →
Marriage: when?
In the annals of embarrassing-mother moments, Susan Patton’s letter to the Princeton paper—exhorting girls (women?) at the school to look around at wonderful guys such as her son (a student there) and consider them a great pool of marriage material … Continue reading →
Academia’s hire-a-terrorist movement
It can be hard to get a job if you’ve got a record, but universities are doing their bit—if the ex-con was a terrorist, that is. Professors Dohrn and Ayers are not certainly not anomalies; Kathy Boudin has found a … Continue reading →
Harvard Commencement Day speakers: upward and onward
Here are some samples from the list of Harvard Commencement Day speakers over approximately the last century and a half. I’ve left out ones you’re unlikely to have heard of, which mostly occur in the early years anyway, and selected … Continue reading →
Mind and matter: academic apostasy
A well-respected academic turns apostate, and reaps the whirlwind. Such a state of affairs should be no surprise to readers of this blog, or readers of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. As Paul Rahe writes: Every once … Continue reading →
Conservative professor: discriminated against, but no one to sue
A jury found that conservative professor Theresa Wagner was discriminated against by the University of Iowa Law School and denied a job promotion because of her politics, but she can’t collect because the Dean was found by the jury to … Continue reading →
If you call someone a Marxist you’re a McCarthyite…
…and of course that’s much worse than a Marxist. Even if the “Marxist” charge is true. Excellent post by Ace. if you note that Marxists are indeed Marxists it’s supposedly a sort of Hate Crime up with which we must … Continue reading →
Allan Bloom on the ubiquity of moral relativism—in 1987
I’ve written before about Allan Bloom’s masterful The Closing of the American Mind, published in 1987, here and here. And I probably will again. It is so richly loaded with thought that almost every sentence might cause the reader to … Continue reading →
Campus conservatives…
…are bullied into the closet at an elite liberal college that prides itself on its atmosphere of civilized discourse—as long as you toe the party line.
Continue reading →On The Closing of the American Mind
Several years ago I read the first third of Allan Bloom’s great work The Closing of the American Mind. The other day I picked it up where I had left off, and was struck simultaneously by how relevant it still … Continue reading →
Louis Michael Seidman: the con law professor v. the Constitution
Yesterday there was a big brouhaha over an op-ed of Louis Michael Seidman’s that appeared in the New York Times. It was the type of piece that, on first reading, appears to be some sort of ironic Onion-esque parody—but sadly, … Continue reading →