The antidote to bad ideas is good ideas, I’ve often said and sometimes written. I’ve railed against censorship and “cancellation” and defended very free, very unfettered speech. Even odious speech, detestably bad ideas spoken aloud. It’s good that it all be spoken aloud, where its moral bankruptcy is obvious in the marketplace of ideas—when rebutted […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Law & Liberty on March 18, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. Tacitus at the beginning of his Annals, after brilliantly summarizing all of Roman history in the space of a few paragraphs, ends by providing an answer to a question that must have arisen in the minds of […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Harvard Salient on February 29, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. CEO Seth Dillon gave an address titled “Humor in American Politics.” On February 27th, the Harvard Republican Club hosted Seth Dillon, the CEO of satirical news outlet The Babylon Bee, for a speech titled “Humor in American Politics,” which aimed […]
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I wrote an article for Minding the Campus a while back titled “Harvard’s Plagiarism Review Process is a Joke.” The article mentioned, in passing, that Harvard doesn’t have a faculty senate and doesn’t have a chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Without a senate, the faculty have no formal representation to approve […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Free Press on January 16, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. After I stated banal facts about human biology, I found myself caught in a DEI web, without the support to do the job I loved. The only way out was to leave… Since early December, the […]
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Harvard recently submitted an obfuscated and unsigned summary of its plagiarism “review process” to Representative Virginia Foxx’s congressional committee, Committee for Education and the Workforce. The document is a mishmash of the terms: “investigation,” “inquiry,” and “assessment.” Harvard had previously circulated a draft of an interim policy on research misconduct. There is no indication of […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Harvard Salient on April 29, 2023 and is crossposted here with permission. The modern conservative has lost control of most of the major institutions of American life. It was therefore no surprise that most were glad when Elon Musk purchased Twitter; it seemed like a step toward a recovery […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Harvard Salient on January 19, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. About a week ago, Harvard announced its “Intellectual Vitality and Free Expression Student Summit,” which was co-hosted by PEN America, a non-profit dedicated to free expression. “Our hope is that through participating in this event,” the […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by National Association of Scholars on January 24, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. In the aftermath of Claudine Gay’s defenestration as president of Harvard, many conservatives, libertarians, and un-woke liberals see an opportunity to rally public support for an operation to rescue higher education. The idea has caught […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The American Conservative on January 14, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. One might think the world had tilted an additional 40 degrees on its axis on January 2. Judging from news accounts, the northern hemisphere was plunged into darkness, and an even more bone-chilling cold than […]
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Much ink and many gigabytes have been spilled on the topic of Claudine Gay’s defenestration from the presidency of Harvard University. The commentary ranges from the tedious and predictable gnashing of liberal teeth that racism and sexism somehow were the cause, orchestrated—naturally—by Republicans, who have made plagiarism a “weapon” in their “war on education.” More […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Spectator World on January 3, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. In the end Barack Obama, Penny Pritzker, 700-some members of the faculty, the mighty voice of the Harvard Crimson and the entire nomenclature of the DEI movement could not save her from herself. Claudine Gay resigned as […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The American Spectator on December 14, 2023 and is crossposted here with permission. Academic dishonesty strikes many people as boring. After all, it is academic. It is not like Sam Bankman-Fried, the “crypto king,” making $8 billion disappear into thin air. It is not like Florida dentist Charlie Adelson […]
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For two centuries after the founding of Harvard College in 1636, there was grotesque gender discrimination in American colleges and universities: there were no female students. Even in 1950, there were far more than two men on American campuses for every woman. But by the late twentieth century female enrollment had surged, coinciding with the […]
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America’s students will get a lot of pass/fail grades during the coronavirus pandemic. The University of Pennsylvania, Lehigh University, and Haverford College have allowed students to choose whether to be graded pass/fail for classes this semester. Duke University announced, “all spring courses at the university will default to a satisfactory/unsatisfactory grade scheme.” The Massachusetts Institute […]
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Two American elite universities, Yale and Harvard, are now in the crosshairs of the Education Department. Why? They accepted money from foreign countries like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran and not reporting the gifts or contracts, which federal investigators estimate to be at least $6.5 billion. The story, which appears in The Wall Street […]
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The recent affirmative action opinion (discussed here) in Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard University held that Harvard’s discrimination against Asians did not amount to discrimination. Despite the victory of Harvard and the entire higher education hierarchy, committed as it is to using racial preferences to promote “diversity,” there is a reason to believe this […]
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Harvard’s decision last month to rescind admission to Kyle Kashuv because of nasty racial tweets he sent three years ago is a curiously unprincipled action. Kashuv is obviously contrite. He shows all the indications of a reformed sinner eager to undergo Harvard’s diversity training. One would think that an institution so solemnly dedicated to social […]
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The following is an excerpt from an op-ed in The New York Times by Randall Kennedy, a law professor at Harvard. I have been a professor at Harvard University for 34 years. In that time, the school has made some mistakes. But it has never so thoroughly embarrassed itself as it did this past weekend. […]
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The hearing last week in the case of Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, presumably the last until the judge offers her opinion, witnessed the unfortunate prominence of both a red herring and a red flag. The Boston Globe captured both the red herring and a red flag in its lede: “US District Judge […]
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Harvard is perhaps the only institution in the country with multiple sets of Title IX procedures, depending on which branch of the university the student attends. At Harvard Law School, the parties are allowed to have full legal representation, the tribunal is basically independent, and there’s meaningful discovery. Harvard undergraduates, on the other hand, experience […]
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By now, it is clear to all observers that the most damaging material that Harvard has been forced to release in the lawsuit filed by Students For Fair Admissions is powerful evidence that Asian applicants, who score higher than applicants from other racial and ethnic groups on grades, test scores, and extracurricular activities, are graded […]
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It is uncertain how the current lawsuit regarding Harvard’s alleged discriminate against Asian applicants will eventually turn out, but the smart money predicts little will change. After all, this is just one of many similar previous lawsuits, and racial preferences survived them all. Nor should we ignore administrative ingenuity in circumventing court orders. At most, […]
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LL Cool J was one of eight winners this year of the Hutchins Center’s W.E.B. Dubois Medal, Harvard University’s highest honor in the field of African and African America studies. It is awarded to individuals “in recognition of their contribution to African American culture and the life of the mind.” We notice that many expected […]
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Harvard’s men’s cross-country team has been put on probation because members of the 2014 team made strong judgments on the sexual attractiveness of members of the women’s cross-country team. What? We wonder if male college students anywhere else have ever engaged in this kind of behavior—noticing that females often differ in their degree of attractiveness, […]
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Elle Woods, the sexy Harvard Law School student from la-la land in the 2001 comedy Legally Blonde, got a taste of what has become a daily diet of politically corrected speech. In that movie, Enid, the super-smart lesbian in the study group from which Elle was excluded, was lobbying to change the word semester to […]
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Harvard, which announced severe penalties on members of single-sex student groups in May, may have almost lived up to the ban in principle for as much as a couple of days. The Harvard Crimson revealed on August 15 that the College had assured the all-female Seneca organization in May that it could “continue to operate […]
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Richard A. Epstein, Defining Ideas, the Hoover Institution These final clubs enjoy widespread acceptance among their members because some young people prefer to organize their social lives around single-sex organizations. To a classical liberal like myself, these revealed preferences count a great deal…. But in the eyes of progressives like Faust, these preferences should be […]
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Harvey Mansfield is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1962. He has written or translated works on Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Alexis de Tocqueville and Edmund Burke as well as a book on Manliness. His notable former students include: Andrew Sullivan, Alan Keyes, William Kristol. Clifford Orwin, Paul Cantor, Delba Winthrop, Mark Lilla, Francis Fukuyama, and Shen Tong. […]
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Since the dawn of time, humankind has sought an explanation for our being on this planet, and some have looked for an answer in “liberal arts” education. But now – at Harvard at least – this profound search for meaning has apparently been transferred from the liberal arts department, where definitive answers have been rare, […]
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