College

The latest news in the Hamline University saga is that a large majority of the faculty — seventy-one of ninety-two members — have called on university president Fayneese Miller to resign. Miller had played the principal part in the dismissal of art history instructor Erika López Prater, after Prater had shown two images of the Prophet Mohammed in her online art history class. One image was a slide of a fourteenth-century painting by a Muslim artist; the other was Muslim painting from the sixteenth century in which the Prophet is veiled. Condemnation of the Hamline administration for dismissing Prater has been nearly universal in American higher education.

Joe Biden’s midterms victory lap didn’t last long. On Thursday, a federal judge in Texas struck down Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. US District Judge Mark Pittman ruled that it was “an unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s legislative power and must be vacated.” It feels like just yesterday White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was at the podium proudly reading reviews from the student debt reallocation website. So many happy customers had nothing but great things to say about their experience. Jean-Pierre quoted one student’s review as follows: “I just filled out the student loan forgiveness form in about one minute on my phone in my pajamas. It is possible that the government actually made a form that’s easy and straightforward.

Georgetown University's School of Medicine is teaching its students to administer puberty blockers and hormone therapy to minors, an investigation by The Spectator reveals. Medical students were told in a 2021 pre-clinical course that the "only way to help" many transgender people is to "'fix' their bodies" through medical intervention. The course also falsely claimed that puberty blockers are "fully reversible." Georgetown University did not return a request for comment. First year medical students at Georgetown are required to take a course on Human Sexuality, which is part of a foundational block on the reproductive system. In an iteration of this course last year, students were greeted with a guest lecture on "Transgender Health Care" by Dr. David S. Reitman.

Just before the start of the fall semester, New York University fired the distinguished professor in organic chemistry Maitland Jones Jr. NYU’s dean for Science Gregory Gabadadze informed Jones in a terse letter that his work “did not rise to the standards we require from our teaching faculty.” Jones is a legend in his field who literally wrote his subject’s 1,300-page textbook Organic Chemistry. He had been teaching at NYU on a renewable one-year contract since his retirement, in 2007, from a forty-three-year career at Princeton University. During his time at NYU, Jones won teaching awards. In 2017, he was named one of NYU’s “coolest” professors, a distinction he shared with only seven of his nearly 10,000 colleagues. Jones’s offense? His class was too hard.

Senator Ted Cruz has come under fire for saying that most baristas are slackers who spend most of their days sucking bongs. Now, Cockburn wasn’t always Cockburn. Like today’s youngsters, he had to mooch around working two jobs at once to pay the rent (after his parents cut off his allowance). So, when Cockburn says what he’s about to say, he says it with authority: Ted Cruz is right. It may be a hard truth but Cockburn has been there, done it and got the Grateful Dead T-shirt to prove it. The Texas senator said: ​​ There is a real risk if you are that slacker barista who wasted seven years in college studying completely useless things, now has loans, and can’t get a job, Joe Biden just gave you twenty grand.

In light of President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, conservatives have revamped their rallying cry that college is a scam and no one should go. In a lot of ways, college is a scam. It is certainly too expensive. Oftentimes, students spend more time awash in woke politics than learning important life and career skills. However, it’s reductionist and not very helpful to tell young people that college isn’t ever worth their time. The oft-cited alternative to college is trade school. Conservatives correctly point out that plumbers, electricians, and similar tradesmen can earn just as much as some college graduates. Their training, meanwhile, is a fraction of the cost of a bachelor's degree. However, we need to be careful about glamorizing manual labor.

The frame for virtually any discussion of American politics at the moment advanced by the hair-on-fire segment of our media elite is that democracy itself is under attack. We are surrounded, according to the likes of CNN's Brian Stelter (peace be upon him), by those who would tear down the foundations upon which the government and ordered law of the United States of America stands, in a frontal illiberal assault on the institutions that keep us free. Fear the QAnon Shaman and his Viking hat! We all remember how close he came to ruling us all astride the floor of Congress.

Americans are beginning to seek alternatives to our established menu of colleges and universities. In fact, not just Americans. Students from other countries are also choosing alternatives to studying in the US. The combined effect has been a sharp drop in American college enrollment, which is down overall by about 8 percent over the last two years, and more than 14 percent at community colleges. International student enrollment is down a total of 15 percent, but that masks an even more serious problem: enrollment of new foreign students fell last year by 46 percent. Some of this, of course, is due to Covid. And some of it is due to a demographic shift: fewer babies born 17 to 20 years ago means fewer young people to fill the seats in lecture halls.

Given the recent spate of “fuck Joe Biden” chants at college football games, you’d be forgiven for thinking that a year cooped up out of the classrooms might have had a transformative effect on America’s undergraduates. Perhaps the kids finally realized that wokeness isn’t the answer? Alas, two recent case studies of campus craziness have arrived to bring Cockburn crashing down to reality. The first comes courtesy of Oberlin College, a liberal arts school infamous for its overblown “sushi-is-cultural-appropriation” scandal in 2015, paying millions in damages after its students libeled a local bakery and for inflicting Lena Dunham on the world.

Are you ready to 'challenge man box culture?' asks the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh’s Women’s Center. Or maybe that special man in your life suffers from 'privilege' and needs rehab through Brown University’s Masculinity Peer Education program. But what about young men looking for meaningful, non-confrontational connections on campus? That scene is awfully dry. While groups like Women in STEM and Women in Business boost female students’ confidence by treating them as capable and competent professionals, college-aged men are often left with little to give their lives direction. Don’t expect these trends to change anytime soon either. According to the Wall Street Journal, women now make up nearly 60 percent of the college population, an all-time high.

The two largest state College Republican federations will unanimously vote to secede from their national organization in the coming days after allegations of election fraud. The chairmen of both the New York College Republicans and Texas Federation of College Republicans told The Spectator they have enough votes to exit the College Republican National Committee. Meanwhile, the California Federation of College Republicans is also ‘seriously considering’ secession, the group’s leader tells The Spectator. The rift would put into question the future of the CRNC and may result in the creation of a competing national GOP college organization. The secession efforts follow the controversial election of Courtney Britt as chairwoman of the CRNC.

Congratulations to Nikole Hannah-Jones for parlaying the intellectual imposture of the 1619 Project into a job for life. Hannah-Jones has been hired by Howard University as a professor in Race & Journalism. Both of these fields are rife with dubious standards and historic embarrassments, so she should fit right in. There are those on the pipe-smoking right who object to allowing a mountebank like Hannah-Jones onto the verdant lawns and into the stinky precincts of the institutions of what used to be the higher learning. They protest about academic standards, as if they still exist.

One of the great successes of modern feminism is the public awareness campaigns to recognize sexual harassment in the workplace. Universities have encouraged whistleblowing and anonymous complaints procedures so that women can safely report such targeting. But when women in academia are subject to vile slurs such as ‘TERF’, all bets are off; it is considered reasonable to publicly hound and humiliate those women. Interestingly, the vicious, censorious mob tend not to target the handful of male academics who speak out against the sort of extreme transgender ideology that results in the removal of women’s hard-won sex-based rights. Holly Lawford-Smith is associate professor in Political Philosophy at the University of Melbourne (UM), Australia.