College

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.

Wheaton College will be removing and replacing a plaque honoring a group of alumni who were murdered by an indigenous tribe during a missionary trip to Ecuador. Why? Because it uses the word 'savage', the school's president announced in an email Wednesday. 'Recently, students, faculty, and staff have expressed concern about language on the plaque that is now recognized as offensive,' president Philip Ryken said in the email. 'Specifically, the word "savage" is regarded as pejorative and has been used historically to dehumanize and mistreat indigenous peoples around the world.

For a thousand years, Western universities were the champions and guardians of reason. Now, they know better. Such is the lesson from the sorry tale of Georgetown University Law Center professor Sandra Sellers, whose career abruptly ceased to exist Thursday for the crime of being able to observe patterns. Of course, Sellers’s remarks aren’t a shocking revelation. They’re common sense. Georgetown proudly maintains an 'Office of Affirmative Action Programs'. What is affirmative action, if not a pledge to admit less-qualified students for identity reasons, even if it means watching them struggle in class? Any poor soul who has hit the rock bottom of applying to law school knows that 'Under-Represented Minority' (URM) status is a boon for law school applications.

Here is a bonus for those who go around saying that the great majority of whites are 'racists' of some deplorable variety or another. You’ve got a 'Get Out of Jail Free' card for inaccuracies, misinterpretations, or any amount of unpleasantness. You don’t have to be right; you just have to be woke. The media will report and gravely acknowledge your grievances, historic or newly found. What target of your righteous indignation is likely to look you hard in the eye and say, 'You don’t know what you’re talking about?' It happens, just not often enough. Which is what gives an ongoing row at the University of Texas, in Austin, its freshness, not to mention its role in showing us all how to take down by several notches the careless accuser, the racial self-promoter.

The Supreme Court yesterday administered a well-aimed slap in the face to a liberal arts college in Georgia that employed grotesquely authoritarian methods in order to silence Christian students attempting to witness to their faith. Georgia Gwinnett College prides itself on being the most 'diverse' college in the South. But when, in 2016, a student called Chike Uzuegbunam tried to evangelize and hand out pamphlets, the campus police decided to give him a taste of what life was like for Christians behind the Iron Curtain. Wrong sort of diversity, you see. Now, I'm the first to agree that Evangelical Christians — or any other religious radicals — can make a bloody nuisance of themselves on campus.

Conservatives are starting to vote with their wallets when it comes to countering the leftist bent of college campuses.Turning Point USA, the student-focused conservative nonprofit, recently announced its new project, ‘DivestU’, which encourages conservative Americans to stop donating to their alma maters. The idea? To show that left-wing bias will no longer be tolerated. The move comes at a time when universities anticipate financial struggles as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. President Trump even threatened earlier this month to reconsider the federal funding and tax-exempt status of universities that ‘are about Radical Left Indoctrination’. Do conservatives finally have the attention of the liberal elite that run the nation’s colleges?

Yogi Berra was right: it’s déjà vu all over again. Just turn on the evening news. If you are old enough, you might blink twice and wonder whether you are not back in 1968. The looting and mayhem, the promiscuous invocations of universal 'racism' and 'non-negotiable demands.' Haven’t we been there, done that? 'We must recognize that justice is a higher social goal than law and order.' Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to some eager CNN reporter? No, that was William Sloane Coffin, Jr., chaplain of Yale University, in 1972. Remember Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers?

Welcome, freshpersons and already indebted students, to the fall semester at COVID College. The college experience is an essential part of American life. For it is here that our young adults learn the American values of democratic socialism, gender exploration, racial guilt and defaulting on the first of, we hope, many unpayable debts.As our adjunct instructors will fail to teach you, before the slaveholder’s charter had ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, there was white supremacist philosopher John Locke’s ‘Life, liberty and property’. Owning a property is so American that even the homeless of Los Angeles aspire to have their own tents. So it’s right that your college education is your first mortgage.

Last year, a progressive student mob came for my job and the faculty and administrators of Sarah Lawrence College did not support me. This week, a student mob again encircled my office — this time because they craved viewpoint diversity.The media portrays America’s students as overwhelmingly ‘woke’ activists obsessed with social justice protests. In reality, Gen Z college students look far more positive. America’s students are intellectually curious, and they want more from college, than is offered by the progressive monoculture encouraged by some professors and many administrators.

Student journalists at Northwestern University apologized for doing journalism on Sunday.In response to complaints by student activists over their coverage of Jeff Sessions’s recent visit to campus, the staff of the Daily Northwestern apologized for causing ‘harm’ to their fellow students in a recent editorial. Among their supposed transgressions, the reporters posted pictures of protesters to social media, which was ‘retraumatizing and invasive’, and committed an ‘invasion of privacy’ by contacting students for interviews.Why apologize for standard journalistic procedures? The editors offered this reasoning: ‘We feel that covering traumatic events requires a different response than many other stories.