Higher education

Princeton University’s Board of Trustees voted to fire tenured classics professor Joshua Katz on Monday — and the reason why has Cockburn adjusting his monocle to look a bit closer at the circumstances. Katz first came under scrutiny in 2018 for a consensual sexual relationship he had with a student at least a decade prior. At the time, he was suspended from his job for a year without pay. Then, new allegations arose that Katz had not been fully honest nor had fully cooperated with the previous investigation. Much to the chagrin of any frat guy looking to him for advice on how to score, Princeton gave him the boot.

The president of the University of North Texas, Neal Smatresk, said in a campus-wide email Tuesday that students who oppose medical transitions for children suffering from gender dysphoria hold "intolerant views". Smatresk's email was sent to the campus community in response to an event hosted by the Young Conservatives of Texas with Texas House candidate Jeff Younger, who has proposed banning surgical and medical interventions for children who claim to be transgender. "I know the last several days may have felt particularly difficult for the transgender members of our community, due to the intolerant views of a handful of campus members," Smatresk wrote.

In January, the Department of Justice dropped charges against Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Gang Chen, a mechanical engineer accused of concealing illicit ties to the Chinese government early last year. United States Attorney Rachael Rollins said regarding the decision, “After a careful assessment of this new information in the context of all the evidence, our office has concluded that we can no longer meet our burden of proof at trial... Today’s dismissal is a result of that process and is in the interests of justice.” In a vacuum, this story may not be all that noteworthy — prosecutors drop charges all the time for a variety of reasons.

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.

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.

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.