Higher education

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Oberlin College hit the headlines earlier this year when it lost a high-profile lawsuit against a small business. Staff and students at the liberal arts college had accused a bakery in the local town of racism and organized a boycott after an employee caught an African American student shoplifting. The owners of the bakery sued the university for defamation, infliction of emotional distress and tortious interference. Turned out, the store’s employees were completely color-blind when it came to stopping people stealing — of the 40 shoplifters arrested in the previous five years, 32 were white — and the jury found with the plaintiffs.

Since 2012 I have publicly identified as Wrongskin. To those ignorant of the term, this means I was born white but I identify as black. I'd kept my race dysphoria a secret for many years but it had become increasingly difficult to hide. Being the transcendental trailblazer I am, I decided to come out and challenge the bigotry of cisrace people. Predictably enough at the time, it was regarded as nonsensical and I was strongly ridiculed. Today however, transracial individuals are finally being ‘seen'.According to the UK’s Telegraph, the Universities and Colleges Union (a British trade union in further and higher education) have stated that regardless of skin tone, people should be able to identify as black.

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.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. The French economist Thomas Piketty, who made his name with Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), has another book out next year called Capital and Ideology in which he looks at changing patterns of voting behavior in Britain, France and America. One of his findings is that, until quite recently, the more educated voters were, the more likely they were to vote for right-of-center parties. Now, the opposite is true. Which might explain why Donald Trump declared at the height of the 2016 presidential election: ‘I love the poorly educated.’ Piketty has already published a paper about this and the data he’s accumulated is eye-catching.

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Leading minds Where are world leaders educated? According to an analysis by the UK-based Higher Education Policy Institute, the US has just overtaken Britain in the number of world leaders educated at the country’s universities. — 62 world leaders (monarchs, presidents or prime ministers) were educated at US universities. — 59 were educated at UK universities. — Two years ago, the respective figures were 57 and 58. — 40 current world leaders were educated in France, 10 in Russia and 9 in Australia. The burning question Is climate change making wildfires worse? Acres burned in US wildfires: 1928 43.54m 1938 33.81m 1948 16.56m 1958 3.28m 1968 4.

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. America’s colleges and universities are in crisis. According to the latest data released by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, enrollment is down 1.7 percent compared with 2018, following a drop of 1.8 percent the previous year. If you contrast 2019 with 2017, that’s more than half a million fewer students. The brunt of this decline is being felt in New England, the center of America’s higher-education sector. In eastern Massachusetts, eight colleges have either closed or merged in the past four years, while in Vermont three colleges have gone to the wall in 2019 alone. Most experts think things will get a good deal worse.

As President Trump ponders restrictions on Chinese tech company Huawei, the FBI is warning American universities about espionage by Chinese researchers and academics. The FBI now advises research universities to track and observe Chinese students and faculty for signs of intellectual property theft. In the last year, the federal government has voided or re-evaluated the visas of 30 Chinese academics for this crime. In April, FBI Director Christopher Wray commented on China’s intelligence operation. China, Wray said, has 'pioneered a societal approach to stealing innovation any way it can, from a wide array of businesses, universities, and organizations'.

I agree with Bernie Sanders, at least to a point. It is lamentable how students are expected to pay back an average of almost $40,000 in debt after they graduate from college. Frankly, it might be a good idea to cancel it, and if the money can be raised from Wall Street, well, so much the better. Yes, I know the conservative arguments against this move. Does it not penalize people who have paid off their debts? It makes no difference to them. Should conservatives oppose the cutting of regressive taxes because people have already been paying them? A more challenging argument was made in a blunt form by Matt Walsh: 'I guess I'm meant to cry tears of sympathy for all of these college grads with student loan debt. Somehow I just can't muster a single tear.

Higher education is dominated by liberal professors and progressive impulses. Conservative professors like me are often apprehensive about teaching in the dominant method, lecture based classes. It’s in the humble seminar, with students and professor debating around a table, that viewpoint diversity can thrive, and discussions of conservative thought survive.Colleagues tell me that they are regularly afraid of the scenario when their class spirals out of control and blows up. In the safe-space, trigger warning, micro-aggression climate of the campus, a professor’s intentions and statements are easily mischaracterized.

The freedom to debate ideas in our nation’s colleges and universities is under attack. That much is well known. The only group on campus that can push back against the tide of censorship and silencing of speakers on campus are the students themselves. Higher education is supposed to be a place of intellectual discomfort, and students should object when their institutions silence dissenting ideas. The latest round of administrative overreach and censorship in response to unpopular views comes courtest of Middlebury College in Vermont and is instructive. Middlebury’s administration canceled a lecture last week that would have featured Ryszard Legutko, a controversial professor of philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Poland and a member of the European Parliament.

Graduation season is almost upon us and since not a single high school had the foresight to ask me to give their commencement address (probably because I dropped out of college in my first semester), I thought I’d share the speech the Class of 2019 really needs to hear... Hello graduates. I’ll keep it brief because I know your attention spans have been decimated by social media; I realize I’m not a meme or a gif and I’ve got approximately four seconds to grab your attention, so here goes. Don’t go to college. It’s a scam. Before you or your well-meaning ‘tiger parents’ who buy into the prevailing wisdom that a college degree is necessary to be successful in life take to Twitter to rile up a mob and ruin my life — hear me out.

Sarah Lawrence College claims that its mission is to graduate students who are, ‘diverse in every definition of the word.’ Unfortunately, recent events which have been in the national eye, suggest otherwise. And this story involves me. Seizing on an op-ed I wrote for The New York Times a few months ago, in which I questioned the lack of ideological balance of the school’s extracurricular programming, a group of student protesters calling themselves the Diaspora Coalition labeled me a racist misogynist. They demanded that my ‘position at the College be put up to tenure review to a panel of the Diaspora Coalition and at least three faculty members of color.

We knew Felicity Huffman from Desperate Housewives, but we didn’t know how desperate a mother she was until now. Huffman and Lori Loughlin of Full House are the two celebrities caught in the Operation Varsity Blues dragnet, along with 31 other individuals who paid as much as $500,000 per dimwit child to one William ‘Rick’ Singer, all so their pampered, ignorant, SAT-flunking little darlings could get into ‘good’ schools where they could snort Xanax, butt-chug ketamine, and slob around in sweatpants and flip-flops like inmates in a mental hospital — just like their more intelligent peers, apart from the Asians, who actually study and are America’s last chance. Let us count the ways in which college admissions are corrupt.

Universities are not the calmest of places just now, what with fights over free speech and the endless claims of harassment and intimidation. Add in the crippling debts from a college education, and many students might be wondering why they bothered at all. But never mind the on-campus animosity and rivalries, a university education ultimately has a beneficial effect on those who go through it – and not just in a financial sense. It make us more trusting and optimistic about the intentions of other people. That is the clear conclusion of the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey on Community and Society, which I co-authored. The survey asked graduates aged 24 and over three questions about interpersonal relations.

While so much of higher-education in the United States is dominated by politically active and overwhelmingly liberal college administrators – the ever growing professional class of administrators who call the shots outside the classroom – it turns out that that not every college looks like those in New England which has a 25:1 ratio of liberal to conservative administrators. As warnings about the diminution of viewpoint diversity become louder, understanding where and why there are some schools that are not completely progressive in orientation should be better understood and one explanation for this is geography: America’s institutions of higher education are deeply embedded in and influenced by the local communities where they are spatially situated.

Three female students are suing Yale and several campus fraternities for ‘alleged gender discrimination and for fostering a sexually hostile environment,’ reports the Yale Daily News. The lawsuit fits into a broader, national conversation happening on college campuses around the country about the role of fraternities, sororities, and any on-campus organization that discriminates on the basis of sex. Increasingly, campus activists — and, in the case of Harvard, sometimes college administrators — are calling for single-sex institutions to be forcibly integrated. I’m biased on this issue, but so are the plaintiffs, whether they recognize it or not.

It’s well known that the question of who can speak and on what topics has become a flashpoint for controversy on our nation’s college and university campuses. I experienced intimidation firsthand after publishing an op-ed in the New York Times in which I questioned some of seemingly liberal, lopsided programming at Sarah Lawrence College (one of the most proudly progressive schools, where I am a tenured professor). I suggested that more balance was needed given our polarized times and reiterated my concerns about collegiate ideological echo chambers. Within hours, my office door and surrounding corridor was vandalized. Pictures of my family were taken and bumper stickers that I had placed on the door to create a welcoming environment for students were stripped off.