Universities

Thursday

Toby Young

The neo-Marxist takeover of our universities

According to Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, America’s universities have succumbed to ‘safetyism’, whereby students are protected from anything that might cause them anxiety or discomfort. In their book The Coddling of the American Mind, published this week, they attribute the spread of ‘trigger warnings’, ‘safe spaces’ and ‘bias hotlines’ on campus to a misplaced concern about the psychological fragility of students. In their view, millennials aren’t ‘snowflakes’, but imagine themselves to be on account of having been surrounded by over-protective parents and teachers.

neo-marxist stepford students universities

Monday

Dominic Green

Why are Harvard and MIT selling out to the Saudis?

It’s all relative with Saudi Arabia. Everyone who matters is related to everyone else. Even relative to the degraded standards of Afro-kleptocracy and Arab dictatorship, the Saudi state is nothing more than the al-Saud family business, plus its clerical and military appendages. And relatively speaking, the Saudis are hypocrites even by the low standards of Arab governance. They have always divided the world into those with whom they are prepared admit economic relations, and those with whom they claim not to have relations of any kind, but secretly do. The former include Saudi Arabia’s slave class of imported servants and construction workers, oil-hungry governments.

saudis harvard

Thursday

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker: my advice to the new president of Harvard

This week my employer, Harvard University, announced its next president, Lawrence Bacow. The campus newspaper asked what advice I would give our incoming chief, and I reiterated the counsel I had offered the search committee: ‘The President of Harvard University is not just the steward of our institution, but, because of Harvard’s fame, a voice for the integrity of academia as a forum for free inquiry.

steven pinker