Yale

Iowa Wesleyan is the latest. Finlandia University before that. Pennsylvania College of Health Sciences as of January 2024. Many others you have probably not heard of: Stone Academy, Cazenovia College, Bloomfield College. These are colleges and universities that have breathed their last. Most often they are just local stories. A college that has been reduced to a few hundred students and perhaps two dozen faculty members comes to its final, final end.  In most cases, that final end has been dragged out long past the point where there was any realistic hope of saving the institution. As a former college president once told me, “Colleges die hard.” The faculty and administrators rarely have other career options.

Before anyone says anything else about Amy Chua, it’s worth noting that we still have no idea exactly why people are talking about her. This is a peculiar state of affairs for a person whose offenses and subsequent downfall have been the recent subject of reporting in multiple major media outlets. There's an allegation: that Chua, a Yale Law School professor, violated both protocol and decency during the 2020 school year by hosting dinner parties at her home for students and elite members of the legal profession. There's a punishment: the alleged infraction cost her a position as the head of one of the Yale Law School's intimate classes for first-year students known as a ‘small group’.

‘You’re about to learn why people generally avoid fucking with me.’ Thus spake Nietzsche scholar and Macquarie University philosophy professor Mark Alfano in a tweet directed at me.I’ll start from the beginning. In late December I published a paper in the academic journal Philosophical Psychology defending the study of race differences in intelligence. This topic arouses strong emotions. But I am a philosopher, and the job of philosophers is to confront issues dispassionately, guided only by reason and evidence. This activity may lead us to question orthodoxies and challenge taboos, but that is what philosophy is all about. Or at least it’s supposed to be.

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.