Via To the People comes the story of New Jersey’s Kearny High School, which became a center of controversy when a student taped history teacher David Paszkiewicz using class time to heap scorn on evolution and admonishing students to embrace Jesus or risk hellfire. School administrators were quick to respond… by banning the surreptitious recording […]

[Read more →]

So, I have no idea whether the “liberaltarian” coalition that was being batted about last month has a chance in hell of working, but I’ve got some advice for any student lefties who feel like giving it the old college try over at Campus Progress.

[Read more →]

A few years back, I wrote a review of a nigh-universally panned farrago of a book called The Cheating Culture, and used as my introductory example my friend and onetime roommate Glen Whitman, an econ professor who has a special gift for (and Javerian relentlessness in) catching plagiarists and cheaters. Apparently, my example was inadvertently […]

[Read more →]

Columbia Teacher’s College responds to the critique from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education I mentioned below, and they’re at least claiming the case is essentially what I’d suspected: The business about social justice and appreciating the effects of discrimination is about, in practice, being able to tailor your teaching style to respond to […]

[Read more →]

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is riled up about the apparent ideological litmus test implicit in the Columbia University Teachers College Conceptual Framework. At first blush, I can see why. Inter alia, it apparently stipulates that students will have a commitment to “social justice” (normally a euphemism for redistribution) and agree that: [S]ocial […]

[Read more →]

Holy hell, I agree with Stanley Fish, here writing on the controversy over a University of Wisconsin prof who peddles his pet theory that George Bush planned 9/11 to his students: Both sides get it wrong. The problem is that each assumes that academic freedom is about protecting the content of a professor’s speech; one […]

[Read more →]

In an article over at TechCentralStation, University of Arizona philosophy prof Uriah Kriegel attempts to tackle what he regards as the puzzle of why African American gains in recent decades haven’t been as great in academia in other arenas. But the way the question is framed, I’m not even sure about the premise, really. The […]

[Read more →]

Plenty of bloggers have been discussing stories about a new study purporting to show that conservatives are not only underrepresented in academia (I’m shocked, shocked!) but, in fact, appear to face job discrimination when one compares the quality of institutions at which folks with comparable professional achievements (in terms of peer-reviewed publications, etc.) teach. That’s […]

[Read more →]

Philosopher Peter Unger, with whom I studied at NYU, writes regarding the kerfuffle over Ross Douthat’s claim in The Atlantic that modern philosophy departments “have largely purged themselves of metaphysicians and moralists.” Says Unger: I noticed that, a couple of weeks ago, you had an interchange with one Ross Douthat, apparently a Harvard graduate who […]

[Read more →]

Y’know, I’ll fully acknowledge that left-leaning groupthink is a perfectly real phenomenon in academe, but this parody sums up pretty well how a lot of the whining on the right—from libertarians as well as conservatives—has always struck me. That the large majority of highly educated people paid to think about philosophy and economics every day […]

[Read more →]