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I’m Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is BrokenIf you enjoyed Netflix’s “The Chair” – a lighthearted depiction of a crisis-prone English Department at an imaginary Ivy League college – you are clearly not in higher education. Something is rotten in the state of academia and it’s no laughing matter. Grade inflation. Spiraling costs. Corruption and racial discrimination in admissions. Junk content (“Grievance Studies”) published in risible journals. Above all, the erosion of academic freedom and the ascendancy of an illiberal “successor ideology” known to its critics as wokeism, which manifests itself as career-ending “cancelations” and speaker...

A federal judge has granted the request of Christian colleges who want to intervene in a lawsuit that seeks to force the U.S. Department of Education to strip federal funding from Christian colleges that abide by traditional beliefs on gender and sexuality. In an opinion released last Friday, Judge Ann Aiken of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon granted the motions to intervene in a case brought forward by dozens of current and former students at 25 Christian colleges who argue that religious exemptions to Title IX discrimination law are unconstitutional. Although the lawsuit was filed against...

Peter Boghossian has taught philosophy at Portland State University for the past decade. In the letter below, sent this morning to the university’s provost, he explains why he is resigning.Dear Provost Susan Jeffords, ​​I’m writing to you today to resign as assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University. Over the last decade, it has been my privilege to teach at the university. My specialties are critical thinking, ethics and the Socratic method, and I teach classes like Science and Pseudoscience and The Philosophy of Education. But in addition to exploring classic philosophers and traditional texts, I’ve invited a wide...

I think the first time I wrote about Portland State University professor Peter Boghossian was back in March 2018 when he hosted a discussion at his school on intersectionality as a religion. “I hope the irony is not being lost on anyone that three liberal atheists are being sponsored, their event is being sponsored, by the most conservative groups on campus,” he said. Not long after that I wrote about another event at the University in which Boghossian hosted James Damore, Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying. During that discussion, Heying pointed out that men were, on average, taller...

So, Harvard University named Greg Epstein, an atheist, as their head chaplain, because apparently nothing makes more sense to them than turning over the spiritual direction of their students to someone whose entire belief system is built around the belief that there is no God. At least Epstein is somewhat honest about his belief system, which is more than I can say about the more than 40 religious leaders of apparently 20 different faiths who gave unanimous consent to this grotesque travesty. Most of America’s universities have been post-Christian, if not openly hostile to Christianity, for many years, so Harvard...

As Oscar Wilde tells us, “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.” This is especially true of bureaucracies on college campuses. Once their seeds are planted, their growth often continues without check. Administrative offices have been growing on college campuses since the 1980s, undoubtedly contributing to the increasing cost of a degree. Besides being expensive, administrative growth shifts resources away from education towards administrative programming. This threatens to undermine higher education’s central mission of teaching and research. There has been particularly rapid growth over the past two decades in the area focused on the promotion of diversity, equity,...

The recent spike in COVID-19 cases in California and across the country from the highly infectious delta variant “is an alarming new factor that we must consider as we look to maintain the health and well-being of students, employees and visitors to our campuses this fall," CSU Chancellor Joseph I. Castro said.Students and staff will be required to be vaccinated against COVID-19 before accessing any California State University campus facilities, the nation’s biggest four-year college system said on Tuesday. The CSU system previously said it was planning to require vaccinations and that a formal mandate would depend on when the...

Universities are to be forced to to deduct marks for poor written English in students' work - and will face tough sanctions if they fail to do so. Under proposals by the Office for Students (OfS) regulator, universities will be required to teach students 'relevant skills', assess them 'effectively' and ensure that any qualifications they issue are 'credible'.... ...The move is intended to tackle poor quality courses and comes three months after The Mail on Sunday revealed the use of 'inclusive assessment' at some institutions under which technical ability in written English was not assessed.... ...'If UK Universities are to...

The assault on language is an integral component of the unrelenting warfare being waged for the conquest and control of the mind, Stephen Karganovic writes. Little wonder that here and there sanity nostalgia is gripping the Western world, at least those isolated portions of it that are not internalising the sinister “new normal.” But it is seemingly to no avail. All commanding positions are firmly in the hands of lunatics, who are determined to turn a once great and exemplary civilisation into an asylum. As George Orwell has taught us, language manipulation is at the frontline (yes, I have just...

Welcome back to Education Insanity, a weekly column updating you on the most insane events taking place in our nation’s schools. Here, we’ll delve into the growing presence of critical race theory, the ideology that claims that America is irredeemably rooted in racism, and “woke” culture. Let’s get started. 10. NYC Law School Makes ‘Systemic Racism’ Course A Graduation Requirement – Washington Free Beacon New York City’s Yeshiva University Cardozo School of Law — ranked 53rd in the nation — is mandating that students take a “race and the law” class in order to graduate. In an email to students,...

Bowing to left-wing pressure, the Department of Justice will not even commit to defending religious colleges from a lawsuit that would force them to act contrary to their beliefs about sex and gender.The Biden Department of Justice briefly instigated outrage from progressives recently when it filed a routine legal brief promising to defend Title IX’s statutory exemption for religious colleges. The DOJ filed the brief to fend off efforts by religious colleges, some of whom are represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, to intervene in a lawsuit brought by 40 past and present LGBT college students who claim the exemption violates...

What’s in Store for Your SonsIn the 1970s, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson playfully warned mothers about the downsides of the cowboy business: “Mammas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys / Don't let ‘em pick guitars and drive them old trucks / Make ‘em be doctors and lawyers and such.” That song was written before today's full-blooded assault on masculinity in American culture. It was a time when you could poke a little fun at traditional male identity while still honoring it. I have been a professor at Bucknell University for twenty years, and alas, I find...

Students looking forward to getting back to college are getting letters from 100 to 200 colleges notifying them of a new prerequisite: getting fully vaccinated against COVID-19. As one letter states, this is because of “our continued desire to protect the health and safety of our community.” This includes high-risk individuals in the surrounding community or wherever the students go in the “mass migration” at the end of the semester, according to the American College Health Association (ACHA).The main purpose of the requirement is not to protect the students themselves. Of all COVID deaths, only about 0.1% have been in...

The Chronicle of Higher Education published an astonishing list of 195 colleges and universities, both public and private, that will require all students to receive the COVID-19 vaccination to attend classes on campus in the fall. It would be astonishing if no students challenged this requirement based on the status of the vaccine alone. According to the FDA, the vaccines for COVID-19 are still considered investigational:This guidance describes FDA’s current recommendations regarding the data and information needed to support the issuance of an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) under section 564 of the FD&C Act (21 U.S.C. 360bbb-3) for an investigational...

I feel sorry for those currently in college.For droves of 2020 freshmen, what should’ve been the most exciting time of their lives turned out to be a depressing, disconnected dud, courtesy of culture shock via no in-person classes and no extracurriculars.And even now — over a year past the start of our planetary pandemic — in many cases, a casual walk across the quad can’t check the most basic box of satisfactorily seeing one’s peers.For what may feel like a lifetime, Americans out and about have grown accustomed to everyone hiding in plain sight.Visually, there’s a moratorium on mouths.And in...

A white Georgetown Law professor belittled black students during a Zoom call with a colleague, saying they “usually” perform “just plain at the bottom” of her classes, according to video posted online this week. The brief clip, posted to Twitter Wednesday, shows an adjunct professor of law identified by the Georgetown Black Law Students Association as Sandra Sellers and another faculty member, David Batson, having what they believed was a private discussion about a class they jointly taught... “We demand nothing short of the immediate termination of Sandra Sellers as adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center,” the group said...

That gasp heard after this ruling dropped comes from every college and university with a “free speech zone” and policies that impose heckler’s vetoes. Plaintiffs suing over restrictions on speech and religious expression on campus only need to establish “nominal damages” to gain standing, the Supreme Court ruled in an 8-1 decision, not necessarily actual damages. That opens up a vast new field of litigation that attorneys all across the country will rush to meet. The 8-1 ruling in Uzuegbunam v Preczewski from Justice Clarence Thomas does not actually settle the case in favor of the students, but the writing...

* "The inaugural conference assured [everyone] that Tibet was never annexed, [and] that the Chinese intervention of 1950 had been requested by the Tibetans," Nicolas Nord, a law professor, recalled. * [T]he proposed new head of the CIA, William J. Burns, said that if it were up to him, he would close Confucius Institutes in Western universities. * Seventeen schools in the UK are already owned by Chinese companies, and that number is destined to rise. In addition, The Times revealed that the University of Cambridge received a "generous gift" from Tencent Holdings, one of the largest technology companies in...

Salem radio host Dennis Prager has said sending your kids to college these days is like "playing Russian roulette with their values." You take a huge chance on the version of your child that returns, so to speak. And that’s largely due to the indoctrination and assault on free speech pervasive on college campuses.Thanks to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, we now know 2021's 10 worst schools when it comes to free speech."Each year, hundreds of students and faculty members come to FIRE for help when their individual rights are threatened," states FIRE's introduction to the list. "Many...

A Cornell Law School professor has launched a new database which lists schools teaching critical race theory, after blasting the practice as ‘very racist’ and accusing ‘anti-racism ideology’ of causing discrimination on campuses. William Jacobson appeared on Fox News on Thursday night to speak about the site, which he claims will help parents avoid sending their children to schools where they will be ‘indoctrinated’ into thinking that the ‘most important thing in society is the color of your skin’. Jacobson, the founder of the conservative website Legal Insurrection, launched the site earlier this week and has already listed 220 universities...