Free Republic

A headline on Newsweek’s web site grabbed my attention in early May: “Wokeness Has Come for Adoption. It’s the Children Who Will Suffer.” This is a subject I know well: My wife and I have fostered three child refugees—from Zimbabwe, Guatemala, and Honduras respectively. These foster children are functionally adopted, and have become full-fledged members of our family. The article noted that a vice-president at Bethany Christian Services, the largest Christian adoption agency in the country, had told a reporter that allowing white families to adopt black children from the foster care system “can cause a lot of harm to...

Historian Wilfred McClay aspires to be the antidote to Zinn, whom he accuses of “greatly oversimplifying the past and turning American history into a comic-book melodrama in which ‘the people’ are constantly being abused by ‘the rulers.’ ” Mr. McClay’s counterpoint, which comes out next week, is titled “Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.” He says . . . he’s seen too many students drawn to Zinn because the standard textbooks are visionless and tedious. “Just as nature abhors a vacuum,” Mr. McClay says, “so a culture will find some kind of grand narrative of itself...

While the firing of Naomi Schaefer Riley by the Chronicle of Higher Education is a disgrace, the greater shame is that it can’t be called a surprise. The racial spoils system in American higher education has by now become so entrenched that to challenge it is to commit an unpardonable sin. And challenge it is precisely what Riley did in her blog post, doing what she’d been hired to do by engaging in a fact-based analysis of an educational issue of vital importance. To be sure, Riley didn’t mince words. “If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline...