Education
Scapegoating the Private School Boy
The Private School Boy is an object of endless horror and fascination. Every few years, the media outrage cycle will crest towards another scandal—a leaked video of a sexist chant, allegations of sexual misconduct or orgiastic excess—and the discourse machine will dissect the sexual mores of elite teenagers
Affirmative Action Conundrums
Historian, anti-racist activist, and recently named MacArthur “Genius” Grant awardee Ibram X. Kendi made waves on Twitter recently with the following (since-deleted) tweet: The survey results to which Kendi referred were highly dubious, but his critics seized on a different point. Taking them at face value (as Kendi seemed eager
Academia’s Identity Crisis
Two months into my first semester as a doctoral student, Donald Trump was elected. A few years later the coronavirus hit. That summer George Floyd was murdered. Each of these events, along with many less seismic ones in between, elicited a similar response from the faculty, students, and administrators around
Cancel Culture Has a Lot to Answer For
Sometimes our most precious cultural institutions fail to live up to their high educational and moral commitments and responsibilities. These failures especially damage the social fabric because they tend to harm many people who rely on them and tarnish the high ideals that the institutions claim to exemplify. An incident
My Late Father Was a Great Teacher. He Wouldn’t Last a Week in the Modern Classroom.
My father passed away a few weeks ago. He had spent his entire working life teaching junior high and high school students. Most communities in our country possess a few teachers of my father’s ilk, educators who are considered local celebrities—the type who can rarely enter a restaurant
What Is Diversity? And Why Is It Valuable?
Suppose I just get back from vacation, and you ask me how it went. “Oh, it was wonderful,” I say, “There was such diversity.” That wouldn’t answer your question at all. Instead, you’d want to know two things: Diversity of what? And why would that sort of diversity
Can We Have Sex Back?
Somewhere between Women’s Studies turning into Gender Studies and the university lawyers turning into risk managers, we seem to have lost the clitoris. As an historian, I consider this a rare case of history surprising us. Asked in 1970 to predict the likely trajectory of academic feminism from that
Male Underachievement and the Gender Turf Wars
The National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), a non-profit education organization, published a report earlier this year that ought to have alarmed many Americans. Compared to the prior semester, the decline in male university enrollment was double that of women: Enrollment declines are steeper for men than for women across all sectors
