A collection of 398 posts
The University of Washington, like most schools, tracks the performance of student groups as part of its effort to enhance diversity and reduce inequality.
But the real scandal—not discussed much in the media—wasn’t Krug’s decade of duplicity.
The activists seeking to eliminate TJ’s meritocratic admissions systems attribute this latter result to systemic racism.
This approach has been greeted with hostility by many colleagues. This is understandable, for it challenges humanists to climb down from the ivory tower and make their research directly relevant to the public.
However well intentioned, these programs will likely increase inequities rather than reduce them, and push the nation’s colleges still closer to the low level of its public schools.
Even though large tracts of our cultural landscape and many old and famous American institutions have fallen or may fall into the grip of this hostile ideology and all the odious apparatus of cancel culture rule, we shall not flag or fail.
The problem with this picture of the Renaissance is not that it has no truth to it—it certainly has some—but that it is perversely unbalanced.
In his declaration of independence published in Quillette, Katz, a chaired professor in the Classics department, defends the importance of free speech in academia and accuses the authors of the letter of trying to impose unreasonable changes at Princeton.
Polarization is baked into the current system, and no reform program will completely level the playing field.
Scholars in the humanities are the bearers of the memory of civilisation, and their role in our society is indispensable.
Nwanevu is predictably coy about affirmative action, the most explicit form of institutional racism in the United States.
It is not unreasonable to consider avoiding research that risks creating unmanageable divisions.
In its most elaborate form, EDI subjects science to the same treatment as has already been meted out to the Western literary canon: a relentless deconstruction whereby each axiom, value, and commitment is presented as infected by cultural imperialism.
Universities are free to promote sexual experimentation. But they should be honest that pushing norms and boundaries involves making mistakes.
While the pandemic has been challenging for everyone, let’s hope the disruption that is taking place in higher education is the beginning of a broader reform movement that refocuses the emphasis on the learner and how instructors and faculty can empower them to create value in the marketplace.