A collection of 443 posts
In its effort to protect its students from potentially awkward social interactions, the university is arrogating adult decision-making to the institution.
This silencing campaign presents itself as inclusive and therapeutic. In reality, it poses a significant threat to intellectual and academic freedom, yet one that seems perennially overlooked in the campus speech wars.
If I had known, 20 years ago, that my side in the ideological wars over gender and sex was going to win so decisively, I would have been ecstatic
At the height of the #MeToo scandal in 2018, when dozens of actresses were coming forward with sordid testimonies about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predation, a much more obscure scandal was unfolding around an academic journal involving the anthropologist David Graeber. The journal—HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory—was imploding
Ironically, what is really needed is the restoration of the entire college campus as a safe space for people of all perspectives.
But a further question remains. Where are the men—and, today, women—of real merit that our form of government allows to come to the fore?
Nevertheless, Drayton’s diatribe does reveal something important—not much about me, something about him, but mostly about the vices that fester in certain reaches of our universities, which serve to undermine rational dialogue and public norms of liberal civility.
The rich kids at Gulliver, those who drove Range Rovers and boasted of extravagant vacations, were not black. But at Amherst, many of my new wealthy classmates were.
This is a dimension where knowledge of the world—that same prior knowledge that needs activating—is the last thing that it would occur to anyone to actually teach children in schools.
Listen onSpotify Toby Young talks to Bruce Gilley, professor of political science at Portland State, about not being able to get his course on conservative political thought approved by his faculty, and his efforts to fight back against progressive authoritarianism on campus. He recently published a piece in Quillette about
Psychological scientists are quick to spot unwarranted causal inferences in others' research — but blind to the same errors in their own, possibly driven by ideological commitments and self-interest.
To a modern research scientist, all of this will seem like common sense, and such principles now are taught even in some undergraduate courses.
Clearly it is possible to do politics in philosophy without doing political philosophy.
The spread of mass education may have exemplified the promise of liberal civilization. The spread of mass education may have exemplified the promise of liberal civilization. But, without an understanding and appreciation of what allowed it to flourish, it could also accelerate its dissolution.
Right now, I’m maybe most spooked by how a living, breathing cultural memory is seeming to evaporate.