The recent lamentable travails afflicting American academia — falling public support, suppression of free expression, declining integrity of research as evidenced by seemingly widespread plagiarism — mask a longer-term but I think serious problem: American colleges and universities are disseminating…
As I recounted recently in the Wall Street Journal, 20 years ago Milton Friedman wrote me to say, after doing a complete analysis, he believed we should be taxing our universities rather than subsidizing them. The economics involved are pretty…
The first 24 years of the 21st century have been the era of Woke Supremacy in our institutions of higher learning. Universities have downplayed traditional academic standards and expectations while becoming centers for promoting ideologies centered around combatting perceived injustices,…
The Founding Father of this fount of worldly wisdom, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., has written a delightful new memoir (How Do We Get Out of Here?: Half a Century of Laughter and Mayhem at The American Spectator―From Bobby Kennedy to…
College enrollments in the humanities have declined, even more than the general fall in the numbers attending college. West Virginia University recently laid off numerous faculty in the humanities, especially foreign languages, and other schools have done so on a…
Writing in this space a few weeks ago, I argued that in several ways the United States is exhibiting characteristics remarkably similar to that of the Roman Empire during its decline in the Christian Era. Like second century Rome, we…
Like many others, I have long sensed that the so-called best and most prestigious American universities were actually very poor at maintaining a campus environment that upholds the free expression of ideas, basic First Amendment protections, etc. But after researching…
For decades, I taught a course in European economic history that stressed the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath and spent a couple of lectures talking about the Roman Empire and other ancient civilizations. The Roman Empire lasted over 500 years…
Polling data confirm that Americans, in general, have a rather low opinion of their colleges and universities. They think they are too expensive and are turned off by the wokeness and arrogance of the administrators and faculty. Some data suggest…
If recent reports are to be believed, academic crimes are on the rise. In a world with shrinking enrollments and many underemployed professionals with PhDs, the temptations to cheat and lie to get published are intense. We are in an…