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…
When I was a boy riding the bus to our diocesan high school, an older kid sometimes sat in the seat next to me. He was an intelligent fellow who has since become a lawyer of considerable reputation. We might…
While most college students in the U.S. reluctantly dragged themselves to their first day of spring semester classes, students in Alyiah Gonzales’ English class on “race, writing, and power” had their first class of the year canceled “in solidarity with…
Harvard University has had a rough few months. It seemed as though the series of scandals that beset the once-revered university had culminated in the resignation of Claudine Gay, its former president. But this week brought forth revelations that dealt…
Last week, teaching, for Thales College, one of the sequences of classes in Western Civilization, I and four students, by chance all of them young men, discussed Machiavelli’s The Prince. It is utterly refreshing when you know, from the start,…
Claudine Gay announced Tuesday that she is resigning from her position as president of Harvard University. The decision, she said, was “difficult beyond words.” Public resistance to Gay had escalated across the nation in recent months as she repeatedly displayed…
I would rather not have another national conversation about race in America. But if we must, can we at least not have the same conversation about race in America? Since the Supreme Court told Harvard that it can no longer…
I wrote about Bates College’s first two major leaguers, the first man to score a touchdown on historic Garcelon Field, and the first to blast a home run on that field (the ball rolled into a ditch). But all four…
A few columns ago, I addressed the subject of what it takes for one to be “obnoxiously gay,” a description that I applied to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg in my 2022 book The Revivalist Manifesto, which recently returned to…
Academic dishonesty strikes many people as boring. After all, it is academic. It is not like Sam Bankman-Fried, the “crypto king,” making $8 billion disappear into thin air. It is not like Florida dentist Charlie Adelson paying a hitman to…