Higher Education

If it were a plague, the government would rush to quarantine the infected, as occurred during Europe's Black Death in the 14th century. An immigration debate at Seattle University School of Law is a plague of a different sort, but deadly in a different way. The victim here is the right to free speech.

As George Orwell said, "some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them." Many stupid ideas originate with academics on college campuses. If they remained there and didn't infect the rest of society, they might be a source of entertainment, much in the way a circus is. Let's look at a few stupid ideas peddled by intellectuals.

Do we go around telling women, African Americans, and gay people that their lives don't matter? According to the October 5 episode of How to Get Away with Murder, "I'm Not Her," that's exactly what "we" do.

Our college-age population consists mostly of 18- to 30-year-olds, and likewise our armed forces. I wonder whether they shared common responses to the 2016 presidential election. Many college administrators provided students with therapy dogs, play dough, coloring books, bubbles, videos of frolicking kittens and puppies, and soft music. They even canceled classes and postponed exams so that their…

Our college-age population consists mostly of 18- to 30-year-olds, and likewise our armed forces. I wonder whether they shared common responses to the 2016 presidential election. Many college administrators provided students with therapy dogs, play dough, coloring books, bubbles, videos of frolicking kittens and puppies, and soft music. They even canceled classes and postponed exams so that their…

The New York Times’ Thomas Fuller filed from Berkeley, where the journalist offered some disturbing ambivalence about the whole First Amendment thing, a tone evident in the headline: “Let Right-Wing Speakers Come to Berkeley? Faculty Is Divided.” It’s a pattern at the Times, with recent pieces suggesting free speech was merely a “canard” used by right-wing racists.

On Tuesday, before Ben Shapiro's appearance at the University of California at Berkeley, Bari Weiss, a staff editor and writer in the opinion section at the New York Times, penned an op-ed accurately describing Shapiro's beliefs, defending his right to speak, and criticizing the "sloppy conflation" by leftist politicians and all too many in the press in trying to label all conservatives as "alt-…

The Associated Press couldn't keep race and income out of its coverage of Hurricane Harvey and Houston's recovery from it. Those angles were wholly predictable and tiresome, but the wire service's Juliet Linderman also decided she would tell readers what the establishment press has from all appearances unilaterally and falsely decided should be the conventional wisdom about the impact of…

Earlier this month, The New York Times ran an article titled "U.S. Rights Unit Shifts to Study Antiwhite Bias" on its front page. The article says that President Donald Trump's Justice Department's civil rights division is going to investigate and sue universities whose affirmative action admissions policies discriminate against white applicants. This is an out-and-out lie. 

Unprofessional all around: The decision by the New York Times Sunday Book Review to publish a laudatory review of “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. At this point, the grievous flaws flushed out by critics on the left and right should have required that any review come with a warning label. Yet even months after criticism from outlets across…

On Friday, in an op-ed which made the paper's print edition, David Brooks, the alleged conservative commentator at the New York Times, surprised more than a few people by calling for Google CEO Sundar Pichai to resign over his awful handling of now ex-employee James Damore's "Echo Chamber" document. Brooks identified the five key players in the drama, and directed sharp criticism at three of them…

In his column this week at The Root, MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson made his latest launch into hyperbole as he claimed that the Trump administration "wants to return America" to the days of "white grievance, violence and discrimination" against blacks, referring to the Philadelphia transit strike of 1944 in which white workers opposed the promotion of blacks to better jobs. Johnson also coined…

August is the month when parents bid farewell to not only their college-bound youngsters but also a sizable chunk of cash for tuition. More than 18 million students attend our more than 4,300 degree-granting institutions. A question parents, their college-bound youngsters and taxpayers should ask: Is college worth it?

The New York Times special Education section Sunday soft-pedaled the authoritarian left-wing movements afoot on many college campuses, including the violence black-bloc "anti-fascist" movement Antifa. First, Laura Pappano’s solid if slightly muddled piece on left-wing campus intolerance of dissenting views appeared under a euphemistic headline: “Where ‘Everything Is Under Attack’ -- Students are…