Higher Education

From the “Trump can’t do anything right department” comes a front-page story in Saturday’s New York Times: “Handshakes at the White House, Hand-Wringing at Black Colleges” by Anemona Hartocollis and Noah Weiland. The Times has spent the last year excoriating then-candidate, now-President Trump for either being racist himself or encouraging racism in his supporters. But after a productive meeting…

After longtime conservative author, columnist, and think tank scholar Charles Murray was chased on Thursday from far-left Middlebury College by an angry mob, the Associated Press felt more than comfortable smearing Murray as a supposed “white nationalist.”  

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement, "The president's decision to ask Betsy DeVos to run the Department of Education should offend every single American man, woman, and child who has benefitted from the public education system in this country." Expressing similar sentiments, Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Cedric Richmond said, "I expect that Mrs. DeVos will have an…

Almost fifteen years ago, South Park paid tribute to a trailblazing animated TV series by calling an episode “The Simpsons Already Did It.” According to Columbia Journalism Review columnist Joel Simon, regardless of the current hubbub over President Trump’s media-bashing, several “Latin American populist” heads of state, including the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, already did it, or…

The social justice warriors at Freeform are at it again, with the episode "Relation of Lines and Colors" of Switched at Birth revolving around the continuing racial tensions at the University of Missouri—Kansas City following an incident of *gasp* cultural appropriation. The episode, which aired February 21, began with the disclaimer: “While the story that you’re about to see is not based on…

American public school students fall well behind students around the world in math and science proficiency. This is not debatable. According to the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, both cited in The New York Times in 2012, "Fourth- and eighth-grade students in the United States continue to lag behind students in…

The fifth and final season of Freeform’s Switched at Birth has the fingerprints of Social Justice Warriors all over it. The second episode, which aired on Tuesday night, “This Has to Do With Me,” provided a “ripped from the headlines” storyline based on the Black Lives Matter campus movement that began sweeping schools and chilling free thought at universities in the fall of 2005.

NYU journalism prof Jay Rosen thinks that for the time being, mainstream media outlets should give inexperienced reporters -- interns -- what’s typically considered among the juiciest of plum assignments: White House correspondent. That, he argued in a Sunday piece on his site PressThink, would be a far more effective way of covering the current administration than we have now. Rosen wrote that…

One wonders just how far spineless college administrators will go when it comes to caving in to the demands of campus snowflakes. For those unfamiliar with the term "snowflakes," it is increasingly being used to characterize college students easily traumatized by criticism and politically incorrect phrases. They demand safe spaces and trigger warnings so as not to be upset by views that challenge…

It would be difficult to think of any principle more basic than that criminal defendants can’t be convicted except by proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But left-leaning “fact-checker” PolitiFact doesn’t even know it. In an error-filled January 19 “fact-check,” PolitiFact’s Anna Orso writes about “the ‘clear and convincing’ standard used in criminal trials.”  The clear and convincing evidence…

In June, when UK voters decided to leave the European Union in the "Brexit" referendum, the U.S. press told the American people that the UK economy would suffer greatly as a result. Moody's economist and max Hillary Clinton contributor Mark Zandi predicted that it would be "going down the rabbit hole." At CBS News, Mellody Hobson said that "they're acting as if a recession is a foregone…

The image of America as “a shining city on a hill” (or a similar phrase) has been a staple of conservative political rhetoric for several decades. In a Tuesday piece for The New Republic, Matthew Pratt Guterl, a professor at Brown University, adapted the metaphor for leftist domestic use: “The nation as a whole seems no longer interested in celebrating any vision of equity, justice, and mutual…

Climate scientist Dr. Judith Curry has had enough of academics politicizing her field. She’s leaving academia for the private sector, which she said on Jan. 3, “seems like a more ‘honest’ place for a scientist working in a politicized field than universities or government labs.” Curry resigned her tenured position as of Jan. 1, with “no intention of seeking another academic” position in a…

In an item published on Tuesday, Matt Sedensky at the Associated Press reported on what he observed in a graduate "Faith and Politics" class at Emory University immediately after and during the weeks following this year's presidential election. Class members' immature reactions to the election's result and the reporter's injected commentary are both disturbing, but very useful. That's because…