Take Back the Party
At a glance, Princeton University seems like a welcoming place to be a female undergraduate. In 2007, the year I matriculated, Princeton boasted a record-breaking female enrollment (41 percent) in its...
View ArticleSorority Sisters Shouldn’t Be Banned From Fraternity Parties. They Should...
Saturday at the University of Virginia was men’s bid night, one of the campus' biggest social events. This year half its usual attendees were missing in action: Sorority members at UVA
View ArticleThe Marquette Professor Who Might Lose Tenure Isn't a Victim of P.C. Culture
A Philip Roth novel has been writing itself for the past several months at Marquette, a Catholic university in Wisconsin. A political science professor there, John McAdams, risks losing tenure
View ArticleWhy Women's Colleges Still Matter in the Age of Trans Activism
Last week, Bryn Mawr College, my alma mater, announced that it would begin accepting applications from trans women, becoming the
View ArticleThe Oklahoma A.P. Test Controversy Masks the Real Scandal of American History...
Last year, between sessions at a conference, I asked a longtime high school teacher in New York City about recent changes to the Advanced Placement U.S. History course framework. Like most A.P....
View ArticleWhy Women's Colleges Need to Embrace Trans Activists—and So Does Feminism
I woke up last Tuesday to a deluge of emails, many from students who took my "Introduction to Trans Studies" class at Yale last semester, all pointing me to a New Republicarticle by Monica
View ArticleColleges Should Stop Worrying About Yik Yak and Start Respecting Their Students
The New York Times discovered the social media app that has taken college campuses by storm: Yik Yak, which allows users to post anonymous messages (“yaks”) that only appear to users within a 1.5-mile...
View ArticleYale Law School Is Deleting Its Admissions Records, and There's Nothing...
You just got lawyered.That was the takeaway from Yale Law School Dean Robert Post’s annual “State of the School” address last Tuesday. In frank terms, he explained that students who requested access to...
View ArticleDon't Blame Students for Being Hypersensitive. Blame Colleges.
Judith Shulevitz’s New York Times op-ed on Sunday about colleges and “safe spaces” paints a bleak picture of campus life in America today. Titled “In C
View ArticleAdjunct Professors Shouldn't Expect Students to Care About Their Terrible Jobs
There's a persistent hope that if only college students knew how little their professors were paid, they’d storm the barricades on their instructors’ behalf, or at the very least be so moved by their...
View ArticleHow to Save the Liberal Arts From Extinction
In 1828, a faculty committee at Yale declared that the aim of a liberal education “was not to teach that which is peculiar to any one of the professions, but to lay the foundation which is common to...
View ArticleElite Universities Are Turning Our Kids Into Corporate Stooges
Duke University, where I graduated in 2002, was as lenient about student infractions—underage drinking, excessive noise, hazing—as most private universities. But there was a limit to its paternal...
View ArticleWhy Black Students Struggle in STEM Subjects: Low Expectations
Dressed in a black hoodie and sagging jeans, DeAndre (name changed) swaggers down the street, singing loudly the gritty lyrics of a gangsta rap.This routine typifies DeAndre’s journey to and from...
View ArticleStudent Debt Strikers: Education Department Is "Using Us" for a "Publicity...
Organizers of a student debt strike canceled a planned meeting with the Department of Education on Monday, believing it would be used as a “publicity stunt” to announce new rules, placing what they...
View ArticleLife Is "Triggering." The Best Literature Should Be, Too.
Sadly, the decline in free speech at American universities, and the proliferation of ludicrous “trigger warning” mandates for books and courses, are topics covered largely by the right-wing media, so...
View ArticleMy Students Need Trigger Warnings—and Professors Do, Too
“Rape” comes to English from the Latin rapere, “to seize.” When I teach Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock”—an early eighteenth-century poem about the true story of Arabella Fermor, whose suitor...
View ArticleGeneration PTSD: What the "Trigger Warning" Debate Is Really About
Generals are often accused of fighting the last war, of confronting every foe through the prism of earlier battles. Political polemicists, no less than military leaders, run the risk of conflating the...
View ArticleThe Hostile Renegotiation of the Professor-Student Relationship
There is a scourge on college campuses today, driving a wedge between students and faculty. Political correctness? Maybe that, too. But I'm referring instead to the newly triumphant caricature of...
View ArticleHow Universities Turned Themselves into Global Franchises
A growing number of colleges and universities are emerging as multinational organizations—creating start-up versions of themselves in foreign countries.Those vacationing in western France may drive...
View ArticleUNC's Hall of Shame
In May of 1870, one dozen members of the Ku Klux Klan lured North Carolina State Senator J.W. Stephens into the basement of the local courthouse, where they stabbed him to death. His murder came only...
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