ARTICLES
Did the Biden-Harris Administration Inadvertently Kill Racial Preferences?
George R. La Noue, University of Maryland-Baltimore County
In its spirited push to install “equity” throughout the federal government, the Biden-Harris administration overreached and created a significant judicial backlash, a development that will make future efforts to achieve those goals very difficult.
The Historians’ Intellectual Malpractice
Edward S. Shapiro, Seton Hall University
On January 5, 2025, the attendees at the American Historical Association convention in New York City voted to approve a resolution strongly condemning Israel for its response to the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Despite the lack of evidence, the resolution accused Israel of something called “scholasticide” and framed the conflict as an episode of “Settler Colonialism,” an empirically vacuous theory that distorts the past, erases 2,000 years of Jewish history, and justifies the murderous slaughter of Jews, Israel, and all Western nations and people.
A Glimpse of Columbia Past
Stewart Justman, University of Montana
A Columbia University alumnus reminisces about his graduate training at this vaunted institution and laments that today the professoriate has abandoned the nonprescriptive instruction he received—“as if it were some liberal piety of a discredited past.” Instead, in the politicized classroom “every conclusion is given in advance, and practices … are sacralized by the imaginary imperatives of social justice.”
The Naval Academy Should Jettison Race-Conscious Admissions
R. Lawrence Purdy
A military veteran and legal counsel in the Gratz v. Bollinger (2003) affirmative action case explains why the demand for a color-blind meritocracy matters, particularly when it comes to our military; and why it is fully consistent with our country’s Constitutional ethos.
Racial Preferences: What the Judge in SFFA v. USNA Got Wrong
William A. Woodruff, Campbell University School of Law
The Supreme Court decision in SFFA v. Harvard (2023), which declared the use of racial preferences in college admissions unconstitutional, did not directly apply to the military service academies. The SFFA then sued the Naval Academy for its racial preferences and lost in district court. William A. Woodruff explains why the judge in the district court case, Richard Bennett, was mistaken for showing deference to the judgement of military leaders.
John Ondrasik Combats Antisemitism with Music at Cornell University
Randy O. Wayne, Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
After witnessing demonstrations in New York City celebrating the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas massacre of Israelis, singer/songwriter John Ondrasik, aka Five for Fighting, decided to use the power of music to speak out against that evil. Randy O. Wayne outlines the musician’s musical tour of college campuses and the way Ondrasik has shaped his music to raise student awareness of Islamic extremism and antisemitism.
We Can Not Give Up on Research Universities
Warren Treadgold, Saint Louis University
While America’s research universities have become ideological monoliths and have failed to deliver sound liberal education, Warren Treadgold rejects conservative calls to abolish or move resources away from them. Treadgold believes the problem of politically conformist universities are the result of fifty years of corrupted hiring policies. To save the schools, Treadgold proposes a whole new system by which faculty and staff can be drawn from a broader and more balanced pool of candidates.
Trump’s Win Sends Therapists Into Crisis
Brooke Laufer
The mental health field is collectively fixated on the perceived sociopolitical despair caused by Donald Trump’s reelection victory. This fixation is premised on the assumption that the politics espoused and represented by Donald Trump is persecuting mental health professionals, even as those professionals see themselves as saviors of the oppressed. As Brooke Laufer explains, “Therapy providers have lost sight of neutrality in their victim/savior identification at great detriment to the healing profession.”
Emma the Mattress Girl: Seeking a Gentleman in College
Jessica Raimi
In September 2014, Emma Sulkowicz, a senior at Columbia College, began “Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight),” her protest against the university administration that had failed to expel a fellow student whom she accused of raping her. Despite obsessive coverage by a fawning media and an obsequious university administration, an investigation concluded that the rape was unproven. Former editor of Columbia College Today Jessica Raimi reviews the evidence in an attempt to decipher why Sulkowicz’s claim of rape was believed so unquestioningly.
The Making of a Poet
Donald T. Williams, Toccoa Falls College
Author and professor Donald T. Williams reminds us that a good poet needs four things: a good eye, a good ear, a good mind, and a good heart.
Becoming an American Politologist
Alfred G. Cuzán, University of West Florida
After escaping the Castro regime in Cuba via Mexico as a child, Alfred G. Cuzán came to the United States and started on his academic career path in political science. Looking back now, Cuzán sees that there were plenty of obstacles along the way, but a handful of faculty and editors willing to “take risks” made it possible for Cuzán to contribute to his goal of making political science a more fully developed discipline. In his remaining years of work, Cuzán would like to do a bit more “to expose the Castro regime for what it is.”
The Role of Institutions in Cancelation
Collin May, Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary
When we think of cancel culture, we usually focus on two parties: the target and the cancelers. However, the cancelers typically seek termination of employment, deplatforming, or some other form of public humiliation for the canceled, which brings into the equation the institutions that will respond to these requests. When an institution agrees to act on a canceler’s request, Collin May explains, it is committing an “institutional betrayal against the target.”
Sexual Misconduct on Campus: Betsy Devos Had It Right
Wiliam Beaver, Robert Morris University
Sexual misconduct has been a prominent issue on college campuses since the 2005 College Sexual Assault Internet Survey brought the matter to national attention. The U.S. Department of Education under three consecutive presidential administrations, starting with Barack Obama, have grappled with how best to manage this issue through the governing structure of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. It is now clear that the process developed under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos did more to properly balance the rights of the accuser and the accused.
FOR THE RECORD
Defending the Permanent Things
John Andrews
The former President of the Colorado Senate, chairman of the State Policy Network, and director of TCI Cable News John Andrews delivered these thoughtful remarks to the National Association of Scholars Membership Meeting in Denver, Colorado on Oct. 25, 2024.
REVIEWS
In this issue’s schedule of books in review, Daniel Asia dissects Benjamin Ginsburg’s The New American Antisemitism and discovers the renowned political scientist has some uncomfortable recommendations for America’s Jews. At the same time, William M. Briggs has a humorous take on Aubrey Clayton’s Bernoulli's Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science, concluding that the fundamental problem in the use of statistics are the scientists who “forget” that correlation does not equal causation.
Richard P. Phelps reviews Katharine Beals’ Students with Autism: How to Improve Language, Literacy, and Academic Success, and helpfully discerns those strategies we now know to be ineffective from those we know work. Historian Edward S. Shapiro points out that Nick Witham’s Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America is marred by the author’s obvious selectivity in the postwar historians discussed in the book. In choosing only those historians who used their research to further a political agenda, Shapiro concludes that Witham’s book is both an analysis and a “symptom” of history’s sharp academic decline.
Jacob Williams discusses prominent French intellectual Pascal Bruckner’s An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt and concludes that Bruckner makes a strong case that France is not guilty of “Islamophobia.” However, Williams also believes Bruckner’s implacable hatred of all things religious “unintentionally advertises the superior capacity of the Anglo-American tradition” in dealing with social crises.
Wight Martindale, Jr. says that John T. Farrell’s The Utopian Dilemma in the Western Political Imagination “is a brilliant, exhaustive, and challenging study” demonstrating that “political utopias are designed to short-circuit the foibles of human nature.” John Adam Moreau writes that Bradley J. Birzer’s American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll, is a delightful revelation of the only Roman Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence. Carroll bequeaths to our age his view of the importance of virtue: “A republic can succeed only if men make sacrifices. Virtue is far better than wealth.”
Photo by Theo Vetter on Unsplash
