Next autumn will mark forty years since I arrived on a college campus as a freshman. I’ve never left the academy since then. I have been student or teacher at many types of institutions: the small liberal-arts college, the “Research I” state university that completely dominates a small town, . . . . Continue Reading »
If Michael Walsh’s account of the rise of the “Unholy Left” in The Devil’s Pleasure Palaceis to be believed, the playbook for the contemporary fragmentation of American values was drawn up in Frankfurt by neo-Marxian philosophers in the years between the two World Wars.
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I joined Baylor University’s faculty in July 2003 after a brief stint as a Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton. What drew me to Baylor is what has attracted, and continues to attract, hundreds of other prospective faculty members: the ideals and goals of the school’s . . . . Continue Reading »
I recently went to a vespers service at the institute of Catholic higher learning that I attend, celebrated in honor of the school’s outgoing president. When it came time for the honoree to give some remarks, he said, “All students, could you please stand.” The seemingly innocuous request . . . . Continue Reading »
When I read this story on the University of Tennessee Office for Diversity and Inclusion asking students and teachers to stop imposing gendered pronouns on one another, I didn’t think about the silliness of trying to create linguistic change by bureaucratic fiat. Or about one more exercise in . . . . Continue Reading »
The book is presented as a follow-up to Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, published nearly thirty years ago. Even its cover imitates the very ’80s design of Bloom’s, minus the Miami Vice pastels. But the impressive roster of scholars, journalists, and editors takes a broader survey of the landscape than Bloom, who focused on higher education.
On Catholic campuses that aspire to Top Ten or Top Twenty status in publicity sweepstakes like the U.S. News and World Report college rankings, one sometimes hears the phrase “preferred peers.” Translated into plain English from faux-sociologese, that means the schools to which we’d like to be compared (and be ranked with). At a major Catholic institution like the University of Notre Dame, for example, administrators use the term “preferred peers” to refer to universities like Duke, Stanford, and Princeton, suggesting that these are the benchmarks by which Notre Dame measures its own aspirations to excellence. Continue Reading »
When I started graduate school in English in the early 90s, I thought that a certificate in Women’s Studies would widen my training and help my career. My university happened to have a famous professor in the field, a pioneer in academic feminism who had created one of the first graduate degree programs in Women’s Studies. A tough, learned woman with exacting standards, she did not suffer fools or histrionic students lightly. She was also a conservative. Continue Reading »
In 1997 Avery Dulles was asked by Commonweal magazine to respond to a disputed question: “How Catholic is the Catholic Theological Society of America?” The impetus was Cardinal Bernard Law’s charge that the CTSA, the largest and most prestigious association of Catholic theologians in the United States, had become little more than a “wasteland” of dissent against official Church teachings. Continue Reading »
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