Do You Know This Scholar?
By Walter Williams | Thomas Sowell has been both a friend and a colleague of mine for over a half-century. On June 30, he completed his 90th year of life, and I want to highlight some important features of that life. Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1930. As part of the great black migration northward during the 1930s and ’40s, he and his family moved to Harlem…
Are Monuments Only the Start?
By Nile Gardiner | The radical left has hijacked debate over America’s monuments to wage a cultural war. Their goal: to deny the moral legitimacy of our democratic republic. Violent attacks on statues and memorials aren’t mere vandalism. They are an assault on the United States itself and the values…
The Humanities as Soulcraft
By James Hankins | At Harvard, faculty independence has gradually been undermined; we are all worker bees now, serving the monstrous regiment of bureaucrats. We have in the latest version of our General Education curriculum what is essentially a glorified distribution requirement. The message sent to students is that an educated person is somebody…
Who Controls the Past Controls the Future
By Hezekiah Kantor | The History Channel’s recent series about Ulysses S. Grant was produced by Leonardo DiCaprio and based on the best-selling biography by Ron Chernow. It concluded on Wednesday and was just about what one would expect from a film created by some of academia’s and entertainment’s biggest leftists. Although the series did fairly well in…
The Literature of Pestilence
By John V. Fleming | During this pandemic, which has been documented nearly to exhaustion, two themes have captured my attention. The first is the difference between old and new plagues; the second is the literary history of pestilence. As a college professor specializing in medieval literature, I find the two topics…
Rotten Education Isn’t Preordained
By Walter E. Williams | Black politicians, civil rights leaders, and their white liberal advocates have little or no interest in doing anything effective to deal with what’s no less than an education crisis among black students. In city after city with large black populations, such as Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., less than 10% of students test…
The Subtle Tyranny Of The ‘Expert’ Class
By Lewis M. Andrews | Three recent developments have raised the issue of whether social media should be able to censor opinions that differ from expert opinion. The first involves YouTube’s decision to take down a widely circulated video by the co-owners of a Bakersfield, California, “Urgent Care” clinic, Dr. Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massahi. Their presentation, based…
Pandemics And Our Love For Post-Apocalyptic Drama
By Bradley J. Birzer | Better to go out with a bang than a wimper? Dating back to the roots of Christianity we have always been obsessed with ‘The End.’ In the year 793, Catholic monks made the following report, all of it disturbing. “In this dire year portents appeared over Northumbria and sorely frightened the people. They consisted of immense whirlwinds…
Is This the End of Campus Education?
By Glenn Moots| Prompted by student petitions, government orders, and recommendations of epidemiologists, America launched its largest-ever simultaneous educational experiment in March: it took K–12 and postsecondary education online. Though many hoped the “virtual” semester would be a one-off, round two may be on the horizon. Boston University was…