[The Weekly Standard] Maybe American higher education was never all that serious about, you know, the education portion of its name. After more than a decade of teaching in the Ivy League, the philosopher George Santayana dubbed Harvard and Yale the nation's toy Athens and toy Sparta. He actually meant it as a compliment--as much a compliment, anyway, as he could muster. Santayana resigned his Harvard professorship in 1912 and moved to Europe.
But something especially odd does seem to be happening on American campuses these days. I confess to a little schadenfreude about the widely reported situation of Laura Kipnis, the Northwestern University professor whose feminist essay in praise of faculty-student dating prompted her school to investigate her for violations of the antidiscrimination provisions of Title IX. Kipnis is a widely published controversialist, and over the years she fanned the feminist flames that have now tried to burn her. The revolution, as the old story goes, devours its children.
Still, from symbolic mattresses and op-eds against Ovid at Columbia, to students interrogated about their Jewishness at UCLA and Stanford, to the stories of lawsuits filed by the undergraduates accused by their colleges of rape, to the reports of the Boston University teacher who used her Twitter account for anti-white-male messages, to the creation of "safe spaces" lest a public lecture trigger a bad memory in someone, to . . . On and on it seems to go, each fresh day bringing some fresh account of militant outrage at American colleges. "Only the dead have seen the end of war," Santayana once warned us. Certainly only the dead have seen the end of campus upset.
It wasn't always thus. I'm not thinking of some supposedly idyllic moment in the 1840s, or the 1910s, or the 1950s. I mean that 20 years ago, in the mid-1990s, at least a small sense of relief was felt by a number of people. Back in 1987, Allan Bloom had out-Santayana'd Santayana with his bestselling lament, The Closing of the American Mind. In the early 1990s Roger Kimball and Dinesh D'Souza added widely read books on the radicalism of college faculty--even as the collapse of Soviet communism from 1989 to 1991 deflated the hopes of the Marxist professors they wrote about.
[DAWN] RECEP Tayyip Erdogan should have seen it coming. Perhaps he did, given that opinion polls were reasonably accurate in predicting the result of Sunday's parliamentary election in The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire.... . In which case, his belligerent tactics clearly backfired.
Erdogan wasn't a candidate, having last year successfully engineered his elevation to the presidency, constitutionally a relatively symbolic post. No one was particularly surprised when the focal centre of political power consequently shifted from the head of government to the head of state.
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Posted by: Fred ||
06/10/2015 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[The Weekly Standard] Maybe American higher education was never all that serious about, you know, the education portion of its name. After more than a decade of teaching in the Ivy League, the philosopher George Santayana dubbed Harvard and Yale the nation's toy Athens and toy Sparta. He actually meant it as a compliment--as much a compliment, anyway, as he could muster. Santayana resigned his Harvard professorship in 1912 and moved to Europe.
