This is a postscript to my post “And Here I Thought That Louie Gohmert Was the Most Ridiculous Congressman from Texas” [https://academeblog.org/2013/06/20/and-here-i-thought-that-louie-gohmert-was-the-most-ridiculous-congressman-from-texas/]. One of the few bills to receive overwhelming bipartisan support over the past three years has been one that eliminated the use of the word “lunatic” in all federal legislation. Paralleling the 2010…
On June 21, Florida Atlantic University reappointed adjunct professor Deandre Poole, who had sparked controversy by asking students to step on a piece of paper with the word “Jesus” on it in a lesson about conformity. The action followed a June 20 report from the FAU Faculty Senate’s Academic Freedom and Due Process Committee. The…
by Peter Wood This post was originally published on June 17 at Minding the Campus. Author Peter Wood is President of the National Association of Scholars. We asked for (and received) permission to re-post the article here, in light of a guest post by Allan Lichtman of American University that is a response to Wood.…
Periodically, it’s always prudent to take a step backward to reflect on the state of American higher education in the first years of the 21st-century. It looks very different today from the higher education system that we inherited from the leadership guiding higher education policy after the Vietnam War. The currents affecting American colleges and…
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Arizona’s voter most recently enacted voter registration law to be unconstitutional. The law required that those registering to vote provide copies of several documents proving their citizenship, pointedly violating the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 which sought to encourage voting by providing a simple, federally processed form…
For the past six months, I’ve been hearing odd complaints that the humanities, once home, supposedly, to the study of “truth, beauty and goodness,” have been overwhelmed by concern for “race, class and gender.” Another came last Friday, using the exact phrases of the older ones, all stemming from a single “study” put forward by…
This past weekend, I read a few reflections on the meaning of Father’s Day, though the holiday did not occasion anywhere close to as many reflections as were published on either Mother’s Day or Memorial Day. Perhaps the three holidays simply fall too close to each other on the calendar for op-ed writers to keep…
By Allan Lichtman, Distinguished Professor of History, American University In his response to my critique of the National Association of Scholars report, RECASTING HISTORY: ARE RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER DOMINATING AMERICAN HISTORY?, at the recent conference of the AAUP, NAS President Peter Wood harps on a remark that comprised well under 1 percent of my…
By Allan J. Lichtman, Distinguished Professor of History, American University This analysis examines the report of the National Association of Scholars: RECASTING HISTORY: ARE RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER DOMINATING AMERICAN HISTORY? (January 2013). The report studies courses as the University of Texas, Austin and Texas A & M University. It concludes that introductory history classes…
The title here is from the end of David Brooks’ column in today’s New York Times. He’s lamenting how we’ve let the humanities become debased, allowing them to fall from their 20th-century high (in terms of college graduates) to a new low (though he doesn’t consider that, before the 20th century as well as in…