The Declaration of Independence (Mike Flippo/Shutterstock.com).What Are They Thinking?
Recently, I raised the issue of the worldview of the Resistance to President Trump (“Resistance, in the Light of 1776”). I would like to delve further into the matter. It will take a few installments. Basically, what I hope to do is to put order in some readings, observations, impressions, and overhearings (I live in a university neighborhood, and one establishment I regularly eat at is the aptly named “One World Café”). This effort is neither scientific nor conclusive. Call it “political” in the sense Pierre Manent employs when he says les choses politiques arrivent en gros (“political things first come to sight in rough outline”).
Conservative Elitism and Flyover Colleges: Why Stanley Kurtz Is Wrong about Higher Education
On National Review Online’s “Corner”, Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, discussed the nature and origins of recent campus disinvitations and disruptions, such as the Black Lives Matter intimidation of Heather Mac Donald at University of California Los Angeles. The essay has two parts. The first provides a narrative history of how American campuses embraced anti-free speech disruptions, and the second half offers policies to end them. Kurtz’s piece offered the now familiar complaint that tenured radicals are at the root of campus disruption, and Republican majorities in Congress should reform the Higher Education Act to force universities to protect speech and, if possible, rescind tenure. Professor Peter Augustine Lawler, the Dana Professor of Political Science at Berry College, critiqued Kurtz’s piece on two grounds. This first is that administrators are now in charge and have pushed faculty to the margins of decision-making. The second is that legislation is precisely the opposite of the proper solution, because federal regulation of various kinds has facilitated the erosion of the true diversity of American colleges.
A Campaign for a Seamless Rule of Law
In this year’s presidential campaign, it would be a wonderful contribution to the republic and perhaps a winning move to run credibly on a rule of law platform. This kind of platform is to be distinguished from a “law and order” one, because it emphasizes that in a well-ordered republic that government must enforce order only through law. And this slogan also underscores that the problem we face is not simply or indeed mainly lawlessness on the streets, but lawlessness in government. Respect for law must begin at the top.
Black Crime Matters
BATON ROUGE, LA - JULY 17: Police officers stand near the scene of where three police officers were killed on July 17, 2016 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (Photo by Sean Gardner/Getty Images)Could a book entitled The War on Cops be more disturbingly prescient? Within just a few weeks of the release of Mac Donald’s work on June 21, the country reeled in horror at the cold-blooded murder of five police officers in Dallas on July 7, followed by the assassination of three more officers in Baton Rouge just ten days later. Americans might be forgiven for taking Mac Donald’s title literally.
The Ultras and Their Ultimatums
Students at a recent protest on the campus of Oberlin College.As we know, the term “diversity” is the buzzword of the century. Few public policy debates in the realms of business or education in this country are conducted without it. The use of racial/ethnic admissions preferences at public universities, for example, is often defended by grossly exaggerating the types of diversity they promote.
