The Post-Partisan Emporium

The Multiversity and its Discontents: The Evolution of a Fatal Flaw By John Staddon     A well-known podcaster has the custom of going “off the grid” for a month each summer, to gain some perspective. I can beat that: I have been retired from academic teaching and research for nearly 14 years and have rarely visited my campus during that time. But last year, I finally encountered the university first-hand, as it is now. Like a 21 st -century Rip Van Winkle, I found it almost unrecognizable. The Multiversity The seeds were sown long ago. American universities have been changing since World War II, and administrations have been complicit. An early signal came from the University of California’s admired president, Clark Kerr. In an engaging 1963 Harvard Godkin Lecture (published as  The Uses of the University ) Kerr painted an optimistic “new age” picture that now looks rather different. Noting the rise of the modern “research university,” with its incoherent mix of divisions, disciplines

The Road to Totalitarianism People can tell themselves that they didn’t see where things have been heading for the last 17 months, but they did. They saw all the signs along the way. The signs were all written in big, bold letters, some of them in scary-looking Germanic script. They read … “THIS IS THE ROAD TO TOTALITARIANISM.” I’m not going to show you all those signs out again. People like me have been pointing them out, and reading them out loud, for 17 months now. Anyone who knows anything about the history of totalitarianism, how it incrementally transforms society into a monstrous mirror image of itself, has known since the beginning what the “New Normal” is, and we have been shouting from the rooftops about it. We have watched as the New Normal transformed our societies into paranoid, pathologized, authoritarian dystopias where people now have to show their “papers” to see a movie or get a cup of coffee and publicly display their ideological c

Troubling Debt Loads at Graduation and Useless College Degrees Let's discuss job opportunities and debt loads of students at graduation. Author: Mish - Jul 25, 2021 College Degrees and Debt Loads at Graduation Data for the above chart was courtesy of Paul Hill, founder of Educate to Career    Their mission is to enable families to make fiscally responsible college to career planning decisions. I asked Hill for a short synopsis of the problems and he wrote these paragraphs. What is problematic with so many people pursuing masters degrees is that far too few of these students are analyzing what their occupational outcomes might be, post graduation. They presume a masters degree will push them over the top and into the strata of high earners. The reality is that for so many grads, there is little or no market for their skill set. If one were to dig deep into the requirements for a specific job (as we have) you'll see that employment opportunities are almost non existent.  For exam

Meet the Censored: Hitler Can history itself violate community standards? Matt Taibbi Jul 30 Hitler, pre-mustache change. 100 years ago yesterday — on July 29, 1921 — Adolph Hitler was elected leader of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party, later known as the Nazi Party. The combustible Army corporal succeeded the party’s original leader, Anton Drexler, whom Hitler originally been sent to spy on, but whose ideas he came to admire (he may even have shaved his mustache to emulate his predecessor). The 533-1 delegate vote set in motion a series of events that would dominate the next two and a half decades of world history. A young Jewish Internet commentator named Manny Marotta wanted to call attention to the date, for educational purposes. Marotta has been maintaining popular accounts on both Twitter and Instagram called 100 Years Ago Live . His simple, clever, and enlightening mission is to describe history as an actual contemporary might have, in the language of

Gender Ideology Run Amok Abigail Shrier Author,  Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 27, 2021, in Franklin, Tennessee, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar. In 2007, America had one pediatric gender clinic; today there are hundreds. Testosterone is readily available to adolescents from places like Planned Parenthood and Kaiser, often on a first visit—without even a therapist’s note.   How did we get to this point? How is it that we are all supposed to pretend that the only way you can know I’m a woman is if I tell you my pronouns? How did we get to an America in which a 13-year-old in the State of Washington can begin “gender affirming” therapy without her parents’ consent? How did we get to an America in which a 15-year-old in Oregon can undergo “top surgery”—elective double mastectomy—without her parents’ permission? And what can we do about it? ***   To understand how we got to this