Remembering Don

Remembering and Appreciating Donald Kagan, Yale Professor, Scholar, and Mentor, Daily Signal, August 18, 2021. "Sadly, with his passing—and the death just a few months earlier of Ambassador Charles Hill—Yale now has no identifiably conservative senior scholars. Yes, there are some who are not clearly party-line progressives, but by and large, the cleansing is complete, and it is now possible to graduate from Yale without even the opportunity to meet a senior scholar who definitely disagrees with the prevailing consensus."

Remember Winston Churchill

Churchill Comes to Washington, Weekly Standard, November 6, 2016, "Monuments to Winston Churchill abound in the United Kingdom. You can remember the greatest man of the 20th century at his birthplace, Blenheim Palace, or by his grave nearby at Bladon. Then there are the Cabinet War Rooms in London, his country house, Chartwell, and, of course, the magnificent Churchill Archives Centre in Churchill College at Cambridge University. As the simple memorial in Westminster Abbey—next to the statue of Churchill in Parliament Square—puts it, there is no shortage of occasions to "remember Winston Churchill" in Britain."

From Academia to a Think Tank: Reflections on How to Be Lucky

From Academia to a Think Tank: Reflections on How to Be Lucky, American Historical Association's Perspectives, December 2014, "So the American academy is reaping what it has sowed. All it has to do to drive more of its graduates away is to keep on doing what it’s done for the past 40 years. The alternative to the status quo, therefore, isn’t nonacademic jobs. That’s today’s reality. The alternative is for the academy to stop relying on luck and instead make an effort to do preparation for nonacademic jobs right."

Check Your Privilege!

Liberals Have Plenty of Privilege to Check, Too, Newsday, May 30, 2014. "Universities are hothouses for ideas, a lot of them bad. Fortunately, most die a rapid death from mockery. But the trending campus admonishment to "check your privilege" is actually a good one."

The Transnationalist Strategy and the First Amendment

Re: WH Asks YouTube to Pull Anti-Islam Video, Contentions, September 19, 2012. "The problem with the White House’s efforts is not just that they are wrong in principle and feeble in practice. It’s not just that it has handed all the agenda-defining power to Islamist radicals, and refused to recognize that the video is an act of political judo against the U.S., and a pretext for violence, not its cause, in the Middle East. It’s not even just that it plays into the Organization of the Islamic Conference’s seemingly-lost campaign for U.N. action against the ‘defamation of religion,’ which the Obama Administration rightly opposed."

The Superstitions of Academic Freedom

Ayn Rand and the Academy, Contentions, August 28, 2012. "The most stifling part of the ivory tower atmosphere is not the way it turns some authors into nonpersons. It’s the tedious artistry inherent in the way smart people write on interesting subjects only to serve the agenda of snipping at conservatives."

University Travel and Totalitarians

Blue State Travel to Cuba, Contentions, January 3, 2012. "A friend has forwarded me a solicitation from the University of Michigan’s Alumni Association to join them on a “Cultural Connection” visit to Cuba. It is a depressing piece of moral blindness. For $3,845, Wolverines can enjoy an eight day trip, complete with “a visit to a local health clinic” to “learn about socialized medicine and the delivery of social services in Cuba,” a trip to an art institute to “compare and contrast the role of the arts in Cuba and the United States” and “identify any differences in the opportunities for artistic expression,” and a “substantive discussion” with the management team of a dance company to explore “the political and financial challenges they face” (i.e. the U.S. embargo) in exporting Cuban dance culture. There is a good deal more in the same vein, including a visit to the Museum of the Revolution and dinner at the Restaurante Vieja Havana, “formerly the American Club,” but you get the picture. It would be pleasant if moral blindness was all that was involved here, but sadly, it’s not."

On 9/11, A Decade On

9/11 Reflection: Ted Bromund, Yale Daily News, September 9, 2011. "I wasn’t scared by 9/11. What scared me after 9/11 was the reaction I saw at Yale."

Qaddafi's Academic Toads

London School of Economics’ Ties to Libya the Tip of the Iceberg for Academia, Contentions, March 4, 2011. "The Director of the London School of Economics, Sir Howard Davies, has resigned after fresh revelations of LSE ties to Libya emerged on Thursday morning. The LSE was already under intense fire for taking a donation of 1.5 million pounds from Qaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam, who studied at LSE and — it appears — may also have plagiarized his thesis."

Journalism Schools and All That

Pretending to Teach a Trade: From the Progressive Era to Today, Contentions, February 10, 2011. "Journalism schools are useless, argues Michael Lewis, but they prosper because they appeal to our worship of professionalism. That’s a nut graph — a nutshell paragraph — one bit of journalism jargon that Michael Lewis doesn’t grasp in his wildly entertaining piece on the Columbia School of Journalism."

More On The "Sputnik Moment"

Re: Re: Oh, Man, Not Another Sputnik Moment . . ., Contentions, January 28, 2011. "J.E. Dyer’s reaction to my post on the “Sputnik moment” theme prompts this reflection: as a conservative, you can cite examples like the academy’s treatment of the Cold War all day long. If you’re a historian, you can point to the Arming America saga, which revealed that a few Second Amendment supporters and amateur historians had a better grasp of historical methodology and reality than the distinguished committee that awarded the Bancroft Prize to that faked book (and then was forced to take it back)."

Citizenship and Historians

Historians and Civic Responsibility, Contentions, January 18, 2011. "The American Historical Association is on a roll. Last month, I felt compelled to read not one but two articles in its monthly newsmagazine, Perspectives on History. This month, the count is two again. Next thing you know, they’ll be hiring British historians in the academy. Well, let’s not get carried away."

Too Many Academics?

Peace Studies and the Historical Profession, Contentions, December 20, 2010. "I don’t say this very often – heck, I’m not sure I’ve ever said it – but the latest issue of Perspectives on History, the American Historical Association’s monthly newsmagazine, contains an interesting article. In fact, it contains two of them, both of which gain additional interest when coupled with recent events in Britain and a piece in the latest Economist on “The Disposable Academic.” The only question is whether the Economist is describing reality or offering a preference."

Divinity School Gone Wild

Sometimes, A Watermelon is Just a Watermelon. Not So At Yale, Contentions, October 9, 2009. "The following message, which I reproduce in its entirety, was forwarded to me in my capacity as a Yale alum by a friend at Yale’s Divinity School. I am assured that it is not a parody. Any other comment is superfluous."

Yale: Living Up To My Expectations Since 1991

What the Yale World Fellows Did on 9/11, Contentions, September 11, 2009. "Yale has a World Fellows Program. When launched, it was talked about on campus as a kind of mid-career equivalent of the Rhodes Scholarship: bring the rising thinkers and doers of the world to Yale for a semester (people with careers, unlike newly minted undergraduates, usually can’t afford to take more than four months off), expose them to American higher education and all its wonders, recruit them into the Yale cadre, and toss them back into the lake to fructify and rise to run the world."

The YUP Scandal, Continued

An Update on Yale, Contentions, September 4, 2009. "Last month, the story broke that Yale University Press was censoring one of its own books—by Jytte Klausen on the Danish cartoon controversy—out of fear that if it published the cartoons in question, it would, in the words of John Donatich, the press’s director, put “blood on my hands.” In other words, there would be riots and murders by outraged Islamists. Since then, there have been several developments that are worth following up on. Martin Kramer has done sterling detective work assembling circumstantial—but plausible—evidence that Yale’s decision had at least as much to do with its desire to win a big donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal as it did with cravenness."

The Problem With A Core Curriculum

When ACTA Speaks . . ., Contentions, August 21, 2009. "I hope that everyone listens, though there’s not much chance of that. On Wednesday, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni released a new study—”What Will They Learn?”—accompanied by a very spiffy site of the same name. The study, timed to hit the market as the annual U.S. News and World Report rankings appear, grades colleges and universities not by easily manipulated and subjective criteria but by doing what is most damaging to academia: taking it at its word."

Why Islamists Intimidate

Self Censorship Watch, Contentions, August 18, 2009. "I’m not afraid of Islamists. As long as we in the liberal West don’t browbeat ourselves into submission, and as long as we take sensible measures to defend ourselves from the threat of mass terrorism—especially from WMDs—there is no reason for free, modern, and enterprising societies to fear losing to medieval Islamism. What makes me nervous is that there are too few leaders today willing to follow Reagan’s example from the Cold War in saying this, and that there are too many 'opinion leaders' and officials who are eager to split the difference between good and evil."

What's On Syllabi at Yale?

Re: Mearsheimer at Yale, Contentions, July 30, 2009. "My friend Adam Hirst takes Prof. Bruce Russett of Yale moderately to task for assigning readings from Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, including their 2006 magnum opus on 'The Israel Lobby,' in a course on 'Classics of World Politics' and a week on 'Contemporary Realism.' I won’t pretend to speak for Prof. Russett on this subject. But I will offer a personal perspective."

On Academic Freedom

Freedom Without Responsibility, Contentions, July 11, 2009. "The facts of the case are not in dispute. On January 19, 2009, UCSB Sociology Professor William Robinson, then engaged in teaching a course on globalization, 'sent an email to students comparing the Israeli occupation of Gaza with the Nazi-controlled Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.' The email contained 42 photos, which Robinson, who specializes in Latin America, had pulled off of the internet, and, among other commentary, the following passage: 'Gaza is Israel’s Warsaw . . .' "