Two essays really struck me over the past week.  One was by Daniel Schwammenthal, director of the AJC Transatlantic Institute, writing from Brussels as “a worried European friend”.  His concern is that America’s future leaders in our universities have been spoon-fed two theories born of Marxism, postmodernism and critical theory, which in combination divide society […]

The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal has described this current period of social unrest America’s “Jacobin moment” because it has the fervor and indiscriminate judgment of the revolutionary mind.  The guillotine isn’t as yet in use, but the impulse is the same–to destroy careers, livelihoods, and reputations.  And lately, the mob’s emphasis is […]

As an alumnus of The University of Texas at Austin, I have taken particular interest in the recent demands made of the administration by elements of the athletic department, primarily the football team that has marched on the state capitol and conducted various press conferences and social media rants.  The demands are of the usual […]

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.  The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.—Daniel Patrick Moynihan I have referred to the quote above many times over the years because I think it is profound on […]

The clash over removal of Confederate images in Charlottesville, Virginia in August and Donald Trump’s failure to specifically call out the white nationalists as the lead culprit in the melee have continued to reverberate and, as the Wall Street Journal has noted, it is unfortunate that most of the attention was focused on the deficiencies […]

In his book 1984 and his essays such as “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell wrote very clearly about how ideology is corrupting and how this corruption is manifest in the way we distort language to suit ideology.  And to him it was clear that “….the decline of a language must ultimately have political […]

Over the past several years, in examples like the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris, there has been no shortage of righteous indignation in this country by people who are quick to champion those who satirize or condemn the views and religion of Islamists in places like France and Denmark.  But most of these same people […]

I was struck several weeks ago by Mark Bauerlein’s essay on SeeThruEdu entitled “A Conflict of Interest”, in which he makes the case that a conflict truly does exist among college faculty and administrators when they consistently invest resources in curriculum and degree tracks without regard for outcomes for students in terms of their economic […]

Are there words or phrases that you get so tired of hearing that they almost make you ill?  How about “awesome”?  Or “no problem”, when a simple “you’re welcome” would do nicely?  Both of these have become obnoxious to me.  But these are benign and  merely irritating.  A different problem is the word for the […]