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{ Tag Archives } Alan Kors

The commonplace campus radical and the tragic tale of decline and fall

There’s another rhetorical crutch at work in the conservative critiques of academia that I’ve been going over—the golden age. KC Johnson’s commentary (see the last post—this one is a close offshoot of that one) refers to “the alarming decline in intellectual pluralism,” and—here’s a coincidence—the site that ran it, Minding the Campus is “a project […]

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2008 12 19 Academia
Duke Lacrosse Case Comments (0)

The commonplace campus radical and the cure that’s worse than the disease

There’s a simple question behind the things I’ve written over the past six months or so about the intersection between the Duke lacrosse case and the conservative critique of higher education. How can anyone who’s worried about the academic world’s low intellectual standards, who’s pushing to raise those standards, even, how can they not only […]

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2008 12 19 Academia
Duke Lacrosse Case Comments (0)

Stupid conservative tricks

Back in 2004 the Duke Conservative Union (DCU) looked up the political party affiliation of 178 Duke faculty members in the humanities and then took out an ad in the Duke Chronicle announcing that the vast majority were registered Democrats. Only 8 were registered Republicans. A day later the paper ran a lengthy piece with […]

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2008 07 18 Academia
Duke Lacrosse Case
Duke University Comments (25)

The trouble with tribalism

The word of the day is “tribalism.” I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Kenya, where there’s no way to avoid the word—certainly not after the post-election violence at the beginning of this year. In a New York Times op-ed a few months ago, Roger Cohen takes the idea of tribalism on a whirlwind […]

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2008 06 11 Academia
Duke Lacrosse Case
Duke University Comments (7)

Alan Kors and the unbearable sadness of educating

It’s a culture-war commonplace that the Left has dumbed-down higher education with its namby-pamby political correctness, hostility to the Western canon, race- and gender-obsessed pseudo-scholarship, etc. What I’m finding, though, is that nothing dumbs down a professor like the culture war. Exhibit A is KC Johnson’s Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW), where a facade of PhD-quality analysis masks […]

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2008 05 20 Academia
Duke Lacrosse Case
Duke University
Teaching Comments (6)