December 2019
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Wealthy Penn Law alumnus protests treatment of Amy Wax
He's partly right, and partly very wrong and confused about academic freedom. He's correct that it is part of the Kalven Report's vision of the university that it is not the job of administrators to take sides on substantive questions addressed by faculty; this is why I objected to Dean Ruger's criticism of Professor Wax's…
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Scholarship by classics professor with “incorrect” views is now as bad as sexual harassment according to students at UT Austin
I'm glad the university has rebuffed these benighted students, but it's no doubt a symptom of what's to come as the campaign against actual sexual harassment gets mixed up with the general New Infantilist hysteria about "harmful" ideas: A group of students at the University of Texas are calling for the firing of a classics…
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It appears this fellow doesn’t care for Boris Johnson
Very amusing and apt:
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Great moments in obscure rock ‘n’ roll: The Frost, “Little Susie Singer,” 1969
Michigan in the late 1960s was a fertile ground for rock music, producing, among others, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, the MC5, Grand Funk, Ted Nugent, Bob Seger, and, the least successful of them all (but arguably more talented than some of the others), The Frost, a band we've not featured since last year. Here's…
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Historian James Oakes (CUNY) interviewed about the NYT “1619 Project”
Another illuminating interview; an excerpt: Q. [A] point we made in our response to the 1619 Project, is that it dovetails also with the major political thrust of the Democratic Party, identity politics. And the claim that is made, and I think it’s almost become a commonplace, is that slavery is the uniquely American “original…
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Who knew Lutherans were into “identity politics”?
Rev. Bruce Foster, a retired minister and a longtime reader of the blog, writes: Your collection of responses to the 1619 nonsense at the Times is very useful. Of course if you weren’t an atheist but rather a member of a progressive Protestant church body all these arguments would be old hat to you. For…
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“Nietzsche, Trump, and Brexit”
You probably weren't expecting to find those three items together, but they are put there by my friend the philosopher Ken Gemes (Birkbeck/London) in this interesting talk. Note that the introduction is in German, but Gemes delivers the lecture in English. I think he gets one thing wrong about Nietzsche: the fundamental problem for human…
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Philosophy PhD applications spreadsheet
Several readers have sent along this useful spread sheet, produced by a user at the "Grad Cafe" discussion board.
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Rep. Devin Nunes, Trump hatchet man
This is a real billboard:
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The perfect holiday gift for your wife
This is hysterical (inspired by this nonsense).
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Schwenkler on Anscombe…
…at Commonweal.
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Historian Gordon Wood interviewed on the NYT “1619 Project”
Here. The New York Times owes the public an apology. An excerpt: Q. Let me begin by asking you your initial reaction to the 1619 Project. When did you learn about it? A. Well, I was surprised when I opened my Sunday New York Times in August and found the magazine containing the project. I…
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Nobel Prize winners explain how ideology/theory blinded economics (Michael Simkovic)
The Financial Times recently published an excellent profile of Esther Duflo, a French economist who shared the Nobel Prize in Economics with two of her co-authors for pioneering empirical work using field experiments (randomized controlled trials) to evaluate the effectiveness of social policies and the effects of taxation. Over the last several decades, economics has…
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In Memoriam: Kenneth Taylor (1954-2019)
MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY–UPDATED I'm very sorry to report that Professor Taylor, a longtime member of the Stanford faculty and an expert in philosophy of language and mind, has passed away unexpectedly. I will add links to memorial notices and more information as they become available. UPDATE: The Stanford memorial notice. And here is…
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Jonathan Turley (George Washington) is not “the second-most cited law professor in the country”…
as The New York Times misleadingly reports today; indeed, he's not even one of the ten-most cited members of the GW law faculty. On Professor Turley's website (the source for the NYT claim), the context was clearer: in Judge Posner's 2003 book Public Intellectuals, Turley was the second-most cited law professor due almost entirely to…
I only just learned of Barry’s passing, and I’m enormously saddened at the news. I wrote my PhD on his…