Forums: Academic Dress

Last month, students at a Southern California high school were caught playing a late-night on-campus game of tag called "Beat the Jew." On the popular social networking site Facebook, a user named Alex Cookson launched an open invitation to an event called “Kill a Jew Day.” It was the fourth time that a call to murder Jews had been put on Facebook within recent days. In D.C., White House press doyen Helen Thomas was captured on tape nonchalantly opining that all Jews should go back to Germany. Implicit in her statement was her assumption that everyone felt the same way, so what's the...

Many Americans who elected Barack Obama thought George W Bush was too much the cowboy. After eight years of Texas swagger and a shoot-first-ask-questions-later foreign policy, voters craved the more considered, cerebral and often inspirational persona of a big city law professor. Now, in the midst of a real crisis, they are having second thoughts.

President and First Lady are partying like rock royalty. The same hypocrite who says our energy costs must “necessarily skyrocket” to fund his political ambition, is giving Marie Antoinette a run for her money when it comes to spending national treasure on personal luxuries. While much of the country is struggling to pay their bills, the President and First Lady are partying like rock royalty. The collection of talent that has made the pilgrimage to the White House to entertain Obama and friends is nothing less than amazing: Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Tony Bennet, Paul Simon, Marc Anthony, Herbie Hancock,...

<p>From his lower school years at St. Albans to his incomplete effort at Vanderbilt law school, Gore was often an underachiever...</p>

Ezra Cornell, a generous man concerned deeply about his country and its culture, when he created his eponymous university in 1868 said, “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.” Professors at Cornell (my grad school alma mater and partial source of rent) have stretched old Ezra’s words to the limit. How? The “English department will begin offering a new concentration in cultural studies to English majors. The concentration will allow students to study different mediums and forms of culture, including literature, film, the Internet and music in terms of ‘historical, social, and political...

A prominent US climate scientist at the centre of the "climategate" leaked email controversy has been virtually cleared of professional misconduct by an internal university enquiry. Michael Mann, of Penn State University, featured regularly in the more than 1000 emails that were hacked from the University of East Anglia in the UK last November. His emails and comments have since then featured in countless blogs and news articles. Some have claimed the emails reveal that mainstream climate scientists have massaged data in order to demonstrate that climate change is caused by human activities. The scientists in the emails, including Mann,...

Stories appearing on several Ukrainian Web sites claim Israel has brought around some 25,000 Ukrainian children into the country over the past two years in order to harvest their organs. The claim, which was made by a Ukrainian philosophy professor and author at a pseudo-academic conference in Kiev five days ago, is the latest expression of a wave of anti-Semitism in the country. It comes a few months after a Swedish tabloid ran an article alleging that Israel Defense Forces soldiers have killed Palestinian civilians for their organs. Jews, Israel and anti-Semitism have become a major motif of the presidential...

Tenure Deconstructed by: Brittany Fortier, July 10, 2009 A system can truly be considered broken when evaluators of hiring decisions are the ones that need to be evaluated. A panel hosted by the Center for American Progress on June 25, 2009, discussed why the American educational system has struggled in keeping itself accountable to students and parents, while at the same time creating a tenure system that critics claim gives teachers jobs for life. Many critics say that evaluation systems for teachers have been a huge reason for this discrepancy. Morgaen Donaldson, Assistant Professor at the Neag School of Education...

Darwinism as Religion in a Holy War Feb 19, 2009 — It might be expected that media attention on Darwin would be exceptionally high this month because of his bicentennial, but some of it seems downright religious. The adulation he has been receiving is almost embarrassing sometimes. It is only exceeded by the righteous indignation frequently expressed against intelligent design. In any other context, the fighting words of the Darwinians would be described as hate speech. Here are some recent examples: 1. Shrine to Darwin:...

In the wake of Operation Cast Lead, a group of American university professors has for the first time launched a national campaign calling for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. While Israeli academics have grown used to such news from Great Britain, where anti-Israel groups several times attempted to establish academic boycotts, the formation of the United States movement marks the first time that a national academic boycott movement has come out of America. Israeli professors are not sure yet how big of an impact the one-week-old movement will have, but started discussing the significance of and possible counteractions...