New York City’s school system went on a spending spree during the pandemic, thanks to the $7.5 billion in federal money it received as part of a $189 billion national relief package aimed at addressing education problems incurred by lockdowns and school closures. Although the funds were nonrecurring, the nation’s largest school district used some of…

The fight over academic freedom on campus increasingly comes down to a fight over three letters—DEI—which goes a long way to explaining the fissures now tearing higher education apart. For progressives committed to social justice advocacy, academic freedom must shield the prevailing academic consensus on race and gender from outside political pressure. Nowhere is that…

A group of intellectual mavericks made splashy headlines in 2021 when they announced plans to launch a new university in Texas called the University of Austin. Backed by a gallery of celebrity intellectuals—its trustees and directors include former Harvard president Larry Summers, Brown University economist Glenn Loury, former ACLU President Nadine Strossen, civil rights leader and…

Commentary While checking out the “banned and challenged” display at my local Barnes & Noble recently, I was reminded that the entire kerfuffle is a giant racket. For publishers and booksellers, “banned” books are likely a money-making racket. Virtually every allegedly “banned” book on the display table is already a massive (sometimes generational) bestseller. Not…

Combating disinformation has been elevated to a national security imperative under the Biden administration, as codified in its first-of-its-kind National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, published in June 2021. That document calls for confronting long-term contributors to domestic terrorism. In connection therewith, it cites as a key priority “addressing the extreme polarization, fueled by a…

New Jersey is enlisting public-school teachers and librarians to show children how to combat what it calls the grave threat of disinformation. “Our democracy remains under sustained attack through the proliferation of disinformation,” Gov. Phil Murphy said in signing the nation’s first law mandating “information literacy” instruction for all K-12 students. The law, which aims to provide students…

Commentary Lamenting the astonishing success of the activist Left’s century-long Gramscian march through America’s major institutions is, at this juncture, old hat. Still, there have been a few recent powerful examples, coming in quick succession, illustrating the extent to which leading liberal institutions of civil society have been captured by far-left activist wokesters who take…

Commentary The facts of life haven’t changed, but sex education is entirely different now from what you likely learned in school. Sex ed in middle school now includes graphic lessons on anal sex, oral sex, and masturbation, with stick figures to illustrate body positions. Supplemental reading in middle school libraries includes “Sex, Puberty, and All…

A Brooklyn College professor admitted in a video he discriminates against conservative, religious students and would like to kill former President Donald Trump. He similarly threatened Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia. A visiting assistant professor of paleoanthropology and evolutionary biology at the Pratt Institute’s Brooklyn College, Jeremy Tausch, appeared…

Little more than a decade ago, DEI was just another arcane acronym, a clustering of three ideas, each to be weighed and evaluated against other societal values. The terms “diversity, equity, and inclusion” weren’t yet being used in the singular, as one all-inclusive, non-negotiable moral imperative. Nor had they coalesced into a bureaucratic juggernaut running…