Higher Education

The straw man argument is a fundamentally dishonest fallback tactic employed by someone whose side is losing a debate: Make up a position the other side has never taken, and then shoot it down. The leftist fever swamp known as Vox, perhaps reacting to the utter implosion of Rolling Stone's University of Virginia fraternity gang-rape story and the potential impact it might have on keeping…

When the now-retracted article by the Rolling Stone magazine was published on November 19 about a brutal gang rape of a first-year student at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the University of Virginia, the major broadcast networks rushed to the story and devoted multiple segments to both the article and reaction on the school’s campus. In doing so, they failed (unlike other outlets) to…

Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana issued a statement on Friday about their much-publicized "A Rape on Campus" story, which zeroed in on an allegation of gang rape at the University of Virginia by a woman named "Jackie." Dana acknowledged that "there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account," and continued that "we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced....…

Andrew Lohse is entitled to hacking out an embarrassingly poorly-argued, simplistic screed. But it is curious that editors at Time magazine chose to publish it. When you boil it down, Lohse essentially argues that fraternities are beyond the pale and must be abolished because of their genesis in the antebellum South.  

Mirabile dictu! Fully 28 profs and former profs from the Harvard Law School have taken a stand for freedom and for the rule of law. They are on the side of the Constitution and simple fairness. As Ivy Leaguers go, their stand took courage.

On Thursday, President Barack Obama did something Republicans have inexplicably been reluctant to do. He nationalized the impending midterm elections by telling a friendly audience at Northwestern University that "I am not on the ballot this fall ... But make no mistake: These policies (of my administration) are on the ballot -- every single one of them." That evening on Fox News's Special…

On Tuesday's The Kelly File on Fox News Channel, Maureen Faulkner, the widow of murdered Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, berated the graduating students at Goddard College in Vermont for honoring her husband's killer, Mumia Abu-Jamal, as their commencement speaker: "I am just absolutely outraged that they would have such a hate-filled murderer on as a commencement speaker...he…

CNN's Twitter account on Thursday boosted a Rolling Stone article that hyped the far-left Occupy Wall Street movement's latest efforts. The social media post touted, "Think #OccupyWallStreet is dead? Think again. This short-lived occupation is still fighting for five key issues," and linked to Rebecca Nathanson's Wednesday piece on the "five campaigns that OWS-inspired groups have continued to…

In a surprisingly favorable gun rights story on Thursday's NBC Today, correspondent and weekend Today host Erica Hill profiled Dartmouth college student Taylor Woolrich "in Washington D.C. speaking to a group that advocates for legal concealed guns on campus and about her desire to carry one." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump] Hill began the segment by declaring: "If…

In a hit record from 1974, a girl repeatedly told a suitor, “I don’t like spiders and snakes.” Presumably no one back then thought the song had any political overtones, but forty years later a post on the Mother Jones website has suggested that the girl’s remark meant she probably was a right-winger. MoJo science writer Chris Mooney reported Tuesday on a recent paper that claims conservatives…

Attempting to take historical revisionism to an absurd level, New York Times "Arts Beat" reporter Jennifer Schuessler claims that the removal of a long assumed to be present period at a critical point in the Declaration of Independence — smack dab after the identification of its three God-given rights — may radically change the document's meaning from its common understanding. Naturally, the…

On Tuesday, the Brookings Institution, with a David Leonhardt column at the New York Times serving as its de facto press release, published a study (full PDF here) entitled, "Is a Student Loan Crisis on the Horizon?" Unsurprisingly, their finding, in one word, was "No." Their more qualifed finding: "[I]n reality, the impact of student loans may not be as dire as many commentators fear." Their…

Timothy Egan, the liberal New York Times reporter turned ultra-liberal columnist, flashed hostility to Wal-Mart (and capitalism in general), as well as a broad ignorance of economics in his latest Sunday Review column, "Corporate Daddy." For some time now, Republicans in Congress have given up the pretense of doing anything to improve the lot of most Americans. Raising the minimum wage? They…

As commencement season winds down, Samantha Reinis at Campus Reform reported that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology expunged God from its invocation on June 6 -- in the name of "inclusion." This decision came after an op-ed in the campus newspaper The Tech by graduate student Aaron Scheinburg, who argued the prayer should avoid religion. (?)