Two more books join the medley of volumes published in the last decade seeking to explain why the West has lost its cultural footings. Matthias Gisslar and Frank Furedi agree that “modernity” must be implicated somehow but on little else. Gisslar’s “anthropology of the West” maintains that rationality, equality, and individualism are exhausted and have taken on entirely different meanings, while Furedi concludes that the Left's success in rewriting history threatens Western cultural identity and core principles.
U.S. colleges are in trouble—financially, demographically, academically, politically—and two recent volumes offer answers to some of the most pressing problems. While one volume, by Brian Rosenberg, longtime Macalester College president, is more serious than the other, Robert Maranto points out that both fail to address the problems of burgeoning bureaucracies, ideological uniformity, and “the empirically verified free speech crisis on campus.”
Edward S. Shapiro’s dissects Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message, in which Shapiro discovers that Coates is an “ideologue awash in his grievances,” basking in the undue adulation effectuated on American campuses.
On January 5, 2025, the attendees at the American Historical Association convention in New York City voted to approve a resolution strongly condemning Israel for its response to the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Despite the lack of evidence, the resolution accused Israel of something called “scholasticide” and framed the conflict as an episode of “Settler Colonialism,” an empirically vacuous theory that distorts the past, erases 2,000 years of Jewish history, and justifies the murderous slaughter of Jews, Israel, and all Western nations and people.
Books by Adam Kirsch and Margaret D. Jacobs offer contrasting views on the fraught topic of what the Left has termed “settler colonialism,” allowing James W. Springer to expose the intellectual muddle at the core this ideology, its hollowness as a tool for understanding the past, and its efflorescence as a weapon in today’s culture wars.
William M. Briggs has a humorous take on Aubrey Clayton’s Bernoulli's Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science, concluding that the fundamental problem in the use of statistics are the scientists who “forget” that correlation does not equal causation.
Preview articles in the summer 2025 issue with pieces by R. Lawrence Purdy, Erwin H. Epstein, Liah Greenfeld, Emre Kuvvet, and more.
Matthew Stewart looks at David M. Rabban’s Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right, in which Rabban makes the “argument that academic freedom merits the status of First Amendment right, distinct from general free speech rights.”
Philosopher Stephen Kershnar reviews Progressive Myths, by Michael Huemer, “a fun and powerful read” in which Huemer inspects a plenitude of factual claims made by progressives that “are demonstrably false or highly misleading.”
Jacob Williams discusses prominent French intellectual Pascal Bruckner’s An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt and concludes that Bruckner makes a strong case that France is not guilty of “Islamophobia.”
Modern science played an integral part in the rise to global dominance of both the Soviet Union and the United States in the twentieth century. Simon Ings’ Stalin and the Scientists explores, through the figures of Trofim Lysenko and Nikolai Vavilov, how communist ideology and tyranny at once exploited, degraded, and censored scientific knowledge, while destroying individual scientists. Audra Wolfe’s Freedom’s Laboratory, recounts how the United States negotiated a new relationship between government and science in the postwar decades. Interestingly, while reading the two books reviewer J. Scott Turner observes, “I was struck by how familiar the Soviet science ecosystem seemed to be, how similar to our own.”
The Supreme Court decision in SFFA v. Harvard (2023), which declared the use of racial preferences in college admissions unconstitutional, did not directly apply to the military service academies. The SFFA then sued the Naval Academy for its racial preferences and lost in district court. William A. Woodruff explains why the judge in the district court case, Richard Bennett, was mistaken for showing deference to the judgement of military leaders.
When we think of cancel culture, we usually focus on two parties: the target and the cancelers. However, the cancelers typically seek termination of employment, deplatforming, or some other form of public humiliation for the canceled, which brings into the equation the institutions that will respond to these requests. When an institution agrees to act on a canceler’s request, Collin May explains, it is committing an “institutional betrayal against the target.”
Alexander Riley critiques Tricia Rose’s Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives―and How We Break Free, a wholly inadequate attempt to explain racial disparities with appeals to systemic or structural racism.
David Lewis Schaefer takes a different approach than Bruce Frohnen on Ilya Shapiro’s Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites, and finds that Shapiro has “performed an invaluable service” toward “the restoration of respect for law and for free intellectual inquiry.”
In its spirited push to install “equity” throughout the federal government, the Biden-Harris administration overreached and created a significant judicial backlash, a development that will make future efforts to achieve those goals very difficult.
The ghost of author William Shakespeare reacts to news that the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is “decolonizing” the Bard’s hometown museum.
It took many decades and just as many bad court decisions before the Supreme Court delivered its verdict in SFFA v. Harvard, revitalizing the foundational meaning of our civil rights laws—equal treatment under the law. Civil rights lawyer R. Lawrence Purdy outlines the steps that must be taken to ensure that this interpretation of the law is permanently ensconced in our jurisprudence and our institutions.
Richard P. Phelps reviews Katharine Beals’ Students with Autism: How to Improve Language, Literacy, and Academic Success, and helpfully discerns those strategies we now know to be ineffective from those we know work.
