I'm taking a break from talking about conservative diversity to think  more about justifying the content of liberal education these days. So here’s an account of chairs of departments of history attempting to justify why students should study and colleges and universities should fund their ...

Ross Douthat—the only really conservative columnist for the NYT—has been endlessly patient in trying to explain to his basically hostile audience that conservative opinion is both reasonable and diverse. The effort he makes here is to introduce liberals to the diverse sources of conservative ...

So I've gotten several emails asking what I think about the idea talked up by the devoted Democratic professor Jonathan Zimmerman in the semi-iconoclastic Christian Science Monitor: affirmative action for conservatives in hiring college and university professors. Now conservatives can claim to ...

As some more traditionalist and religious conservatives have noted with disgust, that's the advice of Ayn Rand: The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized. The gift-buying . . . stimulates an enormous outpouring ...

Nathan Harden writes with his characteristic techno-confidence that most higher education will be online soon enough.  That means that most non-elite private colleges and many mediocre public institutions will soon be out of business.  It also means that only quite a risk-taker would get a PhD ...

So you really have to hand it to The Atlantic.  It’s the magazine that’s “thinking outside the box” (I actually hate that phrase; anyone who uses it can be found way inside some trendy box;  I’m using it with some irony and am therefore an exception. Emily Matcher reports that “progressive ...

Here's the abstract of a study that conservatives such as Charles Murray and magazines such as The Atlantic are having fun with: Previous research suggests that benevolent sexism is an ideology that perpetuates gender inequality. But despite its negative consequences, benevolent sexism is a ...

So I hope I didn’t offend either American Conservatives or crunchy conservatives in my previous post.  I was trying to burst stereotypes about conservatives in general for an audience unfamiliar with their work.  So I’m going to digress once again by thinking a bit about being crunchy and being ...

So here's an article (really blog) from the interesting journal The American Conservative. The AC has two themes:  America ought to be a republic, and not an empire.  And America is held together by our distinctive traditions—and not some abstract ideology. American Conservatives don't think that ...

The Democrats, at their convention, stood so stridently for the rights of the liberated single woman that they offered the Republicans the opportunity to counter with a defense of the moral virtue of ordinary Americans devoted to God, family, country, and worthwhile work well done.  Most Americans ...

This is my second installment in a series on excellent TV shows and the 2012 election. I'm skipping over Girls for now and turning to the HBO series Big Love.  You might ask, of course, why I'm telling you about a show that's no longer on.  My obvious answer is the idea of a repeat or a rerun is ...

We're having a conference—sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute—at Berry College next Friday and Saturday on POP CULTURE and REAL CULTURE.  All the details can be found here.  YOU are certainly invited.  The conference will be attended by and directed toward students from a variety of ...

Well, you can't miss the new film Lincoln.  Here's the big reason:  Daniel Day-Lewis' Lincoln is pretty much WHO we will think of when imagining the person "Father Abraham" from now on.  He really looks like the lanky, awkward Lincoln.  He has the mannerisms down, including those of the world-class ...

Here’s a thought of the novelist Walker Percy’s searching character Will Barrett in The Last Gentleman: For until this moment he had lived in a state of pure possibility, not knowing what sort of man he was or what he must do, and supposing therefore that he must be all men and do everything ...

It's been fashionable for a long time now to deny all evidence for human uniqueness, for the singular greatness of members of our species. So it's refreshing to read Michael Trimble's claim that "The notion that animals can weep—apologies to Dumbo, Bambi, and Wlibur—has no scientific foundation ...