Politics makes strange bedfellows, forcing us to ally ourselves with people whose views on other matters we do not share. How should we determine with whom to join hands and whom to reject? Some people...
Advisory Board Writings
Now, More Than Ever, We Need Diversity in Admissions
Steven Pinker: Identity Politics Is ‘An Enemy of Reason and Enlightenment Values’
Renowned professor of psychology at Harvard and a prolific writer, Steven Pinker is the author of several prize-winning books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, and The Better Angels of Our Nature. This week Pinker releases a new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. I chatted over email with Professor Pinker and asked him some questions on his new book and contemporary politics.
The Enlightenment Is Working
For all their disagreements, the left and the right concur on one thing: The world is getting worse. Whether the decline is visible in inequality, racism and pollution, or in terrorism, crime and moral decay,...
Viewpoint and religious discrimination at San Francisco State University
What happens when a university lets a select group decide what constitutes “hate speech” for an entire campus? The answer at San Francisco State University is censorship of any opinions the group doesn’t like. This...
Free Speech, Campus Safety, or Both
Concrete barriers were erected and a security perimeter was created around six buildings, all reinforced by hundreds of police officers. Weapons, backpacks, helmets, and masks were forbidden. This was not some distant capital in a...
A tale of three governors: Lessons of leadership from Southern history
I grew up in Newport News during the tumultuous years of the 1950s and later graduated from both the College of William and Mary and the University of Virginia. Like millions of others, I have...
Charlottesville: A Personal and Historical Reflection
I grew up as an Orthodox Jewish boy born in 1947 in Newport News, Virginia. I was aware from my earliest years that Newport News had welcomed my immigrant grandparents and their children from the...
Didn’t Slam Anti-Semitism On the Left? Don’t Expect Credibility When You Slam It On the Right.
For the past few decades, we have witnessed the rise of anti-Semitism from the left. From Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in the United Kingdom to college campuses across America, the phenomenon is real, and it...
Is Free Speech Under Fire on Campus?
Over the past few months, a series of student protests has erupted across the United States on campuses such as Amherst, Dartmouth, Ithaca, the University of Missouri and Yale. While the specific spark of each...
