Conservative: A ‘Vulgar’ Gift to Princeton
News of the just-established Emma Bloomberg Center for Access and Opportunity at Princeton University made National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson’s eyes roll: Multibillionaire Mike Bloomberg’s daughter Emma “sits on the board of Bloomberg Philanthropies, which will donate $20 million to her alma mater for its new diversity center, to be named after her. This is the billionaire’s equivalent to a matching set of logo-covered Louis Vuitton luggage or a Burberry plaid baseball cap.” Yet “students who might end up at Princeton if there is a bit more enthusiastic diversity outreach aren’t going to Rikers Island if they fail to get into Princeton — they’re going to Stanford or Penn or Duke.” The folks who truly “need help” are “black high-school dropouts.” Why not help Milwaukee’s North Division HS? That would “matter a great deal more than seeing to it that Princeton has one more thing named after the Bloombergs.”
From the right: The Left Is Exhausted
“Progressivism is a dying ideology,” argues Modern Age’s Daniel McCarthy. That might come as a surprise considering its apparently vast power in academia and the media. Yet the movement “has no leaders more appealing than a 78-year-old Joe Biden,” and it could barely squeeze out a win in 2020 despite having “every advantage: a pandemic and an economic downturn they could pin on the Republican president.” Intellectually, too, the left is “exhausted”: “The radical ideas it promotes today were hatched in gender-studies programs and other arcane precincts of the academy 30 or more years ago. Its economic nostrums are even hoarier, or else, like Modern Monetary Theory, they are the mere reductio ad absurdum of Keynesianism and socialism past.” In short, the left has lost its cultural energy and fecundity. It’s powerful, sure, but it is a power “without heir or legacy.”
Libertarian: Follow Science, Open Schools
Capitulation to teachers unions — not science — is keeping schools from fully opening in deep-blue states, concludes Reason’s Matt Welch. “Schools around the planet were overwhelmingly not spreading COVID-19 even before American teachers were given prioritized access to vaccines.” Many deep-red states have fully reopened schools, yet Democratic-run states are “putting students through half-time hell” by prolonging the process; in Gotham, the United Federation of Teachers’ “outsized influence” has the city dragging its feet. “Now that there’s no excuse for educators not to be vaccinated, there’s none left for buildings to remain even half-shut in this homestretch of a cursed school year.”
Science desk: Psychology’s ‘Half-Baked’ Ideas
In an excerpt from his new book, “The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills,” Jesse Singal at Spectator USA describes his dismay after examining the “implicit association test,” seen as “the most promising” tool for “attenuating the impact of racism.” The IAT, a “10-minute computer task with no connection to the real world,” supposedly measures “unconscious” or “implicit” bias. Yet it turns out to be “unreliable, statistically”; people believe it merely because it tells a story that lines up with “liberal anxieties about race” — “everyone’s racist deep down.” And it isn’t just the IAT, “half-baked ideas” from psychology pervade elite institutions.
Culture critic: The Last Great Humanist
Denis Donoghue, a longtime New York University professor who died this month at age 92, was “one of the last great humanist critics,” eulogizes The New York Times’ Clay Risen. The prolific Irish author “often clashed with critics he considered too political.” The “objects of his derision” were “what he called ‘ideologically opportunistic’ theories that, taking a page from Marxism, saw literature as little more than a social construct to be analyzed alongside things like comic books and soap operas” and “criticized as hopelessly bourgeois the sort of close reading he performed.” As Donoghue once wrote, “If I am listening to a quartet by Bartók or reading ‘Nostromo,’ I should not be using the occasion to plan my next move in the class struggle or the war of all against all.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
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A 'vulgar' gift to Princeton and other commentary - New York Post
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