Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Authority and its Abdication

  • Abdication of Authority?

    Or something worse? Substack latest.

  • Abdication of Authority

    Time was, when university faculty and administrators stood in loco parentis. Now their posture is supine while the students go loco.

  • Abdication of Authority by University Admins? Or Something Worse?

    Just over the transom by someone  in the trenches of academe: I wonder if it's true as you say that "the authorities abdicate." When I read things like this — they seem to come up about once a week now, or once a day — I don't think there are authorities just abdicating.  No, it…

  • Warning to University Admins: Abdication of Authority Carries a Cost

    The cardinal virtues are four: temperance, prudence, justice, and courage. Of the four, courage is the most difficult to exercise. So it is no surprise that cowardice is so widespread among university administrators. There is no coward like a university administrator, to cop a line from Dennis Prager. But the cowardice that issues in abdication of…

  • Heather Mac

    Some Black Lives Don't Matter Heather Mac Donald is a profile in civil courage in stark contrast to the cowardice of the university administrators who, in abdication of authority, allow leftist thugs to prevent her and other sensible people from speaking.  As I have lately observed, the university is pretty much dead, not everywhere of…

  • Were University Admins Always Cowards?

    There is no coward like a university administrator, to cop a line from Dennis Prager.  That is not to say that there have never  been any who have demonstrated civil courage.  But we have to go back a long way to the late '60s and early '70s. With apologies to that unrepentant commie Pete Seeger…

  • The Cowards of Academia

    Dennis Prager: Ann Coulter was scheduled to speak this week at the University of California, Berkeley. Last week, the university announced it was canceling her speech, providing the usual excuse that it couldn't guarantee her safety, or others'. This excuse is as phony as it is cowardly. Berkeley and other universities know well that there…

  • Abdication of Authority in Academe

    Heather MacDonald recounts her experiences at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California and at UCLA: The Rose Institute for State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna had invited me to meet with students to talk about my book, The War on Cops, on April 6. Several calls went out on Facebook to “shut down” this…

  • Leftist Thuggery and Abdication of Authority

    Leftists complain that President Trump is 'authoritarian.' But given the abdication of authority on the part of university administrators who refuse to stand up to leftist thugs and refuse to defend such ideals of the university as free speech and free inquiry, a little 'authoritarianism' looks to be exactly what is needed.  It is the surrender…

  • Cultural Suicide

    Yet another example.  (HT: Karl White) "University students demand philosophers such as Plato and Kant are removed from syllabus because they are white."   The Telegraph title isn't even grammatical. The stupid demand is that these greats BE removed.  Has England declined so far that its journalists can no longer write or speak correct English…

  • The Higher Infantilization and Perpetual Childhood

    I coined 'higher infantilization' recently to cover what is going on in so-called institutions of higher learning.  (The STEM disciplines excepted.) The New Criterion provides a good explanation of this infantilization which is also a feminization: “Perpetual childhood.” Is there a better illustration of this enforced immaturity than the regime of “safe spaces,” “microaggressions,” and…

  • Abdication of Authority

    It began in the universities in the '60s.  And now it is in full 'flower.'  I recall Dennis Prager putting it this way: "There is no coward like a university administrator."  Now hear David French: Fortunately for the radicals, our universities are populated by the craven and the cowardly. Push a professor, even slightly, and…

  • DePaul University Bans “Unborn Lives Matter”

    Here: Reverend Dennis H. Holtschneider, C.M., the president of DePaul University, prevented a College Republicans poster bearing the phrase “Unborn Lives Matter” from being displayed on campus. According to Holtschneider’s open letter to the DePaul community, the poster constituted “bigotry . . . under the cover of free speech” that “provokes the Black Lives Matter…

  • Abdication of Authority

    The refusal of Pope Francis properly to confront and condemn radical Islam is a case of abdication of authority.  While Christians are being slaughtered, and their holy sites pulverized, the foolish Francis commits the No True Muslim Fallacy.  The man is a clown: We have too many clowns in high places: Bill Clinton, 'Bozo' de…

  • Twilight Time for the Universities?

    Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture (Norton, 2000), p. 122: Latin mottoes adorn the crests of many of these schools, boasting of "light" and "truth." [BV interjects: Harvard's crest shows Veritas] The reality, however, is something very different, as thousands of these institutions have literal or de facto open admissions policies in the name…