For decades now, we’ve been force-fed the dogma that American higher-education is the epitome of “woke”–a fully-owned subsidiary of “the Left.” I spent three years working for the National Association of Scholars, an outfit dedicated to manufacturing and marketing propaganda of this kind. I spent twenty-six years in higher education, teaching at a dozen institutions on two continents. I happen to live in a college town, Princeton, have lived here for fifteen years, am walking distance from Princeton University, and spend time on campus just about every day. I happen to work near another college town, New Brunswick, home to Rutgers University, and spend time on campus there about once a week. And I have friends and colleagues in higher education across the United States and Canada. So I’m no stranger to higher education or to controversies about it.
Continue readingTag Archives: writing
Wake Up
True to form, Bret Stephens has an essay in yesterday’s New York Times in which, following AOC’s claims that “Woke 1.0” was “crazy,” he reiterates her point, then offers up a list of nine of Woke 1.0’s victims, and demands restitution for them. The common denominator of all of these victims is that they’re writers or intellectuals of centrist to conservative views, all of whom unjustly lost their jobs (or so we’re told) to the forces of Wokedom.
Continue readingA(nother) Reductio for Institutional Neutrality
And a challenge to its defenders
Imagine a university whose administration passes what it takes to be a procedurally neutral rule–a “time, manner, place” restriction–prohibiting all protests on campus that take place either on grass or on thoroughfares. Protests inside university buildings are prohibited as well. Protests on grass, admin says, damage the grass, and protests on thoroughfares are a traffic hazard. Obviously, protests inside university buildings are too disruptive of university business to be permitted. All neutral considerations.
Now suppose that 99% of campus consists either of grass, thoroughfares, or buildings. It follows that large scale protests will be made impossible on such a campus.
Continue readingTeaching Lolita (Again)
After I lost my academic job back in 2020, I wondered if I’d ever teach again. Part of me wanted to; part of me didn’t. And with the passage of time, part wondered whether I still even knew how to teach. Is teaching like riding a bike? Or like remembering an old password? Or like getting married for the nth time?
Continue readingChanging the Game
The Knicks play at Madison Square Garden. The World Cup is taking place at the Meadowlands. The Delaney Hall concentration camp is in the industrial sector of Newark. All three places are within half an hour of each other. I asked ChatGPT to run a quantitative analysis of the amount of mass media coverage each event was getting in mainstream reporting in the New York metro area. This is what it said:
Continue readingJROTC Out of West Orange
I’ve mentioned a few times that I split my time between Princeton and West Orange, New Jersey, which is why some of my activism focuses on the one place, and some on the other. West Orange High School has a JROTC Air Force program which it never tires of advertising. The High School recently advertised its Student Life Expo for Incoming Freshmen, to take place April 22. High school freshmen are typically students entering ninth grade, i.e., 14 or 15 years old. Among the student groups advertised for such students, under the rubric of “Honor Societies,” is “Kitty Hawk Air Honor Society (JROTC).”* Continue reading
Get ROTC Off Campus Now
Another letter to The Daily Princetonian, likely to go unprinted. Do I sound like a broken record? Yes. Do I care? No.
The photo below is of members of Princeton Army ROTC this morning, ambling from some ROTC training back to Forbes College. It’s all obviously a game to them: ROTC may as well be some alternative sort of NCAA sport. Somebody needs to tell these students that the sport for which they’re training is civilizational annihilation. Are they willing to play that game, or do they think they should demur? No one at Princeton seems to have the courage or honesty to raise this question directly with them, much less with their officers. I have to confess that I myself was waiting for a bus when I took this picture, and didn’t have the nerve to forget the commute, bail out on my work day, walk over to them, and initiate a conversation. We all have an excuse for inaction, but eventually the excuses have to give way to action–mine, yours, everyone’s. Continue reading
The Iranian Sleeper Cells Are Here
If I wrote here that the Iranians had scored a major tactical hit on American soil, I doubt that 1 in 100 people would believe me. But in fact they have. The tactical hit is the hack, on March 11, of Stryker, the medical device company (not to be confused with Stryker the eight-wheeled armored fighting vehicle designed by General Dynamics). Continue reading
Re-organization Tempest Brewing
Policy of Truth has been around for eleven years now, and on reflection it occurs to me that I’ve frankly done a horrific job of tagging and categorizing my posts here over time. Many of them discuss the same topic, theme, or campaign, but are scattered in ways that make them hard to find.
My migrant justice posts are a perfect example: they stretch back over a decade, but are inconsistently tagged, categorized, and titled. You’d never know that a post written in 2025 bears a connection to one written five or ten years ago, but that’s often the case. It also doesn’t help that I’m so indecisive about titles, e.g., posting one and changing it five minutes (or five days) later. Henceforth, all of that will change. O brave new blog, that has such structure about it!
Continue readingNo Such Thing as a Free Ride?
I’ve just worked a fifteen hour day. I want it all to end. I want to end it all.
I take the 8:54 train out of Metropark, hoping to get to Princeton Junction in time to catch the 9:25 bus into town. I’m in luck. We get in at 9:24.
Just as we get there, the son-of-a-bitch bus driver pulls away. In other words, he sees a whole trainload of commuters come in, then leaves a minute early. I curse as I watch him go, sympathizing briefly with every terrorist who’s ever lived. Continue reading
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