Creating responsibility in fact (and not in theory, law, or policy) requires tethering the objects of responsibility to substantial risk. The only risk category that transforms responsibility into innovative success is existential; anything substantially smaller amounts to nothing more than parking tickets, a minor nuisance for minimizing risk in any…

How We (Japan) Got Here: Part 2. Reinventing the Curricula Over the past few years, there have been many elegies for the humanities, particularly the English major (most notably, The End of the English Major). Many humanities majors have significantly declined in enrollment over the past decade or so. Arguments…

Academia in turmoil as New College explores new curricular designs Faulkner’s Sanctuary was published in 1931, two years after his failed The Sound and the Fury. Sanctuary was, at least, not an experimental novel, but it was about rape and abduction, so the reviews were grudgingly mixed. …

The New College Plan Many of the “experimental” colleges that were founded in the late 1950s to early 1970s began with a crisis. “It is acknowledged on all sides that American higher education is facing a crisis and that if we are to continue ‘the pursuit of excellence’ on which…

Vaccines, Money and the Paradox of America The Puritans were a paradox: children of the enlightenment firmly driven by pre-enlightenment values. They approached problems with the cold rationality of scientists but solved them in an ethos that could be traced from the twelfth century back to ancient Greece. They had…

Ricky Vaughn is in trouble (real name, “Douglass Mackey”). In 2016, Vaughn posted memes suggesting that Hillary Clinton enthusiasts could vote by texting “Hillary” or by using the hashtag #PresidentialElection. Now, he’s being prosecuted for violating a federal law that punishes conspiracies “to injure, oppress any person … in the…

Critical Race Theory and Curricula Aren’t the Problems I worked on education projects around the world, mostly for governments, and it’s true that — despite the best efforts of many over the last two generations — higher education in the U.S. is nonpareil and yet its foundations are exceptionally bizarre…

Apparently, a defense of McCarthy, Birch, and Populism Perhaps the most influential political essay of the 20th century is Columbia professor Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” first given as a BBC lecture in 1959 (as “The American Right Wing and the Paranoid Style”) and then published in…

In the early months of 1768, royal Massachusetts governor Bernard fired off a series of letters to the Ministry in London. The Stamp Act had been rejected by the people in November 1765, and the following month James Otis informed Bernard that a government that does not function has abdicated…