ARTICLES
Racial Preferences: This Is No Time to Let Up
R. Lawrence Purdy
It took many decades and just as many bad court decisions before the Supreme Court delivered its verdict in SFFA v. Harvard, revitalizing the foundational meaning of our civil rights laws—equal treatment under the law. Civil rights lawyer R. Lawrence Purdy outlines the steps that must be taken to ensure that this interpretation of the law is permanently ensconced in our jurisprudence and our institutions.
Toppling Statues and the Defenestration of Comparative Education
Erwin H. Epstein, Loyola University Chicago
The concept of “decoloniality”—i.e. defying Western customs and standards of knowledge acquisition—has captured the field of Comparative Education. This is bad for learning and scholarship, as priority is given to “indigenous” ways of knowing over the scientific method. But decoloniality has also become embedded in the work of leading NGOs and international donor organizations, making it the right time to sound the alarm.
How the ‘Social Sciences’ Killed Our Universities
Liah Greenfeld, Boston University
The collapse of communism in the early 1990s left large numbers of social scientists studying Cold War topics without purpose or relevance to policymakers. With communism and class conflict passé and no serious challenge to American power, many practitioners turned to the topics of identity politics and racial grievance as a way to reestablish their public importance. This, more than anything else, says social scientist Liah Greenfeld, is responsible for the fall of our research universities, now the main catalyst for postmodern ideologies attacking the West and undermining its values.
Study: DEI Policies Can Make the Workplace Less Safe
Emre Kuvvet, Nova Southeastern University
A new study by finance professor Emre Kuvvet finds a strong positive association between organizational commitment to diversity and workplace accidents and lost workdays. Additionally, the study shows that greater diversity is associated with a rise in consumer complaints related to health and safety and a decrease in customer satisfaction.
Political Identity Centrality: A Case Study in Cancellation
Collin May, University of Calgary
This is the third article in a three-part series exploring what Collin May’s cancellation as the Chief of the Alberta Human Rights Commission (AHRC) in 2022 can tell us about disintegrating free speech rights and the consistent persecution of heterodox thinking.
ACADEMIC LEVITY
Shakespeare Cometh
Matt Manochio
The ghost of author William Shakespeare reacts to news that the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is “decolonizing” the Bard’s hometown museum.
ACADEMIC DEBATE
Classical Frequentist Statistics: Point/Counterpoint
Ernest B. Hook vs. William M. Briggs
The Spring 2025 issue of Academic Questions contained a review by William M. Briggs suggesting that social scientists discard “frequentist” statistics, which in his view has badly degraded the credibility of scientific research. Here, physician and medical researcher Dr. Ernest B. Hook writes to defend frequentist or “classical” statistics, and Mr. Briggs provides a response.
REVIEW ESSAYS
The Deceitful Misnomer: Settler Colonialism
James W. Springer
Books by Adam Kirsch and Margaret D. Jacobs offer contrasting views on the fraught topic of what the Left has termed “settler colonialism,” allowing James W. Springer to expose the intellectual muddle at the core this ideology, its hollowness as a tool for understanding the past, and its efflorescence as a weapon in today’s culture wars.
Explaining Our Cultural Rot by Exploring the Past
David A. Eisenberg, Eureka College
Two more books join the medley of volumes published in the last decade seeking to explain why the West has lost its cultural footings. Matthias Gisslar and Frank Furedi agree that “modernity” must be implicated somehow but on little else. Gisslar’s “anthropology of the West” maintains that rationality, equality, and individualism are exhausted and have taken on entirely different meanings, while Furedi concludes that the Left's success in rewriting history threatens Western cultural identity and core principles.
Shameless Boosters and a Loyal Critic: Two Takes on the Ivory Tower
Robert Maranto, University of Arkansas
U.S. colleges are in trouble—financially, demographically, academically, politically—and two recent volumes offer answers to some of the most pressing problems. While one volume, by Brian Rosenberg, longtime Macalester College president, is more serious than the other, Robert Maranto points out that both fail to address the problems of burgeoning bureaucracies, ideological uniformity, and “the empirically verified free speech crisis on campus.”
Mixing Politics and Science: Lessons Learned
J. Scott Turner, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, NAS
Modern science played an integral part in the rise to global dominance of both the Soviet Union and the United States in the twentieth century. Simon Ings’ Stalin and the Scientists explores, through the figures of Trofim Lysenko and Nikolai Vavilov, how communist ideology and tyranny at once exploited, degraded, and censored scientific knowledge, while destroying individual scientists. Audra Wolfe’s Freedom’s Laboratory, recounts how the United States negotiated a new relationship between government and science in the postwar decades. Interestingly, while reading the two books reviewer J. Scott Turner observes, “I was struck by how familiar the Soviet science ecosystem seemed to be, how similar to our own.”
Law Schools and the Impoverished View of Free Speech
Bruce P. Frohnen, Ohio Northern University College of Law
Books by two broadly libertarian lawyers—Jonathan Turley’s The Indispensable Right and Ilya Shapiro’s Lawless—seek to explain what Turley calls the “alliance of academic, media, and corporate interests with the government” which has “created an existential threat” to free speech. Law professor Bruce P. Frohnen finds that the “problem is that both authors overlook the role played by educational corruption in producing authoritarian institutions, beliefs, and practices—especially on university campuses.”
REVIEWS
The summer AQ features eleven individual book reviews, starting with Edward S. Shapiro’s dissection of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message, in which Shapiro discovers that Coates is an “ideologue awash in his grievances,” basking in the undue adulation effectuated on American campuses. This is followed by a devastating critique by Alexander Riley of Tricia Rose’s Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives―and How We Break Free, a wholly inadequate attempt to explain racial disparities with appeals to systemic or structural racism. As Riley writes, “The antiracist/systemic racism/metaracism cult refuses their own self-evident agency and that of the people they describe.”
“Yes, I Read Steve Sailer” is the title of Jason Richwine’s review of Steve Sailer’s Noticing: An Essential Reader (1973-2023). Richwine tells us that with the publication of this book—a compendium of Sailer’s greatest essays—the taboo against reading this prolific data genius who revels in politically incorrect topics, may finally be lifting. “While Sailer’s appeal is still mostly on the political right,” the reporter-turned-independent blogger “is more influential than ever before.”
Philosopher Stephen Kershnar reviews Progressive Myths, by Michael Huemer, “a fun and powerful read” in which Huemer inspects a plenitude of factual claims made by progressives that “are demonstrably false or highly misleading.” This is followed by Matthew Stewart’s look at David M. Rabban’s Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right, in which Rabban makes the “argument that academic freedom merits the status of First Amendment right, distinct from general free speech rights.” Stewart is followed by NAS Research Fellow Mason Goad’s review of John A. Gentry’s Diversity Dysfunction: The DEI Threat to National Security Intelligence, “a deep dive into the damage that DEI has wrought for the CIA.”
David Lewis Schaefer provides takes a different approach than Bruce Frohnen on Ilya Shapiro’s Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites, and finds that Shapiro has “performed an invaluable service” toward “the restoration of respect for law and for free intellectual inquiry.” Meanwhile, Robert Carle finds The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt by Edward O’Keefe is an important corrective to the revisionist historians who dismiss “Roosevelt as a racist, a warmonger, or a settler-colonialist.” Instead, writes Carle, O’Keefe demonstrates how Roosevelt “transformed the presidency into a platform for progressive reform within a free-market framework.”
J. Scott Turner finds that Richard Dawkins’ and Jana Lenzová’s The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie is an eloquent defense of the Darwinian faith that won’t look quite so eloquent to those standing outside the neo-Darwinian “epistemic bubble.” Brendan Dooley sees Bradley Campbell’s How to Think Better About Social Justice: Why Good Sociology Matters as a “brief but punchy … educated but not pedantic” attempt to deliver sociology from its fatal attachment to central planning and the “intoxicating delusion” of man-made utopia.
Paul Carls’ Multiculturalism and the Nation in Germany: A Study in Moral Conflict, writes Jacob Williams, is a “breath of fresh air” that analyzes the conflict triggered by the European migrant crisis, which “intensified a long-standing cold civil war over the meaning of the German nation.”
Photo by Oskars Sylwan on Unsplash
