Phillip W. Magness

Why are so many English & MLA faculty fomenting hostility to academic freedom?

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Last Friday evening an angry mob of protesters disrupted a scheduled guest lecture by American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray at Middlebury College in Vermont. After interrupting the event and forcing Murray to deliver his talk by camera from a separate room, the mob turned physically violent. The protesters attempted to physically block Murray’s departure […]

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Climate activism overshadows Shakespeare at English professor conference

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Literature took a clear back seat to ideological activism at the 2017 Modern Language Association Convention, held last weekend in Philadelphia. The annual conference is academia’s largest gathering for professors of English and foreign languages. Academic conferences of this type are usually a venue for faculty to present papers showcasing the latest research in their

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Are the humanities being squeezed out of academia? The evidence says otherwise

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One of the most common narratives of the higher education literature is the claimed decline of the humanities. We are constantly told that the humanities are “under assault” in an academy that increasingly values the STEM disciplines and professional degrees over a “well rounded education.” The humanities are often cast as the victims of an

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Are the “inequality” charts simply tracking tax code changes?

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The main historical argument made by inequality scholars such as Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman asserts that the income and wealth distributions of the United States follow a U-shaped pattern across the past 100 years. According to this narrative, the century began at very high levels of inequality. Intervening events such as the adoption

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A Phony ‘Phocion’: Alexander Hamilton and the election of 1796

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On October 14, 1796 the Philadelphia-based Gazette of the United States newspaper ran the first of 25 “letters” that would forever change the nature of presidential campaigns. Bearing the pseudonym of the ancient Athenian orator ‘Phocion,’ the letters presented a systematic and, at times, bitterly personal argument against Thomas Jefferson’s candidacy for President of the United States. Over

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Commie Chic & Quantifying Marx on the Syllabus

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A recent story about the prominence of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto on U.S. college syllabi has sparked a number of lively debates and discussions about the proper role of such an economically discredited yet philosophically prominent thinker in the classroom curriculum. I’m personally of the view that Marx’s intellectual contributions are severely overrated and I

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