Trump and the Academic Cocoon

Yale historian David Blight has written an op-ed for the New York Times calling for a “reckoning” on the part of universities.

Blight is a scholar of American race relations and the Civil War ; he directs Yale ’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition .

He argues universities must grapple with its blind spots in order to understand why blue-collar workers voted for an “authoritarian in a red tie” in the recent US presidential election.

Frida Ghitis: Academic repartition of plain-speaking has become the norm in academia, including in the STEM fields.

Ghitis says the attack on academic excellence can be found in virtually every faculty hiring search and in publishing decisions of virtually every academic journal.

She says Yale has so many excess funds sloshing around from taxpayer support and tuition, however, that it can set itself up as a mini-government dispensing largesse as well as ideological correction.

Frida Ghitis: Yale has stripped due-process protections from male students accused of sexual assault.

She says campus diversity bureaucrats have stripped due process from accused students.

Ghitis says it is the Trumpist Right that fuels “culture wars, not the Left’s Left with its nonsensical theories about sex, say, or its policies shutting parents out of “gender transition,” Ghitis writes.