Author Archive | David Bernstein

Brian Leiter, on his blog: (1) Bernstein says, accurately, that Columbia Professor Joseph Massad says there are no homosexuals in the Arab world, though there are men who have same-sex contact. What, I, Leiter KNOW Massad really meant was simply to invoke Foucault’s theory of sexuality, because he cites Foucault in two footnotes. [Not mentioned […]

As the chair of George Mason’s hiring committee, and therefore a presumptive U.S. News voter, over the last several weeks I’ve been the recipient of huge amounts of what has come to be known as “law porn”–brochures and other materials meant to inform me about the wonderful qualities of various schools. Most of it simply […]

A transcript of a very informative lecture by Matthias Kuentzel. A short synopsis can’t do the lecture justice, but the basic point is that while there was always anti-Jewish sentiment in the Muslim world, it also was based on the notion of Jews as an inferior group that Mohammed had defeated militarily. Anti-Semitic visions of […]

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about Columbia professor Joseph Massad’s bizarre views about the purported efforts of what he calls “Gay International” to “produce[] homosexuals, as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist,” and his apparent sympathy for Arab governments who respond by persecuting gays. James Kirchik has a more […]

Here’s an interesting article by neoconservative Joshua Muravchik on the future of neonconservatism. As always with Muravchik, it is well-written and provocative. Unfortunately, the article also suggests that Muravchik, and perhaps his editors at Commentary, have learned nothing from the Iraq War. Muravchik states and tries to refute several critiques of neoconservative ideology, but does […]

I frequently have disputes with law reviewer editors over the use of hyphens. Unlike co-conspirator Eugene, I’m not a grammatical expert, or even someone who has much of an interest in the subject. But I do feel strongly that I shouldn’t use a hyphen between words that constitute a phrase, as in “hired gun problem”, […]

The NY Times today profiles a 21 year old “American” jihadist blogger, Samir Khan, born in Saudi Arabia, raised in Queens, living in North Carorlina. I put “American” in quotes because it’s not clear whether Khan is an American citizen. Khan serves as an intermediary to the jihadists of the world, posting their videos and […]

What are the official criteria used to determine the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize? I couldn’t find any information about this on the Nobel website, and all I can get from Wikipedia is that “according to Nobel’s will, the Peace Prize should be awarded ‘to the person who shall have done the most or […]

Ann Coulter is taking a lot of flack for saying that Jews should convert to Christianity, and that they need to do so to be “perfected.” Some, including the talk show host who was interviewing her, suggest that her comments were anti-Semitic. I don’t think so, they reflected chauvinism about Christianity, not hostility to Jews. […]

Among other things, the pamphlet questions whether passage of the ERA would mean that age of consent laws would be abolished, women would be subject to the draft, women would no longer be able to get special protections in the workplace to protect their unborn children, and rape law would have to be changed to […]

First, let me acknowledge that I’ve ready maybe three Dowd columns, ever, so if there is some secret to her columns that I just am not privy to, forgive me. (For example, as a lad it was only after reading many months of Russell Baker’s columns and finally giving up on them that I learned […]

[Bernstein responds to Leiter here.] According to the survey of academics’ ideology linked in my previous post, “creationist identity was also low, but with less identifiable shift by age group (the range was 3.9 to 4.7 percent) and with the strongest disciplinary support in the social sciences (17.6 percent) and humanities (5.0 percent), with negligible […]

The Inside Higher Ed. story on the study is here. A few interesting tidbits: (1) There is a much higher percentage of conservatives teaching at (relatively low-paying, low prestige) community colleges than elsewhere. So much for the oft-heard theory that conservatives are so scarce at elite schools because they are selfish, ambitious, money-grubbers who lack […]

Richard Dawkins says: “When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told – religious Jews anyway – than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a […]

In today’s Wall St. Journal, my colleague Peter Berkowitz notes that the ethics of running a university receives almost no attention in leading university ethics programs. He poses the following questions as examples of issues that should be considered: Is it proper for university disciplinary boards, often composed of faculty and administrators with no special […]