The author of this article, a developmental anthropologist, illustrates how the instructor can use ethnographic films to enhance the study of anthropology and override notions about the scope and efficacy of Western intervention in the Third World, provided the instructor places such films in their proper historical and cultural context. He…

This article reports on the decline in writing ability skills in secondary and higher education students. The author discusses changes that have affected student writing skills over the recent decades and offers recommendations for improving these skills, such as: implementing intensive freshman writing courses; adjusting existing course…

In this article, the author reflects on the flawed writing and composition teaching he received in his early Dartmouth University days. He reports that it took extraordinary classics professors like Don Rosenthal and Jack Zarker to turn around his work, and that these professors contributed to his eventual successful career as a college-level…

In this article, the author reports on an awareness of controversial incidents on campuses around North America surrounding "politically correct" speech codes and thought control measures instituted at the behest of faculty and students of this ideological persuasion. It seems that critical theory is going beyond "critical…

In this article, the author comments on an unsigned newspaper piece titled "Helping Talent Rise to the Top," printed in Canada's "Globe and Mail" about a new measure to enhance student well-being at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. The "Globe" piece lauds Queen's, a top-ranked Canadian…

"We are in a war," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius declared to cheers at a 2011 National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) Pro-Choice America fund-raiser. Secretary Sebelius was referring in part to the uproar caused by the "HHS Mandate," her agency's rule that employer-provided…

More and more Americans are recognizing just how inadequate their system of higher education is, in large part because the ever-increasing costs of attending a college or university are accompanied by an ever-decreasing value in the education they purport to give the student. At the venture capital firm, PEI, founded by Chuck Stetson, the author…

For many years Gunther Schuller was at the center of the classical music world, as a player, composer, conductor, writer, record producer, polemicist and publisher for new music and jazz, educator, and president of New England Conservatory. His book, entitled, "Musings: The Musical Worlds of Gunther Schuller: A Collection of His…

The author has lived in Japan over twenty-five years, teaching in higher education for more than twenty. He observes that it has been alarming to see the inroads of ideological activism in the academic community in Japan, which is having unfortunate effects on the curricula of many schools, including his own, Hokusei Gakuen University. In this…

Civilization is always a work in progress. Every civilization is an experiment in how far people can shift themselves from the evolutionary norm of the small, kinship-integrated tribal society governed by ritual and custom to any kind of society either more complex in structure or less tribal in foundation. People assume that given intelligence…

One thing history's torrent appears to be sweeping away is, ironically, the study of its most productive wellspring, Western civilization. "The Vanishing West", a report the National Association of Scholars released in May 2011, documents the extent of this vanishing. The traditional Western civilization survey requirement, commonplace only…

In terms of political liberation and constitutional democracy, Americans cannot help but think back to 1776 and the Declaration of Independence. For the English, the mind reaches back to the English Declaration of Rights of 1689, and for those with somewhat longer historical memories, to Magna Carta of 1215. But the true origin of political…

The claim that there were "surprising similarities" between the West and the more advanced regions of Asia as late as 1800-1830, and that the Industrial Revolution was the one transformation that set Europe apart from Asia is central to the arguments of multicultural historians such as Kenneth Pomeranz, Bin Wong, Jack Goldstone, John Hobson, and…

The attention in the West, especially in the United States, now accorded Islam and those who conduct themselves according to its precepts betrays woeful ignorance of both. As Graham Fuller has persuasively argued in his recent book, "A World Without Islam", Western culture owes much to Islam as well as to Muslims and would be greatly impoverished…

On January 20, 2009, Dr. Manmohan Singh, the prime minister of India, became the leader of the free world. The free world's attention was focused elsewhere: Senator Barack Obama, who on that day became President Barack Obama, quietly abdicated the role now taken up by Dr. Singh, having run an election campaign premised upon the ever-present but…