February 27, 2025

Now, on to the news…

In a new series for City Journal, John D. Sailer, director of higher education policy at the Manhattan Institute, is examining how the University of California’s President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP) serves as a side-door into faculty positions.

In his second installment, he explains, “Rather than recruiting professors through competitive searches, fellow-to-faculty programs select postdoctoral fellows who demonstrate a commitment to diversity. They then advance them into tenure-track positions, allowing administrators to push their hiring priorities unburdened by a normal competitive process.”

The model, replicated at universities across the country, “pushes conformity across once-distinct academic fields,” Sailer argues.

Some of these fellows’ research interests? “Critical prison studies.” “Decolonial ecologies.” “Queer of color critique.”

Some in academia are sounding the alarm. Read what they had to say here.

At American colleges and universities, radicals are harassing the few remaining dissenters into retirement. The most notable case involves Amy Wax, professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania. Her story begins in 2017, when she published an opinion essay that prompted outrage and calls for her ouster from progressives. John M. Ellis, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of German Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, explains what happened next.

“Every colleague whom I have spoken with has noticed the same thing: an alarming number of surgical residency graduates are unprepared for professional practice,” writes Richard T. Bosshardt, a board-certified plastic surgeon. His own concerns began more than two decades ago, when he was working with a newly trained general surgeon on a procedure and was horrified by what he saw.

Bosshardt, who has been a surgeon for 38 years, explains how surgical practice has changed, and why he’s so worried, here.  

Founded in 2018, San Francisco nonprofit Urban Alchemy pursues what it calls “complementary strategies to conventional policing and security.” Its employees aren’t police officers or security guards, but they patrol subway stations, work at homeless shelters, and try to de-escalate dangerous situations when law enforcement isn’t around.

Though its annual revenues have zoomed from $35,000 in 2018 to more than $70 million today, there is little evidence to suggest that the nonprofit’s “street-psychology-based” interventions improve public safety. Instead, its efforts lead to disastrous outcomes in some cases, writes Sanjana Friedman, head of content for tech review site Product Hunt. Read her deep dive here.

“The nonsensical, non-educational indoctrination should have stopped a long time ago. It has badly damaged the educational system and harmed students’ ability to learn the necessary skills for living as adults.”

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disqus_mfERPWUv3H, commenting on progressive identity policies being pushed in schools

Photo credits: Andrew Harnik / Staff / Getty Images News via Getty Images