Righting the Campus

From an unassuming Midtown Manhattan office, a seventy-eight-year-old conservative thinker challenges the left wing's dominant grip on American universities.

Photos by Liz Borda

John Leo doesn’t believe in Fat Studies. He knows they exist; as a keen observer of the trends in higher education, he’s followed the proliferation of special interest fields such as fat, disability, and transgender studies for the past twenty-five years. What bothers Leo is not that special interest studies exist, but that they’re considered scholarship.

“Why would you do Fat Studies?” he asks rhetorically. “That’s not a college education.” Furthermore, “Why is Disability Studies on campus? It sounds like something a do-good agency should be doing in Midtown.”

Leo, who just turned seventy-eight and describes himself as a “commenter on the culture,” edits Minding the Campus, a website devoted to opinion and commentary on the state of American higher education. Launched in 2007, Minding the Campus is run by the Center for the American University at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

Based in offices opposite Grand Central Station, the Manhattan Institute is ar…