If you’re not familiar with higher education accreditation, you may want to get up to speed. Accreditation is rapidly shaping up to be one of the most important front lines in the never-ending battle between reformers and the establishment. The latest confrontation concerns the Biden administration’s effort to subvert recent reforms in Florida. But first, […]
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Once a field of serious academic research and study, anthropology has devolved into a virtue-signaling celebration of identity politics. The original goal of evidence-based understanding of mankind, its evolution, society, language, and culture, has long since been jettisoned in favor of advocacy for preferred populations and their particular sectoral interests. This devolution was launched at […]
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As part of an ambitious, five-year strategic plan to reinvigorate a civic education grounded in American founding principles and history, the Jack Miller Center has named Hans Zeiger as its next president. Zeiger will begin his new role on August 1. Founded in 2004, the Jack Miller Center is a nonprofit civic education organization based […]
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In one of the laboratory classes I teach, students learn techniques to separate heterogenous mixtures of solids. One procedure involves the separation of sodium chloride from beach sand by mixing the solid mixture in water, filtering the resulting slurry to remove the sand and evaporating the water to recover the sodium chloride. In a second […]
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Today’s assault on intellectual excellence in the academy will eventually end. Hopefully, an investigation will then commence on its causes, and all the usual suspects will be rounded up. This tribunal will, however, likely ignore one key culprit: ordinary faculty—people like me—who complained about the assault, all while enthusiastically aiding it. Yes, some criticized the […]
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“Jupiter, I should like to understand what it is you are talking about. You say your master is sick. Hasn’t he told you what ails him?” —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Gold-Bug” Baptists and bootleggers don’t see eye to eye. Neither joins the other in their activities, yet they benefit from each other’s existence. A cynical […]
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The Civics Secures Democracy Act (CSDA), a bill that was reintroduced in the U.S. Senate last month under the auspices of bipartisanship, represents a federal legislative push to expand and upgrade K-12 civic and history education through a sum of $6 billion in competitive grants over a six-year period. The proposed federal funding bonanza includes: […]
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For a number of years, many Canadian universities have embarked on a process known as “indigenization” (to be followed shortly after with the addition of “decolonization”). This has been embraced especially intensely by my former employer, Mount Royal University (MRU), which posted the following Tweet on Canada Day from its official account: This Canada Day […]
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Statesmanship has fallen on hard times. Modern social science cannot make sense of this once-popular category of classical political philosophy, and the virtues commonly associated with the statesman today are equated with toxic masculinity or worse. Fortunately, in his new book, “The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation,” (Encounter Books) professor emeritus […]
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Just a few years ago, I was beginning to believe that I had reached a point in my life where I might be ready to slow down. After almost six decades on the planet, I had overcome the obstacles of my youth and after more than three decades, I had achieved a level of education, […]
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Student activism has long been part of campus life. Recall the Berkeley Free Speech movement that began in 1964 over the school’s ban of on-campus political activities. The mid-1960s saw countless demonstrations protesting the war in Vietnam, which were followed by widespread agitation over racial issues. Nevertheless, current demonstrations differ fundamentally from past activism. The […]
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As student loan debt has grown (currently more than $1.6 trillion in federal loans), it has gotten more attention from the public and Washington. Progressives are pushing for free college and loan forgiveness. While conservatives have rightly criticized the Biden administration’s proposals, they haven’t put forward many alternatives. Unfortunately, one of the few ideas that […]
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The “woke” haven’t only adopted the ideology of “social justice” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) and assertions such as “diversity is our strength” (Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau), but they adhere to these ideas not so much as preferred guidelines or scientific hypotheses, but as religious truths that aren’t to be questioned. Any misguided […]
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The onerous new guidelines are sure to victimize the innocent and deny students and faculty free speech In June, the Biden administration’s Department of Education rolled out new Title IX guidelines detailing how schools must address sexual discrimination and widening the areas of personal interaction and the “identities” protected under the rule. In fact, the […]
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“Science must overcome its racist legacy” is the headline, followed by a commitment from four guest editors of color to “help decolonize research and forge a path towards restorative justice and reconciliation,” a reparations-tinged evocation of post-apartheid South Africa. It is both embarrassing and disgraceful that Nature, the preeminent British scientific journal, should surrender science […]
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There are two absolutely minimal essential resources for universities to exist: faculty, who provide the most important services educational institutions provide, and students, who are the customers that universities traditionally serve as part, and sometimes nearly all, of their mission. Yet at many schools, the faculty constitutes only a modest minority (perhaps one-fourth or so) […]
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I’m a professor, retiring at 62 because the Woke takeover of higher education has ruined academic life. “Another one?” you ask. “What does this guy have to say that hasn’t already been said by Jordan Peterson, Peter Boghossian, Joshua Katz, or Bo Winegard1? There’s only one way to find out. Defenestration of a Colleague I’ve […]
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Around five years ago, Chinese government influence in American education became a permanent fixture in the news cycle. This was in large part due to the National Association of Scholars’ groundbreaking 2017 report, Outsourced to China, which exposed the deep ties over 100 American colleges and universities maintained with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) through […]
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As readers of Minding the Campus are no doubt aware, the Supreme Court recently issued a decision regarding a fundamental right named in the Constitution. Not Dobbs, which expunges a would-be right lurking in certain penumbras, but Bruen, which invalidates state laws that unduly restrict citizens’ Second Amendment right to bear arms. Bruen overturned a […]
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Université Laval has resorted to professional violence to prop up Quebec’s crumbling covid narrative. The instrument of violence is an eight-week suspension without pay. The objects of violence are two full professors: Patrick Provost, in the Faculty of Medicine’s department of microbiology, infectious diseases and immunology, and Nicolas Derome, in the Faculty of Science and […]
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Race is not a tame problem like those of mathematics or popular games. Tame problems thrive in systems with defined internal logic and operational clarity. Race is a wicked problem. There’s the easy label of the human race; and then, the more difficult divisions into tribe, clan, sect, class, nation, and other forms that can […]
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Our Constitution begins, “We the People, of the United States.” “We the People,” not some of the people or some groups of people – but all of the people. Our Constitution continues by noting that it was instituted “in order to form a more perfect Union,” meaning that the Founders recognized the great imperfections of […]
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Two seemingly unrelated articles appeared recently on the same day and illustrate how free speech can help differentiate colleges and law schools in an increasingly competitive marketplace. The first was an official editorial in the Wall Street Journal, which took Georgetown University Law Center to task for its handling of a controversial tweet by incoming […]
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From a bird’s eye view, most children stories can be understood as a process that guides the child into becoming a member of society──a member of a particular culture, a particular place, and a particular time. We tell them about dangers, morals, customs, and cultural beliefs, and how to perform the rituals of daily life. […]
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Between March 4 and March 6, 2022, the California Teachers Association (CTA), California’s largest teachers union with a membership of 325,000 educators, hosted a convention titled “2022 Equity & Human Rights Conference” in Los Angeles. With an aim to “provide all CTA members with a greater understanding of the issues of diversity, equity and social […]
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As part of the widespread, hysterical reactions to perceived social problems, some are attacking basic mathematics, logic, grammar, and virtues as imperialistic and oppressive. It beggars the imagination, boggles the mind, and turns the stomach, but it’s sadly true. Is it “too white” to insist that 2+2=4? Should we no longer practice linear thinking, hard […]
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The Biden administration has just proposed a Title IX regulation that would redefine sexual harassment more broadly in schools and universities, to restrict speech that some courts have ruled is protected by the First Amendment. The new definition would discard the current definition used by the Education Department, which is based on a 1999 Supreme […]
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Are modern African Americans worse off for slavery? Harvard was directly complicit in America’s system of racial bondage from the College’s earliest days in the 17th century until slavery in Massachusetts ended in 1783, and Harvard continued to be indirectly involved through extensive financial and other ties to the slave South up to the time […]
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Public controversies over the books children read in school are not going away. Numerous disputes have arisen as local school boards in states such as Texas, Virginia, and Tennessee have worked to make changes to the secondary literature used in classrooms. These efforts have been uniformly labeled “book banning,” which makes it difficult to distinguish […]
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In June 2022, Peter Boghossian posted a video featuring Dr. Lyell Asher, a professor of English at Lewis & Clark College, titled “Why Colleges are Becoming Cults.” Although Dr. Asher raised many important points, perhaps the most significant was his discussion of the commonly heard refrain in universities that “[i]t’s not the intention, but the […]
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