Year: 2022

Can We “Long March” Back through the Institutions?

Recently, a San Diego school district superintendent attempted to explain the overall good educational performance of Asian students by highlighting these students’ alleged rich immigrant backgrounds. She said: “people who’re able to make the journey to America are wealthy.” Once her bigoted comments were exposed, the superintendent first apologized and then doubled down and advocated […]

Read More

The Legal Problems With Student Loan Forgiveness

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from The Problems with Student Loan Forgiveness, a new report from the Texas Public Policy Foundation that argues against universal and complete student loan forgiveness. This is the sixth in a series of six excerpts from the report. Part 6: Legal Problems With Student Loan Forgiveness The Executive […]

Read More

The Political Problems With Student Loan Forgiveness

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from The Problems with Student Loan Forgiveness, a new report from the Texas Public Policy Foundation that argues against universal and complete student loan forgiveness. This is the fifth in a series of six excerpts from the report. Part 5: Political Problems With Student Loan Forgiveness There are […]

Read More

The Moral Problems with Student Loan Forgiveness

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from The Problems with Student Loan Forgiveness, a new report from the Texas Public Policy Foundation that argues against universal and complete student loan forgiveness. This is the fourth in a series of six excerpts from the report. Part 4: Moral Problems With Student Loan Forgiveness Student loan […]

Read More

The Economic Problems with Student Loan Forgiveness

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from The Problems with Student Loan Forgiveness, a new report from the Texas Public Policy Foundation that argues against universal and complete student loan forgiveness. This is the third in a series of six excerpts from the report. Part 3: Economic Problems With Student Loan Forgiveness Student loan […]

Read More

The Educational Problems With Student Loan Forgiveness

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from The Problems with Student Loan Forgiveness, a new report from the Texas Public Policy Foundation that argues against universal and complete student loan forgiveness. This is the second in a series of six excerpts from the report. Part 2: Educational Problems With Student Loan Forgiveness The next […]

Read More

The Logical and Rhetorical Problems With Student Loan Forgiveness

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from The Problems with Student Loan Forgiveness, a new report from the Texas Public Policy Foundation that argues against universal and complete student loan forgiveness. This is the first in a series of six excerpts from the report. Part 1: Logical and Rhetorical Problems With Student Loan Forgiveness […]

Read More

Is Violence the Secret Sauce?

When future historians examine the Left’s capture of the academy, a key question will be “Why was it so easy?” And why so quickly, from top to bottom, even at the most prestigious schools, where, most oddly, resistance was almost non-existent? No military historian could find a parallel in which an invading army prevailed similarly […]

Read More

In Rebuttal: Yes, Socioeconomic Status Should Matter in Admission to Selective Colleges

Last week, George Leef of the James G. Martin Center took issue with Kenin M. Spivak’s article in Minding the Campus that advocated normalizing college admissions data for socioeconomic status. Leef’s thesis was that students denied admission to selective colleges have not been harmed. Last year, I wrote “Socioeconomic Status—The Good Kind of Affirmative Action?” […]

Read More

Reflections on the Tyranny of Campus COVID Restrictions

The COVID-19 pandemic appears to be reaching its natural end, but the careers of those educators who helped to incite panic and hysteria are not. Before we close this chapter in history, it is worthwhile to reflect on what has occurred these past two years at schools and universities. George Mason University was the center […]

Read More

Academia and the Big, Bad Fascist

In Review: Jeffrey M. Bale and Tamir Bar-On’s Fighting the Last War: Confusion, Partisanship and Alarmism in the Literature on the Radical Right Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried “Wolf!” may have been originally addressed to children, but of course, adults are the ones who are in most desperate need of its lesson. This […]

Read More

Winged Words

On April 9-11 the Center for Political and Economic Thought (CPET) at St. Vincent College held a conference on “Panic, Policy, and Politics.” I was an invited speaker. When I first read the proposed schedule, I saw that nearly half the presentations focused on the panicked response to COVID. That made sense, and was a […]

Read More

Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College: The Warning to Wokesters

Late last month, an Ohio appellate court affirmed the $31.2 million judgment in favor of Gibson’s Bakery and members of the Gibson family against Oberlin College and its former Dean of Students, Meredith Raimondo. While Oberlin and Raimondo can (and probably will) ask the Ohio Supreme Court to review the decision, that Court grants only […]

Read More

Bulldozing Debate about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Princeton radicals promote a toxic referendum to divest from Caterpillar Last week, as Palestinian extremists murdered three more innocent Israeli civilians in Tel Aviv in an escalating campaign of terror, activist students at two American universities voted on repulsive resolutions to urge their respective universities to divest from companies doing business with Israel. On April […]

Read More

Further Evidence That Higher Education Accreditation Is a Cartel

Accreditors serve as key gatekeepers in higher education. Without accreditation, a college’s students are not eligible to receive federal financial aid such as Pell grants and federal student loans. This gives accreditors a fairly unique role in allocating federal spending—these private entities decide whether taxpayer dollars will flow to a college. Given that the public […]

Read More

Student Loan Suspension Robs the Poor and Enriches the Privileged

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Liberty Unyielding on April 10, 2022, and is republished here with permission. Joe Biden has provided billions of dollars in handouts to high-income people. The most recent example is his administration’s decision last week to suspend student loan repayments yet again, through August 31. It did that even though people with big student loans tend […]

Read More

The Moral Panic at MIT

If you’re looking for proof that America’s panic-stricken institutions of higher education are still in the throes of punitive overreach from the MeToo movement, look no further than the announcement last week that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is parting ways with its most preeminent medical researcher, Dr. David Sabatini. In the healthcare community, […]

Read More

What’s the Basis for Diversity Hiring?

In February 2021, Ohio State University President Kristina Johnson announced a new initiative called RAISE (for race, inclusion, and social equity) to hire 150 new faculty. At least 50 of the RAISE faculty were to be scientists, artists, and scholars whose work addresses social equity and racial disparities, and 100 were to be “underrepresented and […]

Read More

Recent Articles Show Stunning Lack of Self-Awareness among Higher Education Establishment

Set forth below are three articles that appeared in the last few weeks in the higher education trade press: A ‘Stunning’ Level of Student Disconnection How a President Decided It Was Time to Close His College The Enrollment Crisis for Men Continues to Worsen The first two appeared in the bible of the higher education […]

Read More

How to Fix Borrower Defense

Mass student debt forgiveness is unpopular with Republicans and even some Democrats. As such, it’s unlikely that the Biden administration will forgive all $1.45 trillion in student loan debt prior to the midterm elections. But that hasn’t stopped unelected bureaucrats in the administration from working behind closed doors to forgive massive amounts of student loans […]

Read More

Suppressing Pro-Israel Views at the University of Chicago

Student newspaper retracts an op-ed challenging the tactics of anti-Israel radicals The suppression of pro-Israel views on college campuses has been a troubling development in the ongoing cognitive war against Israel. Now, the silencing of pro-Israel voices even appears in student newspapers. The McGill Daily, as one troubling example, has a long-standing, publicly announced policy […]

Read More

Normalizing Illiberalism

What does it take for a fringe dogma that preys on frail human divisions and obsesses with power struggles to be promoted en masse and generally accepted in a country where political liberalism had been the norm? The radical reshaping of contemporary American minds towards an unnatural preoccupation with cultural relativism and identity tribalism began […]

Read More

Debunking the Debunker

The racist, determinist, and anti-individualist mythology behind Robin DiAngelo’s “most common myths white people believe about race” Robin DiAngelo has suddenly gotten very well-known and much wealthier because of her tapping by cultural and educational elites as one of the “experts” on white racism and concomitant non-white suffering. The university at which I am employed […]

Read More

Town vs. Gown: A Personal Memoir

America is awash in culture wars, but one of the least noticed yet most consequential is the hostility between the academy and business. More is involved than a gaggle of Marxist professors condemning capitalism. Academics, especially those in the social sciences and humanities, not only support the increasingly anti-business Democratic Party; their loathing is often […]

Read More

The Latest Batch of Forgiven Loans Shows Why Student Loan Forgiveness Is Such a Bad Idea

The Department of Education is going to forgive an additional $6.2 billion in student loans for 100,000 students through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. This adds to the $1 billion in previously forgiven loans for 11,000 students. This shows one of the reasons why student loan forgiveness is such a bad idea. Under the […]

Read More

Professor KC Johnson Sues over Violation of FOIA by Education Department

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Liberty Unyielding on March 28, 2022, and is republished here with permission. Under the Freedom of Information Act, federal agencies are supposed to respond to records requests within 20 working days, and hand over the records “promptly” thereafter, if they aren’t exempt from disclosure. But rather than doing that, they frequently violate […]

Read More

The Middle East Studies Association Betrays Academia

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the world’s major organization devoted to studying this region, has jettisoned academic impartiality and the quest for truth in favor of political partisanship and extremist activism. In 2017, MESA dropped its self-designation as a “non-political learned society” so that it could pursue an anti-Israel agenda. MESA has not yet […]

Read More

Seventeen Years—And Still Waiting!

Federal Office for Civil Rights (OCR) Refuses to Rule on UW-Madison Title VI Violations In February 2005 the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents ignored my complaints that several financial aid programs violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These programs restricted eligibility to students based on their race, color, and national […]

Read More

Soviet-Style Surveillance at a Connecticut University

Last month, in a statement issued by its Office of Equity and Inclusion, Central Connecticut State University established a new policy designating faculty, administrators, and nearly all other employees as “mandated reporters.” In that capacity, they are required to report to this office any information they come across pertaining to “gender-based discrimination.”  Infractions indicative of […]

Read More

Regulatory Capture of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Higher Education

On March 21, 2021, the Governing Board at the California Community Colleges (CCC), the state-wide public higher education entity in charge of 116 community colleges, held a public meeting to discuss a regulatory proposal on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA). The proposal would amend the California Code of Regulations to establish a set of […]

Read More