Gustave Doré, Don Quijote 2.22 (1869) I wondered what all the fuss was about after I saw the movie There Will Be Blood (2007). It’s visually remarkable but overly moralizing. After two and a half hours, you’re supposed to think American capitalism is about greed, treachery, and murder. In Texas the movie is a litmus […]
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Once upon a time, liberals and conservatives could converse easily. I know that sounds implausible, but it is true. Now, I am fairly old. Fred Flintstone was just two grades ahead of me at Bedrock High. Back then we could debate questions such as whether it was a good idea to let dinosaurs turn into […]
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Last year, Florida’s Stop W.O.K.E Act banned the teaching of certain race-based concepts in K–12 schools and higher education, including the notion that one race is superior or inferior to others. That is an appropriate prohibition in the K–12 system, where young people are particularly vulnerable to the misuse of research by ideological teachers. This […]
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The Declaration of Independence is one of the most important statements on human liberty ever written. Not only did it launch the American Revolution, but it also inspired freedom fighters all around the world. From Frederick Douglass and the struggle against chattel slavery to Winston Churchill and the battle against totalitarianism, the ideas of the Declaration have been a rallying point […]
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The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plan on Friday. The administration was attempting to forgive $10,000 of student loans for borrowers making less than $125,000 per year, and $20,000 for those who had received a Pell grant. The alleged authority for this action was a 20-year-old law that allows […]
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Last Thursday, June 29, the U.S. Supreme Court released its ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, which it bundled with the University of North Carolina (UNC) case, putting an end to race-based affirmative action in college admissions. Framing the decision as one that embraces “the transcendent aims of the Equal Protection Clause,” […]
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A few months ago, I was summarily fired as an editor-in-chief of the kidney section of the most widely used medical reference. UpToDate is used by tens of thousands of physicians every day, helping them make the best and most timely decisions for patient care. Even as I was fired, UpToDate’s leadership team praised my work. […]
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While voters have repeatedly registered their opposition to racial, ethnic, and gender preferences in academic admissions and hiring, administrators, faculty, and the National Association for College Admission Counseling consistently undermine the electorate’s intent. For some time, they have been actively conspiring to subvert the anticipated SCOTUS ruling defending the Fourteenth Amendment’s assertion that no one […]
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Editor’s Note: This piece is part of a new Minding the Campus article series called Minding the Sciences, wherein we are renewing our focus on the sciences given the many threats it faces in modern academia. Click here to learn more. In April, David Muir of ABC News broadcast a special report from South Sudan, […]
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We may critique modern American higher education for many reasons. But there is one fact that embarrasses academic administrators more than any other: as colleges and universities have embraced a monomaniacal fixation on social and economic justice, they have cultivated an ever-increasing reliance on the exploited labor of “adjunct faculty,” who teach courses for a […]
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The Biden administration plans to release new gainful employment regulations. The regulations would terminate federal financial aid for some programs where graduates do not earn more than high school graduates or where the students take on excessive debt, as determined by two debt-to-income tests. My previous list of pros and cons still holds, but having […]
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Professional regulators have betrayed their members and, with them, the people they serve. “Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine at a larger scale.” – Rudolf Virchow Healthcare’s regulatory colleges have always concerned themselves with notions of ‘professionalism.’ They are, at least bureaucratically, the ultimate arbiter of how the term is interpreted, […]
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Editor’s Note: This piece is part of a new Minding the Campus article series called Minding the Sciences, wherein we are renewing our focus on the sciences given the many threats it faces in modern academia. Click here to learn more. Sixty years ago, Rachel Carson warned of a “silent spring” to come. Presently, here […]
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Fear Versus Glory in a Hyper-Democracy Democracy dumbs things down by rewarding conformity. This echoes both the vote and the market. It also explains why new urban America struggles to be as attractive as old urban Europe. In a hyper-democracy—politically, economically, and sociologically speaking—the vulgar mean takes the prize due to its astonishing potential to […]
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Science leadership has forgotten … science The texts for today are from Dr. Marcia McNutt, editor-in-chief of Science from 2013–2016 and current president of the National Academy of Sciences. First, we have an interview with the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy from 2018: Interviewer: I want to touch on a topic that’s another […]
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Wokeism and The Anthropological Origins of Gender Bending American cultural anthropology has a lot to answer for. Its icons—people like Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Edward Sapir—were the indispensable precursors of the woke ideology now so deeply entrenched in our schools and universities, courts, politics, and business. This is not to say that […]
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“Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.” – Proverbs 22:28 (KJV) In the latest row between conservative and liberal theologians over LGBT issues, conservative Anglican leaders said that “they could no longer recognize England’s archbishop of Canterbury as first among equals and called for an overhaul of how the global denomination is […]
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One of the chapters in my new book, The Malfunction of US Education Policy, relates my experience with a research center focused on educational standards and testing—for decades, the only federally funded research center on the topic. That experience was not good. Long story short, it grossly misrepresented a study I managed that had been, […]
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Choosing whether and where to attend college is the most important financial decision of a young person’s life. Yet, in general, we withhold the information that would allow students to make informed decisions. The most blatant example is hiding the cost of college. In 2018, Stephen Burd, Rachel Fishman, Laura Keane, Julie Habbert, Ben Barrett, […]
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Picking up on the ideas of Karl Marx and German historian-economist Werner Sombart, Joseph Schumpeter, in his 1942 classic Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, suggested that in a vibrant, private, competitive market economy, firms are constantly being created and destroyed. Businesses who miscalculate—those who fail to adequately meet the needs of their customers or utilize new, […]
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This year marks the 50th anniversary of the annual survey of higher education endowments conducted by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO). First published in 1974, this survey has become “the preeminent analysis of U.S. college and university endowment performance.” Indeed, the NACUBO survey is the fundamental source of data for […]
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Editor’s Note: This article contains the authors’ opinions and does not contain legal interpretation. In British Columbia, Canada (BC), people who attend counseling and psychotherapy may soon have to search outside of their province, or perhaps their country, if they want to meet with a counselor practicing science-based, rational, exploratory therapy. Soon all counselors may […]
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“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs; you try to get the best trade-off you can get, that’s all you can hope for.” – Thomas Sowell Many academic observers have high hopes that the expected Supreme Court rulings in the Harvard and University of North Carolina cases will settle the race question in college […]
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In Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Heywood Floyd finds himself doing business with a zero-gravity toilet that says: PASSENGERS ARE ADVISED TO READ INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE USE. Following are ten steps of directions. Post-pandemic college professors have technologized themselves into a similar blithe helplessness, a point missing from all the hand-wringing over the […]
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The field of American history is in crisis. Earlier this month, the Department of Education released troubling data indicating that only 13% of eighth-graders met proficiency standards in history. Students are failing to understand the American story and our shared values—and the consequences are severe. To those of us in the civic education space, these scores […]
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David Richardson, a tenured history professor at Madera Community College (MCC), and my colleague and friend, is embroiled in a fast-escalating brouhaha concerning free chocolate bars, free thought, and free speech—all good things that seem to have offended certain members of our MCC campus community. Professor Richardson was hired to teach history in the State […]
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In a 2003 Supreme Court decision, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor famously said, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.” Five years to go and … fat chance. Academia’s support for racial preferences has only increased since 2020—the year of racial hysteria and COVID panic—and it shows […]
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Guiding Readers Toward the Problem “Mailer finally came to decide that his love for his wife while not at all equal or congruent to his love for America was damnably parallel.” – Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (1968) Alexis de Tocqueville’s epic Democracy in America (1835/40) offers a curious preview of the American […]
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Two inexorable forces are driving the woke movement toward an unavoidable reckoning. The first is the binding force of intersectionality, which holds that all marginalized identities must band together to fight systemic oppression. The second is the energizing force of a permanent revolution that recognizes no limiting principles—the movement always seeks the next cultural convention […]
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“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.” – C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain Every year, I teach a cohort of nursing students that has to pass through my chemistry class. They are almost all freshmen and almost all females. In the laboratory sections I […]
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