Month: June 2024

College Is Not a Waste of Money, Time, or Talent

College was a transformative period in my life. I held my professors in high regard, viewing them as beacons of wisdom. For most of my time there, I was a teaching assistant and laboratory technician in the chemistry department, a role that made me feel like an integral part of the university community. The camaraderie […]

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UNC Was Right to Call the Cops

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from an article that was originally published by The James Martin Center for Academic Renewal on June 10, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. The recent protests at UNC are only one example of the unrest at several campuses across the U.S.—albeit mostly “elite” ones—in response to events in the […]

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Remembering the Heroes of D-Day

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClear Politics on June 5, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. After watching “Band of Brothers” in 2007, I began interviewing World War II veterans from Puyallup, Washington, my hometown. Among them were several veterans of the D-Day invasion who described in vivid detail the events that changed […]

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‘Indoctrinate’ New Hires

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by City Journal on June 3, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. In the fall of 2021, the University of Oregon psychology department petitioned the school to hire an “Assistant Professor with a dedicated research focus in diversity/inclusion-related . . . clinical issues.” The department claimed that its proposal […]

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Rich Students Disproportionally Protest Israel: Should We Fund Elite Universities?

My friend, John Fund, a distinguished journalist and political commentator, has brought to my attention a fine study done by the Washington Monthly, showing that virulent anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian protests have occurred disproportionately at elite colleges where most students come from relatively rich families. You heard a lot about pro-Palestinian demonstrations, building occupation, and tent […]

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Identifying and Refuting Marxism on Campus

Although many of the protesters who occupied college and university campuses around the country had little knowledge of intellectual history, they marched to the beat of philosophical drummers they may not have ever heard. Their chants rhythmically echoed ideologies. The anti-Israel and anti-American passions expressed in pro-Palestinian demonstrations have deep and dark roots, tracing back […]

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The State of Student Loan Forgiveness: June 2024

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Cato Institute on June 3, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. Note, this post updates last month’s post. The biggest changes from last month include: Updated total loan forgiveness figures ($167 billion for 4.75 million borrowers) to account for the latest developments. Update on the Mackinac and Cato lawsuit, and the […]

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Lysenko Award, Again!

Author’s Note: This excerpt is from my weekly “Top of Mind” email, sent to subscribers every Thursday. For more content like this and to receive the full newsletter each week, sign up on Minding the Campus’s homepage. Simply go to the right side of the page, look for “SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, ‘TOP OF MIND,’” and […]

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Can Harvard Win Back America’s Respect?

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Law & Liberty on June 3, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. Harvard has had a very bad year. It began last summer with the Supreme Court’s verdict in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which declared that the university’s admissions policies were unconstitutionally discriminatory—or in plain terms, […]

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Modeling Evangelism for Gen Z Through Missions

Editor’s Note: This essay is the third excerpt from the author’s doctoral project titled “Reaching Generation Z with the Gospel at a Christian University through Faith Integration, Radical Hospitality, and Missional Opportunities,” completed as part of the Doctor of Ministry program at Knox Theological Seminary. The content has been edited to adhere to MTC’s guidelines. […]

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How I Introduced My Students to Personal Finance

Along with a 10-year corporate career, I studied in American business schools for about nine years, culminating in a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1991—Columbia was different back then because I did not need to file a “diversity, equity, and inclusion” plan. Then and now, though, American business schools have been long on theory but short […]

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Inflation Is Not a Monetary Phenomenon

Idealistic, fanatical libertarians—the Mises types, Rothbardian and Randian—like to shout from the rooftop that “inflation is a monetary phenomenon.” But that’s mastery of the obvious. Maybe there are still some five-year-olds out there who imagine inflation to be the fault of merchants raising prices so as to screw their clients and, thus also the fault […]

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Reviving the Conscious Presence of the Social Contract in America

In the heart of every democracy lies a sacred covenant; an unspoken agreement that binds together the fabric of society, ensuring harmony, justice, and progress for all. This covenant, often called the social contract, represents a nation’s citizens’ collective will and shared values. This contract is implicit in our constitutional framework in the United States. […]

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Higher Education Subsidization: Part 2 – Subsidy Design

Editor’s Note: This series is adapted from the new paper, Higher Education Subsidization: Why and How Should We Subsidize Higher Education? Part 1 explored the justifications and rationales that have been used to subsidize higher education. This part explores subsidy design considerations. There have been seven main justifications for subsidizing higher education: Promoting favored religions, […]

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Dear ‘Atlantic’: The Golden Age of American Jews Ends Only If We Let It

This April’s edition of The Atlantic featured a retrospective eulogy by writer Franklin Foer for America’s time as a place where anti-Semitism was rare, and Jews in America were welcome.  Foer describes “Antisemitism on the right and the left” as threatening to destroy the America of civic nationalism that characterized the post-WWII boom and revert […]

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The Federal Dollar Chain: In Debt We Trust

The federal dollar chain is an important civics lesson for college students. It will help answer, “Can I expect to receive Social Security payments? And will the United States of America go bankrupt?” The federal dollar chain is at least seventy-five years long. It is a conceptual tool that begins with taxes paid today by […]

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Cut Government Funding of Scientific Research

The Wall Street Journal cries alarum: “Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures.” Dozens of scientific journals have become paper mills—homes for rings of pseudo-academics to cite one another, review another, and puff up their publications with bogus research to secure the rewards of academic employment. After it bought its Egyptian rival Hindawi, academic […]

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Johnny Bull is in Your Barn: Unfunded Mandates and Property Rights

On June 2, 1774, the Quartering Act became law. A royal governor, if Britain’s North American colonies would not provide and pay for barracks, could now house British soldiers in any colonial “uninhabited houses, out-houses, barns, or other buildings” without consent of the legislature, township, or any American. The sun would not set on a […]

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America the Rebellious

On June 1, 1774, Britain’s Parliament gave assent to the Boston Port Act.  By mandating the complete shutdown of Boston’s port, prohibiting any loading, unloading, or transportation of goods within the town and its harbor, Parliament believed it was sending a powerful signal of its authority to the rebellious Bostonians who had dumped tea into […]

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