My street in the Upper West Side of New York City takes Halloween seriously. A week or more before the kids go trick-or-treating, our block features an abundance of ghoulishly carved pumpkins, life-sized plastic skeletons, and enough gauzy cobwebs to set the stage for a dozen Boris Karloff movies. My forays to the suburbs and […]
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Americans think George Ticknor (1791–1871) was their nation’s first Hispanist. They’re wrong; and they overrate the intellect of the Harvard professor. Like his admirers, Ticknor had a linear and encyclopedic mind. We should be grateful—he collected and collated the major texts of the modern history of European literature. But his analysis was buggy, handicapped by […]
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Happy Halloween! The National Association of Scholars—which you should join—held its annual board meeting this past weekend in Denver. It was a delight to finally have that long-anticipated conversation about artificial intelligence (AI) with my colleagues—in person. AI is everywhere these days. It makes headlines in higher education as students turn to it for everything […]
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The fight over student loan forgiveness has consumed most of the attention of the higher education policy world, and as a result, other policies are receiving much less attention than they should. One such neglected topic is borrower defense to repayment, which is a method of waiving repayment requirements for student loan borrowers who were […]
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The case for vigorous, free-wheeling intellectual debates seems to be making a comeback on today’s campuses. This awakening is particularly evident in the growth of organizations dedicated to building a robust marketplace of ideas ruled by logic and evidence, not violent intimidation. Examples include the Academic Freedom Alliance, the Committee on Open Expression, North Carolina’s […]
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Editor’s Note: Below is an excerpt of the article “Hochul Report Whitewashes Teachers Union Antisemitism,” originally posted on American Spectator on October 29, 2024. It has been edited to match MTC style guidelines. The full essay can be found here. When New York Gov. Kathy Hochul commissioned a report on the City University of New York’s rampant […]
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“What kind of a friend could pull a knife When it’s him or you and his kids need shoes? What kind of friend would do you in When the bomb goes off and the shelter’s his? … What kind of friend would tell you lies To spare you from the bitter truth? And what kind […]
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Editor’s Note: Below is a short excerpt from Michelle Kamhi’s essay posted on X. The full essay delves into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly the author’s response to a friend’s pro-Palestinian viewpoint. With permission, this excerpt is crossposted here, as readers of Minding the Campus may find it valuable in addressing campus anti-Semitism and pro-Palestine protests. […]
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I have always been contemptuous of professors who complain that their students aren’t doing the readings. It is easy to ensure that your students do the reading. Just cold-call them and ask basic questions about the content. My students read the first book of Plato’s Republic last week. Here are some of the questions I asked: […]
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As a medical practitioner applying for a faculty position at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Chan Medical School, it is no longer satisfactory to demonstrate a curriculum vitae of excellent merits in research and medical practice. One must also be actively involved in promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) to a level that penalizes individuals […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the American Postliberal on October 23, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. In the aftermath of Hurricanes Helene and Milton progressives have jumped on the climate change rhetoric to explain the disaster. Nowhere do they mention the draining of […]
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Eastern Nazarene College. Clarks Summit University. The University of Saint Katherine. What do these universities have in common? They were all private Christian colleges. And they were among the latest victims to succumb in the college closure crisis. The recent trend of faith-based university closures is troubling. Young adulthood is an incredibly formidable era, characterized […]
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An article in the Atlantic about college students not reading books got a lot of circulation this month. Even at top schools such as Columbia University, undergraduates struggle with works of more than short-story length. Some of them tell their professors that in all their high school years, they never had to read a hefty book from […]
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On what was likely a crisp autumn day in Philadelphia in 1774—before muskets and Minutemen—the American colonies chose diplomacy. They sent a carefully crafted petition to King George III, born out of frustration and hope, as a final effort to mend a relationship that had been fraying for years. Their grievances? Numerous. Following the French […]
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Debates surrounding Title IX, namely the Biden administration’s push to include gender identity, are overshadowing a debate that we should be having about sexual assault and misconduct faced by female athletes. As we continue to uncover new cases of misconduct, it’s clear that Title IX does not effectively address these problems and requires strengthening to […]
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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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During a brief stint working for Congress decades ago, I used the expression “cheaters, liars, and robbers” to help locate the three House office buildings: Cannon, Longworth, and Rayburn. Those three words unfortunately describe much academic misconduct that is potentially shaking the very foundation of trust and support in American higher education. Cheaters Cheating pervades […]
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A new Inside Higher Ed Student Voice flash survey conducted in partnership with Generation Lab offers insights into the voting behaviors and preferences of college students across the United States. The survey, conducted last month, involved responses from 1,012 college students. The publication says the results have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percent, […]
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PEN America’s report on American classrooms paints a dark picture: legislatures are passing gag orders on college administration, faculty, and academic norms. Others, looking at the same picture, see hopeful rays of light: legislatures are correcting the overreach of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” practices. We see the same difference of perspective in a parallel report […]
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Sometimes, reform offers come too late. Joseph Galloway, speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, came to the First Continental Congress with a clever plan—the Plan of Union—to unite the British North American colonies in their own Parliament, subordinate to Great Britain’s Parliament. The American Parliament would vote on many matters, but Britain would have a veto. […]
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“The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small,” former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once restated Sayre’s law in this famous quip on competition in academia. That was the 1970s when scholarly debates about communism and Marxism had little influence on government policies at the height of the Cold […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the College Fix on October 21, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. The Democrat-controlled Senate is not expected to consider the “End Woke Higher Education Act” that recently passed in the House with moderate bipartisan support, but observers remain optimistic […]
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Amy Wax has provided a perfect test case for accessing the state of academic freedom. On paper, just about any college would be lucky to have her. She earned both an MD and a JD, argued 15 cases before the Supreme Court, and then became a law professor at a top college for three decades. […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on September 16, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. Earlier this year, the Martin Center’s Ashlynn Warta wrote convincingly that faculty opposition to academic cuts at UNC Greensboro was best understood […]
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An essay I wrote entitled, “Incoming college STEM freshmen, take note: You need to take your classes seriously,” was published as a special to the USA TODAY Network and in two other South Florida newspapers. I offered ten suggestions for success to incoming college freshmen planning to major in a STEM discipline. Among the suggestions […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by American Greatness on October 2, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is cross-posted here with permission. Chad Aldeman, a Virginia-based researcher who focuses on education-related issues, recently detailed the educational experience of his daughter, who completed sixth grade in June. He writes that […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on October 14, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. Ah, October, when temperatures fall, men rake leaves, and universities publish their annual crime data, as required by the 1990 Clery Act. […]
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Last week, a student of mine learned that I did not identify as far left. I watched, on the Zoom call, as her pupils dilated in fascination: “But you were an English major at Columbia!,” she exclaimed. Incidents like these are not uncommon. Over on my Instagram page, where I post videos to promote the […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on September 27, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is cross-posted here with permission. Things should be what they are in higher education as elsewhere. Colleges advertising a liberal arts curriculum should immerse their students in literature, […]
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The First Continent Congress was not known for taking radical measures. When it met in Philadelphia in the autumn of 1774, it first rejected the plan but was forwarded by Pennsylvania representative Joseph Galloway, Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly. Galloway favored a “solid political union” between the colonies and Britain as the best way to […]
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