Claudine Gay’s recent spectacular flameout has sparked a smoldering brushfire over academic plagiarism. Suddenly, we are seeing plagiarism everywhere. Shortly after the exposure of Gay’s sins, Neri Oxman, who is a Harvard professor herself, and the wife of Bill Ackman—the hedge fund manager that led a donor’s backlash against Harvard’s tolerance of anti-Semitism—was accused of […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClear Wire on April 25, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. Our K-12 educational system is designed to serve much less than 50 percent of American students. For decades the cry has been that “all kids must go to college.” Yet, only a minority do so and fewer graduate. […]
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Socialists and Communists have been celebrating May Day for more than a century now—in the Communist regimes, by a grim display of marching soldiers, tanks, and artillery. On May Day, we should remember how many innocents were butchered by the fanatics who sought to impose the Communist nightmare on humanity—and how many millions led and […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClear Wire on April 25, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. With new institutes emerging at colleges and universities in Florida, Ohio, Utah, Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas, and elsewhere, civics education may be seeing a rebirth. “We need these civics centers at every institution of higher education in America,” […]
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Scarcely a month passes without encountering yet one more new faculty group dedicated to promoting intellectual diversity on campus, yet one more manifesto celebrating campus free speech, and yet one more account of a canceled professor successfully suing those who canceled him. Then, add accounts of red states banning “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) from […]
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With its closing of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) offices and mass dismissals of DEI bureaucrats, Texas brings down the curtain on one of the most shameful, expensive, and destructive higher education vanity projects of this century. This cancerous DEI bureaucracy was imposed on campuses nationwide by radicals who strong-armed cowardly administrations in the summer […]
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In 2021, Middlebury College in Vermont decided to rename a Christian chapel originally named after former Vermont Governor John Mead due to Mead’s historical advocacy for the eugenics movement. A family lawsuit led by the Estate’s Special Administrator, former Vermont Governor Jim Douglas, alleges that John Mead gifted the funds to construct the chapel specifically […]
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Stacy Hawkins, a former vice dean and law professor at Rutgers Law School, recently wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article’s subtitle reads, “If critics have a problem with the goal of diversity, they should say so”—I’ll come to the main title later. As one of these critics, I’ve been vocal […]
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As Lawrence E. Harrison shows, a nation is a state of mind, which means my parents had a transnational marriage. Mom and Dad were both children of Sicilian immigrants, but my dad was American while my mom was Sicilian. Sicilians distrust authorities. From Trump voters to Harvard leaders, my fellow Americans are becoming as Sicilian […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Cato Institute on April 24, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. Immediately after the Supreme Court overturned his last big student loan forgiveness plan, President Biden announced a new effort that would rely on a different law, an effort that is now nearing completion. The administration has released the draft regulations that would […]
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History shows that lofty ideals predicated upon political utopianism and social egalitarianism often generate feel-good, do-bad policies that lead to disastrous outcomes. As Thomas Sowell has sharply observed, “[i]f there is anything worse than unfairness, it is make-believe fairness.” The exhaustion of the #MeToo movement provides a case in point for the unintended consequences and […]
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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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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The American Postliberal on March 22, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. If you have ever been in a classroom where some sort of deadline is approaching, chances are that you have witnessed what I like to call a “half-hearted mini rebellion.” This is a situation in […]
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As a countermeasure to action civics, which aims to convert the “traditional subject of civics into a recruitment tool of the progressive left,” it is crucial for students to engage in civic behavior actively. This behavior, rooted in a nonpartisan American pluralism, accentuates the rights and duties of citizenship in various spheres-school, home, community, and […]
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As with negative rights, there’s a lot of confusion regarding natural law. People use the term without much explanation of what it means, and those of us who are not trained lawyers or legal historians don’t want to reveal our ignorance by asking for clarifications. This is my attempt as a non-specialist to explain what […]
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Years ago, after the Bush administration initiated the Deep State’s surveillance regime via the Patriot Act, I observed that the left and right in this country seemed to be competing to see who could censor the most speech. Since then, the left has forged far ahead in the censorship race, with the rise of cancel […]
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Closing “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) offices around the country is a powerful step in halting the illiberal and divisive harm-centric monoculture that has taken over higher education. However, there remain far too many student-facing administrative offices that seek the same goals. Whether in residential services or student life offices, administrators wield significant power and […]
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“For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.” —Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 1 All university-level students should read, study, and discuss The Federalist Papers (1787–88). This most sacred document of the American founding explains the logic […]
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Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from an article that was originally published by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on April 18, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. After the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, universities with close ties to Middle Eastern governments have faced heightened scrutiny. In February, Texas A&M University announced it would close its […]
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Many philosophers, social thinkers, legislators, and those delirious with power have proposed ways to fix the human condition. Societies themselves have often been organized, often by custom as well as laws, to shape the odd ways in which humans behave—odd ways that often emanate from a desire for individual freedom. Those fixes and organizational principles […]
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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 […]
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Calvin Coolidge said it best: “To live under the American Constitution is the greatest political privilege that was ever accorded to the human race.” Every American should know that wonderful truth. Learning it should be the keystone of social studies instruction in our schools. That’s why the Civics Alliance and Freedom in Education are publishing […]
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In most parts of the world, lawyers are formally trained in an undergraduate degree program. The Bachelor of Law (LL.B), is also an accelerated three-year curriculum. In the United States it takes over twice as long. First you need a 4-year undergraduate degree in any subject—a gratuitous requirement, as there is no such thing as […]
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Editor’s Note: The essay below is a revised and edited version specifically tailored for Minding the Campus. It has been updated from its original publication on The Berea Torch. At a liberal arts college dedicated to the unfettered pursuit of truth, it is “baffling” that tribalism and ambiguity accompanied by a lack of concern for […]
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Much has been made of recent decisions to re-require ACT or SAT scores in student applications to several elite Northeastern colleges. Start of a trend? Will more colleges now follow suit? Covid-19 accelerated an already-existing trend toward adoption of “test optional” admissions, whereby college aspirants could choose whether to include their ACT or SAT scores […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The College Fix on April 3, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. A relatively new report outlines how universities nationwide have signed over students’ private FERPA data to a third-party vendor that reviews their personal information to help study college students’ voting trends. The nine-page report describes how a national voting […]
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Once again, the Washington Post misses the mark when it associates “zombie” CVS of Washington, D.C., or America’s shoplifting pandemic with the decline of liberal democracy. Ironically, torchbearers of modern-day progressivism are willfully oblivious to the fact that their illiberal ideology, not liberal democracy itself, is at the root of many societal problems, including urban […]
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For years, I have been writing about the deficiencies of the federal student loan programs, but I thought diminishing returns were setting into my harangues—everything important had been said. But don’t underestimate the deleterious effects of disregarding the rule of law, the crassness of political ambitions, and the manifest stupidity of some of President Biden’s […]
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Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from an article that was originally published by City Journal on April 4, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. When people hear “lineman,” they think football. At least that’s the reaction Keith Henderson receives when he teaches Philadelphia schoolchildren about jobs in the skilled trades. Henderson, who leads […]
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Editor’s Note: David Randall’s Curriculum of Liberty illuminates the pressing demand for American higher education to equip students with essential knowledge, character, and tools needed to confront contemporary challenges, revitalize the American republic, and safeguard Western heritage alongside the principles of free inquiry. This essay draws inspiration from his groundbreaking work and marks the inaugural […]
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