David Randall is Director of Research at the National Association of Scholars.
In 2023, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) canceled an accepted session from their annual conference: “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology.” AAA’s decision, phrased in today’s academic jargon, was explicitly political. AAA President Ramona Pérez, writing jointly with President Monica Heller of the Canadian Anthropological Society, […]
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On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry gave his “Give me liberty or give me death” speech at the Second Virginia Convention, in favor of a resolution that Virginia form a militia to oppose King George’s tyranny. Moderates at the convention were somewhat reluctant to go on record saying explicitly that George was a tyrant who must […]
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On March 22, 1775, Edmund Burke delivered one of his great Parliamentary orations on Conciliation with America. Britain and America were rushing to war, and Burke pulled out the stops to make an extraordinary peroration for peace. Britain’s current policy was worse than unjust—it was doomed to fail. Peace must be achieved, argued Burke, by […]
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The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal has just released Blueprint for Reform: Teacher Preparation, a thoughtful overview of the state of teacher preparation, with succinct, useful recommendations for policymakers who wish to improve education policy so as to get better-prepared teachers into the classroom. It’s very much worth reading—and I’d say so even […]
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A friend of mine is a professor on the front lines of the artificial intelligence (AI) cheating revolution, both in his classroom and as part of the college committee that judges academic misconduct. He’s discovered that a collective approach to detecting AI cheating may be more effective than an individual one. But adopting a collective […]
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I’ve written earlier about the recent William & Mary Quarterly Forum, whose contributors proposed getting rid of the term “early America”—not least out of a desire to stop teaching American history. Everything I wrote then is true enough, but it was written in a more polemical mode. I want to return to the subject to […]
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Newly confirmed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has just sent an initial email to the staff at the Education Department (ED): Our job is to respect the will of the American people and the President they elected, who has tasked us with accomplishing the elimination of bureaucratic bloat here at the Department of Education—a momentous […]
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On February 9, 1775, the Parliament of Great Britain declared Massachusetts in a state of rebellion. With cause: Massachusetts’ Provincial Congress had met without royal leave and was organizing and training a military force. Massachusetts’ disobedience could no longer be ignored. Now, Britain would arm itself for war. Orders sailed to Governor Thomas Gage in […]
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America survived those crucial months because we had self-government as well as liberty. The Second Massachusetts Provincial Congress assembled on February 1, 1775. The Second Congress would select Samuel Adams, John Adams, John Hancock, Thomas Cushing, and Robert Treat Paine to serve as delegates to the Continental Congress. It authorized a Committee of Safety—among other […]
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Editor’s Note: The following piece builds on the reflections of civilizational decline outlined in Peter Wood’s “Death Wish,” in which he argues that Western civilization is in decline, primarily due to internal cultural decay. Various signs of this decay include moral confusion, widespread violence, lawlessness, and the erosion of traditional values. According to Wood, the […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClear Education on January 27, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. America needs new science standards. That’s why the National Association of Scholars and Freedom in Education published The Franklin Standards: Model K-12 State Science Standards. These standards are […]
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Francis Salvador, who emigrated from England to South Carolina in 1773, was the first Jew to be elected to a South Carolina legislative assembly—in 1774 and 1775, his neighbors voted him into South Carolina’s First and Second Provincial Congresses, with happy disregard for the statutes that gave Jews no right to vote or hold office. […]
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In New Hampshire, they call it “the shot not heard round the world.” On December 14, 1774, local patriots captured Fort McHenry in Portsmouth harbor. It’s probably—definitions and claims vary—the first open act of violent rebellion during the American Revolution. Patriots had been increasingly worried about control of scarce guns and powder since October when […]
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In 2015, when Kamala Harris was California’s Attorney General, she imposed implicit bias training on California law enforcement personnel. In 2020, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz signed into law a bill imposing implicit bias training on Minnesota police. In 2016, even Senator J. D. Vance wrote far too credulously of implicit bias theory: “The data consistently […]
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On December 10, 1774, the First Massachusetts Provincial Congress adjourned. They had been in session since October 7. They were America’s first revolutionary legislature, and they handled their business quite well. You can read all about it in their Journals. It’s an old nostrum that America was able to achieve independence so easily because they’d […]
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Thomas Paine arrived in America on November 30, 1774. He had to be carried ashore in Philadelphia half-dead from a shipboard fever. He left behind in England a life of poverty and failure, and he came to America with anger and resentment at the good and great who lived so well when he lived so […]
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The trouble really begins when the fishermen and the fox hunters prepare to fight. The First Continental Congress had already met but hadn’t called for armed resistance. After all, they were still petitioning the king to withdraw the Intolerable Acts and were only calling for a boycott of British goods. But plenty of Americans had […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClear Science on November 4, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. The latest research fraud scandal concerns one Eliezer Masliah. He’s one of the world’s leading researchers into Alzheimer’s and it looks as if he fabricated a good deal of his data. […]
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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 Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress was adopted on October 14, 1774. It’s important for all sorts of good reasons. The representatives of the colonies—except distant Georgia—came together for the first time to endorse a joint action. They invoked natural law to justify their rights as well as their rights as Englishmen—“the […]
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Another day, another science scandal. Recently, we learned that leading Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease researcher Eliezer Masliah is seriously suspected of research misconduct. A Science investigation has now found that scores of Masliah’s] lab studies at UCSD and NIA are riddled with apparently falsified Western blots—images used to show the presence of proteins—and micrographs of brain […]
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A prime piece of scientific research intended to ameliorate the irreproducibility crisis has itself been withdrawn for failing to adhere to proper reproducibility standards. One of the prime directives of reproducibility reformers is to preregister your research—say in advance what you intend to do and how you will do it—so we know you didn’t repurpose […]
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Between August 25 and August 27, 1774, the First North Carolina Provincial Congress met in New Bern, North Carolina. There they passed resolutions that they would not import any goods from Britain, including slaves, until the Intolerable Acts were rescinded. They also selected delegates for the First Continental Congress, which would meet the next month. […]
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In the first days of August 1774, the Association of the Virginia Convention met and promulgated a series of resolutions that would guide its delegates to the First Continental Congress. These endorsed the policy of embargo with Britain—including slaves—until the Intolerable Acts were rescinded. The resolutions also endorsed in advance actions that would be taken […]
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Thomas Jefferson wrote A Summary View of the Rights of British America in 1774, basically the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. That’s how he got to the drafting Committee of Five for the Declaration in 1776. Fine job you did in 1774, Thomas; why don’t you write another version now? Back in 1774, […]
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Virginians made the rejection of the Intolerable Acts revolutionary. The Intolerable Acts were outrageous abrogations of American liberty. Massachusetts was their primary target, but sympathy began to spread beyond its borders. The Orangetown Resolutions showed how small-town New Yorkers could commit themselves to solidarnosc with Boston. But the most important acceders were the Virginians. Virginia […]
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It was an immortal day dedicated to liberty. Stalwart patriots met on July 4, 1774. 1774? Yes. Two years before we declared our independence, the residents of Orangetown, New York subscribed to the Orangetown Resolutions. The Resolutions stated, in part: 1st, That we are and ever wish to be, true and loyal subjects to his […]
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Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts, George III gave them his royal assent, and, at once, America rose in unanimous rebellion. No, of course not. American patriots were outraged. But in 1774, they weren’t yet at the point of armed rebellion. The radicals of Massachusetts, Samuel Adams and the Boston Committee of Correspondence, proposed instead a […]
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On June 22, 1774, the Quebec Act received royal assent. This, the climax of the Intolerable Acts, not only provided for greater accommodation of Catholicism and French law in Britain’s recently conquered colony of Quebec but also expanded its borders—to include virtually all of the trans-Appalachian West down to the Ohio River. It cut the possibility […]
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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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