Keith Whitaker, Ph.D., is a Founding Associate at Wise Counsel Research Associates. He also serves as Chair of the Board of the National Association of Scholars.
There’s something central to every political community about death. As a result, you must deal with death if you’re going to lead. At the extreme, you have to order other people to shed their blood—and perhaps the blood of still others—for the city or country’s sake. Such was the perspective that Pericles brought to the […]
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As a country, in celebrating resistance, we have lost sight of the important difference between resistance and resolution. For example, even before Donald J. Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017, plans were afoot to thwart his agenda. Those plans coalesced under the hashtag #Resistance, and included marches, demonstrations, plots for electors to ignore state election […]
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For months, the Massachusetts Governor’s allies plotted to strip citizens of their arms. Legislators said they sought only to enhance public safety. But they labored as far from the public eye as possible. Then revealing, “debating,” and passing their legislation in the space of one day, they hurried it to the Governor for signature. The […]
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The nation’s 250 Anniversary is only 29 months away. The National Association of Scholars is commemorating the events that led up to the Second Continental Congress officially adopting the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. This is the third installment of the series. Find the second installment here. Because he has sought to “destroy the […]
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“What can liberal education mean here and now?” asked Leo Strauss in an address he gave in 1959. Three years later he asked, “What then are the prospects for liberal education within mass democracy?” Timothy Burns, professor of political science at Baylor University—and National Association of Scholars member—recently returned to Strauss’s questions in his searching […]
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This past weekend the University of Austin (UATX) held its second “First Principles Summit.” This Summit brought together professors, administrators, public intellectuals, and business-people. (I was also invited.) The purpose of the gathering was, as UATX President Pano Kanelos explained, to hold UATX’s founders accountable to their first principles. Founding is not for the faint-hearted. […]
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As readers of Minding the Campus are no doubt aware, the Supreme Court recently issued a decision regarding a fundamental right named in the Constitution. Not Dobbs, which expunges a would-be right lurking in certain penumbras, but Bruen, which invalidates state laws that unduly restrict citizens’ Second Amendment right to bear arms. Bruen overturned a […]
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How much would you pay for a brigantine beached and abandoned on Midway Atoll in the South Pacific? That’s the question faced by the main character of Robert Louis Stevenson and his step-son Lloyd Osbourne’s novel, The Wrecker (1892). The enterprising young man, Loudon Dodd, bids $50,000—something like $2,000,000 in today’s inflated dollars. Loudon’s reckless […]
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On April 9-11 the Center for Political and Economic Thought (CPET) at St. Vincent College held a conference on “Panic, Policy, and Politics.” I was an invited speaker. When I first read the proposed schedule, I saw that nearly half the presentations focused on the panicked response to COVID. That made sense, and was a […]
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Numbers are in the air we breathe, even thicker than the Omicron variant it seems. Though it’s become passé to mention the COVID case count (53,000 last week, for anyone who’s still interested), one can instead cite 1.4 million (Ukrainian refugees), over 14 million (illegal aliens residing in the United States), 7.5% (US annual inflation), […]
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The National Association of Scholars recently appointed Dr. J. Scott Turner as Director of our Diversity in the Sciences project. Dr. Turner is a retired professor of biology at the State University of New York, though he continues his research on ecology, evolution, and (in particular) termite colonies in Namibia. He is well-positioned to help […]
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New Year’s is a time when many people, enchanted by the vision of a fresh start, think about time. For those of us habituated to the academic calendar, it can feel more like the hump of the year. I was reminded of its charm, though, in a call last week with a client. He was […]
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As we live through our current “Woke” Revolution, it is helpful to reflect on what we can learn from past revolutions and revolutionaries. Long before he was a Founding Father, Ben Franklin was one of the most successful “influencers” (as we’d say now) in the American colonies. His Poor Richard’s Almanack was a multi-decade bestseller. […]
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My first office was my best, and it’s been downhill since. I was a junior in college, 20 years old. I worked a few hours each week as a special assistant to the special assistant to my university’s president. About as low on the totem-pole as one could get, yet I had a corner office, […]
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Oh, for boyhood’s time of June, Crowding years in one brief moon, When all the things I heard or saw Me, their master, waited for … Mine, the sand-rimmed pickerel pond, Mine, the walnut slopes beyond, Mine, on bending orchard trees, Apples of Hesperides! John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Barefoot Boy” is one of […]
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The modern West is unique in being grounded not in a specific land or property, but in a theory of property. A couple, actually. What used to be well-known as the Classical Liberal theory of property—stretching back to Locke and Hobbes—holds that property is the first line of defense of the individual against a potentially […]
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John Silber was not a humble man. In 1996, when he moved up from the presidency of Boston University to the chancellorship, he likened his successor to Joshua and himself to Moses, the only man, according to the Hebrew Bible, who saw God face to face. Today it’s hard to image a college or university […]
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