Latest Articles

University Budget Cuts Were Overdue

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Reason on February 2, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. The bursting of the higher education bubble has finally struck its first blow, and it is a serious one. Several major public universities have announced multimillion dollar budget cuts in January, citing enrollment declines among other factors. Pennsylvania State University expects to cut […]

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The Chatbot as a Study Partner: Caveats for Guidance

Author’s Note: The cover image for this article was created using Text-to-Image artificial intelligence. The prompt was: “Capture the essence of an ethnically diverse student study group, males and females, wide-eyed and immersed in their bedroom, surrounded by books and study materials. The room should exude a sense of curiosity and innocence. A chatbot genie […]

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A Fumble for American Democracy

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Law & Liberty on February 9, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. Is the future of the National Football League’s Super Bowl linked with the future of American democracy? The Super Bowl may seem to some like an overly commercialized sports championship game, but it holds considerable cultural significance. […]

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Why FairAdmissions@MIT is Challenging MIT’s Illegal Sex Discrimination

One of the premier universities in America—the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—is engaging in blatant sex discrimination and few, if any, are paying attention. But the organization FairAdmissions@MIT is paying attention and we plan to hold MIT accountable for illegally violating Title IX’s prohibition of sex discrimination. When Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 […]

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Igniting an Appreciation for Abraham Lincoln in Children

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClear Wire on February 1, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. Historians and the general public regularly rank Abraham Lincoln as America’s greatest president. There is little doubt that he is widely admired for the work he did to end slavery and preserve the Union. But beyond […]

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Remembering Michael Schwartz

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by National Association of Scholars on February 9, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. We recently learned that Michael Schwartz passed away on January 2nd at age 86. Michael held the distinction of being the only member of the National Association of Scholars to have served as president of […]

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Worse than Plagiarism: False Firstness Claims and Dismissive Literature Reviews

Recent revelations of suspicious, unattributed text borrowings at academe’s pinnacle of prestige—the president’s office at Harvard University—once again draws attention to the pestilence of plagiarism. Plagiarism scandals among elites are nothing new, of course, and pop up frequently in the news both here and abroad, often with serious negative consequences for the accused.[1] Of course, […]

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Carroll and Borges: Two Perspectives on Individualism

Author’s Note: Dedicated to Alicia Cerezo “Rara temporum felicitas ubi sentire quae velis et quae sentias dicere licet.” —Tacitus, Historiae, 1.1 “I don’t like belonging to another person’s dream.” —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, VIII There is a quick and easy way, I say, to introduce young readers to the political allegory of Lewis Carroll’s […]

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Sports Madness Reveals Itself Again Very Soon

We are approaching the beginning of the two most important months in athletics in a sports-crazed nation. Between now, approaching February 11’s Super Bowl—where even speculation about the appearance of one of the player’s girlfriend is generating huge attention—in Las Vegas and April 8’s National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) Basketball Championship game in Phoenix, Americans […]

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Revisiting Eisenhower’s Instructions for Combatting Antisemitism

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Real Clear Wire on January 19, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. At the dawn of 2024, the United States is embroiled in a heated discussion over what constitutes antisemitism. In the wake of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks launched by Hamas against targets in Israel, and the […]

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College Cost Reduction Act Improves Financial Aid

The recently released College Cost Reduction Act (CCRA) improves the financial aid system. The determination of a student’s financial aid eligibility involves two key components: the Student Aid Index (SAI) and the Cost of Attendance (CoA). The SAI represents the government’s estimate of what a student—and their parents if the student is dependent—can afford to contribute […]

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Harvard’s Plagiarism Review Process is a Joke

Harvard recently submitted an obfuscated and unsigned summary of its plagiarism “review process” to Representative Virginia Foxx’s congressional committee, Committee for Education and the Workforce. The document is a mishmash of the terms: “investigation,” “inquiry,” and “assessment.” Harvard had previously circulated a draft of an interim policy on research misconduct. There is no indication of […]

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Reevaluating Racial Bias Allegations in Policing

Researchers conducted a meta-analysis of 51 studies published since 2005 from various academic databases looking at racial bias in criminal justice sentencing. They found that with the exception of a “very small” amount of racial bias for drug crimes, there was no statistically significant difference for all other crimes.  Why then, is it a common […]

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The Future of Twitter: Institutional Capture and Conservative Creativity

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Harvard Salient on April 29, 2023 and is crossposted here with permission. The modern conservative has lost control of most of the major institutions of American life. It was therefore no surprise that most were glad when Elon Musk purchased Twitter; it seemed like a step toward a recovery […]

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ACT Racially Biased? Not Really

I taught ACT classes to high school students for over a decade. To keep abreast of changes in the test, I took more than a dozen myself. So, I know the ACT better than most. I’ve also published several analyses of ACT results—here, here, and here—all of which convinced me of two facts: The test […]

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Put the Statues Back

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The American Mind on January 26, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. Radical ideologues are working to destroy Americans’ memory of our beloved past. They vilify and erase our forefathers in our children’s textbooks and jettison their names from public schools and national landmarks. And especially since 2020, they […]

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The Tyranny of Research

These days, politicians and political pundits of a particular orientation like to fancy themselves as the spokesmen of science and reason. Often, rudimentary data points on disparities in a number of socioeconomic and political outcomes based on aggregate group labels are upheld as the unquestionable science that proves systemic inequities of some sort, which then […]

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Israel is an Apartheid Country? No

What is apartheid? If we take this word literally, etymologically, the “apart” element indicates a separation, while the “theid” aspect refers to the practice of extrication of one set of people from another. There are separatist movements in Canada—some citizens of Quebec wish to go their separate ways from the rest of the country. Some […]

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Harvard Shouldn’t Just Blame Students for Free Speech Woes

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Harvard Salient on January 19, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. About a week ago, Harvard announced its “Intellectual Vitality and Free Expression Student Summit,” which was co-hosted by PEN America, a non-profit dedicated to free expression. “Our hope is that through participating in this event,” the […]

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Thank You, Hoover Institution

Higher education has become an identity-laden monoculture in desperate need of reform. Conservative-leaning students and faculty are a minority on campuses, and far too many self-censor out of fear of being canceled. More than half of faculty report that they fear losing their job over misunderstanding something they said or did. This is devastating. Diversity […]

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Privy Council Disses Franklin

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 second installment of the series. Find the first installment here.  In December, we celebrated the anniversary […]

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Thoughts on House Republicans’ Plan for Higher Education

Republicans on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce released the College Cost Reduction Act, which proposes a wide range of changes to higher education. Much is in the bill, but the most important changes revolve around transparency, financial aid reforms, deregulation, and accountability.   Transparency The bill would make several changes to improve […]

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Tea and Feathers

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 second installment of the series. Find the first installment here.  Last month, we celebrated the anniversary […]

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After Claudine: How to Repair American Higher Education

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by National Association of Scholars on January 24, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. In the aftermath of Claudine Gay’s defenestration as president of Harvard, many conservatives, libertarians, and un-woke liberals see an opportunity to rally public support for an operation to rescue higher education. The idea has caught […]

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How Civics Can Counter Antisemitism on Campus

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClearWire on January 22, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. The shocking scenes of college students, faculty, and staff defending Hamas’s October 7th massacre of Israeli civilians as a “legitimate act of resistance” have rightly been called antisemitism. Our father’s antisemitism was the centuries-old hatred of Jews just because […]

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The Decline in American Universities, 2011-2024

Like ancient Rome, American universities have not fallen or declined in a day—or even a year. But as good of a date as any to measure the beginning of the decline is 2011. Enrollments started falling that year and since then they have fallen by roughly 15 percent. The ratio of college students to the […]

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Unethical College Grade Inflation Hurts Students

It was a college campus right out of fiction, complete with the classical architecture of 19th-century buildings, quiet and leafy outdoor quads, and wood-paneled classrooms befitting a small, private, liberal arts college. Speaking as a then-professor of political science, the students were incredible, except for those who never turned in their work during the semester. […]

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An Honest Diversity Statement

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Law & Liberty on January 18, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. For a number of years now pleasant young women (or persons identifying as women, or with female-sounding names) have been contacting me from the university’s diversity office, inviting me to attend sessions to discuss our DEI policies. […]

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The Irrelevance of Proportionality

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Quadrant on November 20, 2023 and is crossposted here with permission. “Everywhere we see true culture vanishing, and what is replacing it is barbaric”  — Romano. Guardini, 1924 Voted into power by the Palestinian people of Gaza during 2006, and with extensive support in the West Bank (Samaria and […]

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DEI: Distraction, Evasion, and Incompetence at the University of Illinois Springfield

If there’s one thing to thank “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) experts for, it’s their knack for revealing the stunning hypocrisy behind universities’ DEI initiatives. Case in point: Maria Thompson and Susan C. Turell’s 2022 DEI audit of the University of Illinois Springfield (UIS), laying bare the university’s failure to adequately address a rape case […]

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