In a recent article for the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), Samuel G. Freedman, a respected journalist and professor at Columbia University, turned his attention to Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation. Ostensibly a critique of Roberts, “The Inconvenient Scholarship of Kevin Roberts” inadvertently reveals more insight into the author’s perspective than that […]
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Shifting student loans from the current government-as-lender model to the private market would be beneficial. As I recently reported, this shift would reduce malinvestment—educational spending that doesn’t justify its costs—while increasing accountability for colleges, improving incentives for both students and institutions, and fostering more informed decision-making through price differences. But privatization is a broad bucket. […]
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The Department of Education (ED) is a bloated bureaucracy feeding off taxpayer dollars and far removed from understanding school districts’ needs. A new report, Waste Land: The Department’s Profligacy, Mediocrity, and Radicalism, lays out exactly where the Trump administration should cut, reallocate, or eliminate wasteful programs. One case study in the report proves what conservatives […]
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Texas universities, similar to Iowa’s Public Schools, maintain affirmative action plans, likely in noncompliance with state legislation, recent executive orders, and the Department of Education’s (ED) latest Dear Colleague letter. Passed in late 2023, Texas’s Senate Bill 17 specifically banned “policies or procedures designed or implemented in reference to race, color, or ethnicity.” Affirmative action plans directly contradict this, mandating race-based “strategies” […]
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In graduate school, up-and-coming academics can dream about conducting interviews and focus groups in a foreign language in some hot and far-away locale. It does not always work out this way. You go where the information can be found. In confronting the elemental challenge of integrating classical education with artificial intelligence (AI), I decided to […]
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Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on March 17, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. Many of America’s large corporations are beating a retreat from their former commitments to saving the planet from catastrophic climate change. They are also […]
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There’s been a lot of chatter around recent cuts to the Department of Education (ED) since President Trump announced a 50 percent reduction in the ED’s task force. On the left, teachers and administrators worry that a dip in funding will disproportionately affect low-income and disabled students, citing an unclear future when it comes to […]
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Tufts University in the Boston, Massachusetts metro area ranks 37th on the U.S. News and World Report and boasts an endowment exceeding $2 billion. Between 2019-2023, the American public funded Tufts research to the tune of $230 million per year, primarily through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the U.S. Agency for […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by City Journal on February 26, 2025. With edits to match MTC’s style guidelines, it is cross-posted here with permission. At American colleges and universities, radicals are harassing the few remaining dissenters into retirement. The most notable case is that of Amy Wax, professor of law at the University […]
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Editor’s Note: The events discussed took place in Toronto, Canada, and therefore, this essay has been added to our Minding the World column. For more op-eds, analysis, and essays on higher education worldwide, visit the column. Over two thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle wrote that the nature of a governing body […]
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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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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 directly by entering your name and email under “SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, ‘TOP OF MIND,’” located on the right-hand side of the […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on May 15, 2024. It was translated into English from French by the Observatory before being edited to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission. The three missions of academics are currently teaching, research, and community […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the College Fix on March 12, 2025. With edits to match MTC’s style guidelines, it is cross-posted here with permission. A Planned Parenthood executive is researching “power and oppression” and “reproductive health services” with the help of nearly half a million in taxpayer funds. The study, “Enhancing Policy Impact for […]
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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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In the lengthening shadows of late summer 2024, as yet another academic year loomed on the horizon, an inescapable realization struck me: The moment had arrived to bid farewell to the groves of academe. The decision to leave behind my university career after nearly a decade in administration and considerably longer in teaching emerged not […]
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The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a classic 1948 Western directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart as Fred Dobbs, one of three desperate men hoping to strike it rich digging for gold in the mountains of Western Mexico. They indeed find gold but at high price. Murder, madness, and banditry ensue. Ultimately […]
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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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Progressive bureaucrats, student activism, eager donors, peer pressure: higher education institutions have an array of internal and external drives for promoting race, gender, and other leftist ideologies, but a powerful factor lies with mandates from accreditors to comply with diversity standards for institutional culture, staff and faculty hiring, student outcomes, and other relevant areas. In […]
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Editor’s Note: This article originally stated that the NSF-funded math postdoc was at Texas Southern University. It has been corrected to reflect that the position is at Texas State University. Despite having one of the most stringent anti-DEI legislations in the country, Texas universities still host an array of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs […]
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The Heterodox Academy found that in 2024, more than 100 colleges and universities across North America adopted institutional neutrality policies. Taking a cue from the 1967 University of Chicago Kalven Report, which argued that the university must remain neutral to be a home to a wide diversity of views, impartiality protects open inquiry and academic freedom […]
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Tenure has long been a target of conservative higher education reformers. Why should the Marxist professors brainwashing our children enjoy employment for life? Abolish tenure, and we can show them the door. Or so the argument goes. Yes, there are a fair number of left-wing nutjobs in the academy, bent on indoctrinating rather than teaching—but not nearly as many as conservative pundits and legislators seem to think. As my […]
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President Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear he wants to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education (ED), and some news reports suggest an executive order to achieve that is imminent. Since the ED was created by Congress, it would take formal Congressional action to eliminate it, and the administration lacks the votes. Therefore, whether […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on September 2, 2024. It was translated from French into English by the Observatory and subsequently edited to conform to Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission. Ms. Réjane Sénac holds a doctorate in political science from the […]
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In the darkness of 2020, the memory that comes up the most was supervising the case of a severely ill young woman who went by the “they/them” pronouns. Understanding the illness and formulating a coherent treatment plan—and, in the process, helping the counselor-in-training to develop clinical thinking—was blocked by the rage of students whose reaction […]
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Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools like Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, et cetera will radically change student assignments and evaluation in college classes. I have already explained how AI means that students can no longer be forced to do the reading. How will college professors change in response? Consider some likely approaches. They can ignore AI because […]
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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 directly by entering your name and email under “SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, ‘TOP OF MIND,’” located on the right-hand side of the […]
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Two of America’s prestigious private universities, Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis, recently did something extraordinary: they jointly bought a full paid ad in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Higher Education is at a Crossroads” that asserted: Ideological forces in and outside of campuses have pulled too many universities away from the core purpose, […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the College Fix on March 3 2025. With edits to match MTC’s style guidelines, it is cross-posted here with permission. About one in nine Christian colleges have some form of connection with Planned Parenthood, a recent investigation by the Pro-Life Generation’s Demetree Institute for Pro-Life Advancement found. The institute, an […]
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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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