Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by American Thinker on November 27, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. Climate change prophecy hangs its hat on computer climate models. The models have gigantic problems. According to Kevin Trenberth, once in charge of modeling at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, “[None of the] models correspond even […]
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Duke’s student government shuts down a new pro-Israel group for defending the Jewish state from lies As if further evidence were needed for the First-Amendment hypocrisy on college campuses, the recent action by the Duke Student Government (DSG) to withhold recognition from a new pro-Israel student group seems to confirm that academic free speech is […]
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The airwaves have combusted. Parents confront school boards. Across the country, state and government agencies are moving in opposite directions: some release the genie of racial equity and Critical Race Theory (CRT) while others try to corral it and squeeze it back into the bottle. In California, CRT, either explicitly or implicitly through its aligned […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is a letter to the editor of Duke Today, written by an anonymous professor in response to Duke University President Vincent Price’s November 18 article, “President Price Update on Campus Climate Survey.” Good to see that something is finally being done about the appalling racial climate that exists on the Duke campus. […]
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I’m a professor of engineering at a large progressive university. I’ve written and just released a short book with James Lindsay called Counter Wokecraft: A Field Manual for Combatting the Woke in the University and Beyond. I’ve written it to help academics who believe in traditional liberal values to counter and overturn the Woke juggernaut […]
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When you are looking for a scientist, an engineer, a designer, or an artist, if the most brilliant, accomplished, and talented candidate is a white male, reject him! White males are not “diverse,” are “privileged oppressors,” and “overrepresented,” so instead hire a member of a “marginalized. underserved minority,” such as a person of color, a […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Nathan A. Schachtman on November 17, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. “You are more than entitled not to know what the word ‘performative’ means. It is a new word and an ugly word, and perhaps it does not mean anything very much. But at any rate […]
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Does Harvard need an ethnic studies department? That question has fueled debates at the university for several decades. Academics made the first call for such a department in 1972. In recent years, pressures have mounted. The Harvard ethnic studies campaign may now be approaching resolution. As it does so, a key question remains as to […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClearWire on November 16, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. Christopher Flannery insists that a civic rebirth depends “on the great truths of the Western heritage” and “the liberating principles of the American Revolution and Founding ” – the foundational truths that Abraham Lincoln called the “principles […]
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At the height of globalization in the 1990s and early 2000s, many political economists—including Susan Strange, Philip G. Cerny, and Nita Rudra—argued that forces of economic and cultural neoliberalism were steadily eroding traditional nation-states and welfare societies. In developed countries, backlash against globalism often manifested as labor protectionism, trade barriers, and nationalism. Meanwhile, in developing […]
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For me and other alumni of the University of Texas, it has become less and less surprising how deeply the gospel of wokeness has permeated and corrupted the institution. Whether it is the dean of UT Law preemptively surrendering to the wokesters and neutering the newly endowed First Amendment Center before it even opened, or […]
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Academics and activists (if there is any difference between them today) claim that racism is a unidirectional relationship through which whites oppress blacks. For example, the leftist Anti-Defamation League defines racism as “A combination of systems, institutions and factors that advantage white people and for people of color, cause widespread harm and disadvantages in access […]
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California has become the first state to require ethnic studies for high school graduates. Assembly Bill 101 (an appropriately Orwellian number!), signed by Governor Gavin Newsom on October 8, will indoctrinate students through the use of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a Marxist-inspired ideology that, if left unchecked, will form the foundation for the restructuring of […]
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In a recent video, filmmaker Ami Horowitz asks students at the University of California, Berkeley to pledge money to the Taliban so that it can mount terrorist attacks inside the United States. The students happily pledge their money to enable that. They belong to a woke, self-hating academic culture that is reshaping our society. “We’re […]
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To ban or to disclose, that is the question. A largely partisan imbroglio has been quietly simmering about the billions of dollars of foreign funds received by American universities. The dispute generally pits conservatives who are concerned about the effects of foreign funding against the elites who often embrace the communist and Jihadist-supporting countries that […]
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As Minding the Campus readers are all too aware, these are dark times in higher education. Political correctness and an enforced far-left ideology (complete with loyalty oaths, departmental diversity commissars, Red Guard-style cancel culture mobs, and cowardly administrators and regents) have created an environment where intellectual rigor and academic freedom are dismissed as the products […]
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As free speech increasingly disappears from today’s campus, the seemingly good news is that groups defending the First Amendment are multiplying. The most recent are the Alumni Free Speech Alliance and the faculty-based Academic Freedom Alliance, whose members span the political spectrum. Also of recent vintage is Heterodoxy Academy, a group of 5000+ educators committed to […]
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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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From Greta Thunberg to Black Lives Matter, activists are fond of pointing out society’s imperfections, but are completely clueless when it comes to proposing alternatives. Meritocracy—and related concepts, such as IQ—is a case in point. When Michael Young coined the term in his famous 1958 book The Rise of Meritocracy, many people shunned the idea […]
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The federal indictments against former University of Southern California Dean Marilyn Flynn and Los Angeles City Councilmember Mark Ridley-Thomas so closely parallel those generated by the Varsity Blues case that it is easy to overlook important differences. In the Varsity Blues case, parents paid Rick Singer to bribe senior athletics officials at several leading universities […]
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In the past decade, schools ranging from Yale University, to Middlebury College, to my own Sarah Lawrence College, have made national news over how they have handled issues of free speech and cancel culture. In reaction, many studies and reports have examined institutional initiatives and the free speech environments surrounding protests and viewpoint diversity. But […]
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Over 6,000 non-tenured University of California (UC) lecturers are threatening to go on strike again. This follows an October 12th collective bargaining offer from UC, which the lecturers criticize as insufficient to satisfy their demands for better pay and job security. Adjunct faculty from UC San Diego and UC Santa Cruz claim that the 4.3% […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClearWire on October 28, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. Professors Benjamin and Jenna Storey have a motto: “Education must begin from where the students are.” Today, they note, “an increasing number of bright, politically interested young people prefer Karl Marx, Carl Schmitt, and Malcolm X to the ‘Federalist Papers,’ John Stuart Mill, […]
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The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has released 280 records in response to a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. But it continues to withhold 3,862 more records, as it explained in an October 25 letter releasing the 280 records. The records are emails from the Commission’s former Chair, Catherine Lhamon, who now heads […]
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With campus cancel culture now so commonplace and brazen that even leftist publications like The Atlantic are sounding the alarm, we are now inaugurating a new MTC award: The Minding the Campus Trofim Lysenko Award for the Suppression of Academic Speech (a Lysenko Award, for short). Who was Trofim Lysenko? The son of Ukrainian peasant farmers and illiterate until […]
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Colleges are increasingly demanding that students disclose details of their private lives in Title IX training. For example, Campus Reform reported that a “mandatory online course at the University of Southern California (USC) asks students to disclose the number of sexual encounters they have had over the past three months” as part of its “Title […]
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Richard Feynman remarked “for Nature cannot be fooled,” hearkening back to Isaac Newton—a reminder that Nature’s laws are indifferent to what humans think or wish those laws might be. The same goes for biology, which we ignore at our peril. Sex genes appeared some 180 million years ago in mammals. Not only do they make […]
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I borrowed over $30,000 for college, and after many years of repayment, I am now officially (student loan) debt-free. By a bizarre twist of fate, much of my professional life has been devoted to studying financial aid programs like student loans. In this essay, I reflect back on how my student loan experience compares to […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClearEducation on October 15, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. Many Americans today assume that the threat of Communism subsided with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But “We continue to see Communist and socialist regimes pop up and spread not only in Latin […]
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“Antiracism” guru Dr. Ibram X. Kendi strikes again. In an emotionally taxing column published by The Atlantic, a melodramatic Kendi laments the alleged misappropriation and distortions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the hands of conservatives opposed to critical race theory (CRT). Kendi disparages “Reagan Republicans then and Trump Republicans today” as King’s “modern-day […]
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