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 on Minding the Campus’s homepage. Simply go to the right side of the page, look for “SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, ‘TOP OF MIND,’” and […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the National Assocation of Scholars on October 1, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. Shadows of Influence: Uncovering Hidden Foreign Funds to American Universities, the latest report by the National Association of Scholars (NAS), written by Neetu Arnold, unearths some staggering truths about unreported foreign gifts to American colleges […]
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In the summer of 2023, the University System of Georgia (USG), led by Chancellor Sonny Perdue, announced a new directive: all institutions must remove “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) statements from hiring documents. During an August meeting at Kennesaw State University’s (KSU) Coles College of Business, Dean Robin Cheramie relayed this change, sparking a moment […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the College Fix on September 27, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. Students hoping to hear from a Republican professor in the philosophy, classics, and history department are likely going to be disappointed at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. That is because there does not appear to […]
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First-generation students and those facing housing insecurity face unique challenges entering their first year of college beyond getting accepted. Once admitted, they must navigate the various administrative offices and processes. Additionally, there’s a critical gap in support during the summer transition period before students begin college. More programs are also needed to help students stay enrolled and […]
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With October 7 approaching, campus protests against Israel cannot be too far behind. We’ve already seen a few. For example, “Protesters return to Columbia University as the fall semester begins.” Emerson College in Boston was the starting point for a pro-Palestinian march throughout the streets of that city. Students for Justice in Palestine organized a […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by PJ Media on September 17, 2024, and is cross-posted here with permission. Canada is officially a multicultural society, thanks to Trudeau pere et fils. According to PM Justin Trudeau, Canada has no cultural core, and is a post-national society. This framing ignores the relevant evidence: Canada has two official languages, […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the College Fix on October 1, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. There are zero identifiable Republican professors in at least seven of the humanities majors at North Carolina State University, a College Fix analysis found. The Fix found 158 Democrats and 8 Republicans teaching in the 10 humanities majors reviewed. The […]
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Online learning has become a normal part of the undergraduate experience, with more than half of all students taking at least one online course in fall 2022. And an increasing proportion of colleges are using online program managers (OPMs)—third-party servicers—to provide their courses to students. OPMs typically put up their own money to build and […]
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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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This past year, I have seen headlines flash across the start page of my Microsoft browser’s newsfeed that featured articles about the supposed chemical origin of life. Was it the result of aliens seeding our planet billions of years ago—a theory called Panspermia? Or an asteroid bombardment with trace amino acids and nucleic acids, the […]
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New York subway scene. Two women. The one with Swedish braids and wearing an army jacket is cradling an umbrella and two flags. One looks like the flag of Yemen, and the other is probably Palestinian. The other woman rests three printed yellow and black poster signs on the floor. One reads “Stand with Palestine. […]
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College Presidents for Civic Preparedness, an organization intended to help their schools become “beacons of free inquiry and civil discourse,” recently announced that it has expanded to 100 members, all of whom have “pledged to champion critical inquiry, free expression, and civil discourse on their campuses.” With this announcement, the organization released an “inaugural progress […]
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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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Many students who planned on using federal student aid like Pell Grants and student loans to attend college this year faced an unexpected obstacle: the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). The FAFSA had long been criticized for being too long and complicated, so in December 2020, Congress passed the FAFSA Simplification Act. The […]
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The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) recently published a brief, useful, and competent artificial intelligence (AI) guide for university administrators, “Adapting to AI: How to understand, prepare for, and innovate in a changing landscape.” The author is Taylor Swaak, a reporter for CHE. Swaak has done her homework for this Guide, living up to her […]
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An extraordinary scholar and polymath, Amy Wax, has been formally sanctioned by the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), although not fired, as many of her detractors attempted to do. Professor Wax has earned degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and Columbia, including an M.D. in neurology, in addition to her law degree. She has argued 15 cases […]
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How is this year’s election going to affect American higher education? I am an economist, and our tribe is somewhere between mediocre to awful at forecasting, but since I am tenured, retired, and unpaid by Minding the Campus, there are utterly no adverse consequences from making a fool of myself with this current assessment. American […]
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Since March 2020, at least 64 colleges—mostly small, private liberal arts schools—have either closed or announced they will be closing, affecting almost 46,000 students. This follows a decade that saw nearly 900 colleges shut their doors. Most of those, however, were for-profit institutions, as the Obama Administration cracked down on such schools for allegedly bilking their students, not […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The College Fix on September 16, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. A conservative Michigan State University professor who wrote a chapter in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has received threats for his involvement in the controversial political policy paper. MSU law Professor Adam Candeub told the Detroit News he has been sent […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is a short excerpt from an article originally published on the Substack Heterodox Stem on September 1, 2024. With edits to fit MTC’s style, it is crossposted here with permission. Is the tide turning against the woke mind-virus? There are hopeful signs for sure, as universities and companies are beginning to eliminate mandatory diversity statements, or are gutting […]
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Recently, Federal Judge Mark C. Scarsi ruled that a leading university (UCLA) acted illegally when it worked with pro-Hamas protesters to deny Jewish students access to portions of campus, including a library. Putting this in perspective, Scarsi wrote that “in the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, Jewish […]
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MREs (Meals Ready-to-Eat), BDUs (Battle Dress Uniforms), and TDYs (Temporary Duty): Three-letter acronyms (TLAs) describe routine aspects of military life. These catchy labels can also reference broad epistemological contexts. They are quick and convenient, allowing users to purport to understand more than they actually do. Unfortunately, they are often misunderstood and obscure more than they […]
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Are we more committed to uncovering objective truths in science, or have we become too afraid to rock the boat in fear of backlash? As a social species, when we come together in groups, we create cultures of norms, including taboos, which can incur steep penalties if broken. This part of human tribalism can magnify some […]
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Last month, California assemblyman James C. Ramos started a state legislative meeting with a prayer; it was appropriate for a meeting that would end with the funeral of anthropology in California. The California legislators met with tribal leaders and California State University (CSU) and University of California (UC) officials to review the progress California’s public universities are […]
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“Political parties live in a house of power. They are organizations for social fighting. The contents of a definite moral choice are never selected. The only criterion is the ubiquitous use of a method.” C. Wright Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America. Training for irregular political operations and lawfare originates from an […]
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The Instituto Cervantes reported in 2015 that about 51 million native speakers of Spanish lived in the United States. Such statistics are always suspect. Some estimates put the current number at 57 million. Then, there are about 11 million Spanish-speaking students with varying abilities. Given the open-border policy of the Biden Administration, we can probably […]
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Author’s Note: Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that the following misfortune for Georgia taxpayers could not have happened to a more deserving group of faculty members. Furthermore, in fact-spilling for the taxpaying public, this exercise is my responsibility alone, and my colleagues are not involved; I speak only for myself. Kennesaw State […]
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There are a host of shady dealings between President Joe Biden and foreign interests—at least according to a 300-page impeachment report released by the House Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means Committees on August 19. These committees allege that Biden committed “impeachable offenses” by using his public positions to obtain financial benefits from foreign sources. While Biden’s […]
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The Biden-Harris administration’s pursuit of student loan forgiveness has moved from persistent to relentless and can now only be described as reckless. To briefly recap, the administration announced its first plan back in 2022, which the Supreme Court ruled was illegal in 2023. Their second plan, a loan forgiveness scheme disguised as a loan repayment […]
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