Last week, the U.S. Department of Education announced new changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program. The changes make a bad program worse. PSLF was launched in 2007 and provides accelerated loan forgiveness for politically favored workers. Other college graduates with student loan debt need to make payments for at least 20 years […]
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The quest for knowledge at our universities has ended because knowledge is “settled”: science, philosophy, sociology, ethics, and politics are all settled. The time for questions is over; now is the time for action, for activism, for transforming society and culture. As John M. Ellis puts it in The Breakdown of Higher Education, “academia now […]
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Dear Outraged College Student: I just read your op-ed in the student newspaper. I can see from it that you are distressed. A speaker with whom you disagree has been invited to come give a talk at the school you attend. You feel it is an outrage against decency, justice, and diversity that this speaker […]
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Next to the Nobel Prizes, possibly the most prestigious and lucrative awards given to American academics are the annual so-called “genius” awards from the MacArthur Foundation. Last week, the foundation announced 25 awards, totaling well over $15 million. I found it curious that only three (12%) of those recognitions went to white or Asian males, […]
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Lambasted from the Left and the Right and misused by universities to circumvent prohibited racial preferences, America’s core values demand reassessment of socioeconomic affirmative action. The Statue of Liberty proclaims: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” A basic tenet of American exceptionalism is our upward mobility. Just about […]
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On a warm day in the early fall of 1966, a 17-year-old former high school student led a group of local Red Guards in a struggle session to publicly shame members of the “Five Black Categories (landlords, rich farmers, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and right-wingers)” in a small town near Shanghai. The teenager, who came from […]
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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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In our current political discourse, virtually any news story can instantly become a flash point for bitter partisan recriminations: COVID-related public health mandates, the January 6 mob actions at the Capitol, and now the Afghanistan pullout. Each of these cases have threatened the interests of the nation as a whole, and in other times, they […]
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Editor’s Note: This essay originally stated that the population of Guilford, Connecticut is “just over 77,000.” The population is, in fact, around 22,000. We have edited the piece accordingly. Like many readers of Minding the Campus, I am despondent over the corruption of K-12 education in America. It seems to have inherited all that is […]
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Cancel culture has harassed Harvard professor Steven Pinker on more than one occasion. Not long ago, the witch hunters demanded the removal of Pinker as a fellow from the Linguistic Society of America. What was his crime? Pinker had the nerve to point out that modern Western Civilization is not the bogeyman social justice warriors […]
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Details are starting to emerge about the Biden administration’s plans for free community college. According to a story in Inside Higher Ed by Alexis Gravely, the key details include: States that opt-in must set community college tuition and fees to $0 and must maintain current spending on community colleges. To offset the loss of tuition, […]
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One of the most alarming developments in the current COVID vaccine war appears in the form of a relatively harmless-looking September 16 press release from the University of California at Riverside (UCR). The press release begins, “The future of vaccines may look more like eating a salad than getting a shot in the arm. UC […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClearWire on September 17, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. Teachers looking for a history and civics curriculum that focuses on America’s promise of securing liberty for all have a new resource: the 1776 Unites curriculum. A creation of 1776 Unites, an initiative of the Woodson […]
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Kabul’s rapid collapse upon the withdrawal of U.S. troops teaches us at least two things about culture. Firstly, different cultures undergird vastly different forms of government. After 20 years of direct U.S. influence in regime-building, Afghanistan has failed to establish its own democratic government, largely due to illiberal political and civic cultural norms. The 20-year […]
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The cancellation of professors is overdetermined, that is, caused by multiple influences all contributing to the end result. Anne Applebaum reviews some prominent cancellations in her lengthy account in The Atlantic, entitled “The New Puritans.” Here are some of the contributing circumstances: One is that the targets tend to be successful, high-ranking, and often popular, […]
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The North Carolina General Assembly is considering a new bill (Senate Bill 729) which seeks to outlaw racial discrimination and racial preferences in public affairs. The bill’s language is identical to similar proposals in California, Washington, Michigan, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Arizona, Colorado, and Idaho, which states: The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Epoch Times on September 8, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. All “anti-racism” and “social justice” writings and campaigns are predicated on the claim that certain races and sexes are being treated unfairly. The only evidence presented to support this assertion is statistical disparities between different […]
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Editor’s Note: This open letter is republished with permission from its authors, Dr. Ronan Connolly, Dr. Willie Soon, and Dr. Michael Connolly, who with other authors recently published the article, “How much has the Sun influenced Northern Hemisphere temperature trends? An ongoing debate.” Their paper was picked up by several news outlets, including The Epoch […]
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A recent lawsuit illustrates yet again that the Biden administration makes false claims without evidence. On June 4, the Biden administration issued a notice calling for new federal policies about school discipline, in light of the fact that “students of color” are disciplined more often than “their White peers.” It cited a controversial report by […]
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A scorched-earth campaign by Woke “anti-racists” is laying waste to America’s education and future. Part II offers a sobering update on the rapid progress the Left has made, as well as some thoughts as to why this has happened. Far-Left progressives are rapidly eliminating all disparate racial outcomes, regardless of merit. At an accelerating pace, […]
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As a new academic year begins, one hero’s journey has ended. Recently as I checked my email, I was stunned and saddened to see that one of my longtime work colleagues had died in a tragic auto accident. I had worked with this person for the past twenty-three years, and while other colleagues and friends […]
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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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The L.A. Times’ Attack on a Volunteer County Board of Education A few weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times editorial board published a scathing editorial criticizing the Orange County Board of Education (OCBE), two weeks after its special board meeting on ethnic studies and critical race theory (CRT). The editorial accused the OCBE and its […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is a public comment sent by Professor David Richardson to the leadership of his community college system, the State Center Community College District in central California. It has been lightly edited for readability. Board of Trustees, College Presidents & Chancellor, Thank you for allowing me to offer a public comment on the […]
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A scorched-earth campaign by Woke “anti-racists” is laying waste to America’s education and future. Part I offers an overview of the philosophic underpinnings of a calamity in the making. America’s education system is at the edge of the abyss. Warning signs are flashing red. The sustained focus of Woke elites on purportedly “rooting out systemic […]
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The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was sued on Monday by the Bader Family Foundation, for illegally refusing to comply with the Freedom of Information Act. The Commission claimed that a FOIA request for the outgoing emails of two Commission officials over a six-month period was too non-specific to qualify as a FOIA request, because […]
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The way we teach history matters. If nothing else, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us that. Natural rights, it turns out, don’t always come naturally; when given the free choice, people will not always choose the same universal truths that we, as Americans, hold to be “self-evident.” Universal reason isn’t as universal […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Pipeline on August 17, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. A cosmic storm is roiling the Astrophysics community. Focused on the name of a NASA space telescope, the controversy is one more in a decade-long whirlwind of accusation that has made clear to straight white […]
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The Taliban has now captured Kabul, a huge setback for women in Afghanistan. For many reasons, one may criticize the U.S. mission in that country, but some facts are undeniable: during the occupation, life expectancy improved by six years, and women’s time in school increased by at least four years. The Taliban is assuring girls […]
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When the Woke Left destroys the dignity and futures of blacks, Latinos, and other marginalized minorities, they call it equity. But racism by any other name just plain stinks. In a year of Woke racist government actions targeting whites and Asians, one of the most unsettling acts of government bigotry instead targets the dignity and […]
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