Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts, George III gave them his royal assent, and, at once, America rose in unanimous rebellion. No, of course not. American patriots were outraged. But in 1774, they weren’t yet at the point of armed rebellion. The radicals of Massachusetts, Samuel Adams and the Boston Committee of Correspondence, proposed instead a […]
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Neither side of the aisle in the U.S. recognizes the other anymore. But this is more normal than we imagine. According to what political theorists call “realignment theory,” life gets bumpy in an electoral democracy, and it can change substantially and suddenly. But it’s deeper than that. Our current national malaise is a very common […]
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During a discussion about whether government funding of academic science was a good idea, I argued that it was a net negative—a prominent physicist once told me that there was no particle physics before World War II. I remember thinking to myself: “Who’s going to tell him? No particle physics? Maxwell? Planck? Rutherford? Einstein?” My […]
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In the last year, there has been a rapid increase in actions that involve removing human remains and photographs of human remains from anthropology and archaeology classrooms, conference halls, publications, and museums, including the American Museum of Natural History, the Penn Museum, and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. These museums and many others around […]
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“We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.” – Denis Didero The French philosopher could not have foreseen the delicate state of today’s young minds, who are culturally conditioned, coddled, and deceived to reject the truth when he wrote those sobering words […]
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Harvard Dean of Social Science Lawrence Bobo set off a firestorm last week when he published an article suggesting faculty should be punished for publicly criticizing the university. His position, if implemented, would severely weaken the already fragile state of academic freedom at Harvard. As dean, his significant power over the careers of many faculty […]
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The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) recently released a report revealing that the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation, a taxpayer-funded program that supports promising young individuals with aspirations to serve in government and the like, has overwhelmingly favored candidates with leftist views in recent years. According to the report, the Foundation has selected a significantly higher […]
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On June 22, 1774, the Quebec Act received royal assent. This, the climax of the Intolerable Acts, not only provided for greater accommodation of Catholicism and French law in Britain’s recently conquered colony of Quebec but also expanded its borders—to include virtually all of the trans-Appalachian West down to the Ohio River. It cut the possibility […]
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Juneteenth has become a national holiday during which we remember and celebrate the end of slavery. The date comes from the tardy dissemination in Texas of the Emancipation Proclamation, President Lincoln’s momentous document by which he freed the slaves in the areas in rebellion. But June 19th is the wrong date to celebrate. The Emancipation […]
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Harvard Dean Lawrence Bobo writes in the Harvard Crimson that faculty speech should have limits. There are, he says, responsibilities as well as rights associated with academic freedom: As Harvard has moved to limit its opining on salient public issues, we must use our voices as faculty responsibly. Do we allow individual faculty with large […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Columbus Dispatch on June 13, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. American higher education is in trouble. In Ohio, enrollment in universities is lower today than a decade ago, and in just the last few months Notre Dame College and Eastern Gateway Community College announced they were closing. Nationally, often violent, anti-Israeli campus protests this spring […]
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Ask the average American about the state of public education, and you’re likely to hear complaints ranging from low scores, poorly paid teachers, drugs, gang violence, lack of funding, threats from school shootings, claims of indoctrination—from both sides of the political spectrum—and a myriad of other complaints. Ask teachers and parents, and you’ll likely get […]
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Minding the Campus contributor Joe Nalven will deliver a featured presentation on the creative use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in art at the San Diego Public Library on August 5. His talk will explore themes of human authorship, hybridism, copyright, and the evolving role of technology in visual art. Nalven has authored numerous articles […]
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Not long ago, I took my car into the shop. The check oil light was on. I knew that wasn’t good. Predictably, the mechanic suggested an expensive repair. It was a bad time to shell out a bunch of cash on a car, but I ended up opting for the repair because I don’t know […]
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“That from henceforth we will suspend all commercial intercourse with the said island of Great Britain, until the said act for blocking up the said harbour be repealed.” — The Solemn League and Covenant, June 1774. Fueled by a fiery conviction to protest Parliament’s embargo on Boston’s port, a local committee crafted a persuasive letter […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from an article originally published by The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on June 6, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. Earlier this year, the UNC Board of Governors approved a new system-wide admissions policy requiring standardized tests only for students whose high school GPAs are less […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The College Fix on June 12, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. The graduate union that represents Massachusetts Institute of Technology ignored the religious beliefs of some Jewish members, according to a federal complaint. Five graduate students at MIT filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) complaint, which […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Free Black Thought on May 9, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. George Orwell is often credited with the maxim, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” I am not sure that the series that I am publishing here, which exposes gender ideology and […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClear Wire on June 13, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. William Carney heard a familiar voice roar, “Forward 54th!” Dashing up a steep slope with sand chafing his arms, legs, and neck, he saw a bullet-ridden flag flutter, beginning an agonizing plummet to the ground. He must save the […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Law & Liberty on June 6, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. We keep us safe” is a progressive mantra. At Princeton, for example, this statement, plus an exclamation point, heads the tweet with the “Princeton Gaza Solidarity Encampment Community Guidelines” that Princeton Israel Apartheid Divest (@PtonDivestNow) posted on […]
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Editor’s Note: This series is adapted from the new paper Higher Education Subsidization: Why and How Should We Subsidize Higher Education? Part 1 explored the justifications and rationales that have been used to subsidize higher education. Part 2 explored subsidy design considerations. This part explores federal subsidies. The federal government provides five main types of […]
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Harvard’s year has been one for the history books. It ranked last in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s annual college free speech survey, earning its own category of “abysmal.” It had quite possibly the worst response to Hamas’s October 7th terrorist attack on Israel in all American higher education. Its former president, Claudine […]
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College students looking for work in Washington, D.C. have many opportunities. These include internships, fellowships, and part-time and full-time jobs. But you must understand how things work in the Washington milieu. The Washington milieu encapsulates the setting where political activities unfold. It comprises nine crucial entities: citizens, the president, Congress, regulators, courts, the bureaucracy, the […]
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On June 15, 1774, Boston citizens held a meeting in Faneuil Hall to debate how the townsmen should respond to the blockade that the British had just imposed on the port of Boston. At issue was whether the citizens should pay for the tea that some radicals had dumped in the harbor back in December. […]
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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 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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The National Association of Scholars has recently unearthed a revealing document from the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD): its “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accountability” (DEIA) evaluation form, which details the district’s religious-like dedication to wokeism. Like Catholics in the confessional, all faculty and academic staff must bare their souls for their transgressions against DEIA—“Oh […]
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“You Americans, all you do is talk and talk, and say ‘let me tell you something’ and ‘I just wanna say.’ Well, you’re dead now, so shut up.” —Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983) Twenty-five centuries ago, history’s greatest historian wrote his masterpiece. The Peloponnesian War—late fifth century BC—initiated the Western tradition of analyzing the […]
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The fringe lens of critical pedagogy has swallowed today’s academia. Facts are deconstructed, logical reasoning is contorted, historical narratives are rewritten, and causality takes a back seat to the post-modernist project of affirming feelings and identities. Increasingly, words lose meaning and become weaponized for the sake of ideological conformity. Cue the perennial abuse of “white […]
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Nils Haug’s recent “Misadventures of a Reluctant Convert—Another Whimsical Memoir” essay described his come-to-Jesus moment as a student in South Africa. He concludes that during this experience, “Truth had found me, dramatically changed my life, and I was never the same. My real education was complete.” I’m a few years older than Nils, but identified […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by American Post Liberal on June 10, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. I have been told by some of my students that I am “based.” According to them, I am not afraid to talk about controversial issues and to challenge them to think beyond conventional platitudes. In […]
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