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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
The arts, once a rich cultural expression boasting the proverbial “moral of the story,” are corrupt! “Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes,” wrote William Shakespeare against Elizabethan era political corruption, and it seems nothing has changed. Is cultural progress, as the modern leftists have failed to re-define it, […]
Read More
“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 […]
Read More
There’s something central to every political community about death. As a result, you must deal with death if you’re going to lead. At the extreme, you have to order other people to shed their blood—and perhaps the blood of still others—for the city or country’s sake. Such was the perspective that Pericles brought to the […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
As a country, in celebrating resistance, we have lost sight of the important difference between resistance and resolution. For example, even before Donald J. Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017, plans were afoot to thwart his agenda. Those plans coalesced under the hashtag #Resistance, and included marches, demonstrations, plots for electors to ignore state election […]
Read More
Last week, the shopping period for my classes at Sarah Lawrence College (SLC) was disrupted on Zoom by a “Divestment Coalition” of campus groups, including the Sarah Lawrence Socialist Coalition and the Sarah Lawrence Review. The coalition announced a “boycott” of all my courses for the 2024-25 academic year, labeled me a “staunch advocate of Israel’s right to […]
Read More
Given the power that trustees of a college possess, one must ask why trustees are so negligible a factor in the institution’s operations. Trustees oversee matters of personnel, finance, curriculum, athletics, building construction, and overall mission—or at least that’s what they are supposed to do. Of course, they aren’t the only voice, but they are the final voice on many […]
Read More
Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by Cato Institute on September 3, 2024. With edits to match MTC’s style, it is crossposted here with permission. Note, this post updates last month’s post. The biggest changes from last month include: The Supreme Court has let the Eighth Circuit’s pause on the SAVE plan remain in place. Reworked the student […]
Read More
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. ” – H.L. Mencken, Minority Report You don’t have to agree with all Mencken’s views to appreciate the poignant message of power hunger corrupting good intentions […]
Read More
For months, the Massachusetts Governor’s allies plotted to strip citizens of their arms. Legislators said they sought only to enhance public safety. But they labored as far from the public eye as possible. Then revealing, “debating,” and passing their legislation in the space of one day, they hurried it to the Governor for signature. The […]
Read More
In June, more than 100 deans signed a joint letter calling for law schools to support constitutional democracy by teaching students to disagree respectfully and engage across ideological divides. As around 40,000 new law students begin their professional education this fall, it is fair to question whether law schools have demonstrated a commitment to this […]
Read More
When members of the U.S. Supreme Court return from their three-month vacation this October, they will hear several major education-related cases. Issues on the docket include Biden’s income-driven student loan repayment plan, school choice, a memorandum on parental behavior, race-based school admission, displaying the Ten Commandments in classrooms, the Bible as a teaching tool, and two […]
Read More
Academic boycotts targeting ideas, individuals, and institutions deemed problematic are no longer just in vogue for faculty. This illiberal and anti-intellectual tactic has now been adopted by students—presumably taking a cue from faculty and administrators—to cancel faculty who hold views they disagree with. I encountered this personally during the most recent course interview week at […]
Read More
While the Biden administration has at least nine plans to forgive student loans, some are much bigger than others. And the two biggest have now run into legal buzzsaws. The Supreme Court (SCOTUS) eventually threw out its first plan in 2022. The second plan introduced a new income-driven repayment plan called SAVE, which, in practice, […]
Read More
Between August 25 and August 27, 1774, the First North Carolina Provincial Congress met in New Bern, North Carolina. There they passed resolutions that they would not import any goods from Britain, including slaves, until the Intolerable Acts were rescinded. They also selected delegates for the First Continental Congress, which would meet the next month. […]
Read More
The continuing changes at the New College of Florida (NCF) have involved the concept of techne. It’s coursework that promises to connect students to real-world opportunities. What might techne mean, either at NCF or elsewhere? Recall this claim from my suggestion for the NCF Mission Statement: “No college does more to increase your odds of getting […]
Read More
The National Association of Scholars (NAS) mourns the loss of Adam Andrzejewski, the visionary Founder and CEO of OpenTheBooks. Adam was a friend to the National Association of Scholars. He inspired our vigorous use of freedom of information requests to pry important information from public universities that are often reluctant to divulge facts that belong […]
Read More