It was an immortal day dedicated to liberty. Stalwart patriots met on July 4, 1774. 1774? Yes. Two years before we declared our independence, the residents of Orangetown, New York subscribed to the Orangetown Resolutions. The Resolutions stated, in part: 1st, That we are and ever wish to be, true and loyal subjects to his […]
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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. Part 3 explored federal subsidies. This fourth and final part explores state subsidies. […]
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In our rapidly changing world, civics education must do a better job. Civics must prepare students to engage their neighborhood, county, state, and nation. Civics courses today rely on history, current events, and case studies. But they fall short in effectively explaining the realities of government, campus, or neighborhood dynamics and teaching how to enact […]
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Sometimes following politics can be a bit like watching a hotly contested football game between your favorite team and its archrival. One minute, your team is marching down the field; the next, they’re giving up a big play. You go up by a few points, only to fall behind again as the hated opponent responds. […]
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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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“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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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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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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“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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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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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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College was a transformative period in my life. I held my professors in high regard, viewing them as beacons of wisdom. For most of my time there, I was a teaching assistant and laboratory technician in the chemistry department, a role that made me feel like an integral part of the university community. The camaraderie […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by City Journal on June 3, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. In the fall of 2021, the University of Oregon psychology department petitioned the school to hire an “Assistant Professor with a dedicated research focus in diversity/inclusion-related . . . clinical issues.” The department claimed that its proposal […]
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My friend, John Fund, a distinguished journalist and political commentator, has brought to my attention a fine study done by the Washington Monthly, showing that virulent anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian protests have occurred disproportionately at elite colleges where most students come from relatively rich families. You heard a lot about pro-Palestinian demonstrations, building occupation, and tent […]
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Although many of the protesters who occupied college and university campuses around the country had little knowledge of intellectual history, they marched to the beat of philosophical drummers they may not have ever heard. Their chants rhythmically echoed ideologies. The anti-Israel and anti-American passions expressed in pro-Palestinian demonstrations have deep and dark roots, tracing back […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Cato Institute on June 3, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. Note, this post updates last month’s post. The biggest changes from last month include: Updated total loan forgiveness figures ($167 billion for 4.75 million borrowers) to account for the latest developments. Update on the Mackinac and Cato lawsuit, and the […]
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Editor’s Note: This essay is the third excerpt from the author’s doctoral project titled “Reaching Generation Z with the Gospel at a Christian University through Faith Integration, Radical Hospitality, and Missional Opportunities,” completed as part of the Doctor of Ministry program at Knox Theological Seminary. The content has been edited to adhere to MTC’s guidelines. […]
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Along with a 10-year corporate career, I studied in American business schools for about nine years, culminating in a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1991—Columbia was different back then because I did not need to file a “diversity, equity, and inclusion” plan. Then and now, though, American business schools have been long on theory but short […]
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Idealistic, fanatical libertarians—the Mises types, Rothbardian and Randian—like to shout from the rooftop that “inflation is a monetary phenomenon.” But that’s mastery of the obvious. Maybe there are still some five-year-olds out there who imagine inflation to be the fault of merchants raising prices so as to screw their clients and, thus also the fault […]
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In the heart of every democracy lies a sacred covenant; an unspoken agreement that binds together the fabric of society, ensuring harmony, justice, and progress for all. This covenant, often called the social contract, represents a nation’s citizens’ collective will and shared values. This contract is implicit in our constitutional framework in the United States. […]
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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. This part explores subsidy design considerations. There have been seven main justifications for subsidizing higher education: Promoting favored religions, […]
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