During the COVID-19 lockdowns, I taught two summer literature and research writing courses at an online classical K-12 school after 15 years of teaching college courses. I expected little from the new teaching experience—my university students often showed little interest in reading and viewed my course as just another hurdle to a degree. Teaching them […]
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Imagine if a university faculty member claimed to have developed a vaccine for the common cold but refused to present her methods or evidence publicly. How would the university react? With intense suspicion. Why? Because if an idea isn’t publicly explained, then it can’t be falsified. Falsifiability is the possibility of finding evidence that contradicts […]
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The rivalry between the University of Michigan (Michigan) and Ohio State is among the most intense and storied in college football, but the last game of the 2024 season was particularly violent. It escalated into chaos, culminating in an on-field brawl that required police intervention and the use of pepper spray. While rivalry games bring […]
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The First Amendment’s free speech protections and “academic freedom” at colleges and universities are pillars of American democracy. But knowledgeable observers long have recognized that subversives, including members of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), use these freedoms to foment revolutionary change in the United States, including the hoped-for creation of a new Marxist […]
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Ivy League applications are down, and Ivy League schools have begun to panic. Over the past few weeks, America’s most coveted schools welcomed the early decision cohort of the class of 2029. Yet unlike in previous years, which saw a consistent increase in the number of applications and a corresponding decrease in acceptance rates, the […]
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By now, most publications have released their 2025 outlooks and their what-to-read book lists. (The National Association of Scholars (NAS) gave its outlook here, and I released a what-to-read book list here). Few, however, are looking inward. So, to be unique, here are my reflections and resolutions. Minding the Campus (MTC) enters 2025 on a […]
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A few years ago, I read E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, a transformative appeal for steering American K-12 education toward deeper academic content and, more fundamentally, toward the primacy of knowledge. The book was a key reason I decided to attend Stanford University’s graduate program in education policy and leadership and reenter the world of education. […]
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The love-hate relationship with artificial intelligence (AI) in academia has shifted from concerns like cheating and skill loss to exploring teaching styles, scaffolding, and expanding lesson plans. This shift reflects broader contexts of learning beyond traditional teacher-centered models. A notable example is the University of Texas at Austin’s collaboration with Grammarly to create the Faculty […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the National Association of Scholars on December 31, 2024, and is crossposted here with permission. On behalf of everyone at the National Association of Scholars (NAS), we hope you had a wonderful time celebrating the holidays! As the new year approaches, education reformers remain hopeful—fingers crossed—for a renewed focus on […]
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French social theorist Alexis de Tocqueville described what I call the Tyranny of Benevolence in Book IV of his brilliant analysis of America’s society and government. Tocqueville published Democracy in America fifty years after Thomas Jefferson and James Madison launched their party revolution (1790–1796) and forty years after Jefferson won his so-called Revolution of 1800. […]
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As I have written elsewhere Jimmy Carter had many redeeming personal qualities often lacking in today’s American political leadership. But his policies also did a good deal of harm, most notably in higher education. Two developments of the Carter years have had lasting harmful effects. First, under Carter, the federal student loan programs began to […]
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Federal agencies pay for research at colleges and universities. Those institutions also charge overhead—called Facilities and Administrative (F&A) or indirect costs—by billing the agency at a fixed rate applied to the direct costs. Arizona State University (ASU) charges 57 percent for F&A. When a professor spends $100,000 of grant money on direct costs, ASU collects […]
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One of the great blessings of life in an open society is the freedom to doubt. There is no state religion that can demand our fealty. There are no ideologies sufficiently empowered to enforce our obedience. And, though there certainly isn’t any requirement to entirely reject an established order, there’s also no obligation to wholly […]
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The left’s favorite slogan, “Speak truth to power,” is just that. It is an empty, propagandist slogan increasingly turned into an ironic snare, considering the power scale being tipped towards their side decisively in multiple facets of American life, and higher education is at the forefront of the irony. Across the nation, campus life is […]
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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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Rudolf Haffenreffer Jr. (1874-1954) was a successful beer magnate during the era of regional breweries, including Narragansett, which was once the dominant brand throughout New England. In 1903, he purchased 376 acres of oceanfront land in Rhode Island, which happened to be where “King Phillip’s War” had both started in 1675 and ended in 1676 […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by PJ Media on December 4, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. Throughout the history of civilization, many major conflicts have been framed as religious wars. Opponents identify with different religions and refer to them in explaining the conflict. Beginning in […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the College Fix on December 13, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. A University of Illinois student reported his accounting professor to the school’s bias team after she made a “passive-aggressive” comment concerning student course evaluations. The College […]
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For unto us a child is born. Unto us a son is given. — Isaiah 9:6 On Christmas, we celebrate a phenomenon theologians call the incarnation. The birth of Jesus Christ was the trans-dimensional irruption of the Son of God into our world from the heavenly realm. Both the Old and New Testaments give witness […]
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For decades, schools have followed a policy of promoting students regardless of whether they meet established standards, often justified by the belief that students will “catch up” when they “find their passion.” However, many never do, and for reasons rooted in basic biology. The brain allocates energy to a task only when it expects a […]
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