Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by PJ Media on November 22, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. The Enlightenment-inspired higher education that I encountered during my 1958-72 studies at Antioch College and the University of Chicago, and at McGill University for much of the time when […]
Read MoreThe language and tone of the recent U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation report, “D.E.I. Division. Extremism. Ideology. How the Biden-Harris NSF Politicized Science,” is very partisan, which makes the report less persuasive than it otherwise might be. Still, the report identifies and criticizes a growing failure of objectivity by the National Science […]
Read MoreAmerican universities stand at a historic crossroads. After decades of strong progressive policies, progressivism has become the status quo. Universities have drifted so far to the left that they have lost all connection to their roots. When it’s easier to find a dissident in Iran than a Republican at Harvard University, it’s a clear sign […]
Read MoreEditor’s Note: The following is the introduction to the author’s comprehensive compilation, featuring excerpts from 170 sources, including news articles, op-eds, books, speeches, letters, conference summaries, panel discussions, policy statements, and legislation. These documents collectively explore race-based preferences in student admissions and faculty hiring, as well as the broader racialization and politicization of universities and […]
Read MoreIn many dimensions, the United States military is just as committed to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) as any Ivy League university. Cully Stimson, writing in the Daily Signal, provides an interesting discussion of the Students for Fair Admissions’s (SFFA) case against the United States Naval Academy (USNA). SFFA, the plaintive in last year’s Supreme […]
Read MoreEditor’s Note: This article was originally published by City Journal on November 19, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. The Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA) banned the use of race in admissions in higher education. In the State University of New York system, however, race-conscious methods […]
Read MoreEditor’s Note: This article was originally published by the Law & Liberty on November 13, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. Disparity studies comparing various demographic groups based on different outcomes in education, employment, health, housing, and income have been a staple of public policy analysis for decades. […]
Read MoreUniversity of Nevada, Reno (UNR) is discriminating against prospective and current students because it is on a mission to raise its percentage of Hispanic students high enough to qualify for millions in federal aid. Why? The federal government leads colleges and universities into achieving racial and ethnic quotas by dangling the money in front of […]
Read MoreThe damage that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) policies are doing to American colleges and universities is increasingly well-known, thanks largely to efforts of the National Association of Scholars and Minding the Campus, but the harm done to U.S. intelligence agencies has not been assessed—until now. My study of the operational effects of DEI policies […]
Read MoreIn today’s academic hiring process, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) statements are a common requirement for faculty hiring across the United States. As seen in a rubric obtained by Minding the Campus through a public records request, the University of Oregon evaluates DEI statements by awarding points to applicants based on their demonstrated “knowledge” of […]
Read More“The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small,” former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once restated Sayre’s law in this famous quip on competition in academia. That was the 1970s when scholarly debates about communism and Marxism had little influence on government policies at the height of the Cold […]
Read MoreThe release of data on incoming freshmen this fall was watched keenly in light of last year’s Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard decision that effectively outlawed race-based affirmative action policies in college admissions. As the data have been released, the picture is mixed. Some schools have seen the expected results: a larger proportion of […]
Read MoreI graduated from a small state teacher’s college in 1963, majoring in physical sciences and math. While I was not privy to overall grade distributions there, I know that Cs, Ds, and failure were not uncommon. This was simply a fact of life and was understood by all. I later became interested in spatial science, […]
Read MoreIn the summer of 2023, the University System of Georgia (USG), led by Chancellor Sonny Perdue, announced a new directive: all institutions must remove “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) statements from hiring documents. During an August meeting at Kennesaw State University’s (KSU) Coles College of Business, Dean Robin Cheramie relayed this change, sparking a moment […]
Read MoreMREs (Meals Ready-to-Eat), BDUs (Battle Dress Uniforms), and TDYs (Temporary Duty): Three-letter acronyms (TLAs) describe routine aspects of military life. These catchy labels can also reference broad epistemological contexts. They are quick and convenient, allowing users to purport to understand more than they actually do. Unfortunately, they are often misunderstood and obscure more than they […]
Read MoreEditor’s Note: This article was originally published by the National Association of Scholars on September 6, 2024, and is cross-posted here with permission. The original article includes audio acquired by the National Association of Scholars that describes allegations of coverup. Allegations of a “coverup” of widespread “discriminatory hiring” erupted at the University of Washington in June, according to audio acquired by […]
Read MoreLast 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 MoreThe National Association of Scholars (NAS) joined the Heritage Foundation for a panel discussion, “Unveiling DEI: Examining Its True Impact on Higher Education,” on August 20 in Washington, D.C. A recording of the full event, which featured Jay Greene, Heritage senior research fellow; Scott Yenor, professor of political science at Boise State University and Washington […]
Read MoreDepending on which side of the political aisle you choose, “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” better known as DEI, stands for very different things. For the far-left, who have largely coopted and infected their less radical comrades, it is something inherently good and imbued in America’s DNA. In response to increasing demands for dialing down DEI […]
Read MoreIn 2008, the voters of the United States elected their first and, to date, only President of color, Barack Obama. We were told at the time that his elevation to the highest office in the land would herald a new age of race relations in our nation. The country would no longer be defined by […]
Read MoreIt’s time that leftists take their heads out of the sand. Whites are not the only group of people that can be racists. Black racism—racism against whites by blacks—is real, and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) makes it worse. From birth through the first grade, I lived in Chicago Heights, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. […]
Read MoreSince I left the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Masters Program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), I’ve been forced to confront the alarming truth that the entire field of psychology is under the sway of a dangerous ideology distilled from postmodern philosophy and critical theories. This ideology disguises its authoritarian objectives using the camouflage […]
Read MoreShould we be worried about the power psychology professions have in our everyday lives and the direction of the field? In researching “Trusting the ‘Experts’ is Risky Business,” I came upon the news of an Indiana family who lost custody of their transgender teen even when there was no finding of abuse. The U.S. Supreme […]
Read MoreShaun Harper, a Professor at the University of Southern California (USC) and Provost Professor of Education and Business, was recently featured in a Chronicle of Higher Education article titled “Can Shaun Harper Save DEI?” As a recent USC retiree, I read the article and reviewed materials from the USC Race and Equity Center, which Harper […]
Read MoreEditor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClear Education on June 25, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. MIT’s announcement that it will no longer require prospective faculty members to submit “diversity statements” is good news for American higher education. Academic institutions around the world should follow MIT’s example. “Diversity statements”, a one or two-page essay about the […]
Read MoreEditor’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 […]
Read MoreAuthor’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 […]
Read MoreThe 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 […]
Read MoreEditor’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 […]
Read MoreForty years ago, when I was an undergraduate in the California State University system, it was pounded into my admittedly mushy brain that one of the mortal sins in academia was not giving someone else credit for their work. If a student failed to cite or improperly cited someone else’s work, whether it be statistics, […]
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