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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Editor’s Note: This statement was originally published by the National Association of Scholars on November 20, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. The National Association of Scholars (NAS) welcomes the nomination of Linda McMahon to serve as the next Secretary of Education. Her character, her experience, […]
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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 […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Liberty Unyielding on July 6, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. It has been edited to fit Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. The Education Department is pressuring colleges to restrict speech that denounces pro-Palestine protesters or denigrates Jews or Palestinians—such as speech calling pro-Palestine protesters “terrorists”—under the rationale that such speech […]
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The Supreme Court’s recent Chevron ruling, while rightly focusing on central issues like presidential immunity, also brought a potential boon for American higher education. This decision, which I believe holds promise for the future, has yet to be fully grasped by the higher education establishment. Specifically, in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Court invalidated […]
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As stated previously, if I were dictator for a day, I would empty the Maryland Avenue headquarters of the U.S. Department of Education (ED), have the Air Force bomb it out of existence, and after the Corps of Engineers removed the rubble, I would give the land to the Smithsonian Institution for an expansion of […]
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One critique of those on the left is that they’ve weaponized the legal and administrative systems against their political opponents. This isn’t necessarily new, or even unique to the left. Republican President Richard Nixon tried to weaponize the IRS to threaten and punish opponents. Decades later, Democrat President Barack Obama did the same. Under Obama’s […]
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It is no secret that the Biden administration wants to forgive student loans. One—of at least eight—of its forgiveness proposals has been definitively buried, which would have forgiven up to $20,000 per borrower, or $10,000 if not a Pell Grant recipient. There were many reasons why this plan was terribly designed, and it was ultimately […]
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The last four years have witnessed a series of desperate attempts to frustrate Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ goal of creating a fair Title IX adjudication framework to replace the one-sided guidance she inherited from the Obama administration. In 2017, when DeVos rescinded what one federal judge deemed the “infamous Dear Colleague letter,” accusers’ rights organizations […]
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Betsy DeVos, who was nominated to be the Education Secretary, has been attacked because she and her husband made donations to a civil-liberties group, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. FIRE is “a nonpartisan organization that defends free speech, religious liberty, and due process on college campuses.” The DeVos family donations drew criticism from […]
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Last week, voters in my home state of Maine overturned a law passed by the GOP-led state legislature to end Maine’s same-day voter registration, which had been the practice in Maine for nearly four decades. Though polls suggested a close race, the law went down to a nearly 20-point defeat, the margin seemingly fueled by […]
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