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 […]
Read More
American 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 More
Tradition-minded education reformers who wish to pass on to our children attachment to the ideals and institutions of the American republic and nation need to create new programs and schools independent of the existing far-left monoculture in academia. One way to go about this is to build up a network of autonomous Centers, such as […]
Read More
The History Channel’s popular series “The Men Who Built America” portrays an incredibly wealthy – yet worried – John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller, who earned much of his vast fortune by producing and refining kerosene, was facing competition not from rival magnates – the Carnegies or Vanderbilts – but from the likes of Thomas Edison and […]
Read More
The current conversation on higher ed reform coming is unusually platitudinous even for an election year. This was clearest earlier this year during the battle between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on the proposed federal student loan interest rate, a subject fairly inconsequential in larger problem of sky-high college costs. In his Democratic nomination acceptance […]
Read More
It’s hard to tell whether it’s a news story or a media meme: Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott, a fan of Texas Republican Gov. (and current GOP presidential candidate) Rick Perry, is reportedly considering foisting on Florida’s public universities the same much-criticized reform proposals that Perry has been trying to foist on public universities in […]
Read More
The Pope Center posts a provocative “clarion call” for reform in Education schools–coming from an Education professor, Nick Shudak of Mount Marty College. Shudak sees as soluble the problem besetting college and university Education departments, but through the kind of courageous action that, I suspect, can only come from outside the ranks of the faculty. Shudak, who chairs […]
Read More
The recent attempts to drive Robert Kerrey from the presidency of The New School are reminiscent of how Larry Summers was driven from the Harvard presidency in 2006 and, further back, how controversies, real and specious, roiled American campuses in the 1960s and 1970s. If the Trustees of the New School are at all tempted […]
Read More
Candace DeRussy, in Raise The Towers: A Call to Good Governance, a new paper from the Texas Public Policy Foundation offers a terse round-up of problems afflicting university governance, and offers a summary of several modes of reform. Her initial diagnosis is a sharp distillation of the problem: Paradoxically, it is the elusive dual nature […]
Read More