When people ask me, “What is the worst thing the federal government has done regarding higher education,” I say it is a close call between two policy blunders: its entering the student loan business for college students, and the creation of the U.S. Department of Education (ED). But if forced to choose, I would say […]
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Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is from an article originally published by the National Association of Scholars on May 6, 2025, and is cross-posted here with permission. The deluge of education news out of the White House has yet to cease. President Trump signed six Executive Orders (EOs) at the end of last month, encompassing a range […]
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Scarcely a week goes by lately without news that another university has had federal funding restricted by the Trump administration. The Wall Street Journal recounts that latest restrictions: “Harvard ($2.26 billion), Cornell ($1 billion), Northwestern ($790 million), Brown ($510 million), Columbia ($400 million), Princeton ($210 million) and the University of Pennsylvania ($175 million).” These actions […]
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Author’s Note: This article 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, enter your name and email under “SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, ‘TOP OF MIND,’” located on the right-hand side of the site. The saga over […]
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The New York Times article, “Trump Officials Blame Mistake for Setting Off Confrontation With Harvard: An official on the administration’s antisemitism task force told the university that a letter of demands had been sent without authorization,” tells a very different story than its title and subhead, one which suggests that Harvard’s arrogance might be leading […]
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On April 16, 2025, Nicholas Decker, a PhD student at George Mason University (GMU), published a Substack essay titled “When Must We Kill Them?,” which calls for violence against President Donald Trump and his administration. Decker, who identifies as a liberal and open-borders advocate in his X bio, bases much of his argument on Trump’s […]
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President Trump recently signed Executive Order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” taking aim at the Smithsonian museums for curating exhibits that twist and disparage American history. The order states: [T]he Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology. This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western […]
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Harvard University and the Trump Administration have collided. The Crimson reports that: Harvard will not comply with the Trump administration’s demands to dismantle its diversity programming and limit student protests in exchange for its federal funding, University President Alan M. Garber ’76 announced in a message to affiliates Monday afternoon. The sequence of events suggests […]
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Author’s Note: This article 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, enter your name and email under “SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, ‘TOP OF MIND,’” located on the right-hand side of the site. On March 27, […]
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The first thing that one needs to understand about the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) is that it exists in its own dimension of reality. It’s called “Planet UMass” for a reason. The second thing that one needs to understand is that much as federal law supersedes state law, university policy supersedes all laws, and […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the College Fix on April 9, 2024. With edits to match MTC’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. While the University of Michigan (UMich) leadership recently announced its plans to roll back “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programming, it may face resistance from its own faculty. […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by American Greatness on March 30, 2025. With edits to match MTC’s style guidelines, it is cross-posted here with permission. Last week, the Trump Administration dropped Biden’s appeal of a July Oklahoma court ruling on Title IX. The ruling had stopped Biden’s April 2024 Title IX regulation from taking effect, joining several other courts that […]
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In 2023, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) canceled an accepted session from their annual conference: “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology.” AAA’s decision, phrased in today’s academic jargon, was explicitly political. AAA President Ramona Pérez, writing jointly with President Monica Heller of the Canadian Anthropological Society, […]
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President Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Education (ED), Linda McMahon, was confirmed today. As the co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) alongside her husband, Vince McMahon, the mogul has had a longstanding career in business, politics, and public service. In 2009, McMahon left WWE to try her hand in politics. But after two […]
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Editor’s Note: This essay is the second installment of a two-part series. You can read Part 1 here. Yesterday’s assessment of Jay Bhattacharya’s appointment as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was written before I had seen two excellent weekend Wall Street Journal stories on the Trump appointee. In a news story by Liz […]
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Editor’s Note: This essay is the first installment of a two-part series. You can read Part 2 here. Probably the most important federal funder of traditional advanced research is the National Institutes of Health (NIH). President-Elect Trump has appointed a remarkable man to head that key branch of the federal government, Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., and Ph.D. […]
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