Editor’s Note: The following is an interview with Minding the Campus contributor Joe Nalven, published initially on Harald Johnson’s Substack, Create or Die, on August 20, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. Joe Nalven is a creative, artist, instructor, and writer based in San Diego. He covers […]
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The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the indispensable role of emergency responders in the healthcare system—and the pressing need to bolster that workforce. Since 2020, shortages of healthcare workers, including first responders, have become especially acute. A 2024 study by Mercer projected that the U.S. will see a total deficit of 100,000 critical healthcare workers by 2028 […]
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What if I told you that a college dropout did more for higher education than many college professors? Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), never earned a formal degree; yet, his influence on American campuses has reshaped discussions around free speech and viewpoint diversity. Kirk dropped out of college, opting instead to […]
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This article presents a sharp and witty critique of the challenges faced in navigating modern technology in higher education. It effectively blends humor and personal anecdotes, utilizing clever cultural references. The engaging writing style is accessible yet insightful, pulling readers in with vivid metaphors and irony. I know this because the artificial intelligence (AI) platform […]
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Conservatives do not need to go out of their way to defend academics who celebrate the death of Charlie Kirk. “People have come out caping for the devil that walked among us […] so no. I will not pull back from CELEBRATING that an evil man died by the method he chose to embrace,” University […]
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Editor’s Note: This is a developing story, and will be updated accordingly. Texas State University (TXST) is now at the center of a lawsuit following the dismissal of Thomas Alter, a recently tenured associate professor of history, who alleges that the institution violated his constitutional rights and breached his employment contract. According to local sources, […]
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Perusing the preliminary rosters for my first-year college writing courses, I thought half-humorously that I could easily have been looking at the United Nations staff directory. Most of the names were of Middle Eastern, Indian, Pakistani, or East Asian origin, with a sprinkling of African, Hispanic, and Eastern European backgrounds. Common Anglo-Saxon surnames were conspicuous […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on Real Clear Education on September 22, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. Every morning, millions of students start their day the same way: roll over, reach for the phone, and open a social media app. Scroll. Snap. Like. […]
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Earlier today, I published Joshua T. Katz’s essay, “Food for Thought Goes Hungry at Princeton.” His piece zeroes in on the university’s decision to cut meal privileges for non-advising fellows in the residential colleges, framing it as a small but telling loss in the broader culture of academic life. Princeton’s endowment is so vast that […]
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At the start of the academic year, Princeton University announced that, effective immediately, faculty and staff members who are “non-advising fellows” in one of the seven so-called residential colleges would no longer enjoy meal privileges in their college. The reason is, of course, the “new financial environment.” Princeton’s endowment is so large that Malcolm Gladwell […]
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It came to my attention yesterday that the University of Southern Mississippi (USM), my alma mater, is at the center of a disturbing hazing lawsuit. The plaintiff, Raphael C. Joseph, alleges that he was so brutally beaten during Omega Psi Phi’s Nu Eta chapter “Hell Night” in April 2023 that he required emergency surgery, a […]
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The managing editor of Minding the Campus, Jared Gould, recently wrote an essay on the University of Chicago (UChicago). He thoughtfully summarized its finances, providing a factual overview of a problem faced, in one form or another, by nearly all universities. As an alumnus of UChicago’s Booth School of Business, his essay caught my attention, but […]
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I knew something was fundamentally broken the day a senior colleague grabbed my shoulders and shook me frantically in the faculty dining hall after a contentious meeting of my school’s social science faculty. The assault was shocking, especially because it happened in what should have been a routine lunch gathering at Sarah Lawrence College (SLC), […]
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On September 25, 1775, Ethan Allen was captured by the British outside Montreal, at the Battle of Longue-Pointe. He would spend several years held captive by the British—and, once released, write up his exploits to popular acclaim in A Narrative of Ethan Allen’s Captivity (1779). Some later historians, revisiting the battle, would conclude: Damfool blowhard […]
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Challenging the prevailing narrative and upholding one’s principles in higher education is often a solitary endeavor. Even tenured colleagues sympathetic to the challenger’s ideas may retreat, fearing only exclusion from the next faculty cocktail party. That is why I notice when someone shows courage, as Mathew Abraham did in 2019 when I faced attacks for […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published by the College Fix on September 24, 2025. It is crossposted here with permission. In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the professional think tank class pushed a startling claim—actually, it’s conservatives who are more violent! Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh only counts murders and excludes the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which […]
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This fall, I’m assigning J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis in my politics and geography class on a deeply liberal and historically activist campus. I can already anticipate the reaction. Some students will object before they’ve read a page, convinced that reading the memoir means endorsing Vance’s politics […]
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The University of California, Berkeley, at the behest of the Trump Administration, has turned over the names of 160 students and faculty involved in complaints of anti-Semitism at that campus. The move provoked a backlash, including an open letter to the university from 600 faculty members involved with Berkeley from around the world, a letter […]
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For years, the debate has raged over what constitutes the best definition of anti-Semitism. While options abound, the three most prominent emerge from a conversation about the most widely used and accepted definition: The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition, adopted by the IHRA plenary in Budapest in 2015. The Jerusalem Declaration, conceived as an […]
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American colleges and universities are facing an unprecedented moment of adjustment. President Trump’s second term has brought sweeping higher education reforms—executive orders against “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) bureaucracies, stricter enforcement against campus anti-Semitism, new scrutiny of foreign funding, and heightened pressure on institutions that grant privileges to illegal aliens. We anticipated a spectrum of […]
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The assassination of conservative activist and Turning Point USA founder, Charlie Kirk, has resulted in a worldwide outpouring of grief. Liberty University (LU)—home to one of the nation’s most vigorous TPUSA chapters and a campus where Kirk frequently spoke—was especially affected by his murder. Kirk’s connection to LU was significant. In 2019, he received an […]
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August marked the return of thousands of students to college campuses nationwide. Whether they were eager to return to the classroom is debatable, but if they weren’t enthusiastic, one reason may have been the lack of access to course syllabi. In many cases, students don’t receive this document—a detailed description of the course along with […]
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