Month: May 2021

Why the Trans Issue is Much Bigger than Bathrooms, Sports, and Fragile Feelings

With news that a transgender powerlifter will likely be competing in this year’s Olympics, questions are once again being raised about how allowing biological men into female spaces could affect the integrity of athletic competition and women’s safety. Many pundits on the left see this as a non-issue; there simply aren’t that many transgender athletes, […]

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An Anti-Antiracism Manifesto

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” Actual, true racism is discrimination or prejudice based on outward perceived or real ethnic or racial attributes. It is nothing more. Discrimination and prejudice based on outward perceived or real ethnic or racial attributes has occurred and does occur in America, as […]

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‘White Fragility’ Is a Racist Concept

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Epoch Times on May 17, 2021, and is crossposted here with permission. Like “black criminality,” “Jewish shrewdness,” “Italian mafiosity,” and “Irish drunkenness,” “white fragility” is a racist concept. Identifying a particular derogatory characteristic, or even a positive characteristic, with a racial or ethnic group, as if it accurately […]

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The Screwed-Up Emails: Part II

Editor’s Note: The following is the second in a series of satirical articles loosely inspired by C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. To read Part I, click here. PART II: THE YEAR 2029 OC (Old Calendar) Prologue: In the year 2024, after Congress created the new states of Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin […]

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Free Community College Will Only Make Things Worse

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Intellectual Takeout on May 19, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. Like nearly all Americans, President Joe Biden believes that a college degree is the ticket to both individual economic advancement and uplifting the poor. To put his money where his mouth is, he has proposed $256 billion in […]

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Was Thomas Jefferson America’s First Abolitionist?

Editor’s Note: The original version of this article stated, “It was Thomas Jefferson who in 1769 drafted the law that, when enacted three years later, permitted the freeing of Virginia slaves.” The “three” here is incorrect and has been corrected to “thirteen.” Most Americans appear to believe that Thomas Jefferson raped the slave child Sally […]

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Instructor’s Statement on Freedom of Expression in the Classroom

To my students: University students should be free from threat of institutional censure to state any opinion they wish and to state their opinions using whatever language they wish. At our university, however, students do not enjoy this freedom of expression. Various documents at Saint Mary’s University constrain what students may say and how they […]

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The Screwed-Up Emails: Part I

Editor’s Note: The following is the first in a series of satirical articles loosely inspired by C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. In honor of C.S. Lewis, who “discovered” the first set of correspondence.   “Satire’s nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an […]

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Liberty Fund’s Mission More Vital Than Ever

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClearWire on May 12, 2021, and is crossposted here with permission. The rise of critical race theory, along with the popularity of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, presents a serious challenge to the concept of “E Pluribus Unum.” According to Richard Reinsch, the editor of Liberty Fund’s […]

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Let’s Hire China to Run Our Schools and Universities

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Epoch Times on May 8, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. The internationalization of labor has been a longstanding policy of government and business. The main reason is the low cost of labor in developing countries such as China, compared to the cost of labor in modern […]

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Teaching Academic Integrity

One of the least enjoyable aspects of college teaching is policing students for cheating. Instructors face the procedural issue of finding cheating as well as the moral issue of warning against it and advocating for academic integrity. Programs such as Turnitin check papers for plagiarism against a database of published material and other student papers. […]

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Legislatures: It’s Time to Defund Universities

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Epoch Times on May 5, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. Our universities have been uniformly corrupted by neo-Marxist political ideology. They no longer teach the great wealth of knowledge of Western Civilization, or engage in research to advance that knowledge. Instead, they indoctrinate their students […]

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Field Notes on Recent Trends in Higher Ed Litigation

Editor’s Note: The following is a reproduction of a pair of emails received by the editors of Minding the Campus. We thought they would attract broad interest and publish them here with the correspondent’s consent. The correspondent has chosen to remain anonymous. The messages have been lightly edited for readability. Three interesting articles about higher ed crossed […]

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Academia Becomes More Ideological, More Coercive

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Epoch Times on April 30, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. Universities as a community of autonomous scholars delving into knowledge and seeking to expand it is a model long out of date. With the explosive growth of university, scientific, and granting agency bureaucracies, coercive oversight and […]

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Sustainable Development in Higher Education: Useful Concept or Trojan Horse?

Having worked within the humanities for a number of years now, I have first-hand experience with the ways in which words and concepts can get politicized and abused. Sometimes, familiar words take on new meanings (e.g., racism, gender), while other times, new concepts get mainstreamed without the general public being made aware of what they […]

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In Defense of the N-word: Context Should Determine its Adoption by Professors

On college and university campuses, no self-respecting individual would use the N-word as a racial slur, given its links to slavery and the dehumanization of Africans. But a marked shift in attitudes has occurred. Professors, particularly white professors, must now refrain from referring to the N-word in any capacity. This eradicationist agenda, however, is misguided. […]

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The Sixties and the Forgotten Man: A Non-Modest Proposal

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt of Peter E. Austin’s essay, “The Sixties and the Forgotten Man: A Non-Modest Proposal.” Dr. Austin was Honors Professor of History and University Studies for sixteen years at St. Edward’s University. Currently he directs The 1960s Project, a large study of the era that grew out of a large lecture course […]

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