As an academic specializing in nationalism, I witness some truly eyebrow-raising trends in the field. Nationalism has long been a contentious research area to navigate, for reasons which need no mentioning. But the rise of ideological policing in universities over recent years has taken this to a whole new level, constraining the parameters of the […]
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It seems to me that Texas always likes to try to outdo everyone else—think of outsized political personalities like Lyndon B. Johnson. Maybe the state has something of an inferiority complex that it thought it could remedy by adroitly using its massive oil revenues. Two large direct beneficiaries of those revenues are the University of […]
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Eight states have already passed laws limiting DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). Senate Bill 83, introduced by State Senator Jerry Cirino, makes Ohio one of 20 states that have proposed but not yet passed such laws. Although SB 83 does far more than rein in DEI, I will focus here on two recent developments that […]
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There is a longstanding myth from the Second World War that the Allies killed hundreds of thousands of civilians by the sudden and shameless aerial bombing of Dresden, a beautiful city remarkable for its history and culture. That the bombing was a shameful war crime against innocent civilian German non-combatants was told by Kurt Vonnegut […]
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When colleges and universities opened in the fall of 2023, five states—Florida, North Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas—had passed legislation banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programs (DEI). These states were well aware that, as David Brooks notes, universities are failing at inclusion—the many so-called diversity initiatives have promoted an ideology of exclusion and intolerance […]
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The accusation that the United States of America was “founded on slavery” is advanced to discredit the nation. Accordingly, if some people were oppressed at the time of the Founding, then somehow the entire American project is illegitimate to this day. Or, in another way, if some people who wrote or signed the Constitution also […]
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“Philosophy would indeed be the easiest of studies, if we might arrive at truth by assuming that one of two accounts must be true, and prove the one by disproving the other; but in philosophy this is just what cannot be done.” F.H. Bradley, Ethical Studies, 1927 “It will sometimes strike a scientific man that the […]
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The Pilgrim’s treaty with the Wampanoag lasted fifty years. This would not have happened had the Wampanoag felt imposed on or exploited. Indeed, at that first Thanksgiving—a three-day feast-The Wampanoag numbered about ninety, while only fifty of the settlers were still alive. Had the Wampanoag decided to end the peaceable encounter, things would not have […]
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Thanksgiving is often a time when people reflect on what they have to be thankful for—family, friends, good health, etc. For many, these are considered blessings, and there is much historical evidence to suggest that Thanksgiving developed as a religious holiday. For example, in his 1863 Proclamation of Thanksgiving, Abraham Lincoln said: “They are the […]
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When the French-Spanish singer and songwriter Manu Chao released the song “Politik Kills” as the third single from his 2007 album La Radiolina, the artist was taking a jab at global capitalism, neoliberalism, and political conservativism of the West. He sings: That’s what my friend is an evidence Politik is violence; What my friend it’s […]
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Over fifty years ago I took a course on the Holocaust, one of the very first of its kind in the country. Being a year-long and only one of three courses that one took per semester, it was highly intensive. The first semester dealt with the history and cultures of the peoples involved—namely, Germans and […]
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The law school deans at places such as Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and Penn rarely turn to me for advice. Ok, never. That’s partly because I am not a lawyer but mostly because I am the head of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), an old organization that is known as one of the conservative voices […]
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Well, this is impertinent, but to build Monticello, That domed dream of our liberties floating High on its mountain, like a cloud, demanded A certain amount of black sweat. —Robert Penn Warren, Brother to Dragons (1979) Concessive ways to dismantle woke ideology exist that don’t require America to abandon her best ideas. This will not […]
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There’s a lot of hand-wringing in Argentina regarding anti-Keynesian candidate Javier Milei’s expressed promise to dollarize the economy if he’s elected president. After a century of centralized industrial planning and oversized welfare programs, along with insane levels of money printing to pay for it all, Argentina went from one of the wealthiest nations on earth […]
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Americans always have drawn upon the history and the greatest books of Western civilization to inspire them to their greatest words and deeds. Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address echoed the medieval church reformer John Wycliffe when he spoke of government of the people, for the people and by the people. George Patton became the […]
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This is the second of a series of articles exploring the scientific deep state. Here, Dr. J Scott Turner will explore basic questions, including how many scientists are employed by the federal government, where they work, what they do, and what are their qualifications? Articles to come will present case studies of how the scientific […]
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In the midst of the Israel-Hamas conflict, calls for “decolonization” have increased significantly. In summary, the philosophy and academic topic of “decolonization” is the rejection of nearly any and all holdovers from colonial powers, like the British Empire. Rejection of these “holdovers” can include everything from a rejection of European formal wear in favor of […]
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For two centuries after the founding of Harvard College in 1636, there was grotesque gender discrimination in American colleges and universities: there were no female students. Even in 1950, there were far more than two men on American campuses for every woman. But by the late twentieth century female enrollment had surged, coinciding with the […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClearReligion on November 9, 2023 and is crossposted here with permission. Mike Johnson opened his tenure as Speaker of the House with a speech citing the creator God mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. The speech drew criticism from columnists in the Washington Post, Time, PBS, and the New York Times, […]
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Is there hope for higher education? If so, it will be found at the University of Austin (UATX). In an email shared with Minding the Campus yesterday, Pano Kanelos, formerly dean of Christ College, the Honors College of Valparaiso University, and now founding president of UATX, gave news of “officially announcing the launch of America’s […]
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On May 27, 2021, an announcement was made that would create shockwaves around the world. This was the press release of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc (formerly the Kamloops Indian Band) in British Columbia, Canada, revealing “the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School [KIRS].” As a […]
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This is the first of a series of articles exploring the scientific deep state. Here, Dr. J Scott Turner will explore basic questions, including how many scientists are employed by the federal government, where they work, what they do, and what are their qualifications? Articles to come will present case studies of how the scientific […]
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“You don’t look Asian because your eyes are round instead of oval.” “She’s the most pregnant woman I’ve ever seen.” “Prospective law students prefer to see young faculty faces rather than old faculty faces.” “I suppose you think you owe Professor Gerber because he practically wrote your paper.” “The law school shouldn’t engage in illegal […]
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I once sat on a faculty hiring committee for an international studies position that rejected a candidate because she failed to apply the theories of Edward Said to her work. Said, a former professor at Columbia University, is most renowned for his theory of “Orientalism,” which posits that every interaction between the West and the […]
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My favorite explanation of Hamas’ and its Iranian sponsors’ latest war against Israel is the erudite Israeli expert on the Arab and Islamic world, Professor Mordechai Kedar, an Israeli Jew who teaches at what Westerners would call Israel’s only conservative university, Bar Ilan. It is conservative because it supports Jewish tradition. Almost all of the […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the Boston Herald on October 22, 2023, and published by the New Haven Register on October 25, 2023. “O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” In this injunction in Article Seven of the Hamas Covenant, ratified in 1988, one finds […]
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On October 10, 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom—whose Democratic party claims to be the party of science and science education—signed two anti-science education bills (AB226 and AB389) into law. These bills require the University of California and the California State University systems to bar the use of skeletal collections that cannot be affiliated with any […]
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Hamas’s rampage through Israel earlier this month was a shock to the world. The terrorists deliberately targeted civilians, including children, women, and the elderly. Babies had their heads cut off. Women were raped and then murdered. In all, 1,400 Israelis were killed, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The sadistic methods are tough […]
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Arguably, American universities in many ways resemble somewhat unruly and disrespectful adolescents—they want to be comfortably sustained by their adult parents/financiers, but their increasingly deplorable behavior needs firmer adult supervision. Hence “outsiders” are becoming assertive, be it major donors to elite private schools or politicians at schools importantly dependent on government subsidies, especially our state […]
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A little over a year ago, I wrote an article regarding a trove of once-secret documents taken directly from Soviet archives by the late dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. Those documents show that Ibram X. Kendi’s “anti-racist” ideology is derived from influence operations conducted by Communist parties—mainly the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the […]
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