What are the important topics that make a university education valuable? And even while the student traverses the various courses? Or in the future, when the student takes his or her place in society? I attended Columbia College in the 1960s. I took the foundational classes in Western Civilization and Humanities, but I failed to […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Dissident Professor on May 7, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. There are a number of college campus protests going on right now, and they will likely continue in some form for some time. You may be sympathetic, or you may object on a number of very legitimate […]
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The revitalization of institutions like the New College of Florida (NCF) provides us with an opportunity to step back and consider the purpose of elite colleges—their telos. NCF has provided a draft mission statement. However, outside some welcome references to a classical liberal arts education, it lacks all specifics. There is nothing measurable, no metric […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Liberty Unyielding on May 4, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. You have a right to free speech, but that doesn’t give you a First Amendment right to camp out on my lawn with protest signs. That’s trespassing. But government officials sometimes allow trespassing when they sympathize with […]
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Apart from a brief overview of the Congressional appropriations and authorization process, there is minimal emphasis on the complexities of government spending and its consequential effects during civics education. This knowledge gap is exploited by activists and special interest groups, who face little opposition from taxpayers when advocating for or against government expenditures. But what […]
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To regain order and discipline on our college campuses, leadership must understand the problem and who is involved. They must then take the necessary steps to ensure that every college campus provides a safe learning environment for all students. Since October 7, 2023, there have been many pro-Hamas and pro-Palestinian demonstrations on our nation’s college […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Epoch Times on April 29, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. The sudden uprising of university students across North America in support of Hamas and allegedly about the welfare of Palestinians does not result, for most students, from close ties with people on the other side of […]
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What do you get when you mix startup culture and therapy? Since the pandemic, the psychological wellness of the First World has been in freefall. As of 2023, the National Alliance on Mental Illness reports that one in five U.S. adults experience mental illness and 17 percent of youth aged six to 17 have a […]
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What’s been happening on elite campuses this spring is quite simple. Protesters have enacted “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). They’ve put into practice the DEI corollary known as “silence is violence.” The message is clear: Jews are not welcome short of performing the “silence is violence” pantomime. Protesters are engaging in red-guard-like behavior under the […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Cato Institute on May 1, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. Note: This post updates last month’s post. The biggest changes from last month include: The newest plan relying on regulatory changes under the Higher Education Act has been released and is summarized. A new court case against the SAVE plan […]
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Bad pronouncements from fellow economists have historically caused lots of mischief, but there is something important on which most of them agree: people respond to positive incentives—money, material goods, power, even sexual attractions—and try to avoid negative incentives—losing large sums of money, freedom through imprisonment, etc. I have argued for decades that those incentive systems, […]
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I recall an incident on a trading floor at a firm where I once worked. A young man—let’s call him William—got himself too long on the stock of Barclays as it crashed in concert with the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008. William was betting big that Barclays was oversold and that it […]
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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 […]
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Claudine Gay’s recent spectacular flameout has sparked a smoldering brushfire over academic plagiarism. Suddenly, we are seeing plagiarism everywhere. Shortly after the exposure of Gay’s sins, Neri Oxman, who is a Harvard professor herself, and the wife of Bill Ackman—the hedge fund manager that led a donor’s backlash against Harvard’s tolerance of anti-Semitism—was accused of […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClear Wire on April 25, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. Our K-12 educational system is designed to serve much less than 50 percent of American students. For decades the cry has been that “all kids must go to college.” Yet, only a minority do so and fewer graduate. […]
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Socialists and Communists have been celebrating May Day for more than a century now—in the Communist regimes, by a grim display of marching soldiers, tanks, and artillery. On May Day, we should remember how many innocents were butchered by the fanatics who sought to impose the Communist nightmare on humanity—and how many millions led and […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClear Wire on April 25, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. With new institutes emerging at colleges and universities in Florida, Ohio, Utah, Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas, and elsewhere, civics education may be seeing a rebirth. “We need these civics centers at every institution of higher education in America,” […]
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Scarcely a month passes without encountering yet one more new faculty group dedicated to promoting intellectual diversity on campus, yet one more manifesto celebrating campus free speech, and yet one more account of a canceled professor successfully suing those who canceled him. Then, add accounts of red states banning “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) from […]
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With its closing of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) offices and mass dismissals of DEI bureaucrats, Texas brings down the curtain on one of the most shameful, expensive, and destructive higher education vanity projects of this century. This cancerous DEI bureaucracy was imposed on campuses nationwide by radicals who strong-armed cowardly administrations in the summer […]
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In 2021, Middlebury College in Vermont decided to rename a Christian chapel originally named after former Vermont Governor John Mead due to Mead’s historical advocacy for the eugenics movement. A family lawsuit led by the Estate’s Special Administrator, former Vermont Governor Jim Douglas, alleges that John Mead gifted the funds to construct the chapel specifically […]
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Stacy Hawkins, a former vice dean and law professor at Rutgers Law School, recently wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article’s subtitle reads, “If critics have a problem with the goal of diversity, they should say so”—I’ll come to the main title later. As one of these critics, I’ve been vocal […]
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As Lawrence E. Harrison shows, a nation is a state of mind, which means my parents had a transnational marriage. Mom and Dad were both children of Sicilian immigrants, but my dad was American while my mom was Sicilian. Sicilians distrust authorities. From Trump voters to Harvard leaders, my fellow Americans are becoming as Sicilian […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Cato Institute on April 24, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. Immediately after the Supreme Court overturned his last big student loan forgiveness plan, President Biden announced a new effort that would rely on a different law, an effort that is now nearing completion. The administration has released the draft regulations that would […]
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History shows that lofty ideals predicated upon political utopianism and social egalitarianism often generate feel-good, do-bad policies that lead to disastrous outcomes. As Thomas Sowell has sharply observed, “[i]f there is anything worse than unfairness, it is make-believe fairness.” The exhaustion of the #MeToo movement provides a case in point for the unintended consequences and […]
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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 […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The American Postliberal on March 22, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. If you have ever been in a classroom where some sort of deadline is approaching, chances are that you have witnessed what I like to call a “half-hearted mini rebellion.” This is a situation in […]
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As a countermeasure to action civics, which aims to convert the “traditional subject of civics into a recruitment tool of the progressive left,” it is crucial for students to engage in civic behavior actively. This behavior, rooted in a nonpartisan American pluralism, accentuates the rights and duties of citizenship in various spheres-school, home, community, and […]
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As with negative rights, there’s a lot of confusion regarding natural law. People use the term without much explanation of what it means, and those of us who are not trained lawyers or legal historians don’t want to reveal our ignorance by asking for clarifications. This is my attempt as a non-specialist to explain what […]
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Years ago, after the Bush administration initiated the Deep State’s surveillance regime via the Patriot Act, I observed that the left and right in this country seemed to be competing to see who could censor the most speech. Since then, the left has forged far ahead in the censorship race, with the rise of cancel […]
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Closing “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) offices around the country is a powerful step in halting the illiberal and divisive harm-centric monoculture that has taken over higher education. However, there remain far too many student-facing administrative offices that seek the same goals. Whether in residential services or student life offices, administrators wield significant power and […]
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