Month: March 2024

Classical Christian Education: The Antidote to Progressivism

Reflecting on my teaching journey that spanned from the late 1970s to 2020, I can’t help but notice the stark contrast in educational approaches. When I started, education was centered around traditional book learning and assessments, a teacher-led process that continued into the 1990s. However, as I retired from full-time teaching in 2020 and transitioned […]

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Intolerable Acts: Then and Now

The nation’s 250 Anniversary is only 29 months away.  The National Association of Scholars is commemorating the events that led up to the Second Continental Congress officially adopting the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. This is the forth installment of the series. Find the fourth installment here.  Intolerable is a strong word. We […]

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To Renew Faith in Education, Look to Passover and Resurrection

“You cannot own a child of God.” Those were the words I read and re-read in most term papers from the community college course on American government I taught in the COVID-19 spring semester of 2020. In light of a divided America on edge amidst a pandemic, this was the most common answer to the […]

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Intellectual Treason at Harvard, Penn, and MIT

The antidote to bad ideas is good ideas, I’ve often said and sometimes written. I’ve railed against censorship and “cancellation” and defended very free, very unfettered speech. Even odious speech, detestably bad ideas spoken aloud. It’s good that it all be spoken aloud, where its moral bankruptcy is obvious in the marketplace of ideas—when rebutted […]

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A Healthy Culture in a Healthy Economy

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Law & Liberty on March 25, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. A specter is haunting capitalism – the specter of “higher” things. Or so an increasing number of thinkers among the New Right, the National Conservatives, or the Economic Nationalists might say. They insist that the “neoliberal” order of free enterprise and […]

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What Are Negative Rights?

Negative rights signal the core of natural law in the American tradition, also known as our Bill of Rights. Without them, the Constitution might never have been ratified, or we might be a very different country today. Most of us can list them—the right to free speech, the right to keep and bear arms, the […]

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Lasting Education Reform Will Require Empowering Tradition-Minded Professors and Institutions

Tradition-minded education reformers who wish to pass on to our children attachment to the ideals and institutions of the American republic and nation need to create new programs and schools independent of the existing far-left monoculture in academia. One way to go about this is to build up a network of autonomous Centers, such as […]

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Hope for Harvard?

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Law & Liberty on March 18, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. Tacitus at the beginning of his Annals, after brilliantly summarizing all of Roman history in the space of a few paragraphs, ends by providing an answer to a question that must have arisen in the minds of […]

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Give Me an Engaged Electorate

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Real Clear Wire on March 20, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. On March 23rd in 1775, Patrick Henry rose at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, to urge his countrymen to arm themselves for the Revolutionary War. Four weeks before the battle of Lexington and Concord, Henry […]

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A Closer Look at the Founders’ Perspectives on Slavery

Juneteenth, a celebration held in Texas since 1866, was recognized as a federal holiday for the first time in 2021. Juneteenth commemorates the day Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, TX, to tell the enslaved African-Americans that the war was over and they were free—whereas Union states Kentucky and Delaware practiced slavery for six additional months […]

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The Real March Madness

If there is an annual event that most clearly demonstrates the importance of merit and skill on American college campuses, it is the March Madness surrounding the NCAA basketball championships. The public, whose support of higher education is sharply waning in light of increasing collegiate inanities, intensely roots for favorite schools and players. In higher […]

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Congress Must Defund MIT Until It Gets Its House in Order

The ramifications of MIT President Sally Kornbluth’s failure to quell the outbreak of anti-Semitism on campus, frustrated by the active opposition of her own senior administrators, Deans, DEI officers, and radical faculty that blossomed under the appeasement policies of past president Rafael Reif, now threaten MIT’s federal funding. As well it should. The House Committee […]

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Why Are We Surprised That Mobs of Hamas Supporters Disrupt Our Lives and Spread Hate?

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Epoch Times on March 12, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. As mobs rampage through American and Canadian streets celebrating and championing Hamas and its genocidal anti-Semitism, disrupting university campuses and blocking access to Jewish-owned stores, restaurants, and houses of worship, most citizens and political figures look on […]

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Which Types of Schools Would Gain Under the College Cost Reduction Act?

We’ve been exploring the pros and cons of the College Cost Reduction Act, a bill introduced by House Republicans. Here we continue that effort, asking which types of colleges would gain or lose under the bill. Two new features the bill introduces are bonus payments and risk sharing penalties that colleges would receive to pay […]

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The Myth of Housing Disparities and Residential Segregation

Educational inequities, racial wealth gaps, health disparities, environmental racism … America’s race peddlers have invaded every aspect of our public life with their ongoing schemes of injecting race into various government programs, education policies, health initiatives, and so on. Alas, the never-ending race grift has descended on government housing policies. Since 2023, the San Diego […]

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At UC Berkeley, there is one administrator for every four undergrads

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The College Fix on March 12, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. ANALYSIS: Nearly 30 different DEI programs at UC Berkeley don’t help ratio The University of California Berkeley employs one full-time administrator for every four undergraduate students, according to a College Fix analysis. This is an 11 percent increase in full-time […]

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College Presidents Are Oblivious to Their Campus Climate

The past five months have shown the world just how toxic speech is on college campuses. The climate for open inquiry and dialogue is under attack nationwide, and students are scared to speak, question, and express themselves freely. Using disparaging rhetoric, even violence, to prevent speech is now commonplace on campus, and thus, many students […]

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Escalation Towards an Independent Terrorist State

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Gatestone Institute on March 3, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. Both US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron reveal their simplistic, and somewhat imperialist, Western approach to a complex Middle Eastern situation, irrespective of the aims and intentions of the two […]

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A Modern Day Thermopylae

If you are at all familiar with the history of Western Civilization or perhaps the movie 300, then you probably already know the basics about the Battle of Thermopylae. 2500 years ago, a small band of Spartans led by King Leonidas and some allied Greek forces sought to prevent an invasion of the Greek peninsula […]

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True North

The nation’s 250 Anniversary is only 29 months away.  The National Association of Scholars is commemorating the events that led up to the Second Continental Congress officially adopting the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. This is the forth installment of the series. Find the third installment here.  Joe Biden — Photo by Gage […]

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Academic Freedom is Not an Academic License

Academic freedom is constantly referred to by faculty and administration. It is often used as a proxy for free speech, and a free speech absolutism where “anything goes.” It serves as an academic totem; as an indulgence, that faculty seem to consider beyond any boundaries of definition or responsibility. Limiting academic freedom would delimit faculty […]

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The Higher Education Bubble is Ready to Burst

“It’s a collateralized debt obligation [CDOs] made up out of, like, C-rated mortgages,” said Wesley Yang in a conversation with John Sailer in 2022. “These people, their job is—as the rating agency—to say that it’s all A plus.” Yang and Sailer were not talking about the CDOs stuffed with subprime mortgages and fraudulently passed off […]

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The Babylon Bee Comes to Harvard

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Harvard Salient on February 29, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. CEO Seth Dillon gave an address titled “Humor in American Politics.” On February 27th, the Harvard Republican Club hosted Seth Dillon, the CEO of satirical news outlet The Babylon Bee, for a speech titled “Humor in American Politics,” which aimed […]

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Defining the Boundaries of Free Speech: Threats, Libel, and Blackmail in Society

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of free speech. It is imperative for society and even more important on campus. After all, the latter is the place where ideas and the search for the truth are held to be particularly precious. Without untrammeled free speech, it is difficult to see how this mission can […]

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The Potted Plants of Higher Education

Throughout most of the nearly seven decades in which I have had an intimate association with American higher education, I have pondered the question: “Who really ‘owns’ the universities?” Several groups claim at least partial control on many campuses, hence the oft-cited term “shared governance.” But to avoid chaos, some specific individual or group has […]

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DEI-vestment: University of Florida sheds ‘inclusion’ for innovation

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Blaze Media on March 7, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. The Sunshine State is now the test case of whether anti-DEI laws can have a meaningful effect in turning back these neo-racist programs. The University of Florida boldly advanced to the front of the academic line last […]

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A Long View on Artificial Intelligence

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Law & Liberty on March 1, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. Over the past year, artificial intelligence has become a subject of widespread public interest and concern. This is mainly thanks to new Generative AI models, such as ChatGPT and Bard, which have brought AI unprecedented attention and […]

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No Borders: Higher Education Enables Illegal Immigration

Last month, Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student at the University of Georgia (UGA), was fatally beaten by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela. As expected, the left quickly came to defend the status of what they refer to as “undocumented migrants”—though “illegal” is the accurate term. Janet Frick, a professor at UGA, took to X […]

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Minding the Sciences—Wicked Science and Understanding Climate Change: Uncertainty, Risk, and Pragmatics

Wicked problems need wicked science to, minimally, frame what is puzzling. Wickedness is not a moral judgment. Instead, it is tied to the limits of knowing—when rationality is encumbered by ambiguity and uncertainty and when control over the variables is limited or currently impossible. Predictions that emerge from modeling, especially those that reach decades into […]

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Louisiana is Right to Scrap a Mandatory FAFSA

This morning, the Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted to let high school students graduate if they do not file the Federal Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). This smart move redresses a tragic reality: artificially increasing college access has meant that young people who ought not go to college are going […]

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