Month: July 2024

The Buckeye’s Transparency Black Eye: Ohio State University Delays More Public Records Requests

Over the last two years, I’ve written more than a few stories drawing from public records requests. But sometimes, an institution’s response to those requests—or labored, muddled, confusing non-response—becomes a story of its own. Case in point: The Ohio State University.  In August of last year, I received a tip that the university had abruptly […]

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How Americans Mourned the Assassination of a Controversial Leader

Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by RealClear Wire on July 24, 2024. With edits to match MTC’s style, it is crossposted here with permission. It is easy to forget how unpopular Abraham Lincoln was during his lifetime. In fact, he was hated by much of the country—not only in the South, which seceded after his […]

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I Grew Up in Black America. DEI Is Not About Equality.

It’s time that leftists take their heads out of the sand. Whites are not the only group of people that can be racists. Black racism—racism against whites by blacks—is real, and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) makes it worse. From birth through the first grade, I lived in Chicago Heights, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. […]

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Marquette Silent on Trump Assassination Attempt, Yet Vocal on January 6th, Affirmative Action, and DACA

On July 13, America experienced what seemed like another “shot heard around the world.” Former President Donald Trump avoided death by mere centimeters after a shooter attempted to assassinate him at a Butler, PA, rally. As news exploded across every social media platform, newspaper, and broadcasting station, one institution decided to stay silent: Marquette University. […]

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Native Americans Weren’t Singing Kumbaya When White Settlers Arrived

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the author’s book Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America’s School Curricula. It is posted here with permission.  Modern historians often bewail the fact that the historical understandings of Native Americans have frequently been negative and one-sided, representing them as a mass of faceless […]

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Corporate America Doesn’t Understand Gen Z’s Entrepreneurial Spirit

A high cumulative grade point average, multiple majors, impressive summer internships, and extensive study and travel abroad no longer guarantee an entry-level job after college graduation. According to a recent study by Intelligent, corporations are hiring fewer recent graduates, believing they are unprepared for the workforce. Unfortunately, a college record that sounds impressive on a […]

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Refuting Myths About The 1954 Indochina Geneva Conference

Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by the American Thinker on July 21, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. [July 21 marked] the 70th anniversary of the end of the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indochina, which brought to an end more than seven years of war between France and Ho Chi Minh’s Communist Viet Minh Front. It […]

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Financial Armageddon is Coming for College Sports

In recent years, intercollegiate college athletics has become an expensive activity for many American colleges and universities. Even at 68 Power Five Conference schools whose teams generate significant football and basketball income, very few typically even claim to make a profit, and that is using accounting procedures that, if followed by Fortune 500 companies, would […]

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Democratic Elites Are the Problem

“Everything goes when anything goes all of the time.” —Paul Westerberg Alexis de Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America (1835/40) that upon the advent of written constitutions and electoral politics, the aristocracies of the Western world had to rediscover their purpose. He saw the United States as the most acute example of a society in […]

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The First Draft of Liberty

Thomas Jefferson wrote A Summary View of the Rights of British America in 1774, basically the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. That’s how he got to the drafting Committee of Five for the Declaration in 1776. Fine job you did in 1774, Thomas; why don’t you write another version now? Back in 1774, […]

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The Red Scare Was No Moral Panic

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the author’s book Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America’s School Curricula. It is posted here with permission.  One central left-wing myth, underlying many other beliefs, is that the United States is a “McCarthyite” society prone to “Red Scares.” The belief props […]

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Teaching the Teachers: Subject Expertise Comes First

Recent polling by College Pulse for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) reveals that college-aged Americans are abysmally ignorant of our rich historical heritage and knowledge of our most important civic institutions. An implication is that the colleges neglect to instruct students to remedy that scandalous deficiency. While that is no doubt correct, […]

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Women Lead Campus Protests, Men Outperform in Civic Literacy

Men and women are increasingly diverging politically, a notably pronounced trend on college campuses. College-aged men—a shrinking demographic—have become more conservative, while college-aged women have moved into the liberal camp. Young women are more likely than their male counterparts to vote, care about political issues, and participate in social movements and protests. A cursory look […]

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Spellbooks, Rituals, ‘Demonology,’ Taylor Swift Rumors: Classes on Witchcraft Abound This Fall

Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by the College Fix on July 22, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. Professors say they’ve seen growing academic interest in magic, occult Universities are offering a variety of classes on witchcraft and magic this fall, including courses that will examine tarot cards, create spellbooks, and analyze why people accuse […]

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Psychology Has Been Overtaken by a Dangerous and Pervasive Ideology

Since I left the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Masters Program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), I’ve been forced to confront the alarming truth that the entire field of psychology is under the sway of a dangerous ideology distilled from postmodern philosophy and critical theories. This ideology disguises its authoritarian objectives using the camouflage […]

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American Education: Public, Popular, and Polarizing

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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Calling on Gentlemen in Fairfax County

Virginians made the rejection of the Intolerable Acts revolutionary. The Intolerable Acts were outrageous abrogations of American liberty. Massachusetts was their primary target, but sympathy began to spread beyond its borders. The Orangetown Resolutions showed how small-town New Yorkers could commit themselves to solidarnosc with Boston. But the most important acceders were the Virginians. Virginia […]

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Why Music Thrives in Our Universities

“The arts, taken as a whole, quietly govern the metaphysical heritage of our Western tradition.” Hans Georg-Gadamer,  Theory, Culture and Society “Words are the gods living within a convention, but tones are the daemons.”  Goethe, 25 February 1870, Cosima Wagner’s Diary, 1: 193 Music thrives across our nation’s universities because the students themselves create it. […]

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Waiting for Answers: A Statement on the Attempted Assassination of Former President Trump

Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by the National Association of Scholars on July 16, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. The attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, by a 20-year-old man from suburban Pittsburgh has riveted the nation’s attention. I have no wish to clutter the […]

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Reading Is a Skill Just as Important as Ever

Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by Tribune Chronicle on July 13, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. As the years pile up and experience grows, many folks find opportunities to share tips and guidance for those who are coming up behind them. It’s the way of the world, of course, that adults take […]

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Did Ravel Stand on Beethoven’s Shoulders?

At an exhilarating four-hand piano house concert in Tucson, two noted recording and performing artists, Dana Muller and Gary Steigerwalt, played a signature piece by Maurice Ravel (1875 – 1937), La Valse: Poème Chorégraphique composed in 1919-1920. Later, in a discussion with the audience, the pianists noted that they followed the faster tempo set by […]

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Psychology Has Lost Its Credibility

Should we be worried about the power psychology professions have in our everyday lives and the direction of the field? In researching “Trusting the ‘Experts’ is Risky Business,” I came upon the news of an Indiana family who lost custody of their transgender teen even when there was no finding of abuse. The U.S. Supreme […]

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The Illusion of Institutional Neutrality: A Mercifully Short Refresher

In April, I published a tiresomely long explanation of why the newly popular idea of “institutional neutrality” is a dead end. My essay, “The Illusion of Institutional Neutrality,” took up so much space because I wanted there to be at least one easily available account of where this idea came from, why it was about […]

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‘New York Times is pure propaganda.’ Agreed.

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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Biden Administration’s ‘Anti-Harassment’ Mandate to Colleges Tells Them to Violate the First Amendment

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Liberty Unyielding on July 6, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. It has been edited to fit Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. The Education Department is pressuring colleges to restrict speech that denounces pro-Palestine protesters or denigrates Jews or Palestinians—such as speech calling pro-Palestine protesters “terrorists”—under the rationale that such speech […]

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‘Teaching Sociology’ Is an Ideological Nightmare

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from an article originally published by The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on July 10, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. An empirical study of what is being taught and learned in university sociology courses around the country would be challenging to carry out. But American sociology provides […]

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University of Illinois Springfield Golf Team Accuses Head Coach of ‘Shocking Abuse’

In recent interviews with 2aDays, University of Illinois-Springfield (UIS) student-athletes have accused head golf coach Michael Leotta of severe misconduct, exposing a troubling pattern of abuse and systemic failure within the university’s athletic department. These revelations reflect broader issues in collegiate athletics and underscore the urgent need for reforms to protect student-athletes. Former athletic director […]

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Safetyism and the Tentifada: Modern Campus Protests Undermine Intellectual Rigor and Erode Higher Education

The spring of 2024 witnessed the startling reemergence of anti-Semitism on the quads of many leading universities. Rather than admissions policies that quietly barred Jews from campus in the early twentieth century for fears of “overrepresentation,” the present paroxysms are on florid display. Camps were erected, students assembled with signage, makeshift libraries, and teach-ins that […]

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Academia Portrays Racism as Exclusively Perpetrated by Whites, but That’s Not the Case

As an integrationist, multiculturalist, and white man married to a highly educated black woman and the father of two biracial children, I deplore racism in all its forms—systemic, overt, and covert, from any race or color. Racism must be condemned universally, regardless of its source. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared during World War II, “We […]

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Shaun Harper Has a Plan to Save DEI. It Includes Eradicating Dissenters.

Shaun Harper, a Professor at the University of Southern California (USC) and Provost Professor of Education and Business, was recently featured in a Chronicle of Higher Education article titled “Can Shaun Harper Save DEI?” As a recent USC retiree, I read the article and reviewed materials from the USC Race and Equity Center, which Harper […]

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