As a professor with over twenty years of experience in higher education, I’ve watched with growing concern—not only at the rise of anti-Semitism on campus, but also at the shallow, reactive ways many institutions have responded. Nationwide, Jewish students are encountering levels of hostility and marginalization that would have been nearly unimaginable just a few […]
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Don’t let young people trick you into believing they are digital experts because they are so adept at texting, taking photos, and incessantly tinkering with their smartphones. My experience teaching college students suggests that they are consumers of everything digital, with little understanding of how the digital world works or how it affects them. Since students are […]
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The more I learn about the higher education portions of the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), the more I like it. But recognizing that we tend to fall into information bubbles, I do try to seek out opposing views. So, I was pleased that Inside Higher Ed ran an op-ed by Rachel […]
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This year marks my ninth year coaching students on their college essays. It also marks my first year coaching ChatGPT. Passionate about the transformative power of writing, I signed up to teach three high school students how to outline and draft their college essays back in 2017. After studying countless Ivy League college application files […]
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For Americans living in the age of social media and instant clicks, Washington often feels like a nonstop, partisan version of the Jerry Springer Show. A recent Time article about the long-running show—which aired from 1991 to 2018—described its format as a place “where guests went on to discuss their deepest, darkest secrets and confront […]
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You see it in horror movies all the time when the hero’s loved one gets bitten by a vampire, or a zombie, and then slowly becomes a monster. It is such a classic feature of the genre that it borders on cliché. The plot of Bram Stoker’s Dracula revolves around it. The characters of Abraham […]
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Author’s Note: This article 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, enter your name and email under “SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, ‘TOP OF MIND,’” located on the right-hand side of the site. Students haven’t been […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from an article originally published on Heterodox Stem on July 6, 2025. With some edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. The primary function of universities is to educate skilled labor. Within universities, skills are esteemed mainly by awarded degrees or titles and the […]
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It’s just too easy. “Here’s a picture of my homework, what are the answers?” “Write me a 500-word essay on Catcher in the Rye that sounds like me (I’m in 8th grade).” As humans, we build things that allow us to take the path of least resistance. From the wheel to the printing press, we […]
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In the sprawling deserts of Saudi Arabia, a new city-state is slowly rising from the sands. This city, named NEOM, is part of Saudi Arabia’s ambitious 2030 Vision Plan to make the oil-rich kingdom one of the world’s most technologically advanced nations. The project is estimated to cost the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) $500 billion and […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by PJ Media on July 7 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. The newly elected Democrat candidate for mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, is a perfect exemplar of an American college graduate: an anti-Semitic communist. Mamdani, who refuses to disavow […]
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On college campuses across the United States, the chant “Free Palestine” has become a rallying cry. Many students, faculty members, and activists insist that Israel is a settler-colonial state and that the land known as Palestine has been unjustly taken from its indigenous Arab inhabitants. The left accuses Jews of colonizing a land that never […]
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Sol Stern passed away on July 11 at age 89. Sol was my good friend, and I mourn his loss. Long before I met Sol, I reviewed one of his books, Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice. Years later, when we chanced to meet one another, he remembered that review […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from an article originally published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on July 14, 2025. It is crossposted here with permission. Buried in a recent report from the Economic Innovation Group is a statistic that should make every university administrator in America lose sleep: Foreign-born workers who arrived […]
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A group of scholars from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has issued an open letter denouncing philosophy professor Alex Byrne for his role in co-authoring the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s (HHS) report on pediatric gender dysphoria. The report critically evaluated the evidence for gender-affirming medical care for minors, questioning the safety […]
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Harvard does not trust the Trump administration. The Trump administration does not trust Harvard. Yet, you make peace with your enemies, not your friends. The best way forward is for Harvard—and other elite schools—to make a deal on one important aspect of their dispute: Provide admissions transparency in exchange for student visa forbearance. If that […]
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Last month at an academic freedom conference in England, a friend from a traditional part of the Middle East jokingly dismissed the sea of Pride flags festooning Oxford as the new “flags of the empire.” They observed that Pride flags outnumbered the Union Jack, the United Kingdom’s flag and that of the old British Empire, […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on the College Fix on July 14, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. The One Big Beautiful Bill that President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4 caps how much money graduate students can borrow from the federal […]
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In the third episode of VAS News Chat, Teresa Manning and I examine the mounting pressure on American universities from both legal and geopolitical fronts. Manning, who serves as Policy Director at the National Association of Scholars and leads its Virginia affiliate, unpacks a series of federal actions—from Title IX enforcement battles to investigations into […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Liberty Unyielding on July 3, 2025, and is crossposted here with permission. It has been edited to fit Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. This fall, a Virginia couple is sending their daughter to George Mason University (GMU), Virginia’s largest public university, which has over 40,000 students. On June 30, they […]
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The most consequential—and I think harmful—economist of the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes, uttered the expression headlining this article. Keynes believed public policy should concentrate on immediate, short-run problems. With that in mind, I have been part of American higher education for over six decades, and this is easily the most significant year in terms […]
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David Eltis’s Atlantic Cataclysm: Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades is a necessary and sobering work that should be read by every college student seeking to understand slavery not as an American peculiarity, but as a global institution embedded deep within human history. Drawing on decades of archival research, statistical data, and newly analyzed ship records, […]
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In April, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Jr. announced his plans to notify medical schools that they will lose federal funding if they do not offer nutrition courses aimed at teaching students how to provide holistic treatment for patients. According to Kennedy, nutrition education is lacking in America’s medical schools, and as a result, […]
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How should one begin to understand why the modern left mischaracterizes the constitutionally vested Electoral College system as a setback to democracy, or why they paint parental efforts to curate age-appropriate school library contents as “book burning?” Such ad hominem attacks, distasteful indeed, are standard operating procedures to deflect from their own illiberal impulses. But […]
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Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on June 18, 2025. The Observatory translated it into English from French. I have edited it, to the best of my ability, to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission. Although the founder of La Tribune de […]
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Much has been written about how places like Harvard have failed to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism. The coverage is both shocking and, sadly, predictable. But what’s really struck me lately is just how willing Harvard can be to take action on anti-Semitism, so long as it means going after Jews. Harvard researcher of gender […]
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Author’s Note: This article 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, enter your name and email under “SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, ‘TOP OF MIND,’” located on the right-hand side of the site. For decades, weather […]
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Daren Bakst and Marlo Lewis have edited a series of science policy recommendations for reforming the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that literally put the irreproducibility crisis of modern science first. In the first chapter of Modernizing the EPA, Marlo Lewis argues that the EPA’s policy mistakes derive from permitting and fostering practices associated with the […]
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There is much discussion these days about the need for “regime change” in certain countries. I don’t generally like the phrase because it can be misunderstood. It implies that a legitimate administration is in charge of a country or institution, and that illegitimate methods will displace it. Much of the world, however, actually needs regime […]
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Yesterday, two nonprofits, Fair for All and Join Our America, filed a federal civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, alleging the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) violated Title VI and the First Amendment. On May 21st, 2025, the Our America Foundation reached out to the University […]
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