Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by City Journal on February 26, 2025. With edits to match MTC’s style guidelines, it is cross-posted here with permission. At American colleges and universities, radicals are harassing the few remaining dissenters into retirement. The most notable case is that of Amy Wax, professor of law at the University […]
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Editor’s Note: The events discussed took place in Toronto, Canada, and therefore, this essay has been added to our Minding the World column. For more op-eds, analysis, and essays on higher education worldwide, visit the column. Over two thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle wrote that the nature of a governing body […]
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The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal has just released Blueprint for Reform: Teacher Preparation, a thoughtful overview of the state of teacher preparation, with succinct, useful recommendations for policymakers who wish to improve education policy so as to get better-prepared teachers into the classroom. It’s very much worth reading—and I’d say so even […]
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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 directly by entering your name and email under “SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, ‘TOP OF MIND,’” located on the right-hand side of the […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on May 15, 2024. It was translated into English from French by the Observatory before being edited to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission. The three missions of academics are currently teaching, research, and community […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the College Fix on March 12, 2025. With edits to match MTC’s style guidelines, it is cross-posted here with permission. A Planned Parenthood executive is researching “power and oppression” and “reproductive health services” with the help of nearly half a million in taxpayer funds. The study, “Enhancing Policy Impact for […]
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A friend of mine is a professor on the front lines of the artificial intelligence (AI) cheating revolution, both in his classroom and as part of the college committee that judges academic misconduct. He’s discovered that a collective approach to detecting AI cheating may be more effective than an individual one. But adopting a collective […]
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In the lengthening shadows of late summer 2024, as yet another academic year loomed on the horizon, an inescapable realization struck me: The moment had arrived to bid farewell to the groves of academe. The decision to leave behind my university career after nearly a decade in administration and considerably longer in teaching emerged not […]
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The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a classic 1948 Western directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart as Fred Dobbs, one of three desperate men hoping to strike it rich digging for gold in the mountains of Western Mexico. They indeed find gold but at high price. Murder, madness, and banditry ensue. Ultimately […]
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I’ve written earlier about the recent William & Mary Quarterly Forum, whose contributors proposed getting rid of the term “early America”—not least out of a desire to stop teaching American history. Everything I wrote then is true enough, but it was written in a more polemical mode. I want to return to the subject to […]
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Progressive bureaucrats, student activism, eager donors, peer pressure: higher education institutions have an array of internal and external drives for promoting race, gender, and other leftist ideologies, but a powerful factor lies with mandates from accreditors to comply with diversity standards for institutional culture, staff and faculty hiring, student outcomes, and other relevant areas. In […]
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Editor’s Note: This article originally stated that the NSF-funded math postdoc was at Texas Southern University. It has been corrected to reflect that the position is at Texas State University. Despite having one of the most stringent anti-DEI legislations in the country, Texas universities still host an array of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs […]
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The Heterodox Academy found that in 2024, more than 100 colleges and universities across North America adopted institutional neutrality policies. Taking a cue from the 1967 University of Chicago Kalven Report, which argued that the university must remain neutral to be a home to a wide diversity of views, impartiality protects open inquiry and academic freedom […]
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Tenure has long been a target of conservative higher education reformers. Why should the Marxist professors brainwashing our children enjoy employment for life? Abolish tenure, and we can show them the door. Or so the argument goes. Yes, there are a fair number of left-wing nutjobs in the academy, bent on indoctrinating rather than teaching—but not nearly as many as conservative pundits and legislators seem to think. As my […]
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President Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear he wants to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education (ED), and some news reports suggest an executive order to achieve that is imminent. Since the ED was created by Congress, it would take formal Congressional action to eliminate it, and the administration lacks the votes. Therefore, whether […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on September 2, 2024. It was translated from French into English by the Observatory and subsequently edited to conform to Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission. Ms. Réjane Sénac holds a doctorate in political science from the […]
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In the darkness of 2020, the memory that comes up the most was supervising the case of a severely ill young woman who went by the “they/them” pronouns. Understanding the illness and formulating a coherent treatment plan—and, in the process, helping the counselor-in-training to develop clinical thinking—was blocked by the rage of students whose reaction […]
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Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools like Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, et cetera will radically change student assignments and evaluation in college classes. I have already explained how AI means that students can no longer be forced to do the reading. How will college professors change in response? Consider some likely approaches. They can ignore AI because […]
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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 directly by entering your name and email under “SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, ‘TOP OF MIND,’” located on the right-hand side of the […]
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Two of America’s prestigious private universities, Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis, recently did something extraordinary: they jointly bought a full paid ad in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Higher Education is at a Crossroads” that asserted: Ideological forces in and outside of campuses have pulled too many universities away from the core purpose, […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the College Fix on March 3 2025. With edits to match MTC’s style guidelines, it is cross-posted here with permission. About one in nine Christian colleges have some form of connection with Planned Parenthood, a recent investigation by the Pro-Life Generation’s Demetree Institute for Pro-Life Advancement found. The institute, an […]
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Newly confirmed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has just sent an initial email to the staff at the Education Department (ED): Our job is to respect the will of the American people and the President they elected, who has tasked us with accomplishing the elimination of bureaucratic bloat here at the Department of Education—a momentous […]
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President Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Education (ED), Linda McMahon, was confirmed today. As the co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) alongside her husband, Vince McMahon, the mogul has had a longstanding career in business, politics, and public service. In 2009, McMahon left WWE to try her hand in politics. But after two […]
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Higher education accreditation is an arcane but vitally important target for reform in the new administration. Accreditation is used to ensure colleges meet a minimal level of quality—colleges without an accreditor approval do not have access to federal financial aid programs like Pell Grants and student loans. But accreditation is broken. As I lay out […]
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Barnard College was finally showing signs of responsible leadership when it expelled two students for participating in an egregious, anti-Semitic disruption of a class on modern Israel at Columbia earlier this semester. But after almost two years of anti-Semitic chaos on campus, the college’s leaders have evidently still not learned their lesson. When protesters who were […]
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It is immensely encouraging to see state legislatures proposing and, in some cases, passing bills that would end “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) indoctrination in public colleges and universities. DEI programs are widespread in higher education, and they do profound harm to students, faculty, and the quality of education. Getting rid of them, however, is […]
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Initially enacted in 1972 to prohibit sex-based discrimination in federally funded educational institutions, Title IX aimed to ensure women’s equal participation in academia. But in the last few decades, each U.S. president has attempted to make amendments to the law. In 2011, the Obama administration broadened its scope to include sexual harassment and assault, mandating […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on March 6, 2024. It was translated from French into English by the Observatory and subsequently edited to conform to Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission. While the acronym “INSPE” is not explicitly defined, it […]
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On Feb. 5, U.S. Rep. Dave Joyce (R-OH), in collaboration with Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), introduced the Higher Education Accountability Tax (HEAT) Act, H.R. 1006. By amending the Internal Revenue Code, the bill seeks to hold private colleges and universities accountable for their role in the student debt crisis by increasing taxes on their investment […]
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During the Civil War, Democrats attempted to use cotton and private shipping companies to undermine American security and gain support in Europe for the Confederacy. Today, the blue state of California is leveraging Berkeley to build ties with China and undermine America’s qualitative advantages in dual-use technology and to undermine energy independence. On the West […]
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