Author’s Note: This article originally appeared in my weekly Top of Mind newsletter, which goes out to subscribers every Thursday. Sign up to receive it directly in your inbox.
I write to you this week from the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range. The air is cold here, but the scenes are spectacular. I’m without my usual deep dive into the latest foolishness in higher education so that you can enjoy your Thanksgiving dinner in peace. Still, I have a few updates and some timely reading worth your attention.
Many of you have been following our American Revolution series. What began as a special project on Minding the Campus has grown into a full-fledged historical enterprise deserving a home of its own. We have now launched a dedicated Substack that will serve as the permanent archive for the project as we approach America’s 250th anniversary. If your holiday bandwidth allows, give the Substack a look.
Furthermore, in the spirit of the season, I’ve resurfaced a couple of pieces that fit neatly between helpings of turkey—or tacos, depending on your latitude.
Elizabeth Weiss’s “Thankful to Western Civilization” offers a brisk defense of Thanksgiving and the civilizational inheritance that makes the holiday possible. And, in a shameless plug, I revisited my own “Thanksgiving Guide for Crazy Uncles,” which provides a fact-based but mischievous set of conversational tools for those brave enough to mention that the world is getting stranger by the year.
You’ll also find, prominently on the front page, a piece by our student contributor Claire Harrington, who asks whether we’re witnessing the beginning of the end of campus land acknowledgements—a ritual that, she argues, is rapidly wearing out both institutional patience and moral force, a development she’s more than a little thankful for.
And if you missed last week’s much-discussed essay by Nathaniel Urban and me, “The Great Feminization Began with Education,” this is a good time to read it. We argue that the institutional imbalance Americans now feel so acutely—the rise of feminized institutions shaped around emotional safety, consensus, and therapeutic priorities—traces back to an educational system that rewards feminine modes of engagement, sidelines the strengths of boys, and then channels its graduates into a professional class formed in that mold. Restoring balance begins where the distortion began: in education. I’d be grateful for your help in keeping the essay in circulation.
With that, find this week’s articles below. Thank you for reading and for supporting Minding the Campus. I hope your holiday is restful, your dinner is hot, and your weekend is peaceful.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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Image by Виктория Марьенко on Adobe; Asset ID#: 627861003
