Month: November 2025

Self-Esteem Is a Social Hazard

Once upon a time, people dressed sharply, minded their manners, and worried about how their behavior reflected on their families and communities. Sure, this was partly driven by vanity, but it was also useful. Such prosocial vanity is maligned by modern standards as shallow, but it was not shallow; it served a purpose: it kept people […]

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A Student’s Short Take on DEI: It’s Undermining Education and Intellectual Growth

“Diversity, equity, and inclusion” ideology, or DEI, has replaced merit and intellectual diversity with forced inclusivity and conformity. In K-12 education, this shift has often meant lowering expectations to prevent students from feeling excluded, rather than raising all students to higher standards. In practice, this prioritizes social comfort over genuine learning. For example, philosopher and […]

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Faculty Face Widespread Punishment for Speech, Administrators and Unions Stay Silent

The ideal of academic freedom has always rested on a simple promise: scholars must be free to pursue truth, wherever it leads. But new data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) show how far higher education has drifted from that ideal. In FIRE’s latest survey, an astonishing 94 percent of faculty reported […]

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Helicopter Parenting Won’t Get Your Child into Harvard

It’s that time of year again: the college admissions process for American high school seniors, where students race to prepare application essays for a chance to study at many of America’s elite colleges and universities. As a private college admissions counselor at my firm Invictus Prep, I guide a handful of students through the college […]

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Trump’s Social Media Vetting Faces Free Speech Backlash. But Some Foreign Students Agree with Him.

The Trump administration’s new monitoring of social media for visa applicants and visa holders, in particular for international students, has generated vigorous debate over the free speech rights of non-Americans. But some of those most affected by the new policies support the intention of protecting American identity through strict immigration policy. The State Department in […]

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