Editor’s Note: This response was submitted in early September 2025 in response to Jared Gould’s Top of Mind column, “If You Want Young Adults to Grow Up, Don’t Bar Them from Serious Work,” published December 5, 2024. Well, I am back from Gotham [Manhattan]. We walked through Hudson Yards on our way to Moynihan Station, […]
Read More
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) recently published an essay in its flagship magazine, Academe, titled “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity.” Written by Lisa Siraganian, the J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities and professor at Johns Hopkins University, the piece makes a sweeping and unsettling claim: that efforts to foster intellectual diversity on […]
Read More
The presence of artificial intelligence (AI) on college campuses is a foregone conclusion—a recent report found that 93 percent of students use it regularly for coursework. By this point, it is no longer a question of whether AI tools will be used on college campuses, but instead, how they will be used. Back in July, […]
Read More
As universities attempt to rebrand their “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs and offices, many have embraced the term “inclusive excellence,” promoting it as a strategy to recognize and cultivate both individual and institutional success. Inclusive excellence is framed as a method that values multiple perspectives to enhance overall performance. But in practice, it is […]
Read More
For my entire adult life, I can’t recall an initiative to collect data to combat racial discrimination that has not been met with enthusiastic support. But then President Trump announced that colleges would have to submit more of their admissions data to combat racial discrimination, and things got weird. To understand the context here, recall […]
Read More
International students have long been a lifeline for universities; one could even argue that they are a cash cow. They bring global perspectives, help fill enrollment gaps, and—very importantly—pay tuition at higher levels that subsidize the tuition of domestic students. For decades, countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia competed […]
Read More
Yesterday, we reported that Texas State University (TXST) had terminated Thomas Alter, a newly tenured associate professor of history, following remarks he made on a virtual September 7th Socialist Horizon conference. At the time of that publication, we didn’t yet know that a Hays County district judge had already ordered the university to reinstate him […]
Read More
Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs on September 29, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. Oklahoma’s new social studies and science standards make it possible for students to have much-improved instruction in Oklahoma’s public K-12 classrooms. It […]
Read More
Editor’s Note: The following is an interview with Minding the Campus contributor Joe Nalven, published initially on Harald Johnson’s Substack, Create or Die, on August 20, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. Joe Nalven is a creative, artist, instructor, and writer based in San Diego. He covers […]
Read More
The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the indispensable role of emergency responders in the healthcare system—and the pressing need to bolster that workforce. Since 2020, shortages of healthcare workers, including first responders, have become especially acute. A 2024 study by Mercer projected that the U.S. will see a total deficit of 100,000 critical healthcare workers by 2028 […]
Read More
What if I told you that a college dropout did more for higher education than many college professors? Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), never earned a formal degree; yet, his influence on American campuses has reshaped discussions around free speech and viewpoint diversity. Kirk dropped out of college, opting instead to […]
Read More
This article presents a sharp and witty critique of the challenges faced in navigating modern technology in higher education. It effectively blends humor and personal anecdotes, utilizing clever cultural references. The engaging writing style is accessible yet insightful, pulling readers in with vivid metaphors and irony. I know this because the artificial intelligence (AI) platform […]
Read More
Conservatives do not need to go out of their way to defend academics who celebrate the death of Charlie Kirk. “People have come out caping for the devil that walked among us […] so no. I will not pull back from CELEBRATING that an evil man died by the method he chose to embrace,” University […]
Read More
Editor’s Note: Find an update to this article here. Texas State University (TXST) is now at the center of a lawsuit following the dismissal of Thomas Alter, a recently tenured associate professor of history, who alleges that the institution violated his constitutional rights and breached his employment contract. According to local sources, Alter was terminated […]
Read More
Perusing the preliminary rosters for my first-year college writing courses, I thought half-humorously that I could easily have been looking at the United Nations staff directory. Most of the names were of Middle Eastern, Indian, Pakistani, or East Asian origin, with a sprinkling of African, Hispanic, and Eastern European backgrounds. Common Anglo-Saxon surnames were conspicuous […]
Read More
Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on Real Clear Education on September 22, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. Every morning, millions of students start their day the same way: roll over, reach for the phone, and open a social media app. Scroll. Snap. Like. […]
Read More
Earlier today, I published Joshua T. Katz’s essay, “Food for Thought Goes Hungry at Princeton.” His piece zeroes in on the university’s decision to cut meal privileges for non-advising fellows in the residential colleges, framing it as a small but telling loss in the broader culture of academic life. Princeton’s endowment is so vast that […]
Read More
At the start of the academic year, Princeton University announced that, effective immediately, faculty and staff members who are “non-advising fellows” in one of the seven so-called residential colleges would no longer enjoy meal privileges in their college. The reason is, of course, the “new financial environment.” Princeton’s endowment is so large that Malcolm Gladwell […]
Read More
It came to my attention yesterday that the University of Southern Mississippi (USM), my alma mater, is at the center of a disturbing hazing lawsuit. The plaintiff, Raphael C. Joseph, alleges that he was so brutally beaten during Omega Psi Phi’s Nu Eta chapter “Hell Night” in April 2023 that he required emergency surgery, a […]
Read More
The managing editor of Minding the Campus, Jared Gould, recently wrote an essay on the University of Chicago (UChicago). He thoughtfully summarized its finances, providing a factual overview of a problem faced, in one form or another, by nearly all universities. As an alumnus of UChicago’s Booth School of Business, his essay caught my attention, but […]
Read More
I knew something was fundamentally broken the day a senior colleague grabbed my shoulders and shook me frantically in the faculty dining hall after a contentious meeting of my school’s social science faculty. The assault was shocking, especially because it happened in what should have been a routine lunch gathering at Sarah Lawrence College (SLC), […]
Read More
On September 25, 1775, Ethan Allen was captured by the British outside Montreal, at the Battle of Longue-Pointe. He would spend several years held captive by the British—and, once released, write up his exploits to popular acclaim in A Narrative of Ethan Allen’s Captivity (1779). Some later historians, revisiting the battle, would conclude: Damfool blowhard […]
Read More
Challenging the prevailing narrative and upholding one’s principles in higher education is often a solitary endeavor. Even tenured colleagues sympathetic to the challenger’s ideas may retreat, fearing only exclusion from the next faculty cocktail party. That is why I notice when someone shows courage, as Mathew Abraham did in 2019 when I faced attacks for […]
Read More
Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published by the College Fix on September 24, 2025. It is crossposted here with permission. In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the professional think tank class pushed a startling claim—actually, it’s conservatives who are more violent! Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh only counts murders and excludes the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which […]
Read More
This fall, I’m assigning J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis in my politics and geography class on a deeply liberal and historically activist campus. I can already anticipate the reaction. Some students will object before they’ve read a page, convinced that reading the memoir means endorsing Vance’s politics […]
Read More
The University of California, Berkeley, at the behest of the Trump Administration, has turned over the names of 160 students and faculty involved in complaints of anti-Semitism at that campus. The move provoked a backlash, including an open letter to the university from 600 faculty members involved with Berkeley from around the world, a letter […]
Read More
For years, the debate has raged over what constitutes the best definition of anti-Semitism. While options abound, the three most prominent emerge from a conversation about the most widely used and accepted definition: The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition, adopted by the IHRA plenary in Budapest in 2015. The Jerusalem Declaration, conceived as an […]
Read More
American colleges and universities are facing an unprecedented moment of adjustment. President Trump’s second term has brought sweeping higher education reforms—executive orders against “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) bureaucracies, stricter enforcement against campus anti-Semitism, new scrutiny of foreign funding, and heightened pressure on institutions that grant privileges to illegal aliens. We anticipated a spectrum of […]
Read More
The assassination of conservative activist and Turning Point USA founder, Charlie Kirk, has resulted in a worldwide outpouring of grief. Liberty University (LU)—home to one of the nation’s most vigorous TPUSA chapters and a campus where Kirk frequently spoke—was especially affected by his murder. Kirk’s connection to LU was significant. In 2019, he received an […]
Read More
August marked the return of thousands of students to college campuses nationwide. Whether they were eager to return to the classroom is debatable, but if they weren’t enthusiastic, one reason may have been the lack of access to course syllabi. In many cases, students don’t receive this document—a detailed description of the course along with […]
Read More