The American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation have released a new booklet of advice for university trustees. My short contribution focuses on how trustees can reduce university spending and personnel and offers nine recommendations which I summarize below. Recommendation #1: Have a Specific and Measurable Goal A clear, specific, and measurable goal is […]
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Following a cycle more irregular than the U.S. Presidential elections, but perhaps meriting equal attention for American Jews, the 2025 World Zionist Congress Election has arrived. In a development that some are calling “the surge,” the number of slates competing in the 39th elections has increased by 69 percent compared to the 2020 elections, driven […]
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For those of you who have been following my publication trail with Minding the Campus, you are likely familiar with my frequent discussions on scientific ethics. I have commented on research misconduct, peer review fraud, and the reproducibility crisis, examining the effect of careless behavior and intentional fabrication in the scientific world and their profound […]
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A Chinese student at the University of Minnesota (UMN) was expelled for allegedly using artificial intelligence (AI) on a test in 2024. The student is suing UMN officials for violating his Fourteenth Amendment right to due process. The test in question was a preliminary doctoral exam in UMN’s School of Public Health. UMN’s disciplinary Hearing […]
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Anyone intimately familiar with U.S. education research of the past half century recognizes its marked difference from that of other fields. Some attribute the difference to an inferiority of methods, implying that education professors are not quite as bright as, say, economists. I would argue, instead, that bias is, by far, a greater problem—that bias […]
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With the largely unregulated release of both domestic and foreign-based artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the United States, corporations, businesses, and governmental institutions are seeking sustainable policy solutions to address disruptions to their normal organizational operations. American higher education institutions, as corporations tasked with maintaining institutional solvency and delivering rigorous educational programs, are also facing […]
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An extraordinary number of public state universities now admit a majority of their students from out of state. At the University of Vermont, the number is 75 percent. At the University of Delaware, the number is 66 percent. Other universities with a majority of out-of-state students include North Dakota State University (65%), the University of […]
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Scarcely a week goes by lately without news that another university has had federal funding restricted by the Trump administration. The Wall Street Journal recounts that latest restrictions: “Harvard ($2.26 billion), Cornell ($1 billion), Northwestern ($790 million), Brown ($510 million), Columbia ($400 million), Princeton ($210 million) and the University of Pennsylvania ($175 million).” These actions […]
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The University of Oklahoma offers a Social Justice Minor, which “introduce[s] students to the complexities of structural inequalities and injustices while teaching students critical thought processes.” Arizona State University offers an MA in Social Justice and Human Rights that prepares students to understand “how social justice and human rights issues are defined by multiple and […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on the College Fix on April 24, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. For at least the 11th year in a row, the federally funded Truman Scholarships overwhelmingly went to left-leaning students, a College Fix analysis found. Among this year’s winners, announced late last […]
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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. The saga over […]
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The New York Times article, “Trump Officials Blame Mistake for Setting Off Confrontation With Harvard: An official on the administration’s antisemitism task force told the university that a letter of demands had been sent without authorization,” tells a very different story than its title and subhead, one which suggests that Harvard’s arrogance might be leading […]
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Tsinghua University in Beijing is China’s top university and is often considered the top university in Asia. It is also a key instrument of the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign influence efforts and has played a key role in advancing China’s influence at American colleges and universities. Its influence is felt in many areas but none […]
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When one observes a map, it often tells a story. If an individual viewed a map during the Second World War, the Atlantic was the centerpiece, with Europe and the United States on either side. Following Great Britain’s decline and America’s rise, the United States stood front and center, with the Pacific and the Atlantic […]
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Around the time I was writing this, I had just finished reading Amanda Montell’s fascinating and hugely popular 2021 book Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism. I had also read some reviews, one of them being this blog post written by Brittany Shields in which she suggests that “Of all the cultish groups Montell mentions, she […]
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Higher education’s problem is more than a loss of confidence. Anti-Semitism on many college campuses is a visible symptom of far deeper problems. Anti-Semitism has been tied to the networked problems of discriminatory “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), wokeness, and critical consciousness. But this is more than anti-Semitism as the canary in the coalmine phenomenon. […]
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Organizations such as the Roman Catholic Church have catechisms, a list of beliefs to which all members are expected to subscribe. Interestingly, the 1848 Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was really an extension of a slightly earlier Communist catechism authored by Engels. As far leftist extremists increasingly took over college campuses over […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on the College Fix on April 7, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. A controversial nationwide PhD initiative criticized for excluding white scholars recently removed racially exclusionary wording from its website. The U.S. Department of Education is currently investigating 45 […]
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In an era where comfort and personal expression dominate campus dress, the idea of dressing up for class may seem outdated. Hoodies, sweats, yoga pants, and slippers are the unofficial winter attire, traded in for midriffs, booty shorts, and flip flops when the weather heats up. PJs for final exams is one thing, but wearing […]
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What does a liberal education look like? If history is anything of a guide, Latin, memorization of poetry, and studying nature are likely to be its hallmarks. Ritalin, breathing exercises, and bureaucracy: not so much. In certain circles, some of the practices dismissed, definitely disproven by social scientists and 20th-century educational progressives, are being brought […]
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As a cultural anthropologist, I had the privilege of living in societies and cultures very different from my American urban upbringing. Perhaps I could have had somewhat similar experiences if I had ventured in other parts of my own society, where people lived in villages or isolated farms and ranches, where people were primary producers […]
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“We can’t hold them. The city is lost.” “Tell the men to break cover. We ride for Minas Tirith.” So Faramir, captain of Gondor and son of the steward, says to his lieutenant during the battle of Osgiliath. It is a pivotal scene in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King that […]
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At sunrise on April 19, 1775, about 80 American townsmen in Lexington, Massachusetts, filed out of Buckman Tavern onto Lexington Green. They were commanded by French and Indian War veteran John Parker. Parker was restrained. His words were, “Stand your ground; don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let […]
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On April 16, 2025, Nicholas Decker, a PhD student at George Mason University (GMU), published a Substack essay titled “When Must We Kill Them?,” which calls for violence against President Donald Trump and his administration. Decker, who identifies as a liberal and open-borders advocate in his X bio, bases much of his argument on Trump’s […]
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Consider the question, “How can the resurrection of Jesus change higher education?” From a Christian standpoint, the resurrection of Jesus Christ has already changed higher education. In fact, the Christian vision for life and learning decisively inspired the idea of a university, starting in medieval Europe through cathedral and monastery schools. Without the resurrection, there […]
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Of course, Paul Revere was a hero as he rowed and rode to alarm the countryside around Boston: “The British are coming! The British are coming!” (“The Regulars are coming out,” the staid historians tell us were his actual words.) So too were the much neglected William Dawes and Samuel Prescott. We owe our independence and our liberty to their pluck and bravery. […]
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President Trump recently signed Executive Order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” taking aim at the Smithsonian museums for curating exhibits that twist and disparage American history. The order states: [T]he Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology. This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western […]
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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. I’d rather dodge […]
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As student visas continue to be revoked, many left-leaning news outlets and writers have expressed wariness of Trump’s motivations. They characterize the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which the Trump Administration has used as a basis to revoke student visas, as tendentious grounds for action and worse, creates a climate that echoes McCarthyism. The […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on the College Fix on April 10, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. A new Catholic trade school called the College of Saint Joseph the Worker recently opened in Steubenville, Ohio, to train students “in skilled […]
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