Articles

The Intensification of #MeToo Threatens Fairness and Academic Freedom

History shows that lofty ideals predicated upon political utopianism and social egalitarianism often generate feel-good, do-bad policies that lead to disastrous outcomes. As Thomas Sowell has sharply observed, “[i]f there is anything worse than unfairness, it is make-believe fairness.” The exhaustion of the #MeToo movement provides a case in point for the unintended consequences and […]

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Crybabies in the Classroom

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The American Postliberal on March 22, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. If you have ever been in a classroom where some sort of deadline is approaching, chances are that you have witnessed what I like to call a “half-hearted mini rebellion.” This is a situation in […]

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Practicing Civic Behavior: A Key Student Priority

As a countermeasure to action civics, which aims to convert the “traditional subject of civics into a recruitment tool of the progressive left,” it is crucial for students to engage in civic behavior actively. This behavior, rooted in a nonpartisan American pluralism, accentuates the rights and duties of citizenship in various spheres-school, home, community, and […]

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What Is Natural Law?

As with negative rights, there’s a lot of confusion regarding natural law. People use the term without much explanation of what it means, and those of us who are not trained lawyers or legal historians don’t want to reveal our ignorance by asking for clarifications. This is my attempt as a non-specialist to explain what […]

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The Right Must Avoid the Left’s Free Speech Pitfalls

Years ago, after the Bush administration initiated the Deep State’s surveillance regime via the Patriot Act, I observed that the left and right in this country seemed to be competing to see who could censor the most speech.  Since then, the left has forged far ahead in the censorship race, with the rise of cancel […]

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Closing DEI Offices Is Not Enough

Closing “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) offices around the country is a powerful step in halting the illiberal and divisive harm-centric monoculture that has taken over higher education. However, there remain far too many student-facing administrative offices that seek the same goals. Whether in residential services or student life offices, administrators wield significant power and […]

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Say ‘Yes’ to the First Amendment

“For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.” —Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 1 All university-level students should read, study, and discuss The Federalist Papers (1787–88). This most sacred document of the American founding explains the logic […]

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Carnegie Mellon isn’t being open about its relationship with Qatar

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from an article that was originally published by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on April 18, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. After the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, universities with close ties to Middle Eastern governments have faced heightened scrutiny. In February, Texas A&M University announced it would close its […]

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Progressive Overreach and the Procrustes Impulse

Many philosophers, social thinkers, legislators, and those delirious with power have proposed ways to fix the human condition. Societies themselves have often been organized, often by custom as well as laws, to shape the odd ways in which humans behave—odd ways that often emanate from a desire for individual freedom. Those fixes and organizational principles […]

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Top of Mind: Standardized Tests

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 on Minding the Campus’s homepage. Simply go to the right side of the page, look for “SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, ‘TOP […]

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Why Law School Should Be an Undergraduate Program

In most parts of the world, lawyers are formally trained in an undergraduate degree program. The Bachelor of Law (LL.B), is also an accelerated three-year curriculum. In the United States it takes over twice as long. First you need a 4-year undergraduate degree in any subject—a gratuitous requirement, as there is no such thing as […]

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The Baffling ‘Bull’ Behind Title IX

Editor’s Note: The essay below is a revised and edited version specifically tailored for Minding the Campus. It has been updated from its original publication on The Berea Torch. At a liberal arts college dedicated to the unfettered pursuit of truth, it is “baffling” that tribalism and ambiguity accompanied by a lack of concern for […]

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U.S. Colleges and Admission Testing: Required, Optional, or Blind?

Much has been made of recent decisions to re-require ACT or SAT scores in student applications to several elite Northeastern colleges. Start of a trend? Will more colleges now follow suit? Covid-19  accelerated an already-existing trend toward adoption of “test optional” admissions, whereby college aspirants could choose whether to include their ACT or SAT scores […]

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Concerns raised over universities signing over students’ private FERPA data to voter data companies

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The College Fix on April 3, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. A relatively new report outlines how universities nationwide have signed over students’ private FERPA data to a third-party vendor that reviews their personal information to help study college students’ voting trends. The nine-page report describes how a national voting […]

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John Maynard Keynes vs. Friedrich August Hayek on Saving Liberal Democracy

Once again, the Washington Post misses the mark when it associates “zombie” CVS of Washington, D.C., or America’s shoplifting pandemic with the decline of liberal democracy. Ironically, torchbearers of modern-day progressivism are willfully oblivious to the fact that their illiberal ideology, not liberal democracy itself, is at the root of many societal problems, including urban […]

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The Worst Federal Higher Ed Policy Initiative Ever

For years, I have been writing about the deficiencies of the federal student loan programs, but I thought diminishing returns were setting into my harangues—everything important had been said. But don’t underestimate the deleterious effects of disregarding the rule of law, the crassness of political ambitions, and the manifest stupidity of some of President Biden’s […]

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Linemen for the County

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from an article that was originally published by City Journal on April 4, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. When people hear “lineman,” they think football. At least that’s the reaction Keith Henderson receives when he teaches Philadelphia schoolchildren about jobs in the skilled trades. Henderson, who leads […]

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Curricular Visions: Revitalizing the Great Books

Editor’s Note: David Randall’s Curriculum of Liberty illuminates the pressing demand for American higher education to equip students with essential knowledge, character, and tools needed to confront contemporary challenges, revitalize the American republic, and safeguard Western heritage alongside the principles of free inquiry. This essay draws inspiration from his groundbreaking work and marks the inaugural […]

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April 1774: The Pendulum Swings

The nation’s 250 Anniversary is only 29 months away. The National Association of Scholars is commemorating the events that led up to the Second Continental Congress officially adopting the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. This is the sixth installment of the series. Find the fifth installment here.  “His Majesty trusts that no opposition […]

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Minding the Sciences—Science’s Goose is Cooked: Seven Pillars of Folly

The era of Big Science began formally in 1950, when the National Science Foundation opened its doors. Its mission was to fulfill a hopeful promise: for government to fund the very best academic science, to explore science’s “endless frontier,” in the inspiring words of Vannevar Bush, President Roosevelt’s—and subsequently President Truman’s— science czar. There was […]

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Biden Title IX changes threaten free speech, due process: legal experts

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The College Fix on April 8, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. ‘Single campus bureaucrat’ would be ‘judge and jury’ Pending Title IX changes threaten free speech and due process, according to several legal experts who spoke to The College Fix. The administration’s submitted updates to Title IX of the Education […]

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Having a Theological Vision

Editor’s Note: This essay is an excerpt from the author’s doctoral project titled “Reaching Generation Z with the Gospel at a Christian University through Faith Integration, Radical Hospitality, and Missional Opportunities,” completed as part of the Doctor of Ministry program at Knox Theological Seminary. The content has been edited to adhere to MTC’s guidelines. For […]

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About Friendship and Democracy

“To justify a general conclusion, requires many observations, even where the subject may be submitted to the Anatomical knife, to Optical glasses, to analysis by fire, or by solvents.” —Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV I’ll never forget a beautiful Peruvian girl, breathtaking she was, and a true friend, Ivy Arbulu. […]

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Echoes of Lost Conversations: A Review of ‘Bright College Years’

For a novel that is smart and fun, Bright College Years, is also depressing. It reminds us of a lost world, of what the campus experience once was but is no longer. . It’s also timely: if recent events (optimistically) portend that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the self-mockery age of […]

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Two Cultures Revisited

A New Science Culture  In 1959, British novelist and one-time scientist C. P. Snow delivered a lecture at Cambridge called “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” He accused humanists of being scientifically ignorant and not knowing about the second law of thermodynamics—not to mention the non-conservation of parity. Science and literature—the humanities—were two separate […]

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MTA Fights Racism with Anti-Semitism?

Just two months after the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) voted in favor of a ceasefire resolution labeling Israel’s defensive war against Hamas as “a genocidal war on the Palestinian people,” the union has once again engaged in the demonization and delegitimization of Israel. On March 21st, the MTA hosted a two-hour webinar titled “Context and […]

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Slavery Revisited: Time on the Cross at 50

Author’s Note: The following is based on a more comprehensive paper titled “Slavery Revisited: Time on the Cross at 50,” published in the Spring 2024 edition of the Independent Review. Most serious works of scholars are respectfully evaluated by modest numbers of colleagues and occasionally play a small role in determining the prevailing interpretation of […]

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On the Puzzle of Out-of-State Tuition

Public institutions typically charge out-of-state students much higher tuition than in-state students. Bryan Caplan and Alex Tabarrok, two leading libertarian economists, have been discussing the puzzle of why that is the case. They correctly rule out the monopoly or cartel explanation. If public colleges were a monopoly or cartel, they could charge higher prices to […]

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Living in an AI World: Will We Survive and in What Reality?

People should be very concerned about the biases being programmed into AI https://t.co/VS4v1JvRt5 — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 11, 2024 A female pope? A black Viking? Yes, according to Google’s generative artificial intelligence (AI) program Gemini, which had produced just such images about two weeks before Musk’s X post. Gemini became the object of ridicule […]

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Classical Christian Education: The Antidote to Progressivism

Reflecting on my teaching journey that spanned from the late 1970s to 2020, I can’t help but notice the stark contrast in educational approaches. When I started, education was centered around traditional book learning and assessments, a teacher-led process that continued into the 1990s. However, as I retired from full-time teaching in 2020 and transitioned […]

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