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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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), […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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“Charlie Kirk said Martin Luther King was a bad man and that desegregation laws were a mistake. Do we agree with him?” commented one of my Ph.D. classmates on my tribute to Kirk. The unhinged reactions from self-anointed intelligentsia to the assassination of an American hero and a Christian martyr range from disingenuous platitudes to […]
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When it comes to campus safety, statistics don’t always tell the whole story. A new study crowns Berkeley as the safest U.S. college town—but ask its students, and you might hear a different story. Wasatch Defense Lawyers, a criminal defense firm based in Utah, evaluated the safety of U.S. college towns in a recent study. […]
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The tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University has thrust the subject of political violence into the national spotlight. As expected, pundits and politicians quickly framed the attack as a rare outburst from the left, leaning on studies showing that right-wing extremists commit more politically motivated murders. Don Lemon, who was fired from […]
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If the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) can successfully prevent woke artificial intelligence (AI) in the federal government, as outlined in Trump’s Executive Order Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government (EO 14319), then perhaps academic institutions, corporations, and publicly available AI systems could also be freed from the prevailing mindset of engineering […]
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Every semester, I pose a question to my students: Why are you here? Would you prioritize deep learning, even if it meant a lower grade, or chase the highest grade, even at the cost of true understanding? They almost always claim learning matters most. But I’m growing skeptical that they actually mean it. Those words […]
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There is a sense, when reading Allen Guelzo and James Hankins’s The Golden Thread: A History of Western Civilization, Volume I: Christianity and the Ancient World, that one is being invited into a conversation that has all but disappeared in our age. For decades, Western civilization courses have been dismantled in schools and universities, replaced […]
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Every September, the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center releases its annual survey on Americans’ knowledge of the Constitution. The survey has, for nearly two decades, charted the ebb and flow of civic awareness in the United States. The latest results, released recently, suggest that something unusual is happening: Americans are remembering—or perhaps relearning—how […]
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Our society has become obsessed with science, engineering, math, and technology (STEM)—not only in the name of progress but also because we have deemed reading and writing almost wholly unimportant. According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the number of humanities bachelor’s degrees awarded to graduating seniors across American universities decreased by approximately […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published by AEI on September 11, 2025. It is crossposted here with permission. Charlie Kirk is dead. The founder of Turning Point USA was fatally shot by a sniper while speaking at Utah Valley University. Authorities are investigating the killing as a politically motivated assassination. For years, Kirk warned that escalating […]
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Shortly after the brutal murder of Charlie Kirk on a Utah college campus, one of my sons, who lived in France for several years, sent me a photo of a group of protestors holding placards that read, “Je suis Charlie.” Meaning, I am Charlie. The photo was from January 2015, when Islamic terrorists murdered several […]
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Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is from an article originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on September 9, 2025. The Observatory translated it into English from French. I have edited it, to the best of my ability, to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission. In the joy […]
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Watching the Cross, on Calvary, about 3 PM or so, the Roman centurion recognized the truth: “This man truly was the Son of God!” This thought comes to mind watching the coverage of the assassination of Charlie Kirk in the last twenty-four hours. I did not know him, nor was I a follower of his. […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published by the College Fix on September 09, 2025. It is crossposted here with permission. Grand Valley State University’s (GVSU) Frederik Meijer Honors College has shifted toward a “social justice” orientation in both its curriculum and admissions in an effort to increase racial diversity, according to emails recently obtained […]
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In response to my recent Martin Center article, “The Emptiness of Antisemitism Studies,” George Leef wrote in National Review and posed the question: “Can American universities take antisemitism seriously?” His framing perfectly captured the larger stakes of the problem. My original piece—later reprinted in Minding the Campus and by the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research—showed […]
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In Season 5, Episode 7 of Gilmore Girls, Rory Gilmore—ever the ambitious Yale student journalist—follows whispers and cryptic clues to the Life and Death Brigade, a secret society of Yale’s wealthy elite known for their reckless, over-the-top spectacles. Her way in comes through Logan Huntzberger, the heir of a media dynasty and a core member […]
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It’s been 24 years. September 11, 2001, was a Tuesday, but what I recall just as vividly is what happened the day before. The week of September 10-15 was to be “Palestinian Awareness Week” at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst). Everything changed on Tuesday morning, but on Monday afternoon, we had no idea […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published by the National Association of Scholars on September 10, 2025. It is crossposted here with permission. We are appalled at the murder of Charlie Kirk. He was a decent man, a father and husband, a patriot, a Christian, and a force to be reckoned with in opposing the radical left […]
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