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 […]
Read More
Calvin Coolidge said it best: “To live under the American Constitution is the greatest political privilege that was ever accorded to the human race.” Every American should know that wonderful truth. Learning it should be the keystone of social studies instruction in our schools. That’s why the Civics Alliance and Freedom in Education are publishing […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
“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. […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 forth installment of the series. Find the fourth installment here. Intolerable is a strong word. We […]
Read More
“You cannot own a child of God.” Those were the words I read and re-read in most term papers from the community college course on American government I taught in the COVID-19 spring semester of 2020. In light of a divided America on edge amidst a pandemic, this was the most common answer to the […]
Read More
The antidote to bad ideas is good ideas, I’ve often said and sometimes written. I’ve railed against censorship and “cancellation” and defended very free, very unfettered speech. Even odious speech, detestably bad ideas spoken aloud. It’s good that it all be spoken aloud, where its moral bankruptcy is obvious in the marketplace of ideas—when rebutted […]
Read More
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Law & Liberty on March 25, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. A specter is haunting capitalism – the specter of “higher” things. Or so an increasing number of thinkers among the New Right, the National Conservatives, or the Economic Nationalists might say. They insist that the “neoliberal” order of free enterprise and […]
Read More
Negative rights signal the core of natural law in the American tradition, also known as our Bill of Rights. Without them, the Constitution might never have been ratified, or we might be a very different country today. Most of us can list them—the right to free speech, the right to keep and bear arms, the […]
Read More
Tradition-minded education reformers who wish to pass on to our children attachment to the ideals and institutions of the American republic and nation need to create new programs and schools independent of the existing far-left monoculture in academia. One way to go about this is to build up a network of autonomous Centers, such as […]
Read More
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Law & Liberty on March 18, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. Tacitus at the beginning of his Annals, after brilliantly summarizing all of Roman history in the space of a few paragraphs, ends by providing an answer to a question that must have arisen in the minds of […]
Read More
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Real Clear Wire on March 20, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. On March 23rd in 1775, Patrick Henry rose at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, to urge his countrymen to arm themselves for the Revolutionary War. Four weeks before the battle of Lexington and Concord, Henry […]
Read More
Juneteenth, a celebration held in Texas since 1866, was recognized as a federal holiday for the first time in 2021. Juneteenth commemorates the day Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, TX, to tell the enslaved African-Americans that the war was over and they were free—whereas Union states Kentucky and Delaware practiced slavery for six additional months […]
Read More