The scene was deeply troubling. Hundreds of college students proclaimed that Hamas’ October 7, 2023, assault on Israeli civilians was a heroic and justified act of liberation. It confirmed a level of ignorance engendered by decades of decay in our colleges and universities. But equally troubling is the fact that the United States Congress immediately […]
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Noah Webster, known as the Father of American Scholarship and Education, wrote in 1788: It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and […]
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Much ink and many gigabytes have been spilled on the topic of Claudine Gay’s defenestration from the presidency of Harvard University. The commentary ranges from the tedious and predictable gnashing of liberal teeth that racism and sexism somehow were the cause, orchestrated—naturally—by Republicans, who have made plagiarism a “weapon” in their “war on education.” More […]
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“What can liberal education mean here and now?” asked Leo Strauss in an address he gave in 1959. Three years later he asked, “What then are the prospects for liberal education within mass democracy?” Timothy Burns, professor of political science at Baylor University—and National Association of Scholars member—recently returned to Strauss’s questions in his searching […]
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Millions of potential and current college students fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) every year. In 2020, Congress passed a law updating the FAFSA and the aid formulas for 2024, but the Department of Education’s (ED) release of the new FAFSA has been a fiasco. Despite having three years to prepare, […]
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I had a conversation about fifteen years ago with a colleague from Seville. We sat in a restaurant in Charlottesville, Virginia, as she expounded on the dangers of economic freedom and defended what seemed to me like the divinely ordained need for government regulation. I was perplexed. “That’s not my tradition and it’s not my […]
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Colleges and K-12 schools penalize students for written work that copies from a source without quotation marks and citations. But many colleges provide wiggle room for faculty. Harvard allowed its former president, Claudine Gay, to correct the record by adding quotation marks and citations long after papers were published. Imagine a school being unwilling to […]
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I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America — Alexis de Tocqueville From 1991 to 1994, at Duke University, I edited a publication called the Faculty Newsletter. The Newsletter had a short and rather erratic history and folded a couple of years […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Spectator World on January 3, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. In the end Barack Obama, Penny Pritzker, 700-some members of the faculty, the mighty voice of the Harvard Crimson and the entire nomenclature of the DEI movement could not save her from herself. Claudine Gay resigned as […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by American Greatness on January 4, 2023 and is crossposted here with permission. Last month, the Biden Education Department announced plans to issue two Title IX rules in March, having missed prior deadlines in May and October. The delays are good news since both rules are bad, representing a more top-down sexual pathology […]
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If economic rationality guided American universities, the recent Supreme Court decision declaring racial preferences unconstitutional should have been welcomed. The decision provides an off-ramp to costly failures at a time when higher education struggles financially. Given these fiscal strains, why fund diversity, particularly if this invites expensive litigation? Even those embracing the “diversity is our […]
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Yesterday, the National Association of Scholars (NAS) learned that Carol Iannone had passed away in her Manhattan apartment sometime during the holiday season. It’s heartbreaking news. She was that rare chimera, the hardened idealist, coupling an innocence ever shocked by the world as it is, to a tough-minded tenacity that never relented in fighting back. […]
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As stated previously, if I were dictator for a day, I would empty the Maryland Avenue headquarters of the U.S. Department of Education (ED), have the Air Force bomb it out of existence, and after the Corps of Engineers removed the rubble, I would give the land to the Smithsonian Institution for an expansion of […]
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They sold America, the greatest nation on Earth, for next to nothing because that’s what they believe it’s worth. The Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Mr. Hunter Biden up to a million dollars a year! Wow! It seems like a lot of money. But what were the Bidens selling? Not Hunter’s expertise in, say, energy, […]
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The University of Southern California (USC) Professor John Strauss’ Nov. 9 confrontation with students protesting Israel’s invasion of the Gaza strip resulted in USC Provost Andrew Guzman initially banning him from campus. Strauss’s interactions with the students were brief, concluding with his declaration that “Hamas are murderers. That’s all they are. Everyone should be killed, […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Spectator World on December 24, 2023 and is crossposted here with permission. Harvard president Claudine Gay’s troubling history of appropriating other people’s idea and words and passing them off as her own has a well-worn name: plagiarism. Every college and university in the United States prohibits plagiarism. Most present students with […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Epoch Times on December 22, 2023 and is crossposted here with permission. Commentary In a recent Free Press article, “We Were Taught to Hate Jews,” five individuals from Muslim families report on the anti-Semitism that was integral to their upbringing. One said: “It’s like asking me how often I […]
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The origin of Christmas is often linked to Roman pagan festivals, most often either Saturnalia or Dies Natalis Solis Invicti. Both holidays fall in December. Saturnalia, which was a week-long festival that ran from December 17th until the 24th to honor the god Saturn for agricultural abundances, is said to have included decorating homes with […]
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Christmas, for me, is the German Jewish holiday passed down from my father’s mother. “My father’s father was a Baptist minister,” said my dad, “and my father’s family didn’t do Christmas trees or any of that. The Puritans’ America wasn’t gaudy that way. Trees, candy canes, and ornaments was stuff the Germans brought over. It […]
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Outside of the sciences and engineering, today’s colleges and universities are producing nonsense on an industrial scale while, conversely, little emerges that might help America’s current tribulations. No sane person expects university professors to solve problems of crime, housing, education, and the like unless they have an appetite for jargon-laden ideological claptrap. This outpouring of […]
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“Oh horrible, horrible, most horrible,” as a Chorus in Greek Tragedy might chant: midst a “storm of multitudinous tears.” Rockets raining on civilians, maidens and mothers raped, tortured, beheaded, babies too, others kidnapped, and the dead desecrated, one corpse so mutilated turned out to be two … pieta! … and all the while the terrorists brandish the flesh […]
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In stockjobber parlance, Argentina is “risk on.” By electing rising political star Javier Milei as President—he took office on December 10th—Argentina is the first modern nation to embrace the libertarian creed. We’ve not had such a determined political philosophy on the world stage since Goldwater—maybe Reagan. The runoff on November 19th wasn’t even close. The […]
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The moral bankruptcy of the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were finally on full display during their Congressional testimony on Tuesday, Dec 5th. The three Presidents are hardly alone: leadership at many other universities has proved equally offensive, if not worse. When asked whether a […]
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Ethnic Studies activists promoting a version of Marxism and hyper-divisive racial categorizing are seeking to overturn American society. They are teaching America’s young to scorn its central idea of common humanity and its Western civilization achievements. A unifying theme in the agendas of these activists is their shared hostility towards the Jewish people, evinced by […]
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The distinguished British historian Andrew Roberts has just written, alas, an attack on the Boston Tea Party that is much beneath him. The Tea Party, it turns out, was an entirely self-interested operation, with nary a shred of idealism about it: It was in no sense a spontaneous activity: some accounts of it portray a […]
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Author’s Note: The nation’s 250 Anniversary is only 30 months away. The National Association of Scholars can hardly wait. Over the interval, we will post short commemorations of the events that led up to the Second Continental Congress officially adopting the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Some events are familiar to most Americans, […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The American Spectator on December 14, 2023 and is crossposted here with permission. Academic dishonesty strikes many people as boring. After all, it is academic. It is not like Sam Bankman-Fried, the “crypto king,” making $8 billion disappear into thin air. It is not like Florida dentist Charlie Adelson […]
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Author’s Note: The above photo of Guenther Thaer appeared in the Ithaca College Yearbook. Thaer was hired by both Cornell and Ithaca to teach German language and literature, even though both of these German faculties probably were aware of his extensive Nazi past through his publications. A copy of his application to teach says nothing about the books […]
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The University of Arizona (UA) has just floated a proposal to establish a program for graduate students aimed at sharpening their hatred for America. UA is, of course, a public university, so Arizona taxpayers are being asked to pay for an effort to turn future leaders of the country into revolutionists. It is called “Emancipatory […]
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It is not news that the Lancet is politicized. The once-respected journal, the gold standard for medical research publication, has been hawking radical left policy in the guise of “medical policy” for a generation and more. America’s medical establishment may never be quite as radical as the Lancet, but it usually adopts Lancet’s positions with […]
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