Is there any news that is not fake news? The question is not rhetorical. Some media sources are admittedly engaged in partisan politics under the guise of news reporting, but many at least give an obligatory nod to the notion of journalism as something in principle separable from propaganda. One wonders, though, if any news […]
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David Eltis’s Atlantic Cataclysm: Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades is a necessary and sobering work that should be read by every college student seeking to understand slavery not as an American peculiarity, but as a global institution embedded deep within human history. Drawing on decades of archival research, statistical data, and newly analyzed ship records, […]
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Daren Bakst and Marlo Lewis have edited a series of science policy recommendations for reforming the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that literally put the irreproducibility crisis of modern science first. In the first chapter of Modernizing the EPA, Marlo Lewis argues that the EPA’s policy mistakes derive from permitting and fostering practices associated with the […]
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Imagine a board run by your competitors who decide whether you’re allowed to work. That is the process of licensing. Rebecca Haw Allensworth’s The Licensure Racket opens with the story of Omar Mahmoud, a 52-year-old Army veteran, Arabic-speaking immigrant, and licensed barber. After moving to Tennessee, he hoped to continue the career he had pursued […]
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The United States has long been the gold standard for higher education. Its colleges and universities top global rankings and draw students from every corner of the world. But the shine is fading fast. Public support for these institutions is in free fall, and it’s not just a vibe: enrollment is dropping, even at some […]
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Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on January 5, 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. Susan Neiman’s latest book in […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from an article originally published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on May 23, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. At one time, most Americans—and virtually all academics—would have agreed with the famous saying, often attributed to […]
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Science and Anthropology in a Post-Truth World is a book about the recent anthropological origins of the celebration of unreason that permeates academia and much of the world we now live in, especially in the U.S.. The book logically falls into three parts. The first and most lengthy part of the book is devoted to […]
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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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It is easy to assume that the authors of Don’t Go To College: A Case For Revolution (2022) would be anti-intellectuals who never darkened a university’s doors and are jealous of anyone who did. Ah, but not so fast. Michael J. Robillard and Timothy J. Gordon were in the “belly of the beast” as students, […]
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If you’ve spent any time in higher education, you’ve probably been told that all white people are inherently racist, police forces should be defunded, and that “diversity, equity, and inclusion”—with a new side of “belonging”—should guide every aspect of modern life. Maybe you’ve even sat through a diversity training where microaggressions are sins and America’s […]
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An old professional friend, Richard Phelps, asked me in late April to write a review of his latest book. I agreed to write a full-length review without a deadline or remuneration. The book is accurately described in the 2023 Choice Review excerpt reprinted online, although one might quibble about 2001, the year given for the […]
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In his 1995 classic, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, James W. Loewen took American history textbooks to task for their rose-tinted portrayal of history, such as glorifying Columbus while neatly skipping over the violence and exploitation that followed his arrival. Textbooks of Loewen’s time were off the mark, […]
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On the Warpath: My Battles with Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors is an explosive and humorous new book by Elizabeth Weiss, a National Association of Scholars board member and Minding the Campus contributor. Her book reveals how the field of biological anthropology, which includes the study of skeletal remains to reconstruct the past, and forensic […]
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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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There is a longstanding myth from the Second World War that the Allies killed hundreds of thousands of civilians by the sudden and shameless aerial bombing of Dresden, a beautiful city remarkable for its history and culture. That the bombing was a shameful war crime against innocent civilian German non-combatants was told by Kurt Vonnegut […]
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Over fifty years ago I took a course on the Holocaust, one of the very first of its kind in the country. Being a year-long and only one of three courses that one took per semester, it was highly intensive. The first semester dealt with the history and cultures of the peoples involved—namely, Germans and […]
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In Review: Jeffrey M. Bale and Tamir Bar-On’s Fighting the Last War: Confusion, Partisanship and Alarmism in the Literature on the Radical Right Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried “Wolf!” may have been originally addressed to children, but of course, adults are the ones who are in most desperate need of its lesson. This […]
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Posted by Mark Judge and Emily Esfahani Smith Cross-posted from the Daily Caller and Acculturated.com. Mark Judge: How Bloom Killed Conservatism Almost 25 years ago, a catastrophe befell American conservatism. University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom wrote about rock and roll. His words came in the book “The Closing of the America Mind,” which was […]
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In his recent book, Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy, Andrew Rosen writes: “It’s rare for anyone to lay out a clear case as to exactly what the problem is with private-sector education.” Ok, here it is. The problem is not, as Rosen says, that the pairing of the words for-profit and education makes […]
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“Here are some [college] degrees that cost you roughly $30,000 in tuition, their much cheaper replacements, and the savings you’d realize: Degree Replacement Savings Foreign Languages Language Software $29,721 Philosophy Read Socrates $29,980 Women’s Studies Watch Daytime TV $30,000 Journalism Start […]
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What were the best books of the year on higher education? A panel of ten prominent people in the field, invited to vote by Minding the Campus, picked as their top two choices, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa; and “Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting […]
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It seems only yesterday that a few colleagues and I gathered every night in the back of the newsroom of New York Times, then on West 43rd Street, to create the first edition of the Fiske Guide to Colleges. It’s hard to believe that the appearance of the 2012 edition this month marks the 30th […]
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I haven’t read Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, and frankly, I’m not sure that I want to. Having had high expectations of other widely touted books on higher education—most recently, Hacker and Dreifus’s Higher Education?, Martha Nussbaum’s Not For Profit, Mark Taylor’s Crisis on Campus—and having been sadly […]
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Neither liberals nor conservatives take the education part of higher education very seriously. Instead, college gets used as an arena for special interest promotion and ideological dispute. The right publishes lists of “The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” while fulminating about post-modernism and the hedonist student culture. The left pours endless billions of taxpayer […]
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————————————- Read Part 1 here. ————————————- In examining the gulf between sticker price and real cost, let’s consider the top 10 national universities as defined by U.S. News & World Report in its most recent rankings. Using U. S. Department of Education data, I compiled the average net prices that students from different family income […]
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By Peter Sacks Jeffrey Selingo, the editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, should have known better. He told ABC News: “students that maybe 10 or 15 years ago came from families who can easily afford to pay for their son’s or daughter’s education are now being forced to apply for financial aid.” That sounds […]
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In the epilogue of a new compendium volume, Mark Bousquet notes that, “In July 2007, the American Sociological Association reported that one-third of its members felt their academic freedoms were threatened, a significantly higher figure than the one-fifth ratio recorded during the McCarthy years.” Sounds dire, doesn’t it? Well not if you’ve spent the prior […]
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Cary Nelson, current president of the American Association of University Professors, has a new book dealing with academic freedom and its relationship to broader structural problems in higher education. No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom is interesting and important, but also frustrating. It provides remedies to the problems confronting academic freedom at the […]
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Less than 60 percent of students at our four-year colleges complete their studies and graduate. That depressing statistic has drawn many critics, and now it has occasioned a book, Crossing the Finish Line, by three well-connected members of the academic establishment–William Bowen, Matthew Chingos, and Michael McPherson (hereafter, BCM). The authors obtained some data on […]
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