Minding The Campus - Page 2 of 128 -

College Students Required to Detail Sexual History Before Registering for Classes

October 27, 2021
By Hans Bader

Colleges are increasingly demanding that students disclose details of their private lives in Title IX training. For example, Campus Reform reported that a “mandatory online course at the University of Southern California (USC) asks students to disclose the number of sexual encounters they have had over the past three months” as part of its “Title […]

Our Sex Starts in the Womb, Our Gender As We Toddle On

October 25, 2021
By Joe Nalven

Richard Feynman remarked “for Nature cannot be fooled,” hearkening back to Isaac Newton—a reminder that Nature’s laws are indifferent to what humans think or wish those laws might be. The same goes for biology, which we ignore at our peril. Sex genes appeared some 180 million years ago in mammals. Not only do they make […]

I Just Made My Last Student Loan Payment—Here’s How to Improve the System

October 21, 2021
By Andrew Gillen

I borrowed over $30,000 for college, and after many years of repayment, I am now officially (student loan) debt-free. By a bizarre twist of fate, much of my professional life has been devoted to studying financial aid programs like student loans. In this essay, I reflect back on how my student loan experience compares to […]

Educating Students About the Victims of Communism

October 20, 2021
By Mike Sabo

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClearEducation on October 15, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. Many Americans today assume that the threat of Communism subsided with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But “We continue to see Communist and socialist regimes pop up and spread not only in Latin […]

The Exhaustion of “Antiracism”: Who has permission to quote MLK?

October 18, 2021
By Wenyuan Wu

“Antiracism” guru Dr. Ibram X. Kendi strikes again. In an emotionally taxing column published by The Atlantic, a melodramatic Kendi laments the alleged misappropriation and distortions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the hands of conservatives opposed to critical race theory (CRT). Kendi disparages “Reagan Republicans then and Trump Republicans today” as King’s “modern-day […]

PSLF Was Already Bad. The Biden Administration Just Made It Worse.

October 13, 2021
By Andrew Gillen

Last week, the U.S. Department of Education announced new changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program. The changes make a bad program worse. PSLF was launched in 2007 and provides accelerated loan forgiveness for politically favored workers. Other college graduates with student loan debt need to make payments for at least 20 years […]

How Our Illiberal Universities Betray Liberal Democracy

October 11, 2021
By Philip Carl Salzman

The quest for knowledge at our universities has ended because knowledge is “settled”: science, philosophy, sociology, ethics, and politics are all settled. The time for questions is over; now is the time for action, for activism, for transforming society and culture. As John M. Ellis puts it in The Breakdown of Higher Education, “academia now […]

Dear Outraged College Student

October 8, 2021
By Alexander Riley

Dear Outraged College Student: I just read your op-ed in the student newspaper. I can see from it that you are distressed. A speaker with whom you disagree has been invited to come give a talk at the school you attend. You feel it is an outrage against decency, justice, and diversity that this speaker […]

Campus’ Disappearing White Males: The MacArthur Awards

October 6, 2021
By Richard Vedder

Next to the Nobel Prizes, possibly the most prestigious and lucrative awards given to American academics are the annual so-called “genius” awards from the MacArthur Foundation. Last week, the foundation announced 25 awards, totaling well over $15 million. I found it curious that only three (12%) of those recognitions went to white or Asian males, […]

Socioeconomic Status—The Good Kind of Affirmative Action?

October 6, 2021
By Kenin M. Spivak

Lambasted from the Left and the Right and misused by universities to circumvent prohibited racial preferences, America’s core values demand reassessment of socioeconomic affirmative action. The Statue of Liberty proclaims: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” A basic tenet of American exceptionalism is our upward mobility. Just about […]

Mao’s Red Guards and America’s Justice Warriors

October 4, 2021
By Wenyuan Wu

On a warm day in the early fall of 1966, a 17-year-old former high school student led a group of local Red Guards in a struggle session to publicly shame members of the “Five Black Categories (landlords, rich farmers, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and right-wingers)” in a small town near Shanghai. The teenager, who came from […]

The Barefoot Boy’s Guide to Ownership

October 2, 2021
By Keith Whitaker

Oh, for boyhood’s time of June, Crowding years in one brief moon, When all the things I heard or saw Me, their master, waited for … Mine, the sand-rimmed pickerel pond, Mine, the walnut slopes beyond, Mine, on bending orchard trees, Apples of Hesperides! John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Barefoot Boy” is one of […]

The Common Good Project

October 1, 2021
By Edwin C. Hagenstein

In our current political discourse, virtually any news story can instantly become a flash point for bitter partisan recriminations: COVID-related public health mandates, the January 6 mob actions at the Capitol, and now the Afghanistan pullout. Each of these cases have threatened the interests of the nation as a whole, and in other times, they […]

King, Kendi, and the Good People of Guilford, Connecticut

September 30, 2021
By Jay Bergman

Editor’s Note: This essay originally stated that the population of Guilford, Connecticut is “just over 77,000.” The population is, in fact, around 22,000. We have edited the piece accordingly. Like many readers of Minding the Campus, I am despondent over the corruption of K-12 education in America. It seems to have inherited all that is […]

In Review: Philip Dwyer and Mark Micale’s “The Darker Angels of Our Nature”

September 29, 2021
By Gabriel Andrade

Cancel culture has harassed Harvard professor Steven Pinker on more than one occasion. Not long ago, the witch hunters demanded the removal of Pinker as a fellow from the Linguistic Society of America. What was his crime? Pinker had the nerve to point out that modern Western Civilization is not the bogeyman social justice warriors […]

Six Thoughts on Biden’s Free Community College Plan

September 27, 2021
By Andrew Gillen

Details are starting to emerge about the Biden administration’s plans for free community college. According to a story in Inside Higher Ed by Alexis Gravely, the key details include: States that opt-in must set community college tuition and fees to $0 and must maintain current spending on community colleges. To offset the loss of tuition, […]

Vaccines in Food? UC Riverside Announces New Research on mRNA Veggies

September 24, 2021
By John Fraim

One of the most alarming developments in the current COVID vaccine war appears in the form of a relatively harmless-looking September 16 press release from the University of California at Riverside (UCR). The press release begins, “The future of vaccines may look more like eating a salad than getting a shot in the arm. UC […]

1776 Unites Curriculum Highlights the American Character

September 23, 2021
By Mike Sabo

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClearWire on September 17, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. Teachers looking for a history and civics curriculum that focuses on America’s promise of securing liberty for all have a new resource: the 1776 Unites curriculum. A creation of 1776 Unites, an initiative of the Woodson […]

In Defense of Liberal Culture

September 22, 2021
By Frank Xu

Kabul’s rapid collapse upon the withdrawal of U.S. troops teaches us at least two things about culture. Firstly, different cultures undergird vastly different forms of government. After 20 years of direct U.S. influence in regime-building, Afghanistan has failed to establish its own democratic government, largely due to illiberal political and civic cultural norms. The 20-year […]

Why Professors Are Canceled

September 20, 2021
By Philip Carl Salzman

The cancellation of professors is overdetermined, that is, caused by multiple influences all contributing to the end result. Anne Applebaum reviews some prominent cancellations in her lengthy account in The Atlantic, entitled “The New Puritans.” Here are some of the contributing circumstances: One is that the targets tend to be successful, high-ranking, and often popular, […]

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UT Austin Ends Inquiry Into Antiracism Study for Children

“The University of Texas at Austin said late last week that three professors investigating the effectiveness of an antiracism curriculum for white preschoolers and their parents may continue that research in full. UT Austin paused the study, known as GoKAR!, and then allowed only parts of it to resume earlier this month, following a complaint to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and some other negative publicity alleging that GoKAR! discriminated against participants on the basis of race.” - Inside Higher Ed, 11/29/21

How education will shape 2022's midterm elections

“Next year’s midterm election season will include campaigns for state school board seats and elected superintendents in more than a dozen areas. Scores of gubernatorial and legislative races will also take on added importance for teachers and students, as the power centers of local government flex new influence over classroom practices. The outcome of these races could lie in the hands of voting parentswho are fired up over school safety measures, debates about how to teach the nation’s history and the role parents play in shaping the decisions schools make for students.” - Politico, 11/29/21

Doctors Warn New Medical School Guidance Would Lead to Unqualified Physicians and Unscientific Medicine

“The two accrediting bodies for American medical schools now say that meritocracy is 'malignant' and that race has 'no genetic or scientific basis,' positions that many doctors worry will lower standards of care and endanger lives by discouraging vital genetic testing. ... The guidance won't just influence the way doctors talk, these practitioners said, but also what they know and how they treat patients. It could even make them unwilling to screen racial minorities for serious conditions—including many types of cancer—that they are more likely to inherit, on the mistaken belief that genes play no role in racial health disparities.” - Washington Free Beacon, 11/29/21

Columbia Settles COVID-19 Refund Case

“Columbia University has reached a $12.5 million settlement with students who sued the school for failing to refund fees when it pivoted to online classes in the spring of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the U.S., Columbia—like most U.S. colleges and universities—shifted to remote learning in an effort to keep infection rates low. A class action complaint brought against the university in April 2020 sought reimbursement for both tuition and fees for the spring semester, though the request to reimburse tuition was dismissed by a judge in February.” - Inside Higher Ed, 11/29/21

Kyle Rittenhouse’s leftist ASU classmates want him gone

“One of the things that makes Kyle Rittenhouse quite proud is the fact that he is a student at Arizona State University although, so far, he’s only attended online. The leftists on campus, however, think that being online is already more than he deserves and are trying to get him kicked out of the college. So far, ASU is holding the line but one wonders how long it will do so. ... We must all hope that the university holds strong. In the event it does, it should also expel everyone behind the petition and rally for defaming Rittenhouse. If the students remain on campus, ASU becomes a target for any lawsuit.” - American Thinker, 11/29/21

Cyberattacks keep targeting colleges. How can they protect themselves?

“Cyberattacks on colleges and universities have been increasing over the years, but the pandemic ushered in a new era of urgency. The attacks pose not just financial risks but also operational risk, as was the case when the University of Massachusetts Lowell canceled classes for nearly a week in June after a security breach. Some institutions, like Wichita State University, have been sued over cybersecurity incidents. Now, as higher education institutions adjust to the new normal of hybrid learning and remote work, many are also making improvements to data security.” - Higher Ed Dive, 11/29/21

Entrepreneurship is fine — but it's time to fix the academic job market

“The problem is not that entrepreneurial skills and qualities like fundraising and risk-taking are inherently bad, but rather that the argument encouraging doctoral students to be more like entrepreneurs ignores serious structural issues with the academic job market. I don't doubt that responding to market needs, cultivating resilience and writing for a variety of audiences will increase my chances of becoming a tenured professor. Even so, the odds aren't in my favor, and touting a more refined academic and personal brand as a solution to improving the doctoral experience and student outcomes seems out of touch with the reality that Ph.D. students face.” - Higher Ed Dive, 11/29/21

Survey Says: Davidson College Should Mend Its Ways

“This deep division between the beliefs of important donors and the actual conduct of school officials has been brought to light in a new report about Davidson College by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). The beliefs of the top donors are so at odds with the actions of the administration in recent years that one must wonder why they have remained silent and continued to contribute for so long. The answer to that question may be that they were somewhat unaware of how far Davidson had drifted to the left. But no more ... ” - The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, 11/29/21

Pilot program at 4 community colleges seeks to design supports for single mothers on campus

“Colleges can help single mothers succeed by providing them with basic needs supports, building inclusive environments on campus and giving them flexible educational experiences, according to a new report from the Education Design Lab. The Education Design Lab, a nonprofit organization focused on education and the workforce, is helping four community colleges launch pilot programs to better support single mothers through college, with the aim of reaching at least 6,000 of these learners by 2024.” - Higher Ed Dive, 11/29/21

It’s Time to Cancel ‘Woke’ Math

“Bill Gates spent $140 million to create an allegedly 'anti-racist' math curriculum. I am a math professor at an historically black college. I’m the son of an historian who chaired the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at a State University of New York college. I’m someone who has received 800 hate messages from supporters of the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Racism is not merely an academic matter to me. But Bill Gates’s initiative is itself racist, in that it calls quite good pedagogical practices 'white supremacist.'” - American Greatness, 11/27/21

Racial Newspeak Comes to the Classroom

Fighting Microaggressive Oppression at Duke

Counter Wokecraft: Why I Wrote It and Why You Should Read It