Good News on Student Loan Forgiveness, Biden’s SAVE Plan Is Paused by Courts

While the Biden administration has at least nine plans to forgive student loans, some are much bigger than others. And the two biggest have now run into legal buzzsaws. The Supreme Court (SCOTUS) eventually threw out its first plan in 2022. The second plan introduced a new income-driven repayment plan called SAVE, which, in practice, […]

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The People from Nowhere

Between August 25 and August 27, 1774, the First North Carolina Provincial Congress met in New Bern, North Carolina. There they passed resolutions that they would not import any goods from Britain, including slaves, until the Intolerable Acts were rescinded. They also selected delegates for the First Continental Congress, which would meet the next month. […]

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Write for Minding the Campus

As September approaches, several topics need your attention. At the top of the list, I hope our Middle Eastern experts will address curriculum issues related to 9/11. The terrorist attack continues to shape international relations curricula, but I believe that history, political science, and international relations programs largely fail to teach the history and politics […]

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“Techne”: The Future Students—and Parents—Want

The continuing changes at the New College of Florida (NCF) have involved the concept of techne. It’s coursework that promises to connect students to real-world opportunities. What might techne mean, either at NCF or elsewhere? Recall this claim from my suggestion for the NCF Mission Statement: “No college does more to increase your odds of getting […]

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A World Without Heroes

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 OF MIND,’” and […]

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National Association of Scholars Mourns the Loss of Adam Andrzejewski

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) mourns the loss of Adam Andrzejewski, the visionary Founder and CEO of OpenTheBooks. Adam was a friend to the National Association of Scholars.  He inspired our vigorous use of freedom of information requests to pry important information from public universities that are often reluctant to divulge facts that belong […]

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Auguste Comte and the Modern University

Dedicated to my father, Lee, on his 96th birthday—my first philosophy teacher “By speculating upon causes, we could solve no difficulty about origin and purpose. Our real business is to analyze accurately the circumstances of phenomena, and to connect them by the natural relations of succession and resemblance.”  Comte, Positive Philosophy (tr. Martineau, 1858) “Most […]

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Why We Should Free Literary Study from Marxist Proponents

I scanned the first message I received in my Columbia University MA English group chat. Bookmarking my copy of Ayn Rand’s We the Living, a novel about the ills of post-Revolutionary Russia, I recoiled. Reviewing the text, sent by a researcher of “imperial conspiracy” in a “postcolonial context,” I felt my vision blurring. This couldn’t […]

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Ending the Leftist Think Monopoly on Campus

For learning and discovery communities to flourish, there has to be a diversity of ideas that are explored and debated, with multiple perspectives discussed civilly by veteran scholars—the faculty—as well as inquisitive young learners—the students. While campuses in recent years have obsessed over what are intellectually relatively unimportant dimensions of diversity, such as the skin […]

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America’s Other Universities

As anti-Israel protests convulsed American campuses in the spring semester—likely to reappear soon in the fall—one might be forgiven, judging from the headlines, for thinking that the Ivy League and a handful of major state universities constitute the entirety of American higher education. Not infrequently, even commentators on these events hailed from the same set […]

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What’s So Bad About Colonialism?

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the author’s book Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America’s School Curricula. It is posted here with permission.  A widely accepted contemporary belief, prevalent throughout American secondary and higher education, is that post-1800 Western colonialism was an unmitigated evil. Notably, this does not hold […]

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The AAUP Discredits Itself

When I began my academic career, my colleagues regarded the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) as the great proponent and bulwark of academic freedom. The senior colleague I admired most—a gentleman and scholar, the embodiment of what it meant to be a professor—was a long-time member. My, how times have changed. Yes, the AAUP […]

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The Imminent Student Loan Disaster We’re Not Talking About

Editor’s Note: The following is a short excerpt from an article originally published by The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on August 7, 2024. With edits to fit MTC’s style, it is crossposted here with permission. Legal battles over President Biden’s various schemes to forgive student debt continue. In July, the Eighth Circuit Court of […]

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The Case for Diversity in American Higher Education

Although our national motto, E Pluribus Unum, appropriately reflects how diverse peoples have melded together to form a tribe that we call “Americans,” that does not negate the fact that there are numerous different ways we carry out the business of life across our vast land. That is especially true regarding the provision of higher […]

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Why Are Race-Based Scholarships and Programs Suddenly Under Attack?

Editor’s Note: The following is a short excerpt from an article originally published by The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on August 5, 2024. With edits to fit MTC’s style, it is crossposted here with permission. For nearly five decades, American universities systematically discriminated against white and Asian Americans. Quotas, “holistic review processes,” and “factors” […]

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When Women Ruled and Gentlemen Complied

“Tú sola comprendiste que el hombre y el tigre se diferencian únicamente por el corazón.” —Horacio Quiroga, Juan Darién (1920) At an event at Stanford Law School last year, Associate Dean Tirien Steinbach shut down Federal Judge Kyle Duncan’s speech because his ideas hurt people’s feelings. More recently, officials in the United Kingdom have indicated […]

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Try Not to Live By Lies

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 OF MIND,’” and […]

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Grade Inflation Is the New Affirmative Action

I teach at an Ivy League university. I can’t count how many colleagues have told me that they “just give everyone an A.” This mindset doesn’t belong to just one instructor, department, discipline, or generation. I do not “out” any one or two particular people when I describe my experience with grade inflation. It’s happening […]

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Students’ Availability Heuristic Turned Campuses into Nightmares: This Semester, Professors Must Break It

With colleges and universities reopening in a few short weeks, I want to remind fellow faculty that educating students is one of the most important tasks they are charged with performing. For faculty to provide a responsible college education today, we professors must help our students learn how to find and then embrace the truth […]

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Beyond Alarmism: A Christian Ethic of Earth Stewardship

Editor’s Note: The following is a brief excerpt from the author’s in-depth essay, “Using the Cultural Mandate of Genesis 1:28 and the Ten Commandments as the Foundation for a Christian Ethic of Earth Stewardship,” originally published by the Cornwall Alliance on November 7, 2023. Shared here with permission. Introduction As recently as the 2018 Gallup […]

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