The headline on this epistle is from a great satiric song written in the middle of the last century by the late humorist and Harvard grad Tom Lehrer. Harvard has indeed been fighting the federal government fiercely this year, scoring a major victory last Wednesday when an Obama-appointed federal district judge, Allison Burroughs, declared that […]
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On September 2, Higher Ed Dive reported that the University of Chicago (UChicago) is embarking on a $100 million cost-cutting plan. The plan includes laying off up to 150 members of its staff and freezing admissions to 19 doctoral programs in the 2026–27 academic year—almost all of which are in the liberal arts and humanities, […]
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The world is changing quickly. In the 2010s, computer science was considered one of the most “marketable” majors. Nowadays, it has an increasingly high unemployment rate. Philosophy on the other hand, once the caricature of a “useless” major, is now being praised by people like Marco Argenti, the CIO of Goldman Sachs, who stated in April […]
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A delightful summer read—well, anytime read actually—is Scottish author Muriel Spark’s 20th-century novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), which also has an excellent 1969 film adaptation featuring Dame Maggie Smith. Set in an Edinburgh girls’ school during the 1930s, the story follows a group of students mentored by the unconventional if melodramatic teacher, Jean Brodie. The girls are known […]
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Texas State University (TXST) recently held its second annual “Sex in the Dark” event, an anonymous question-and-answer panel that promised to “create a comfortable environment for students to learn and ask questions about sex, sexual health, and relationships.” Hosted by Healthy Cats–Peer Educators and Students Against Violence, the August 27 event began with a resource […]
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Last week, Robin Westman shot up the Annunciation Catholic school in Minneapolis, Minnesota, killing two children and injuring eighteen more people, including fourteen children. As details of the case emerged, it became clear that the circumstances of the shooting were more complex. Robin Westman was, in fact, Robert Westman and had legally changed his name […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on the College Fix on September 3, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. Young college graduates face a job market that is “deteriorating rapidly” as even the unemployment rate for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and business fields […]
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Recent conflicting statements between President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, combined with reports of student deportations, have created widespread confusion about America’s current policy on international students. Contributors to Minding the Campus have already critiqued Trump’s remark that he would allow 600,000 Chinese students into the country, and have argued that the administration […]
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Author’s Note: This article 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, enter your name and email under “SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, ‘TOP OF MIND,’” located on the right-hand side of the site. On Sunday, the […]
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Idaho’s House Bill 264, Protecting the Privacy of Women, was signed into law in April. The legislation requires “covered entities”—including correctional facilities, domestic violence shelters, and state educational institutions—to designate restrooms, changing areas, and dormitories exclusively for either males or females. Access to these spaces is restricted based on a person’s biological sex. Two transgender […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published by the National Association of Scholars on September 2, 2025. It is crossposted here with permission. The Trump administration has rolled out the welcome mat for Chinese students. A few months ago, when Chinese President Xi Jinping held a meeting with President Trump regarding the ongoing trade war between China […]
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Over the last year, President Trump has made it his mission to ensure that all organizations and institutions receiving federal support comply with federal regulations. Higher education, for example, has seen over 4,000 grants—totaling billions of dollars—canceled, ending years of Americans’ tax dollars being spent on ridiculous, ideologically driven causes. Public education players, such as […]
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Editor’s Note: The following essay was submitted in response to Jared Gould’s Top of Mind column, “Young Americans Are Right to Be Angry—But Their Education Keeps the Cycle of Frustration Going,” published on August 21, 2025. Sorry for the late response, but I’ve been away from the web, visiting relatives and hiking. I read your […]
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Two recent news items from academia caught the eye. One is that Harvard might establish a new institute for the study of civics and the Constitution. Presumably, this would be a self-governing body within the university with enough independence to pursue a distinct mission—in this case, a relatively traditional approach to its discipline. If Harvard […]
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On August 20, the MIT Technology Review declared that artificial intelligence (AI) will help predict space weather. Yes, space has weather. Serious weather. It comes from eruptions from the sun called Coronal Mass Ejections (CME), which fling a vast quantity of mass into space. It can be dangerous to us if one of these solar […]
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This May, pro-Palestine protesters disrupted a commencement ceremony at the College of Staten Island. A crowd of students chanted, “Palestine will be free.” The next month, Liam Carey, a Williams College sophomore, tied himself to a Williams campus flagpole, replaced the U.S. flag with a Palestinian one, and wrote pro-Palestine graffiti on Sawyer Quad. The […]
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Harvard College has a grade inflation problem. But beneath it lies a deeper scandal: the faculty who have allowed, and even encouraged, the decay. The Atlantic recently reported that the average GPA at Harvard now hovers around 3.8—a number so inflated it renders distinctions meaningless. Students today can largely count on being graded as excellent, […]
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When Nemat “Minouche” Shafik became the first woman to serve as president of Columbia University, expectations were high. Yet, in just over a year, her tenure was dominated by controversy as Columbia emerged as the epicenter of pro-Palestinian protests following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. Demonstrators occupied campus buildings, even […]
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On September 1, 1775, George III refused to accept the Olive Branch Petition, Congress’s last attempt to avoid war. When John Adams heard the word back in America, he must have breathed a sigh of relief. On July 5, 1775, almost a year to the day before our Declaration of Independence, the Second Continental Congress had signed […]
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In the third episode of VAS News Chat, I join Teresa Manning, Policy Director at the National Association of Scholars and President of its Virginia affiliate, to examine the parallels between the healthcare and education systems, how generational differences shape perceptions of hardship, the anger many young people feel in response to the exponential rise […]
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