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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