left vs. right

Student Essay: Civil Discourse Is a Lost Art on Campus But I Learned to Disagree Better

In college, I have often found myself—and still do in some instances—reluctant to share my political views, as they often diverge from the prevailing consensus. Fearful of losing friends or isolating myself on campus, I chose not to engage in political discussions. Where the college experience should immerse students in viewpoint diversity, mine has been […]

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Democrats Outnumber Republicans 5 to 1 as Commencement Speakers

Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on the College Fix on May 14, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. Democrats will outnumber Republicans as commencement speakers at the nation’s top 100 universities, according to a College Fix analysis. The College Fix looked for the main undergraduate ceremony speaker for […]

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Higher Ed’s Fate in 2024

How is this year’s election going to affect American higher education? I am an economist, and our tribe is somewhere between mediocre to awful at forecasting, but since I am tenured, retired, and unpaid by Minding the Campus, there are utterly no adverse consequences from making a fool of myself with this current assessment. American […]

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The Kirkpatrick Doctrine and Domestic Policy

Jeane Kirkpatrick was the American Ambassador to the United Nations during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. A brilliant and principled woman, she was famous for her pithy characterizations of the surreal, indecorous nature of politics at the UN. She once said, for example: “What takes place in the Security Council more closely resembles a mugging than either […]

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David Horowitz: Battlefield Notes from a War Gone Unnoticed

I have been reading essays by David Horowitz for nearly fifty years, starting when he became an editor of the radical new-left magazine, Ramparts, in 1968, and I was a high school student prepping for debates about the Vietnam war. David famously moved beyond his red diaper origins, his Marxist enthusiasms, and his admiration of […]

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