Let’s face it: science has gone woke. What used to be an ideological virus afflicting the arts and humanities has now spread through the entire university, STEMM fields included. That’s why Minding the Campus is renewing our focus on the sciences through a new, ongoing article series called Minding the Sciences. Here, we’ll cover wokeism in STEMM, scientific integrity, research funding, climate science, scientific associations, and much more.
A group of scholars from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has issued an open letter denouncing philosophy professor Alex Byrne for his role in co-authoring the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s (HHS) report on pediatric gender dysphoria. The report critically evaluated the evidence for gender-affirming medical care for minors, questioning the safety […]
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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. For decades, weather […]
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In a recent article, I described how Arizona State University (ASU) refused to investigate plagiarism by its administrator, Sethuraman Panchanathan, while he was serving as director of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Panchanathan later resigned unexpectedly and returned to ASU—just in time for the university to sue the NSF to preserve its high rate of […]
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In Episode 9 of The Week in Science, Director of Science Programs at the National Association of Scholars (NAS) Scott Turner takes us on a tour of scientific upheaval—political, bureaucratic, and biological. We begin with the five stages of grief—not for people, but for scientists, who are still grappling with the Trump administration’s supposed war […]
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On Wednesday, June 25, 2025, Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner announced the relocation of HUD headquarters to Alexandria, Virginia, where National Science Foundation (NSF) staff are currently sited. As NBC4 Washington reported, NSF employees promptly staged a protest, filling the hallways in Alexandria, chanting, shaking their fists, and forcing HUD’s press announcement […]
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July 2025 will mark the centenary of the famous Tennessee “Scopes monkey trial.” This is the fourth and last article in a series leading up to the centennial events in Dayton, Tennessee, the site of the trial. Read the first in the series here, the second here, and the third here. Just what was the Scopes […]
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In Episode 8 of The Week in Science, I outline the details of the 2026 presidential budget request for science funding, highlighting some new studies that detail the complex migration of humans from Africa. This being the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Steven Spielberg’s movie Jaws, there’s news about the science of sharks, too! […]
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Author’s Note: July 2025 will mark the centenary of the famous Tennessee “Scopes Monkey Trial.” This is the third article in a series leading up to the centennial events in Dayton, Tennessee, the site of the trial. Read the first in the series here and the second here. In the 1925 Dayton Monkey Trial, it […]
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Author’s Note: July 2025 will mark the centenary of the famous Tennessee “Scopes Monkey Trial.” This is the second article in a series leading up to the centennial events in Dayton, Tennessee, the site of the trial. Read the first in the series here. A century ago, the world’s greatest three-ring circus was about to […]
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In Episode 6 of The Week in Science, host Scott Turner, Director of Science Programs at the National Association of Scholars, explores a trio of fascinating topics. Science magazine decries “massive cuts” to the National Science Foundation (NSF) budget, slashing it from $9 billion to $3.9 billion—a 57 percent reduction. The chance of a research […]
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Note: July 2025 will mark the centenary of the famous Tennessee “Scopes Monkey Trial.” This article is part of a series leading up to the centennial events in Dayton, Tennessee, the site of the trial. In the summer of 1925, the town luminaries of Dayton, Tennessee, summoned John T. Scopes from his tennis game to […]
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The new Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor who gained fame as an early critic of U.S. COVID-19 policy, delivered his first public speech on May 2 at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He described the “failed” response to COVID-19 and then explained how this failure informed his […]
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In Episode 5 of The Week in Science, Scott Turner, Director of Science Programs at the National Association of Scholars, offers a timely critique of the growing media narrative around a so-called “Trump brain drain”—the claim that scientists are fleeing American institutions due to MAGA-led funding cuts. Turner says that what is actually driving scientists away […]
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In Episode 4 of The Week in Science, Scott Turner, Director of Science Programs at the National Association of Scholars, asks whether private philanthropy can rescue science from declining federal support. Before 1950, most scientific research was funded by private donors—not the government. That changed after WWII, when federal agencies like the National Institutes of […]
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Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on March 11, 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. In a great burst of […]
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In Episode 3 of The Week in Science, Scott Turner, Director of Science Programs at the National Association of Scholars, examines the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in scientific writing, the scientific deep state’s concerns over the politicization of science, and the federal government’s controversial changes to research funding rules. The episode also revisits the […]
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In Episode 2 of The Week in Science, Scott Turner, Director of Science Programs at the National Association of Scholars, dissects Science magazine’s critical response to the first hundred days of the Trump presidency. The magazine describes a “chaotic 100-day push” that they claim has dismantled scientific and public health infrastructure, including the erasure of […]
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The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has launched a new podcast. It features Scott Turner, NAS’s Director of Science Programs, who will cover topics that strike his fancy each week in the world of science. Watch for a new episode every week. In Episode 1, Turner looks at two articles published in the May 1, […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the soon-to-be-published National Association of Scholars report, Rescuing Science. It has been edited to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines and is cross-posted here with permission. I sought a career in academia because it promised a life of intellectual freedom; to think, write, and teach what I […]
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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. Far too many students are entering higher education ill-equipped to handle the rigors of collegiate-level science classes, according to professors who say they’ve had to alter their […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the soon-to-be-published National Association of Scholars report, Rescuing Science. It has been edited to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines and is cross-posted here with permission. Public funding of academic research is shaping up as a major political confrontation between universities and the Trump administration. The first […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the soon-to-be-published National Association of Scholars report, Rescuing Science. It has been edited to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines and is cross-posted here with permission. Since the Trump administration proposed a 15 percent cap on them in February, indirect costs on research grants are the object […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by All Things Rhapsodical on May 01, 2025. With edits to match MTC’s style guidelines, it is cross-posted here with permission. It is common these days to hear that climate justice requires redistributive payments from those societies, such as the U.S., that contribute most to greenhouse gas emissions to […]
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Anyone intimately familiar with U.S. education research of the past half century recognizes its marked difference from that of other fields. Some attribute the difference to an inferiority of methods, implying that education professors are not quite as bright as, say, economists. I would argue, instead, that bias is, by far, a greater problem—that bias […]
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Tsinghua University in Beijing is China’s top university and is often considered the top university in Asia. It is also a key instrument of the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign influence efforts and has played a key role in advancing China’s influence at American colleges and universities. Its influence is felt in many areas but none […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the soon-to-be-published National Association of Scholars report, Rescuing Science. It has been edited to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines and is cross-posted here with permission. Recently, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposed that indirect costs rates (administrative overheads) on research grants from the NIH […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the soon-to-be-published National Association of Scholars report, Rescuing Science. It has been edited to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines and is cross-posted here with permission. Indirect costs are a hot topic right now, set off by the Trump administration floating a proposal for the National […]
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I have previously reported through two Minding the Campus articles (here and here) that the National Science Foundation (NSF) director, Sethuraman Panchanathan, published a paper through the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) that copied an uncited source previously published through the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). In addition to copying from IEEE for […]
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For millennia, man has wondered whether he is alone in the universe. Organizations such as the SETI Institute (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence), founded in 1984, once employed more than 100 scientists, educators, and support staff in their quest to “explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe.” To […]
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Science™ is fighting back! In case you were worried. The final straw was the National Institutes of Health (NIH) decreeing in February that indirect cost reimbursements on research grants would henceforth be cut to about 25 percent of their current rate. Hard to see what the complaint is there. Indirect costs mostly fuel administrative bloat, […]
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