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.
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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For more than half a century, Americans have been warned that the end of the world is near. Yet the deadlines pass, the world keeps turning, and yesterday’s warnings morph into tomorrow’s threats. The climate crisis has long been cited as one such crisis that will end the world, and it has been packaged as […]
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The latest atrocity in the Trump War on Science™ has just dropped. Robert F Kennedy Jr. has just announced that federal funding for research on mRNA vaccines has been cut by $500 million. Outrage has predictably followed. The United Auto Workers astroturf group Stand Up for Science is demanding that Kennedy be impeached—aren’t cabinet officers […]
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The Fall 2025 semester has commenced at universities throughout the U.S. Many new and returning students will pursue a course of study in various STEM-related fields. I teach chemistry to two separate STEM (Science, Engineering, Technology, and Math) cohorts. One is made up of students preparing for careers in medicine, forensics, marine biology, and graduate […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on RealClear Science on August 19, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. The irreproducibility crisis of modern science—the failure of large proportions of scientific research to produce true results—just keeps on going. In November, a survey of 1,924 biomedical […]
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There’s an entire TikTok category of videos, Why is Common Core Math Bad. If you go to Instagram, there’s a math teacher who’ll tell you, If you’ve ever tried to read the Common Core’s Standards for Mathematical Practices, they’re almost impossible for math teachers to understand … and that means that students, parents, and administrators […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on the College Fix on August 14, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. Two bioethics professors at Western Michigan University are exploring a controversial thought experiment: Should spreading a debilitating meat allergy be morally required if eating meat is […]
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Duke University’s School of Medicine is preparing to dock the salaries of tenured faculty who fail to bring in enough research grant money—a move that undermines one of academia’s most sacred job protections. Under the policy, basic science professors who fall short of “minimum expectations” for external funding could see their pay reduced to as […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on the author’s Substack the Art of Science on August 10, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. On the bookshelf in my academic advisor’s office sits a beautiful burgundy cloth-bound book from the 1890s. With a finely textured […]
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This week, the Trump administration won an important victory in the legal campaign being mounted by universities over funding of scientific research. Part of the Trump administration’s agenda has been reorienting federal support of research toward new priorities, including artificial intelligence (AI), computing infrastructure, and military needs. On April 18th of this year, the National […]
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On Friday, August 1, a Federal District Court in New York gave Trump a win: Judge John P. Cronan allowed the President’s National Science Foundation Directive to remain in effect while being challenged in the court. The Directive terminates research grants for “things like misinformation and diversity, equity and inclusion,” among other subjects. Researchers were […]
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The Trump War on Science™ delivered a new body blow. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) put out new guidance for researchers applying for grant funding. From September, proposals for new and ongoing research projects would be scrutinized for inordinate use of AI tools like ChatGPT in writing the proposals. Even worse, the NIH would […]
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Should we measure and scale anti-Semitism? Do we really need to know whether Harvard is the most anti-Semitic college in the United States or whether Egypt ranks number one in the Middle East—or is it Jordan? Anyone can see that those places are steeped in Jew-hatred, regardless of who “wins” the competition. The Netherlands records […]
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Why is it that Sethuraman Panchanathan became director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) after republishing work and passing it off as novel? And why did Victor McCrary become chair of the National Science Board (NSB)—NSF’s oversight provider—after he did the same thing? Moreover, previous NSF Director Kelvin Droegemeier took credit for students’ work, and the paper […]
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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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