April 1774: The Pendulum Swings

The nation’s 250 Anniversary is only 29 months away. The National Association of Scholars is commemorating the events that led up to the Second Continental Congress officially adopting the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. This is the sixth installment of the series. Find the fifth installment here.  “His Majesty trusts that no opposition […]

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The Worst Federal Higher Ed Policy Initiative Ever

For years, I have been writing about the deficiencies of the federal student loan programs, but I thought diminishing returns were setting into my harangues—everything important had been said. But don’t underestimate the deleterious effects of disregarding the rule of law, the crassness of political ambitions, and the manifest stupidity of some of President Biden’s […]

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Linemen for the County

Editor’s Note: This is an expert from an article that was originally published by City Journal on April 4, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. When people hear “lineman,” they think football. At least that’s the reaction Keith Henderson receives when he teaches Philadelphia schoolchildren about jobs in the skilled trades. Henderson, who leads […]

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Curricular Visions: Revitalizing the Great Books

Editor’s Note: David Randall’s Curriculum of Liberty illuminates the pressing demand for American higher education to equip students with essential knowledge, character, and tools needed to confront contemporary challenges, revitalize the American republic, and safeguard Western heritage alongside the principles of free inquiry. This essay draws inspiration from his groundbreaking work and marks the inaugural […]

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Minding the Sciences—Science’s Goose is Cooked: Seven Pillars of Folly

The era of Big Science began formally in 1950, when the National Science Foundation opened its doors. Its mission was to fulfill a hopeful promise: for government to fund the very best academic science, to explore science’s “endless frontier,” in the inspiring words of Vannevar Bush, President Roosevelt’s—and subsequently President Truman’s— science czar. There was […]

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Biden Title IX changes threaten free speech, due process: legal experts

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The College Fix on April 8, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. ‘Single campus bureaucrat’ would be ‘judge and jury’ Pending Title IX changes threaten free speech and due process, according to several legal experts who spoke to The College Fix. The administration’s submitted updates to Title IX of the Education […]

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Having a Theological Vision

Editor’s Note: This essay is an excerpt from the author’s doctoral project titled “Reaching Generation Z with the Gospel at a Christian University through Faith Integration, Radical Hospitality, and Missional Opportunities,” completed as part of the Doctor of Ministry program at Knox Theological Seminary. The content has been edited to adhere to MTC’s guidelines. For […]

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About Friendship and Democracy

“To justify a general conclusion, requires many observations, even where the subject may be submitted to the Anatomical knife, to Optical glasses, to analysis by fire, or by solvents.” —Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV I’ll never forget a beautiful Peruvian girl, breathtaking she was, and a true friend, Ivy Arbulu. […]

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Echoes of Lost Conversations: A Review of ‘Bright College Years’

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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Two Cultures Revisited

A New Science Culture  In 1959, British novelist and one-time scientist C. P. Snow delivered a lecture at Cambridge called “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” He accused humanists of being scientifically ignorant and not knowing about the second law of thermodynamics—not to mention the non-conservation of parity. Science and literature—the humanities—were two separate […]

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MTA Fights Racism with Anti-Semitism?

Just two months after the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) voted in favor of a ceasefire resolution labeling Israel’s defensive war against Hamas as “a genocidal war on the Palestinian people,” the union has once again engaged in the demonization and delegitimization of Israel. On March 21st, the MTA hosted a two-hour webinar titled “Context and […]

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Slavery Revisited: Time on the Cross at 50

Author’s Note: The following is based on a more comprehensive paper titled “Slavery Revisited: Time on the Cross at 50,” published in the Spring 2024 edition of the Independent Review. Most serious works of scholars are respectfully evaluated by modest numbers of colleagues and occasionally play a small role in determining the prevailing interpretation of […]

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On the Puzzle of Out-of-State Tuition

Public institutions typically charge out-of-state students much higher tuition than in-state students. Bryan Caplan and Alex Tabarrok, two leading libertarian economists, have been discussing the puzzle of why that is the case. They correctly rule out the monopoly or cartel explanation. If public colleges were a monopoly or cartel, they could charge higher prices to […]

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Living in an AI World: Will We Survive and in What Reality?

People should be very concerned about the biases being programmed into AI https://t.co/VS4v1JvRt5 — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 11, 2024 A female pope? A black Viking? Yes, according to Google’s generative artificial intelligence (AI) program Gemini, which had produced just such images about two weeks before Musk’s X post. Gemini became the object of ridicule […]

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Classical Christian Education: The Antidote to Progressivism

Reflecting on my teaching journey that spanned from the late 1970s to 2020, I can’t help but notice the stark contrast in educational approaches. When I started, education was centered around traditional book learning and assessments, a teacher-led process that continued into the 1990s. However, as I retired from full-time teaching in 2020 and transitioned […]

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Intolerable Acts: Then and Now

The nation’s 250 Anniversary is only 29 months away.  The National Association of Scholars is commemorating the events that led up to the Second Continental Congress officially adopting the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. This is the forth installment of the series. Find the fourth installment here.  Intolerable is a strong word. We […]

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To Renew Faith in Education, Look to Passover and Resurrection

“You cannot own a child of God.” Those were the words I read and re-read in most term papers from the community college course on American government I taught in the COVID-19 spring semester of 2020. In light of a divided America on edge amidst a pandemic, this was the most common answer to the […]

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Intellectual Treason at Harvard, Penn, and MIT

The antidote to bad ideas is good ideas, I’ve often said and sometimes written. I’ve railed against censorship and “cancellation” and defended very free, very unfettered speech. Even odious speech, detestably bad ideas spoken aloud. It’s good that it all be spoken aloud, where its moral bankruptcy is obvious in the marketplace of ideas—when rebutted […]

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A Healthy Culture in a Healthy Economy

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Law & Liberty on March 25, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. A specter is haunting capitalism – the specter of “higher” things. Or so an increasing number of thinkers among the New Right, the National Conservatives, or the Economic Nationalists might say. They insist that the “neoliberal” order of free enterprise and […]

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What Are Negative Rights?

Negative rights signal the core of natural law in the American tradition, also known as our Bill of Rights. Without them, the Constitution might never have been ratified, or we might be a very different country today. Most of us can list them—the right to free speech, the right to keep and bear arms, the […]

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