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Thomas K. Lindsay, Ph.D.

Tom K. Lindsay, Ph.D., is a distinguished senior fellow for Next Generation Texas at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He has more than two decades’ experience in education management and instruction, including service as a dean, provost, and college president.

Higher Education

Americans Are Becoming Too Ignorant To Be Free. One State Is Attempting To Reverse The Trend

In April, 673 professors at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC) signed a public letter attacking two bills before the state legislature. One of the bills, House Bill 96, requires teaching of the Constitution. House Bill 96 bolsters civic education through creating a new American history/government graduation requirement for all the state’s public college and university students. But this, in truth,...

May 16, 2023

K-12 Education

In Telling the Story of the Alamo, Remember the Facts

Everything that’s wrong with revisionist history is summed up in the lead paragraph of Time magazine’s new piece, “We’ve Been Telling the Alamo Story Wrong for Nearly 200 Years. Now It’s Time to Correct the Record.” Authors Brian Burrough and Jason Stanford begin with a hypothetical: America opens up Alaska for colonization, and Canadians move...

June 10, 2021

Higher Education

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being at the University of Texas-Arlington

Out-of-state friends frequently ask me what life is like in “Deep-Red Texas.” I answer that there are many blessings to living in the Lone Star State, to which I escaped from Chicago a decade ago. But when they ask whether the same blessings accrue in Texas public higher education, the story is mixed, for I...

April 30, 2021

Higher Education

Making Higher Education More Affordable

The extortionate cost of higher education continues to rise and is unlikely to moderate soon. From 2000 to 2020, college tuition and fees nationwide rose more than three times faster than general price inflation and more than twice as fast as average hourly wages. Put simply, college is unaffordable to many and becoming more out...

April 27, 2021

K-12 Education

Children’s Literature in the Age of Wokeness

“Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those, the art of living well.” So wrote the philosopher Aristotle in the Fourth Century B.C. Books are indispensable to a sound education, and in light last week being National Library Week, I wanted to look for...

April 13, 2021

Other

Why I Cancelled My MLB Subscription

I love Major League baseball. And not just Major League. I’ve stopped to watch High School and even Little League games in the hope of identifying the next Mike Trout. I’ve subscribed to MLB for years so that I could follow my beloved White Sox even after moving away from Chicago. I even watched all...

April 7, 2021

K-12 Education

San Francisco School Board Dances Atop Lincoln’s Grave

If a U.S. president can be impeached twice—even with the second trial coming after he leaves office—Abraham Lincoln can be assassinated a second time, with the second attack coming on his reputation. This posthumous attack comes from the woke luminaries heading up the San Francisco Unified School District, which recently decided to rename its schools formerly known...

March 12, 2021

Higher Education

Student loan forgiveness would be windfall for dentists, doctors and lawyers

With President Joe Biden in the White House, progressives are pushing for universal student loan forgiveness. New data from the Department of Education provides an excellent snapshot of how badly targeted student loan forgiveness would be. This new data gives us the most detailed view into the roughly $86 billion in student loans taken out by students who graduated...

January 25, 2021

Higher Education

UT should take the next step to defend free speech on campus

Friends of the First Amendment were elated this fall to read University of Texas President Jay Hartzell’s clarion call for free speech on college campuses. The title of his op-ed in the Dallas Morning News got to the heart of the matter: “There is no higher education without free speech.” Nor is there democracy without free speech. These...

December 24, 2020

K-12 Education

In The Name Of Anti-Racism, San Diego Schools Will Teach Black And Hispanic Kids Less

During his successful run for the presidency in 2000, George W. Bush warned against “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Then-candidate Bush delivered his remarks at the 91st annual meeting of the NAACP on July 10, 2000. Bush added, “A great movement of education reform has begun in this country built on clear principles: to raise the...

November 25, 2020

Higher Education

An Education Antidote to ‘Fake News’

In this era of highly polarized politics, we appear finally to have arrived at an issue upon which both the Left and Right agree, namely, that “fake news” is undermining democratic discourse. How can we prevent voters from being deceived by fake news? To this bipartisan concern, I offer a nonpartisan answer—education. Specifically, the country’s...

October 16, 2020

Higher Education

The real problem with the Barrett confirmation debate

Amid all the uproar of 2020’s contentious presidential election race, the country now finds on its plate another Supreme Court nomination, to fill the seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. As the New York Times’s Adam Liptak put it recently, “Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court, has compiled an almost uniformly conservative...

October 15, 2020