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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

The Chronicle of Higher Education Weeps: Texas Accountability Law Ruins Everything for Woke Faculty

As the public’s once-high view of college education burns down before our eyes, the universities’ favorite water-carrier, the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE), continues to fiddle. CHE’s recent article on Texas Tech University (TTU) rebottles an old whine, warning that Texas’ 2025 law, Senate Bill 37, has brought a wave of faculty self-censorship, administrative pressure,...

July 7, 2026

Family

Has ‘The Civil War’ Creator Ken Burns Forgotten Lincoln?

Ken Burns became famous for his magisterial PBS film series, “The Civil War.” My family loved this series, which featured, naturally enough, Lincoln’s arguments and tactics during the war. But Burns’s latest pronouncement makes one wonder whether he really learned anything about Lincoln at all. In a recent podcast discussing the impending closure of his...

July 3, 2026

Family

Does America’s 250th Deserve Our Celebration?

As we observe the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the question has been raised whether our experiment in self-government still merits our celebration—or our condemnation. I find myself having to republish a rebuttal to this claim every July 4, because every July 4 brings a new call to no longer celebrate the Fourth....

July 3, 2026

Local Government

When Elite Journalists Fail Remedial Civics: The MSNBC Edition

In a single revealing moment on MSNBC, Katy Tur exposed the central fault line in American politics — not a gaffe about U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, but a profound confusion about the foundation of the American regime itself. Reacting to Johnson’s statement that our rights come from God, not government, Tur asked whether this...

June 15, 2026

Higher Education

Harvard Joins the ‘Right-Wing Conspiracy’—Declares That College Grades Have Been a Joke for Decades

So, it turns out that the little boy was right all along about the emperor’s new clothes. In an effort to restore grading standards, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences is conducting an email ballot on the administration’s proposal to limit solid A grades at 20% of students per course (plus up to four additional A’s, if merited)....

June 5, 2026

Higher Education

The Eternal ‘Apple of Gold’: Lincoln’s Defense of Justice Thomas’s Call to Our Founding Principles

Recently at UT-Austin, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas spoke as part of the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. Thomas understands what too many in our day have forgotten: that the Declaration is, as Abraham Lincoln put it, the “apple of gold,” and the Constitution is the picture of silver framed around it. The...

April 30, 2026

Higher Education

Yale Finally Says the Quiet Part Out Loud

Yale’s Committee on “Trust in Higher Education” just released what higher-education reformers have to view as a remarkable document. It addresses the ongoing erosion of public trust in America’s universities. In doing so, it owns up to the self-censorship, extreme faculty political homogeneity, grade hyperinflation, administrative bloat, and the opaqueness of “holistic” admissions. For an...

April 30, 2026

K-12 Education

Study: K-12 Grade Inflation Making American Kids Dumber, Costing Them Millions

When teachers inflate grades — giving higher marks than students’ actual performance warrants — the effects ripple far beyond the classroom. Increasingly widespread high school grade inflation can cost students more than $200,000 in lost earning potential per teacher per year, finds a groundbreaking new study. Authored by Jeffrey T. Denning, Rachel Nesbit, Nolan Pope,...

March 23, 2026

K-12 Education

Alpha School isn’t an ‘AI story.’ It’s a structural indictment—and employers/HR should pay attention

Alpha School’s “AI education shakeup” is really a warning to employers: the fastest way to outperform isn’t smarter tech—it’s removing the soul-crushing compliance load that keeps humans from owning the mission. Alpha School was founded in 2014, and it’s recently become a national talking point because its students do core academics in roughly two hours...

March 18, 2026

Higher Education

A Triumph for Civic Renewal at America’s 250th

A Texas program aims to improve civic literacy in underserved communities. At a time when we Americans routinely worry about the health of our civic culture, the U.S. Department of Education has made a notable investment. Earlier this month, the department approved a $1.9-million grant for The American Civic Tradition at 250, a joint initiative of Texas...

January 28, 2026

Higher Education

Brandeis Is Doing Something About Grade Inflation. Will Texas Be Next?

This is a good-news, bad-news tale for American higher education. The good news: A top-tier university has finally taken serious aim at the epidemic of grade hyperinflation. The bad news: We have fallen so far that even elite institutions must now devise entirely new, parallel evaluation systems just to deliver what straightforward, principled grading should...

January 22, 2026

Higher Education

Texas’ Top 10% Rule: A Well-Intentioned Distortion of Merit

The Declaration of Independence proclaims that “all men are created equal” and endowed with “unalienable Rights” to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” This foundational American creed demands a meritocracy—a system in which talent, effort, and achievement determine outcomes, not birth, wealth, or group identity. Yet Texas’s Top 10% rule, enacted in 1997, subverts...

November 4, 2025