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.
A recent Dallas Morning News editorial board article desperately wants Texas to pump the brakes on the Classic Learning Test (CLT). Why? It’s worried about politics creeping into college admissions and about the CLT’s thinner track record compared with the SAT and ACT. But let’s be honest: the politics and the diluted standards arrived a...
Just how bad is American higher education today? Consider this observation on today’s college students from Jessica Wilson, a professor of great books and humanities at Pepperdine: “It’s not even an inability to critically think. It’s an inability to read sentences.” She is not alone. Professors at elite colleges report that many incoming students arrive...
Senate Bill 37, passed by the 89th Texas Legislature and signed into law in 2025, was a major step toward restoring academic integrity in Texas public higher education. The law requires every public university governing board to review its general education curriculum at least once every five years. The Legislature did more than require a...
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,...
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...
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....
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...
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)....
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...
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...
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,...
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...