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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

For Whom Belle Tolls: An End to Accreditors’ Wheelan and Dealing?

A recent Inside Higher Ed article (IHE) on the college accreditor, SACS (Southern Association of Colleges and Schools) reveals—albeit, unintentionally—a great deal about the disconnect between the higher-education establishment and the rest of the country. Half puff-piece, half press coverage, the article anguishes over “the political trials of a Southern accreditor,” and especially its longtime...

November 14, 2023

Higher Education

The Last, Best Hope: A New Texas University Looks to Restore Genuine Higher Education

As someone who has spent most of his life working in American universities, my subsequent writing about it in these pages has been for the most part negative. And not without reason: My on-campus experience, coupled with my research, has led me to agree with the assertion that constitutes the subtitle of Allan Bloom’s “The...

November 6, 2023

Foreign Policy

The Antidote to Media Abuse: Overturn NYT v. Sullivan

The false, violence-promoting headline above, from the Oct. 17 New York Times, raises again an old question and, with it, an old word—calumny—as in, what is the role of government in preventing calumny? Calumny is the making of false and defamatory statements about others in order to damage their reputation. When written, such false, defaming statements are...

November 3, 2023

K-12 Education

What Would Thomas Hobbes Say About School Choice?

As the Texas Legislature meets in special session to debate whether or not to empower parents with school choice, the battle lines are being clearly drawn. Those in favor of expanding school choice point advance their case on the basis of both general principles and documented results. At the level of principle, they affirm that...

October 19, 2023

Higher Education

Learning Liberty at WTAMU

The latest poll by Gallup of Americans’ attitudes toward higher education is out, and the results should come as a surprise to nobody. The number of Americans who express “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education has dropped from 57% in 2015 to only 36% today. While Republicans’ trust in...

October 4, 2023

Critical Race Theory

DEI versus the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution

This Sunday evening (Sept. 17) will bring the end to another Constitution Day. The question facing America is whether we are also reaching the end of constitutional democracy: Do we still believe in the “self-evident truths” of equality and inalienable rights? If it seems strange even to ask such a question, consider the principles of...

September 13, 2023

Higher Education

China’s Confucius Institutes: A ‘Mussolini Model’?

Earlier this year, a concerned student at Binghamton University, a public university in New York, challenged the propriety of the school’s partnership with the China-funded Confucius Institute on its campus. Last month, the university published an imperious rebuff to the inquiry. “The campus is confident that the concerns you raise in your email do not...

August 1, 2023

Higher Education

Schooled in Shouting Down: Princeton’s Window into America’s Future

Debate over “the future of American education” has reached a fever-pitch of late. But too often these debates resolve nothing, because none of the competing sides can agree even on what “education” means—or should mean. Without initial agreement on this most fundamental question, it’s less than surprising that the resulting disputes generate far more acrimony...

June 19, 2023

K-12 Education

Forging the Next Generation of Thought Leaders: The Richardson Youth Liberty Fellowships

As an education researcher, too often I find myself compelled to report bad news: poor learning outcomes, including declining civic literacy; political indoctrination taking the place of reasoned scholarship; shout-downs depriving speakers and their intended audience their First Amendment rights; grade inflation, as well as other maladies afflicting American education. But today I’m happy to...

June 14, 2023

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