Tom K. Lindsay, Ph.D., is a distinguished senior fellow of higher education and constitutional studies 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.
“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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
It was the best of rides; it was the worst of rides. I took an Uber drive from the White House to Reagan airport last March. When I got in, the driver, after saying hello, immediately informed me, “America was founded on slavery.” I was a bit taken aback by his assertion, not that I...
For decades, America has failed to instill a love of country in its younger generations, with a recent poll finding that only 51 percent of young Americans are proud of America, while only 40 percent would be willing to sacrifice for their country. Along the same lines, most Americans do not know even the basics...
In the 1940s and 1950s, U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) led a movement to purge communists from positions of power. Many government employees, academics, writers, labor union leaders, and entertainers were inappropriately fired or blacklisted for the “crime” of having (or being suspected of having) a different ideology than Sen. McCarthy. Later generations use the...
Who said the following? Students must “make progress both ideologically and politically, which means that they should study Marxism, current events and politics. Not to have a correct political point of view is like having no soul.” No, this is not the Ivy League’s new Mission Statement. Yet. It comes from Chairman Mao’s 1957 essay, “On...