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6 days ago | 
mindingthecampus.org | David Randall
Of course, Paul Revere was a hero as he rowed and rode to alarm the countryside around Boston: “The British are coming! The British are coming!” (“The Regulars are coming out,” the staid historians tell us were his actual words.) So too were the much neglected William Dawes and Samuel Prescott. We owe our independence and our liberty to their pluck and bravery.
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1 week ago | 
jamesgmartin.center | David Randall
Artificial Intelligence (AI) looks to upend higher education—all education—in no end of ways. The advantage it gives to cheaters by itself is upending the practice of teaching. But AI poses its greatest threat to the liberal arts, to the studia humanitatis, by getting rid of the basic function of this education: to prepare recipients for a job serving the state.
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4 weeks ago | 
mindingthecampus.org | David Randall
In 2023, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) canceled an accepted session from their annual conference: “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology.” AAA’s decision, phrased in today’s academic jargon, was explicitly political.
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1 month ago | 
mindingthecampus.org | David Randall
On March 22, 1775, Edmund Burke delivered one of his great Parliamentary orations on Conciliation with America. Britain and America were rushing to war, and Burke pulled out the stops to make an extraordinary peroration for peace. Britain’s current policy was worse than unjust—it was doomed to fail. Peace must be achieved, argued Burke, by a change of policy on the part of Great Britain. Burke’s audience was the House of Commons, not America.
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1 month ago | 
mindingthecampus.org | David Randall
zero comment The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal has just released Blueprint for Reform: Teacher Preparation, a thoughtful overview of the state of teacher preparation, with succinct, useful recommendations for policymakers who wish to improve education policy so as to get better-prepared teachers into the classroom.
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1 month ago | 
mindingthecampus.org | David Randall
2 comments A friend of mine is a professor on the front lines of the artificial intelligence (AI) cheating revolution, both in his classroom and as part of the college committee that judges academic misconduct. He’s discovered that a collective approach to detecting AI cheating may be more effective than an individual one. But adopting a collective approach to judging malfeasance undermines the principle that we judge individual wrongdoing.
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1 month ago | 
mindingthecampus.org | David Randall
I’ve written earlier about the recent William & Mary Quarterly Forum, whose contributors proposed getting rid of the term “early America”—not least out of a desire to stop teaching American history. Everything I wrote then is true enough, but it was written in a more polemical mode. I want to return to the subject to examine the issue of historical terminology in greater depth and to attempt to consider the Forum’s contributions as charitably as possible.
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1 month ago | 
mindingthecampus.org | David Randall
Newly confirmed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has just sent an initial email to the staff at the Education Department (ED): Our job is to respect the will of the American people and the President they elected, who has tasked us with accomplishing the elimination of bureaucratic bloat here at the Department of Education—a momentous final mission—quickly and responsibly … We must start thinking about our final mission at the department as an overhaul—a last chance to restore the culture...
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2 months ago | 
jamesgmartin.center | David Randall
Federal statutes require the United States Department of Education (ED) to fund race discrimination at postsecondary institutions through laws such as § 1059e. Predominantly Black Institutions, § 1059g. Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-serving institutions, and §§ 1101 – 1101d. Hispanic-Serving Institutions.
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2 months ago | 
mindingthecampus.org | David Randall
On February 9, 1775, the Parliament of Great Britain declared Massachusetts in a state of rebellion. With cause: Massachusetts’ Provincial Congress had met without royal leave and was organizing and training a military force. Massachusetts’ disobedience could no longer be ignored. Now, Britain would arm itself for war. Orders sailed to Governor Thomas Gage in Massachusetts to bring the rebels to heel. Soon, his men would march to Lexington and Concord.
