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Jan 14, 2025 | 
rlo.acton.org | Jeffrey Polet
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Nov 5, 2024 | 
lawliberty.org | Jeffrey Polet |Jeff Polet |Paul Schwennesen |Daniel Pitt
Americans fetishize voting. Granted, exercising the right seems an important act of democratic citizenship, and denial of the franchise typically accompanies the denial of a whole range of civil rights and liberties. But our focus on voting, and especially national horse-races whose conclusions result from the plebiscite, too often distracts us from the real work of citizenship, which is studious attention and attendance to the near-at-hand.
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
rlo.acton.org | Jeffrey Polet
Since March of 2020, “at least 64 public or nonprofit colleges have closed, merged, or announced closures or mergers,” affecting an estimated 46,720 students. More than 500 have shut down in the past decade.
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Jul 30, 2024 | 
rlo.acton.org | Jeffrey Polet
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty never lost its relevance, but we have witnessed a resurgence of interest in it. In the latter half of the past century, many conservative writers, most notably Willmoore Kendall, provided trenchant criticisms of Mill’s arguments. Mill, these critics wrote, undermined the claims of tradition and the demands of virtue in forming good public order.
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May 20, 2024 | 
acton.org | Jeffrey Polet
The landmark 1983 study of American education, titled “A Nation at Risk,” warned that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” It continued: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war,” a claim one critic of the report suggested “came perilously close...
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May 3, 2024 | 
rlo.acton.org | Jeffrey Polet
My bad. When I was asked to write a review of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, I assumed we had entered a new stage in the gender wars. Having successfully worked around my undergraduate physical science requirement by taking a January-term class on Einstein and writing a paper on his philosophical ideas, I trust I’m forgiven for not knowing that the “three-body problem” refers to an unsolvable problem in physics.
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Mar 15, 2024 | 
frontporchrepublic.com | Jeffrey Polet
After fifteen largely joyful years of existence, it seems appropriate to ask whether we have retained our relevance. The struggle to catch and hold the public’s attention proves even more difficult now than it was in 2009. Events have transpired at such dizzying speed that vertigo seems our natural state.
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Sep 26, 2023 | 
rlo.acton.org | Jeffrey Polet
We have interesting classifications of our institutions of higher learning. The Carnegie classification of major research universities distinguishes between R1 and R2 schools. The well-known U.S. News & World Report Rankings separate national universities from regional ones, and also from national liberal arts colleges. Alongside the state university system, the Selective Liberal Arts Colleges (SLACs) are the pillars of American higher education.
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Aug 28, 2023 | 
acton.org | Jeffrey Polet
Unless we live in the night when all cows are black, we occupy a multihued world whose contours become more distinct as light intensifies. Our tendency to simplify brings us deeper into the shadows, and perhaps one of our greatest oversimplifications is the uncritical faith in progress, and one of the unfortunate side effects of this tendency is that we too easily identify those on the right side of it and those on the wrong side.
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Aug 9, 2023 | 
rlo.acton.org | Jeffrey Polet
Why the gnashing of teeth over the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action? Why have some schools responded by eliminating legacy admissions? What does the controversy tell us about how we understand the university itself? Others have observed that affirmative action debates almost always involve questions of admission into elite universities. The debates are seldom, if ever, about who gets to work assembly lines and construction sites.
