It’s Time to Mandate Merit
In an August City Journal piece, my former colleague John Sailer wonderfully quoted an anonymous professor: “Every day, the universities wake up and break the law.” Just about every faculty-hiring…
Articles
Articles
The Exhilarating and the Dull
Sir Roger Scruton wrote in How to Be a Conservative that “the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull.” Conservative higher-education…
Reforms We’re Cheering For in 2026
Every December, the staff of the Martin Center share our higher-ed-reform dreams for the coming 12 months. Some are obvious; others are fanciful. We offer them all here in a…
How Postmodernism Killed Great Literature
Last week, I finished reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s bestselling 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. While I usually do not read books from the “Millennial Sad Girl Navigates Modern…
Ten Books We Want Under the Tree in 2025
If you’ve been a longtime reader of the Martin Center’s work, then you know we collect books. Our library now holds nearly 1,000 titles, although our recent move means that…
Do Data Dashboards Truly Illuminate?
In 2010, when I first entered the institutional-research field, the most common request from academic departments was a simple, almost humble “I need data.” A decade later, that request had…
RE: “Florida’s H-1B Visa Crackdown”
Bruce Gilley’s article “Florida’s H-1B Visa Crackdown” (Dec. 19) raises legitimate concerns about higher education, but its argument fails on its own terms and is inconsistent with the broader goals…
Florida’s H-1B Visa Crackdown
Conservative politicians have often made their careers in part by fixing higher education. Both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan leveraged the campus radicalism of the 1960s to expand their voting…
The Cost of Tuition Discounting
Public universities have spent years insisting that rising tuition is unavoidable. State funding, they say, hasn’t kept pace. Costs are up, and quality must be maintained. But a new brief…
Wyoming’s Higher-Ed Funding Choice
Last week, Cowboy State Daily—Wyoming’s largest news outlet—published a piece titled “UW Seeks Extra $54 Million On Top Of Its $440 Million State-Funded Budget.” Cowboy State Daily’s reporter did a…