Jeffrey Polet is professor emeritus of political science at Hope College and director of the Ford Leadership Forum at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation.
Posts by Jeffrey Polet
September 30, 2024
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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July 30, 2024
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.
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May 03, 2024
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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September 26, 2023
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.
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August 09, 2023
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?
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March 14, 2023
Some years ago, only tangentially related to the reading we were doing in our seminar class, the students and I got into a conversation about jobs we found especially unappealing. I began with “guy who sprays de-icing chemicals on planes in the middle of winter from a cherry picker,” and the students quickly followed suit.
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November 10, 2022
At its best, a democratic polity ought to deal well with complexity, this complexity composed of clashing ideas and principles as well as the interests of multiple actors and stakeholders. Such a polity will seek proximate solutions that require constant fine-tuning.
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August 04, 2022
Betsy DeVos thinks the Department of Education “should not exist.” She’s not the first secretary of education we’ve had who understood her central purpose to be the dissolution of the agency of which she was in charge (until she resigned on January 7, 2021).
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March 28, 2022
In his “Parable of the Madman,” Nietzsche, reflecting on the death of God, observes that “this tremendous event is still on its way,” continuing that “deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard.”
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February 09, 2022
Ilya Shapiro, a Russian émigré, a serious scholar of the American Constitution, and formerly of the libertarian Cato Institute until he was scheduled on February 1 to begin running Georgetown’s Center for the Constitution, has found himself in a thicket of racial controversy.
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