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
October 14, 2025
What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him?
For You have made him a little lower than the angels,
And You have crowned him with glory and honor. Continue Reading...
July 24, 2025
Every now and then you read a book so simple in concept and so interesting in outcome that you kick yourself for not having come up with the idea. Many people have a sense that higher education has jumped the rails in a variety of ways, but mostly that sense gets fed by anecdote and rumor and clickbait.
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April 03, 2025
Educating young people in a mass democracy proves no easy task. Variations in location, the abilities and interests of the students, the role of the parents, and conceptions concerning the end(s) of education create much confusion that aggregated metrics fail to capture.
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March 05, 2025
An old joke: A man walks into a psychiatrist’s office and says, “Doctor, my brother is crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.” The doctor ponders this and suggests that the man bring his brother in to be treated.
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January 14, 2025
Hope College required all seniors to take a “senior seminar,” the ostensible purpose of which was to help each student refine his or her “worldview.” Not liking, for a variety of reasons, the word
worldview with its implicit relativism, I could nonetheless use the course to get students to struggle through competing “worldviews.”
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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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