I have been involved in higher education, in one form or another, for 35 years, first as an undergraduate, then as a graduate student, a professor, and now as a senior academic administrator. I am no stranger to debates about who gets to call themselves “Doctor.” …

Though it is mostly true, it is not completely true that Donald Trump is swinging around wildly trying to stay in power. He has a playbook, or at least his advisors do. It is an old playbook that has only worked once, but when it worked, it produced the most…

It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric. To lower the temperature. To see each other again. To listen to each other again. To make progress, we must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans. The Bible tells us that to everything there…

Here, in a nutshell, is the Law of Bad Numbers: In an election involving millions of votes, it will always be possible to find reasons to dispute results that you don’t want to accept, and none of them will affect the final tally. Think about the enormity of the task…

The executives at Fox News didn’t create the false equivalency between “fair” and “balanced,” but they certainly turned it into a national catchphrase before abandoning their network tag line in 2016. The phrase itself invokes an intuitive human belief that fairness means treating all sides of a dispute equally. This…

In a two-party system, political parties are not really coherent ideologies. There are simply too many ideological positions in a large republic for two parties to represent. …

The Lincoln-Douglas Debates — seven engagements that occurred in different Illinois cities between two candidates for the US Senate in 1858— remain the gold standard for political debates in our nation. Partly this is because of the format. A one-hour opening speech, a 90-minute rebuttal, and a 30-minute response from…

“Originalism” may be a reasonable way to interpret 99.99% of Constitutional questions that come up. But the Supreme Court exists to handle the other .01%. Justices of our highst court need to have more than one tool in their belt. “Originalism” pretends to distinguish itself from other theories of interpretation…

The current conservative shibboleth “we’re a republic, not a democracy” is deeply flawed as both history and as contemporary English usage. The modern term “democracy” completely includes what our 18th-century Founders meant by the term “republic,” and the eighteenth-century definition of “democracy” describes a kind of state that has not…