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
April 23, 2026
In Rockefeller Center stands the famous statue of Prometheus, the benefactor of mankind, bringing fire from heaven. In Hesiod’s telling, Prometheus is accompanied by Pandora; while Prometheus brings art and learning, she brings all the pains and travails of life, slamming the lid of her famous box before hope can escape.
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March 31, 2026
On June 22, 2010, Michael Hastings published in
Rolling Stone magazine an essay entitled “The Runaway General,” a profile of General Stanley McChrystal and his leadership of American troops in Afghanistan.
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December 29, 2025
Herbert Butterfield in his
The Whig Interpretation of History argued that assessing the past in light of the present, what we call “presentism,” is the source of all historical errors. Our tendency to do so results from a very real problem: How do we impose some sort of narrative order on the complex, disparate, and voluminous material presented in historical reflection?
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November 19, 2025
In March of 2020, I published an essay warning both the public and our policymakers against overreacting to the COVID threat. We overreact, I argued, in times of “epistemic uncertainty,” when we do not know enough about a threat we face and are unclear about our best response.
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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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