Author Profile

Jonathan Butcher

Jonathan Butcher serves as senior policy analyst in the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation. He has researched and testified on education policy and school choice programs around the U.S., and his work has appeared in journals such as Education Next and the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy.

He has appeared on local and national TV and radio outlets, including C-SPAN, Fox News, and HBO’s Vice News Tonight. His commentary has appeared nationally in places such as the Wall Street Journal, Education Week, National Review Online, and Forbes.com, along with newspapers around the country.

In 2017 he was a co-recipient of the State Policy Network’s Bob Williams Award for Most Influential Research for a proposal to protect free speech on campus, alongside Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Jim Manley of the Goldwater Institute.

Jonathan previously served as the education director at the Goldwater Institute, where he remains a senior fellow.

Articles by Jonathan Butcher

Arizona State University and Offerings at the Temple of the Woke

Sep 29, 2021 · Jonathan Butcher · Comments Off

The hiring of a critical race theorist to teach music is yet another offering from academics at the temple of the woke. Little good it will do students or individuals and communities interested in rejecting racial prejudice. In July, Arizona State University officials hired a music professor to train K-12 music teachers, emphasizing that the … Continue reading “Arizona State University and Offerings at the Temple of the Woke”

Conserve Free Speech on Campus

Nov 20, 2019 · Jonathan Butcher · Comments Off

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from The Not-So-Great Society, published by the Heritage Foundation. Who cares that 20 students at the University of Wisconsin staged a protest in October 2017? Just months earlier, violence broke out at the University of California, Berkeley, after the invitation of a controversial speaker to campus. In March, a … Continue reading “Conserve Free Speech on Campus”

Woke Capture at UT-Knoxville Oct 5, 2022
It’s by now a commonplace story: State universities in “red” states, where most of the voters and legislators dislike progressive ideology, are being infiltrated by administrators and faculty who insist on implementing radically leftist policies and courses. Earlier this year, for example, the Martin Center published this article by Jonathan Small on the ways that … Continue reading “Woke Capture at UT-Knoxville”
Do American Undergraduates Still Respect Their Professors? Sep 29, 2022
The pandemic has affected numerous aspects of daily life. Included among these are how students and faculty relate and respond to each other on campus. With many classes going virtual and universities dealing with unprecedented circumstances, student and faculty relations may well be expected to have shifted. How students view faculty can tell us many … Continue reading “Do American Undergraduates Still Respect Their Professors?”
Higher Education Used to Love Controversy Sep 28, 2022
It is interesting but depressing to me that the more eminent a college or university is perceived to be, the more outrageous are efforts by administrators to stifle individual expression and enforce a numbing conformity of ideas reminiscent of universities in the old Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. The most prestigious group of schools in … Continue reading “Higher Education Used to Love Controversy”

In Praise of the Freshman Fifteen Oct 6, 2022
According to a recent report from the National Student Clearinghouse, students are not accumulating enough credits in their first year of college to graduate in four years. The cohort studied in the report consisted of 342 colleges and more than 905,000 first-year students, examined from fall 2019 to summer 2020. The traditional route for full-time … Continue reading “In Praise of the Freshman Fifteen”
Woke Capture at UT-Knoxville Oct 5, 2022
It’s by now a commonplace story: State universities in “red” states, where most of the voters and legislators dislike progressive ideology, are being infiltrated by administrators and faculty who insist on implementing radically leftist policies and courses. Earlier this year, for example, the Martin Center published this article by Jonathan Small on the ways that … Continue reading “Woke Capture at UT-Knoxville”
Re: “Failing Introductory Economics” Oct 4, 2022
To the editor: I admire the fact that Professor Ross is not willing to “dumb down” his class in order to make it more popular. Colin Barnett Albuquerque, NM