HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: This professor is beloved for making his students intellectually uncomfortable. Duke just dumped him.

About 100 students and alumni have asked Duke University to reinstate a professor whose teaching style encourages students to think critically about their opinions and opposing views.

They believe that the private university refused to renew a contract for Evan Charney, associate professor of the practice in the Sanford School of Public Policy, because he made some students feel uncomfortable by playing devil’s advocate on sensitive issues.

“In a time when political tribalism and divisiveness keep us from engaging fruitfully with one another, the skills Charney teach us are necessary to train the next generation of citizens,” they wrote in an open letter published by The Duke Chronicle.

The College Fix reviewed two other letters defending Charney (below), including one from ethnically Chinese students who disputed that his classroom is not a “safe space” for minorities.

Hannah Beiderwieden told The Fix she believes a lot of students are “unprepared to have their views challenged” because “no professor has this kind of discourse.”

Cost of attending Duke University: $72,554 per year.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: One Surefire Way to Stop Outrageous Student Demands.

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PREPARING TO LAUNCH A RAFALE: French naval aircraft continue to train on the carrier USS George H. W. Bush.

THE NEXT TARGET OF TRUMP ADMINISTRATION MAXIMUM PRESSURE: Iran. The ayatollahs deal in terror — and organized crime.

On April 17, three weeks before the Trump administration withdrew from the JCPOA, the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence held a hearing that addressed Iran’s global terrorism and crime networks.

Witnesses accused Tehran of directing organized criminal syndicates engaged in narcotics, weapons and human trafficking. One witness testified that its criminal syndicates operate in southwest Asia, eastern Europe, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa and that the regime launders money for narcotics traffickers in South America and Central America.

A committee member posed a critical question: Do these Iranian activities present a direct physical threat to the U.S.? A witness reminded the subcommittee that in 2011 an Iranian operative was arrested before he could assassinate a Saudi diplomat in a Washington, D.C. restaurant. The Iranian operative intended to murder the Saudi official using a large bomb that would have destroyed the restaurant and no doubt killed several dozen people in the building and on the street.

Obama was going to let the robed Capones get nukes. (bumped)

NEWS YOU CAN USE: MS-13 Members Are Bad, It’s OK to Say Mean Things About Them.

Well, I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.

JUST FINISHED On The Lee Shore, by Philip Allan. Not quite C.S. Forester or Patrick O’Brien, but not bad at all.

PAUL BEDARD: Weekly Trump Report Card: Promises kept on Jerusalem, abortion.

This week’s White House Report Card finds that President Trump had another eventful week with several victories and, of course, more controversy over the Russia probe. He fulfilled two major campaign promises, shifting the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and he went even further than former President Reagan’s pledge to conservatives in curbing taxpayer funding of clinics that provide abortion.

Along the way his team won Senate support for Gina Haspel, the first woman approved to run the CIA, used his new legal team headed by Rudy Giuliani to muck up the Russia probe, broke bread with Democrats on prison reform, and gave space to his wife, Melania, who is recovering from a [kidney] operation.

Grader and Democratic pollster John Zogby highlighted the bad news but found good too, giving the president a “B” for the week.

Hmm.

THE LAST DAYS OF TIME INC.: An oral history of how the pre-eminent media organization of the 20th century ended up on the scrap heap.

Curiously missing from the New York Times article: how Time magazine quickly went far to the left in the wake of the 1967 death of its center-right founder Henry Luce, and alienated itself from the very readers Luce originally pitched the magazine to when he created it.

YOU CAN’T BLAME THE ECONOMY ANY MORE: U.S. Fertility Rate Fell to a Record Low, for a Second Straight Year.

Some actuarial thoughts here.

I wonder whether there’s something else at play here: could there be an emerging split, with a rising percent of Americans believing that the work of raising the next generation is all well and good, but reserved for other, more willing people? After all, once getting married and starting a family is no longer the “normal” thing to do in one’s twenties, once women start to view a baby as a “capstone” following career success, as a recent Atlantic article suggested, once, indeed, having children becomes a choice one must make, it becomes all the clearer that this is a choice which requires not just financial sacrifice, but sacrifice of free time that may have become particularly valued for pursuing a hobby or working extra hours for advancement’s sake. And recall, again, that the considerably greater drops in births among ethnic minorities, from much-higher-than-whites to only-a-little-bit-higher, suggests that even this narrative isn’t quite right, and raises questions of fertility rates by family income that are much harder to pin down and make for much more uncomfortable discussions.

But (if I haven’t already exhausted your patience with my charts) here’s the bottom line: it already is the case that declining birth rates will affect Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, un(der)funded public pensions, and the like. How an aging population will affect a country’s economic vitality and ability to innovate is a source of much hand-wringing. But if there is a widening economic and social/cultural gap between families and non-families, this will also impact how we allocate resources, and lead to further disputes about that allocation, that will make figuring the whole thing out much harder.

Indeed. And I had some related thoughts here.

SHOCKER: A school initiative that encourages kids to run around for 15 minutes every day in fresh air is improving their health.

WAIT, IS SAYING THAT EVEN ALLOWED? Trump’s Strategy for the Middle East Is Working.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Am I Tuning in at the Wrong Times, or Does CNN Really Have Trump Derangement Syndrome?

YEP: Mark Levin Calls on Trump to Appoint Commission to Clean Up the Intel Community — ‘To Hell with Jeff Sessions.’

Sessions may be doing more than meets the eye, but this whole debacle is going to call for deep structural reform that goes beyond anything a prosecutor can do.

AS USUAL, IT STARTED WITH THE JEWS: Did the Obama Administration’s Abuse of Foreign-Intelligence Collection Start Before Trump? One clue: The Russia story is a replay of how the former White House smeared pro-Israel activists in the lead-up to the Iran Deal.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Book Plug Friday! Meet Margaret Ball.

RESOLUTION REJECTED: “BE IT RESOLVED, WHAT YOU CALL POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, I CALL PROGRESS”: Friday night’s Munk debate in Toronto shows that Canadians (in general not exactly a rough bunch) reject political correctness.

Even before Michael Eric Dyson & Michelle Goldberg (FOR THE RESOLUTION) squared off against Stephen Fry & Jordan Peterson (AGAINST THE RESOLUTION), the crowd was already strongly against the resolution (36% FOR vs. 64% AGAINST). But after the debate it was overwhelming (30% FOR vs. 70% AGAINST). The shift of 6% to AGAINST made Fry & Peterson the declared winners of the debate.

Ho hum, right?  It’s not like this is surprising.  Yet the identity politics juggernaut marches forward both in Canada and the USA, aided by a strong and effective ethic of political correctness, which makes open discussion of the issues more difficult than is should be.  The Trump Administration has had only the most marginal effect. There is a special look of terror that comes over the eyes of conservative political leaders when one brings to their attention the opportunity to say or do something that would help. Alas, I have witnessed that look too many times to count.

WELL IT MUST SEEM LIKE A FAIRY TALE, TO A WOMAN OF HER PROFESSION: The NYT’s Nellie Bowles Doesn’t Get Jordan Peterson.

I WILL FEAR NO EVIL: Scientists Bring A Severed Brain Back To Life, Sparking Ethical Debate. “It may come to the point that instead of people saying ‘Freeze my brain,’ they say ‘Hook me up and find me a body.’” Huh. Sounds familiar.

PAULA BOLYARD: ROYAL WEDDING EMBLEMATIC OF THE DECLINE OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

The ceremony itself featured an African-American bishop who cited the American civil rights movement and quoted Martin Luther King Jr. as often as he did Jesus. The couple opted for a secular song, “Stand by Me,” performed by a predominantly black gospel choir—jaws literally dropped—in addition to old-school Christian hymns sung by the congregation. The traditional Anglican vows were altered slightly to allow the outspoken feminist Markle to opt out of the traditional promise to obey her husband.

While the acceptance of people of color into the royal fold is a welcome and long-overdue change, the acceptance of divorce and immorality by the Church of England is another thing altogether. That the Church blessed the union at all, coming as it did after the couple had been openly cohabitating and in light of Markle’s divorce, signals a radical departure from the traditions of the church headed by Queen Elizabeth, who inherited the title “Defender of the Faith” on the day of her coronation. That designation was first granted to King Henry the VIII by Leo X in 1521. Henry VIII, you will recall, famously left the Catholic church after the Pope refused to annul his marriage to first marriage to Catherine of Aragon. He later appointed himself Supreme Head of the Church of England and went on to wed five more women.

In his 1999 book the Abolition of Britain, Peter Hitchens contrasted between Winston Churchill’s reserved 1965 funeral and the lugubrious outpourings in the wake of the 1997 death of Lady Di to illustrate the breakdown in English civility and the ole’ stiff upper lip attitude. But in hindsight, it’s even more astonishing to watch the 1978 miniseries Edward & Mrs. Simpson to observe that as recently as the 1930s, royalty marrying an American divorcee caused a constitutional crisis that nearly tore the Empire apart.

GOOD ADVICE: Lock Your Damn Doors.

MICHAEL WALSH: The Camp of the Saints Heads for the Great White North.

ANOTHER SIGN CHINA IS THINKING AHEAD, TO THE NEXT WAR: The Chinese Air Force reorganizes the 15th Airborne Corps.

OPEN THREAD: Was there any news today?