BOOK REVIEW: THE UNIVERSITY UNFETTERED. George Leef is skeptical: “Whether the University achieved excellence is debatable, but it certainly spent a lot of money.”

STUDENT LOANS: A MULTIGENERATIONAL TRAP. The sooner we freeze the increases on all of them forever, the better off we’ll be.

INSTITUTIONAL REVIEW BOARDS:

How it started: “No more Tuskegee experiments!”

How it’s going: “Idil Issak at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville is an anthropology student who wants to conduct research by interviewing eight female Ethiopian nationals working in the domestic service industry in the United Arab Emirates (UAE)..Issak’s experience with the IRB has been a Kafkaesque nightmare.”

NCLA does great work.

COLLEGE ATHLETES NOW GET PAID. IS UNIONIZATION NEXT? Maybe, but it doesn’t work that well with the NIL money scheme. Will the big stars really strike (and lose games) so they can give some of their money to the benchwarmers?

WHAT’S HOBBLING HIGHER-ED REFORM? There is a real (though nascent) effort from within higher ed to try to save the sector and make it something we can be proud of again. Rick Hess lays out some of the issues tripping them up.

HOW DO WE REFORM LAW SCHOOL ADMISSIONS? Some suggestions here, because let’s face it, AI is not going to make lawyers obsolete. (And that’s not just because we lawyers will make that illegal…)

PROF ALLOWS STUDENTS TO USE AI FOR ESSAY; THEY MOSTLY DECLINE. And (at least the honest ones) had some fairly thoughtful reasons why:

Anxiety was one dominant theme. Students reported choosing the traditional assignment because they feared they would mess up using AI and get punished for cheating. Students also said they were nervous that AI would give them wrong information or lead them to fail to meet the assignment’s expectations or make them sound robotic. “I feel like AI gives me ideas and phrases that sound too fake,” as one student put it.

DO WE WANT CAMERAS IN THE COLLEGE CLASSROOM? A prof at U. of Houston argues we should welcome it. I’m not so sure, as society doesn’t seem to have improved the more we record one another, and I bristle at the surveillance state. But I am sure that if colleges hadn’t squandered so much public trust, nobody would be asking for this.

WORKFORCE PELL GRANTS ARE COMING. IS THAT GOOD? I’m always skeptical about throwing more money at colleges. If folks actually get some useful skills out of it, though, that would be a nice change.

GAMING THE SYSTEM ON SYLLABUS TRANSPARENCY? There are reasonable arguments both for and against requiring public university syllabi to be open to public view. There’s no argument for pretending they are open while they’re not really, unless you want to make state legislators morally certain you’re hiding something awful.

HAS TRUMP GIVEN UP ON ROLLING BACK HIGHER ED DEI? An interesting question, but my impulse is to say that he probably hasn’t. I’d prefer to see real rollbacks from Congress or the courts anyway. Shortcuts are tempting and may even work for the left when they have the total cooperation of the administrative state, but the right has to do things the hard way if they want them to actually occur.

HOW CHINA CORRUPTS ACADEMIC RESEARCH. I knew it was bad, but sheesh. Even Xi Jinping is an academic fraud, apparently, having had his dissertation ghost-written. And, of course, pointing out that fraud is even harder in China than it is here, since you might just catch a bullet for your trouble.

WHEN A MED SCHOOL VIOLATES THE LAW. UCLA is not having a good couple of years.

HAVE EMPLOYERS FORGIVEN COLLEGES? “[S]eventy percent of employers have either ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in U.S. higher education,” according to Morning Consult. I am gonna have to press X to doubt this finding given what Americans generally are thinking:

New FIRE data shows one-third of Americans have little to no confidence in U.S. colleges and universities. This seems hard to sustain for an industry charging 80 grand a year but what do I know? pic.twitter.com/qRYlvWG4Dp

— Robert Shibley (@rshibley) February 24, 2026

WANT A JOB AT FIRE? NOW’S YOUR CHANCE! When I started at FIRE, I figured I’d have to leave and make a “real” career in biglaw after a couple of years. That was 23 years ago! You never know where your career will take you.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL BUYOUT MADNESS. There is too much money sloshing around in college football. I think it’s time for a minor league, and a return to “students who happen to play football.”

THE ENDLESS WAR ON GRAMMAR. Led, of course, by English teachers. They appear to be winning, so I suppose it would seem silly to them to stop!

STATE LAW MUST SUPERSEDE ACCREDITOR REQUIREMENTS. If a school can’t be accredited and also follow the law, it should take the conflict up with both legislators and accreditors, but it has to follow the law.

Ultimately, the solution may be that some state regulations against any concept even DEI-adjacent are loosened (Plato? Come on…), while accreditors dial back their DEI requirements. Both sides have something to lose if they don’t come to an agreement. But the major share of the blame has to be on accreditors, who should have understood that their power up until now relied on a nearly universal belief that their requirements weren’t used to play political games. But they played stupid games, and now they’re winning stupid prizes.

LET’S RETURN TO TEACHING STUDENTS HOW TO ARGUE. In the sense of “we are discussing the crux of the issue” rather than “I am (X identity) so I feel (Y feeling) and you can’t challenge that.” An idea so crazy it just might work (and that is also thousands of years old).

THE MISSING MEN OF UNC. UNC-Chapel Hill is now slightly more than 60/40 women to men. This is more lopsided in terms of sex balance than most big state schools because NC’s big engineering school is at NC State, but this is just another wake-up call that there is a mismatch between what our culture (likely) needs and what our institutions are designed to deliver. (I say “likely” because you can credibly argue that men are less likely to need a college degree because of the nature of the jobs they may select.)

FEDERAL DEPT OF ED MAKES AN INVESTMENT IN CIVIC EDUCATION: $1.9 million to The American Civic Tradition at 250, at two Texas universities. Weird, I thought my tax money was reserved for teaching people to be ignorant of and hate America.

COULD THE CAMPUS MINDFULNESS FAD ACTUALLY BE…DANGEROUS? “The scientific literature identifies a wide range of other negative effects associated with mindfulness meditation. Studies have documented adverse psychological, physical, and spiritual side effects, including depersonalization, psychosis, hallucinations, anxiety, increased seizure risk, disorganized speech, loss of appetite, and insomnia.” I admit, I’m surprised.

DISABILITY “ACCOMMODATION NATION” IN THE UNC SYSTEM. And it’s the same just about everywhere else. The perverse incentives to get diagnoses are just too strong. After all, your kid probably has struggles too. Are you letting him or her down by not going the extra mile?

DO WE NEED A FACULTY MERIT ACT? “The Faculty Merit Act requires state universities to publish every higher-education standardized test score (SAT, ACT, CRT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, etc.) of every faculty member, as well as the standardized test score of every applicant for the faculty member’s position.”

EXPOSING ‘A STORY OF FRAUD AND BETRAYAL’ IN ACADEMIA. There’s a new book out about the famous “signing first” paper that claimed promising to be honest ahead of time made people more honest in follow-up data gathering. Turns out the data on honesty was faked, which, cosmically, seems like pushing it.