THE SOLUTION TO AI CHEATING: PEN AND PAPER. I would also support IBM Selectric III typewriters with that cool correction tape that sucks letters off the page. That’s peak tech right there.

UNC MAKES BUDGET CUTS BEFORE FORCED TO DO SO: Never thought I’d live to see the day anyone did this. Will other schools get the memo?

WILL RACE-BASED SCHOLARSHIPS SURVIVE? I hope not. I can imagine a world where they might solve more problems than they cause, but it’s clear we don’t live in that world.

DO THE WORST GET ON TOP IN ACADEMIA? A Hayekian analysis. I don’t know if the “worst” get on top in academia any more than normal corporate jobs. But it’s worth considering the idea of more administration being done by faculty on rotation.

WE MADE COLLEGE AN OBLIGATION, AND STUDENTS TREAT IT LIKE ONE. Shockingly, they are not that amped up for more mandatory schooling that is also super expensive.

THE LAW SCHOOL ACCOMMODATIONS RACKET. This is a huge problem at all sorts of schools. Are you the chump if you’re not taking advantage of it? I wonder…

COLORADO REPEALS REQUIREMENT THAT ATTORNEYS NOT COOPERATE WITH ICE IF THEY WANT TO USE E-FILING. FIRE was prepared to sue, but it looks like Colorado finally found a First Amendment-violating hill it wasn’t prepared to die on.

WHAT WOULD A PRO-FAMILY ACADEMIA LOOK LIKE? Yeah, I know, but after you stop laughing, give it a read.

HIGHER ED – IS DOOM NIGH? Doom is nigh, says Richard Vedder.

WHEN TRUTH IS NO LONGER PARAMOUNT. I don’t think it’s clear what a campus is supposed to be doing if truth-seeking is not primary to its mission, but plenty of folks on campus don’t agree.

SOCIAL JUSTICE RUINS EVERYTHING, ARCHIVIST EDITION: “Archiving is about shaping memory, advancing justice, and ensuring access in a digital age. Our ARM students preserve the past and build ethical frameworks for the future…”

No, it’s not. Nobody wants this. The constituency of people who want archivists making decisions based on “shaping memory” (Orwell much?) or “advancing justice” is effectively 0% of the population. Not everything has to be politics. People are begging higher ed to stop being this way.

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