TUITION DISCOUNT RATES ARE RISING. Mid-tier private colleges likely hardest hit, which makes sense. It’s one thing to pay Yale all of your money to indoctrinate your kids to hate you. It’s another to pay, say, DePaul for the same dubious privilege.

THE SCOTT GERBER CASE, REVISITED. NAS’ Peter Wood: “This matter involves an effort by the dean of ONU’s law school, Charles H. Rose III, to coerce Professor Gerber to resign… Perhaps most troubling of all to some of his colleagues, he is a leading authority on the jurisprudence of Justice Clarence Thomas.” Thrown out of class in April, he still has not been told what he did. If they can do this to a tenured professor, nobody is safe. (Disclosure: my firm represents Prof. Gerber.)

HILLSDALE PROF WILFRED MCCLAY ON ‘THE DEATH OF LEARNING.’ And why we still need the liberal arts.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER: RADICALIZING MILITARY EDUCATION. Why is it that nobody is looking into whether the Russians (or Chinese) are behind this? That’d be some real bang for their ruble/yuan…

MAYBE NOBODY BLEW UP THE UKRAINIAN DAM. Last December, the Ukrainians decided to take some experimental HIMARS potshots at it: “The Ukrainians…even conducted a test strike with a HIMARS launcher on one of the floodgates at the Nova Kakhovka dam, making three holes in the metal to see if the Dnieper’s water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages.” This spring, the Russians controlling the dam mechanisms let the water get so high it was overtopping the dam for a month, generally A Bad Thing. Thinking back to the Oroville Dam in 2017, I wonder how long our dams would last under such conditions.

THE NEW YORKER COVERS THE ‘GATHERING OF THOUGHT CRIMINALS.’ In a sane country, such a gathering would not exist. As it is, I know a bunch of them myself (and work with two of them). Yikes. I guess I should note for the record here that I am not suicidal and do not have any information that would lead to the arrest and convic—

HOW ALUMNI CAN HELP IN THE BATTLE AGAINST INSTITUTIONALIZED DEI-ISM. Your alma mater needs you! (So do your kids and grandkids, if college is not to be bald-faced indoctrination.)

HOW OUR COLLEGE LEADERS “CULL THE HERD.” DEI is a religion, except there’s no Golden Rule and anyone can be part of the Inquisition. No school is beneath its gaze–the victim here, Matthew Garrett, is a tenured prof at Bakersfield College, a California community college. Scott Gerber, who is going through a similar ordeal, is a tenured law professor at Ohio Northern University in tiny Ada, Ohio. (Disclaimer: Gerber is my client.) The people running higher ed are running it right into the ground, and at this point, they have to know it.

THE UNIVERSITY OF AUSTIN GEARS UP FOR ITS FIRST INCOMING CLASS IN 2024. If they can pull it off, the opportunity is huge. Simply hiring any professor thrown out for badthink would give it a first-class faculty.

SEVENTH GRADER SENT HOME TWICE FOR ‘ONLY 2 GENDERS’ T-SHIRT. (Well, the second time, it said “CENSORED” genders.) Back in my day you had to wear a “Big Johnson” or “Coed Naked” t-shirt to get sent home!

DUKE HEALTH’S ANTIRACIST “PLEDGE” IS NOT GUIDED BY SCIENCE. From the article: “After much back and forth, I received the following reply from a Duke Health senior administrator: ‘I concede that I cannot find a [clinical] trial that proves implicit bias is the cause of worse health outcomes for African Americans. Believe me. I have looked.'”

Science cannot be the arbiter of moral choices. If “science” proved that the world would be better off in the aggregate if we carpet bombed (say) Dog River, Saskatchewan, off the map, would that make it right? Obviously not, so cut it out, “science.”

FLORIDA PASSES BILL INTENDED TO IMPROVE CAMPUS DEBATES AND BAN FLAGRANTLY IDEOLOGICAL HIRING. I think there is good reason to be cautious about such bills. But you know what would stop them in their tracks without any concerns about legislative bigfooting? Campuses could improve debates and stop the flagrantly ideological hiring.

ARE LAWYERS AND DOCTORS ACTUALLY OVEREDUCATED? Rich Vedder points out that compared to other countries, our grad students of all kinds probably are, at least in terms of time to degree. (I had no idea a Ph.D. in 3 years “wasn’t that atypical in the 1960s.”) I do think that a two-year law school with a year of apprenticeship (not just a wine-and-dine summer position) would be much better than our three-year track.

WHAT TO DO WHEN THE MOB TARGETS YOU. My colleague Mike Allen discusses the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s feature piece on what happened to Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Junot Díaz after a woman accused him of sexual misconduct in front of a crowd at an academic conference. This was seized upon by the usual suspects: BuzzFeed led the auto-da-fe, with the Washington Post, NPR, Vox, and CNN not far behind, and so the mobbing began, with more and more accusations coming out of the woodwork, most of them simply wrong.

So what do you do when you’re the Diaz of the moment? 5 tips: 1) Expect moral disorientation. 2) Don’t apologize. 3) To the mob, your personal life is political. 4) Realize facts don’t matter to the mobbers. 5) You need to get help. This may seem obvious when you’re not at the center of it, but actually following these is tough when you are. Mike has more at the link. If you know someone who’s going through this, they could really use these tips.

BIG COMPANIES SUDDENLY DECIDE THAT MOTHER’S DAY EMAILS ARE TRIGGERING. More at this Twitter link; just keep scrolling. Is this new this year? If so, who’s behind this? And while I am all for being sensitive to women (and men) who have lost children, where do I go to get this level of solicitousness?

::Extra Cynical Mode Activated:: Are we sure these companies didn’t just stumble on this as some kind of really effective market segmentation? Like, maybe people who opt-out using these emails are much more likely to buy things at an Independence Day sale?

IF IT WEREN’T FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS THEY’D HAVE NO STANDARDS AT ALL. I think virtually all speech should be protected on campus, but it is utterly impossible to imagine that a non-black professor in 2023 could say “Blacks are so f–ing racist” on Twitter, or even be accused of telling a student in class “It’s not your fault you were born in Africa,” and end up with a university defending them and posting something like this. Colleges should do this (if it’s true), but they won’t. Insult the right groups, though, like white people (in virtually all cases), Jews (in this case) or Asians (in some cases, depending on whether the school is in Stop Asian Hate vs. Stop Asian Admissions mode), and boy do you ever get some serious due process. This unequal treatment is wrong, it’s corrosive, it’s not equal justice, and people are noticing it more and more.

LET’S GO BRANDON! At one Michigan school district, students weren’t allowed to wear Let’s Go Brandon gear to school–but gay pride stuff was OK. Now FIRE is suing to protect all students’ First Amendment rights, in its first-ever K-12 lawsuit.

BOOK OUT MAY 16: ‘BRUTAL MINDS: THE DARK WORLD OF LEFT-WING BRAINWASHING IN OUR UNIVERSITIES.’  If only this were an exaggeration.

QUESTION ASKED: IS TRACKING HIGHER ED DATA BY RACE ACTUALLY HELPFUL? One of the most harmful things is how selectively it’s tracked. Anyone working with those accused of Title IX offenses will tell you that minority students appear to be wildly overrepresented among the questionably accused. I’ll give you one guess about what racial stats the Department of Education doesn’t make schools track.

FANCY PROPUBLICA PROPAGANDA STORY: CLARENCE THOMAS GOES ON LUXURY VACATIONS WITH BILLIONAIRE. Sorry, but if it’s not to an island owned by a pedophile who gets suicided in prison and whose client list is shrouded in secrecy surpassed only by the Las Vegas mass shooting footage and Obama’s college transcript, I refuse to care. After all, ProPublica doesn’t.

ARE MICROCREDENTIALS A FAD OR CAN THEY REVOLUTIONIZE HIGHER ED? I think it could be the latter. Imagine a world where instead of having to hire someone who has been through 4 years of indoctrination, you can hire someone with the needed knowledge and skills. Could be a game changer.

TWITTER ALGORITHM INCLUDES “GOVERNMENT REQUESTED.” Man, I can just feel the freedom. Bonus question: which governments?

APPALACHIAN STATE PAYING GRAD STUDENTS DIFFERENTLY BASED ON RACE. The message here seems to be that the only thing the South did wrong in Jim Crow was picking the wrong victims. Pretty sure that’s not what I learned…

I ASSUMED THIS WAS FAKE, BUT IT’S NOT. Super-professional highlighting mine.

TRUMP INDICTED. What could go wrong?