HIGHER ED NOT RESPONDING TO THE AI CHALLENGE. Yeah, I know, a shocker, but things could get really bad, really fast unless they take some seriously dramatic action. It was one thing when a diploma meant you could at least fake your way through stuff. If it doesn’t even mean that, college will lose perceived value ultra fast.

HOW WILL AI IMPACT HIGHER ED? My own feeling is that like a whole lot of “advancements” we have seen, it will end up benefiting people who are curious and energetic wildly disproportionately, and harm people who just use it as a crutch. Most will be in the latter category.

NEW BOOK OUT FROM FIRE THIS WEEK: AUTHORITARIANS IN THE ACADEMY. China gets the headlines for creepy campus censorship right here in the USA, and rightfully so, but they’re not the only ones–and campus leaders here have been totally craven.

‘DUKE IS ABANDONING AMERICAN HISTORY.” Yeah, I know, big surprise, but this nugget seems like hair-on-fire bad news that should have alarmed my ole alma mater: “Between 2011 and 2022, the number of primary history majors at Duke plummeted from 90 to just 22.” Duke has 6600 undergrads. 22 history majors should not even be possible.

TRUMP’S “BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL” CUT GRADUATE-SCHOOL SUBSIDIES – NOW DO UNDERGRAD. The sooner the better.

DE-DEI-ING IS COMPLICATED. While the federal government should not be setting classroom curricula–and Trump’s DEI executive orders don’t require unlawful changes to classes (at least how I read them)–removing the “systemic racism” that is so much of DEI is going to be really thorny. Here’s some free advice to get them started: colleges need to immediately get control of race preferences in hiring. Faculty largely still have no idea they’re violating the law by routinely just skipping people in searches because of their race or sex.

INDIANA LAW PROMPTS PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES TO ELIMINATE OR MERGE 400 DEGREE PROGRAMS. The higher ed reckoning is here.

NEW BOOK: ‘SLACKING: A GUIDE TO IVY LEAGUE MISEDUCATION.’ Get it now for your favorite nepo-baby to help them sneak through to graduation! (Though I am pretty sure the authors don’t mean it that way.)

MICRO-CREDENTIALS NOT WORKING OUT AS HOPED? “Just 12 percent of the 1.1 million ‘micro-credentials’ currently on offer lead to significant wage gains.”

U OF WYOMING RENAMES ‘SCHOOL OF CULTURE, GENDER, & SOCIAL JUSTICE’ TO ‘DEPARTMENT OF AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES.’ Oh, well, that should solve the problem.

THE ANTISOCIAL MIND OF THE CAMPUS LAND ACKNOWLEDGER. It’s always been a problem:

“We acknowledge that this university is on stolen land.”
“Great! Can we have the land back, then, since you stole it?”
“No.”

That’s what a sociopath would do.

WHAT IF FEDERAL RESEARCH FUNDING TO UNIVERSITIES IS JUST A BAD IDEA? It’s not as though we had no research before that: “In the 1950s…professors needed to be enticed into writing grants.”

WILL THE MILITARY ACADEMIES DUMP RACIAL PREFERENCES? They’ve been ordered to, so the fact that this is not an automatic “yes” should be pretty big worry.

JUDGE ORDERS COLUMBIA PROTESTER MAHMOUD KHALIL RELEASED ON BAIL. With all the people during the campus protests that committed actual crimes/offenses, it was always weird that the feds focused on Khalil, on whom they failed to pin a single crime in three months of detention.

THE DUMBING DOWN OF THE SAT CONTINUES. Pretty damning: “[T]he ACT and CLT correlate with the old SAT better than the current SAT does.”

WHY DOES AMERICAN HIGHER ED WORK SO POORLY? A review of Rich Vedder’s latest book, Let Colleges Fail. At this rate, we may have little choice but to watch a lot of them fail.

IS HARVARD DOOMED? I more or less say “Yep!” in a long article on Greg Lukianoff’s Substack, The Eternally Radical Idea.  (Greg asked me to expand on my weirdly popular “Harvard is unironically doomed” X thread.)

BRUCE GILLEY ON A YEAR AT NEW COLLEGE OF FLORIDA. “The fact is, we just don’t know how this will play out. The safest bet is that there will never be any public university in the United States whose faculty is even remotely politically balanced, much less intellectually diverse.”

‘DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS STAYS WOKE.’ Enjoy trying to figure out the description of the book “The Virgin Mary and the Neutrino.” No using ChatGPT!

FINANCIAL AID FRAUD IS A BIG PROBLEM. “[F]inancial-aid fraud remains quite easy to commit and is rising at an alarming rate.” Yeah, it probably was easy right until this guy blew the whistle on it. Dangit, how come I always learn about the good scams only after it’s too late?

‘KILL THE ADMISSIONS ESSAY.’ “A longstanding college-application genre is hampering the pursuit of merit.”

Yup.

DEI ADVOCATES: WE WILL DIE ON THE HILL OF “PUTTING STUDENTS FIRST.” How about “Ye shall know them by their fruits?” How’d all that DEI jazz work out?

COLLEGES USING DEI TO BUILD A NEW ‘ELITE.’ “IQ over 145. SAT score of 1580. Valedictorian. Varsity athlete. Student-government leader. Dozens of AP classes… [R]ejection after rejection after rejection. No scandal. No black mark. Just a long, rather brutal silence from the institutions that claim to champion excellence.”

GOOD NEWS: SOMEONE’S STILL DOING ACTUAL COLLEGE. In an abortion discussion, “the students exceeded my expectations. They were willing to share their own positions, admit when they weren’t sure of things, and disagree without rancor.” The fact that it is entirely reasonable for this to exceed expectations is a grave condemnation of campus life today. Glad that UNC is giving the old ways a shot at its School of Civic Life and Leadership.

CAN CATHOLIC COLLEGES HELP STAVE OFF CIVILIZATIONAL COLLAPSE? Depends on the college. For example, I wouldn’t count on DePaul…