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As controversy swirled around President-elect Donald J. Trump's battle with the CIA concerning its questionable intelligence product on Russian hacking, a strong defense of the agency and an attack on Trump came from Joshua Rovner of Southern Methodist University (SMU). Professor Rovner declared in a press release, "By ignoring intelligence, Trump risks policy tunnel vision." But the idea that the CIA’s "intelligence" was sacrosanct was put in question when it was suggested that Obama's CIA director John Brennan was orchestrating what Rep. Peter King (D-NY) called a "hit job" on Trump. King said, "We have John Brennan--supposedly John Brennan--leaking to...

A university think tank just published a list of recommendations for paying for college. Perhaps not too surprisingly, they mostly involve increasing taxpayer-funded government subsidies of higher education. To its credit, the Miller Center at the University of Virginia acknowledges that the economy is worse than the U. S. government claims it is. "Total unemployed, people who want to work but are discouraged from looking, and people who are working part time because they cannot find a full-time job peaked in 2010 but remains at 9.8 percent," the executive summary of "Investing in the Future: Sharing Responsibility for Higher Education...

Anti-Semitism is turning some of Britain’s top universities into no-go zones for Jewish students, according to a top peer. Baroness Ruth Deech, who once held the highest office for dealing with student complaints, said the situation stems from institutions failing to curb a perceived hatred of Jews because vice chancellors are afraid of offending potential investors from the Gulf. As a result, the peer said Jewish students are gradually getting a feeling universities such as Manchester, Exeter, SOAS and Southampton are places they should avoid, which could be perceived as anti-Semitic. …

But the Florida professors are blazing the trail as the first faculty members to officially call for campus-wide sanctuary in the aftermath of the presidential election. They work at Florida International University (FIU), a public institution with 54,000 students, more than half of them Hispanic. One of the professors, Asia Eaton, teaches psychology and women’s and gender studies and the other, Jason Ritchie, anthropology. Dozens of other university staff members also signed the document making the sanctuary demand. It starts off like this: “Like many people in South Florida, we were caught off guard by the election.” It continues to...

A prestigious private military school is providing coloring books for cadets to deal with stress. The Virginia Military Institute, the first state-sponsored military college in the country founded in 1839, offers a “stress busters” program to provide students with yoga classes to “unwind and relax.” . . . “This is an opportunity for cadets to unwind and relax before studying for finals. This event often includes stress reduction activities such as yoga, therapy dogs, coloring book stations, card/game stations, and grab-and-go snacks to take with you on your way to study!”

When administrators at Loyola University Maryland got wind of a planned campus-wide student party with a "Party in the USA" theme, they say they began hearing concerns that students might show up in offensive costumes related to this month's presidential election. In a series of emails, administrators urged Student Government Association members sponsoring the party to reconsider the theme, which they characterized as potentially divisive and harmful.

Hampshire College in Massachusetts has announced that it will no longer fly the U.S. flag at all in response to an incident where the flag was taken down and burned. The president of the college says that by getting rid of the flag the school will be able to focus on other issues like halting Islamophobia and promoting gay rights. The mess for Hampshire College started a week and a half ago, after Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election. The school responded to Trump’s victory by keeping the U.S. flag at half-staff, as if in mourning, which upset...

EDIT: Owing to too little sleep, I’m sad to report that I misread this report and the bill is in the Iowa state legislature, not Congress. We can only dream I suppose. Hey… could anyone in D.C. work on a matching version? The article has been edited to reflect this.(Jazz) We’ve long since grown used to stories coming from the nation’s college campuses where “safe spaces” are set up for everything from Halloween costumes to the results of the presidential election. But some universities have taken it a step further, setting up special counseling sessions for “grieving” students and additional...

If you want to see what America will look like if universities get to remodel it, have a look at what higher education looks like. "We investigate the voter registration of faculty at 40 leading U.S. universities in the fields of Economics, History, Journalism/Communications, Law, and Psychology," Mitchell Langbert, Anthony J. Quain, and Daniel B. Klein wrote last month in an article which appeared in Econ Journal Watch. "We looked up 7,243 professors and found 3,623 to be registered Democratic and 314 Republican, for an overall D:R ratio of 11.5:1." "The D:R ratios for the five fields were: Economics 4.5:1,...

An Iowa lawmaker has one thing to say to state universities that spend taxpayer dollars on election-related sit-ins and grief counseling: “Suck it up, buttercup.” “I’ve seen four or five schools in other states that are establishing ‘cry zones’ where they’re staffed by state grief counselors and kids can come cry out their sensitivity to the election results,” said Rep. Bobby Kaufmann (R-Wilton) to the Des Moines Register. “I find this whole hysteria to be incredibly annoying. People have the right to be hysterical … on their own time.” Kaufmann plans to introduce new legislation in January that he calls...

President-elect Donald J. Trump, it is. Regardless of what the media wanted us to believe, the election of Donald Trump was not only possible—it happened! And there have been legitimate reactions, happy and disappointed, from many across the country. But feigning fear, to the point of seeking safe spaces, and comparing the election of Donald Trump to the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, is utterly ridiculous and truly despicable.... read more

Administrators at the University of Pennsylvania reportedly provided students upset over the results of Tuesday’s presidential election with emotional support puppies, coloring books, and chocolate. . . . “Some professors turned Wednesday’s classes into ‘safe spaces’ in which students could freely express their concerns for their futures. On a campus that voted 3612-375 in favor of Hillary Clinton, these open forums were naturally dominated by anti-Trump voices.” “Obviously the diversity at Penn is not diversity of opinion since the opinion of almost half the country is almost unaccounted for on campus,” Tancredi claimed. “I’m also worried for my fellow students....

“I was already terrified of white men,” one professor at the University of Hartford, Erin Bartram, admitted, but explained that there’s not even “a word to describe how scared I am of them now,” noting that “they are so much worse than” she thought. “How do I face these students who’ve just seen half of America repudiate their rights, their citizenship, their bodies, their very beings?!” she went on to exclaim.

“People are frustrated, people are just really sad and shocked,” said Trey Boynton, the director of multi-ethnic student affairs at the University of Michigan. “A lot of people are feeling like there has been a loss. We talked about grief today and about the loss of hope that this election would solidify the progress that was being made.” There was a steady flow of students entering Ms. Boynton’s office Wednesday. They spent the day sprawled around the center, playing with Play-Doh and coloring in coloring books, as they sought comfort and distraction.

As the reality of President-elect Donald Trump settled in very early Wednesday morning, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes summed up an explanation common to many on the left: The Republican nominee pulled ahead thanks to old-fashioned American racism. But the attempt to make Trump’s victory about racism appears to be at odds with what actually happened on Election Day. Consider the following facts. Twenty-nine percent of Latinos voted for Trump, per exit polls. Remarkably, despite the near-ubiquitous narrative that Trump would have deep problems with this demographic given his comments and position on immigration, this was a higher percentage of those who...

I am mad. I am mad because I am scared. And if you are a woman, you should be, too. Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us. The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female. Can you imagine this happening to a man? Clinton is guilty of SWF (Speaking While Female), and emailgate is just a reminder to us all that she has no business doing what she’s doing and must be punished, for the sake of all decent women everywhere. There is so much of...

The American academy, which has revealed itself to be markedly susceptible to the intrigues of the Saudi-based radical Wahhabi sect and the Muslim Brotherhood, now faces the challenge of an Iranian radical presence. Since 2014, admission of Iranian students to U.S. colleges has been permitted by the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control. Iran has yet to flood the U.S. with its own professors.

Aristotle often evaluated a thing with respect to its “telos” – its purpose, end, or goal. The telos of a knife is to cut. The telos of a physician is health or healing. What is the telos of university? The harvardmost obvious answer is “truth” –- the word appears on so many university crests. But increasingly, many of America’s top universities are embracing social justice as their telos, or as a second and equal telos. But can any institution or profession have two teloses (or teloi)? What happens if they conflict? As a social psychologist who studies morality, I have...

Infantile skittishness on campus is not confined to just politically correct and so-called diversity issues, as bad as that is. As a recent Wall Street Journal article pointed out, college students are now literally flooding mental-health centers on campus year round for anything and everything. Here's some of what the Journal found.   At Ohio State University, a clinical psychologist holds a well-attended 'Beating Anxiety' workshop twice a week. To defuse anxiety, the students are advised to exercise, get more sleep, and refrain from "catastrophic thoughts" brought about things like an upcoming physics exam or if my friend doesn't text me back right...

The sustainability campaigns on American college campuses, which we have covered for about as long as they have existed, may seem more ubiquitous than pledge drives on PBS. Nevertheless, some scholars think they haven’t gone far enough. "We are currently on track to having the hottest year ever, breaking the record established last year," Marcus Peter Ford writes on the Academe blog maintained by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). "We also set records for warmth in 2013 and 2014." "And yet, to date, climate change has had little impact on how we understand the purpose of higher education....