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On a Thursday morning conference call, Big Ten presidents discussed an exemption request from Nebraska to allow the Cornhuskers to replace Saturday’s canceled football game against Wisconsin with a non-league opponent, the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. It got zero traction, league sources told Yahoo Sports. There was no need for even a show of hands, let alone an actual vote. No one was in favor of granting it. The league’s previously agreed-upon rules — conference games only — was reaffirmed. Also reaffirmed was the belief around the Big Ten that Nebraska, even after nine years of membership, remains a difficult philosophical...

In the wake of George Floyd’s death, a number of colleges have cut back their interactions with local police departments and are redesigning their law enforcement programs. The University of Minnesota (UM) was one of the first to accede to faculty and student demands to cut ties with local police. The university scaled back its contract with the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) to provide officers at events and limited its reliance on MPD’s specialized services. The university’s Department of Public Safety was ordered to limit university police officers’ interactions with the city department. UM is one of more than 90...

The Department of Education has completed an investigation into American universities’ compliance with federal law relating to reporting of foreign gifts and contracts. As you might expect, our universities believe that laws are for the little guys: American Universities failed to report $6.5 billion in foreign gifts and contracts, an investigation by the Department of Education found.Federal law requires schools to disclose substantial foreign gifts and contracts to the Department of Education (DOE) twice a year. Many have for years failed to do so, while others severely underreported the income. The deluge of the financial disclosures poured in as...

Just one week into the Big Ten college football season, the conference is now feeling the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. On Wednesday, Wisconsin announced that it would be pausing all football-related activities for seven days due to an "elevated number of COVID-19 cases within the Badgers' program," the program said in a statement. Wisconsin's game against the Nebraska Cornhuskers on Saturday, October 31, will not be played.

In a year when numerous faculty members who aren’t “woke” have been pilloried, and many universities are revamping themselves in accordance with the agenda of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, I was amazed to read an article by Harvard history professor Naomi Oreskes and her student, Charlie Tyson, who claim that research findings that university professors overwhelmingly lean to the left are wrong. Oreskes and Tyson published “Is Academe Awash in Liberal Bias?” in the Chronicle of Higher Education on September 14. Their piece violates common sense and misconstrues basic statistical reasoning.

Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence is leaving the door open about his football future despite previously saying he planned on heading to the NFL following this his junior season. Lawrence, the 6-foot-6 passer with the flowing hair, is considered the likely consensus No. 1 pick in next spring's NFL draft.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently released a report decrying the politicization of public higher education governance, entitled The New Order: How the Nation’s Partisan Divisions Consumed Public-College Boards and Warped Higher Education. The report says more about the tunnel vision that pervades the liberal media and academic establishment than it does about the real state of politics in academia. Politicization is indeed a major governance problem, as the report suggests. However, it is not, as the authors claim, a recent phenomenon resulting from Republican dominance in state politics, the Tea Party movement, and the surge in conservative populism. It...

It is no secret that the student debt burden in America, now estimated at a cumulative $1.64 trillion, is one of the greatest scandals of a scandal-debauched age. According to Forbes, it is now the second-highest consumer debt category, higher than both credit card and auto loan debt, and behind only mortgage debt. It represents a crisis of national proportions. Notwithstanding the rosy assumptions we sometimes come across, refinancing is merely a stopgap measure that only marginally relieves the pressure blighting the lives of graduates. Student loan forgiveness, a more dramatic attempt to deal with the problem, comes in several...

Ohio State coach Ryan Day apologized to Nebraska for the Buckeyes offense not taking a knee in the final seconds of Saturday's 52-17 win at Ohio Stadium. Leading 45-17 in the final minute, the Buckeyes reached the Nebraska 2-yard line. Rather than take a knee, freshman quarterback Jack Miller ran into the end zone.

There’s so much to like about what James Franklin has done at Penn State. He’s rebuilt the program from the throes of NCAA probation, turned the Nittany Lions into a consistent College Football Playoff contender and brought a sense of football normalcy to a town and program that desperately needed it. Franklin is one of the sport’s top-10 coaches, something that can’t be questioned after his resuscitation of Vanderbilt and resurrection of Penn State. He’s won 70% of his games at Penn State and averaged 10.5 wins the past four years. Since taking over at Vanderbilt in 2011, game management...

Michigan football helmets are one of the most distinguishable lids in college or pro football. The Wolverines winged look with the Maize and Blue colors has been in place for a century, but there will be a slight modification for this coming season. When the Michigan Wolverines hit the field for Saturday's season-opener at Minnesota, they'll have an "EQUALITY" sticker on the back representing the diversity and commitment to unity. The helmet decals will be worn by all Michigan's varsity sports this year after a student-athlete initiative in conjunction with the athletic department developed the designs that will be worn...

The College Football TV Schedule for the 2020 season is listed below. The schedule includes all Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) and Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) games scheduled for this season with the date, time, and TV. Rankings are based on the AP Poll until the College Football Playoff Rankings are released.

The Big Ten is slated to begin its 2020 football schedule this week. But when one team takes to the field, they’ll be sporting a black helmet logo to show solidarity with the fight for social change. On Thursday, the Illinois football team announced that their players will be wearing a black Block I decal on their helmets for their season-opener against Wisconsin tomorrow. The move is the result of an initiative from the student-athletes in support of advocating for social change.

The University of Texas will not have its band performing against Baylor on Saturday. The dispute over “The Eyes of Texas” song looms large for the Longhorns. And it has reached a point that members of the band are refusing to play. According to Andrew Zhang with The Daily Texan, an internal survey was conducted to see if band members would be participating in the longstanding tradition. The results found that portion of the band would choose to skip the performance.

Fifteen years ago, American higher education was beset with serious problems, especially rising costs, politicization of the curriculum, the mania over diversity, and falling academic standards. At that time, however, few people would have said that among its problems was the threat to freedom of speech on campus. But one scholar who did see that freedom of speech was coming under attack was University of Wisconsin professor Donald Downs. His book Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus was an alarm bell in the night. He saw that the forces of intolerance and repression were gathering strength. Downs has now...

“Sunlight,” Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote, “is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” Few aspects of the contemporary academy more need enhanced sunlight than the Title IX adjudication process, which operates almost entirely in the dark—even going as far as not publicizing the training materials that adjudicators used before the adoption of the new Title IX regulations. Providing only a beam of sunlight, however, can obscure as much as it reveals—as seen in recent litigation involving the University of North Carolina’s Title IX adjudication process. In 2016, the Charlotte Observer, the Herald-Sun, WRAL,...

Alabama and Georgia put on a display on Saturday, proving why they are the top two teams in the SEC. The Dawgs lost, but Georgia fans can take solace in two things: One, everyone in the East has at least one loss, so everything that UGA wants to achieve is still on the table. Two, the Dawgs are unlikely to take much damage in the rankings or, more important, in the eyes of the College Football Playoff committee. Or, maybe UGA fans won’t find these thoughts that comforting:

The Tennessee Vols football season has reached the point, after a 34-7 blowout home loss to the hated Kentucky Wildcats, where windows are being smashed by flying beer bottles and wives are looking for new relationships. Now 2-2 after back-to-back losses with Alabama coming to town Saturday, it’s getting ugly, especially on the Tony Basilio Show where this caller said it’s bad in his home. “I’ve been watching Tennessee football for 30 years and I did something today that I’ve never done,” Vols fan said. “I messed up and threw a beer bottle through a window and my wife left...

This time next week, the Big Ten will have played its first slate of games in its 2020 season. Another couple of weeks after that, the Pac-12 and the rest of the FBS will have joined the party. It's a reminder that there's a lot of football that not only has to be played, but a lot of football that hasn't even started. And yet the biggest game of the year feels like it just took place. Alabama and Georgia faced off in prime time with both teams trying to prove they are one of the best teams in this...

Around 40% of college students said they will likely or certainly protest if President Donald Trump wins the election, according to an Axios poll released Friday. Exactly 22% of students surveyed said they are ‘likely’ to protest and 17% said they will ‘certainly’ protest should Trump win the 2020 election, the College Reaction/Axios survey found. More students, 30%, said they would not protest if Trump won and 31% said they are not likely to protest a Trump victory. “The dissatisfaction with the status quo is also reflected by the number of students who are willing to protest Trump reelection with...