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1:22 VIDEO AT LINK. He tells the truth................ Twitter-X Version: https://x.com/robsmithonline/status/206509674596132494

In the fall of 2023, I took my first law school exam, a 13-page extravaganza replete with tortured fact patterns and endlessly subdividing short-answer questions. We had all of three hours to complete it. In a state of sustained panic, I macheted my way through the onslaught of pages, managing—just barely—to finish in the nick of time. The result was a piece of work product that, in any other legal context, would be career-ending: an unedited first draft, blurted out under conditions of extreme haste. Several students I spoke with had failed to complete the exam at all. Other students,...

Jurors can consider manslaughter in addition to the murder charge against Karmelo Anthony, the judge said Tuesday. Anthony is charged with murder in the April 2, 2025 death of Austin Metcalf. Both were 17 at the time and were set to compete that day for different Frisco high schools at a track meet. If convicted, Anthony faces up to life in prison. The case has drawn national attention from the start and generated a flood of misinformation and racist vitriol on social media. Anthony is Black. Metcalf was white. Journalists from The Dallas Morning News will provide live updates throughout...

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Hulu series host Nikole Hannah-Jones is set to speak at a Juneteenth event in Springfield. The University of Illinois Springfield Center for Lincoln Studies, in partnership with Juneteenth Inc., the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and the UIS Institute for Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice, will host a conversation with Nikole Hannah-Jones, host and executive producer of the Hulu docuseries “The 1619 Project,” as part of its Juneteenth Lecture Series.

My most recent Martin Center column highlighted the irony, considering higher education’s formative influence on America’s prevailing anti-natalist culture, of the industry’s anxiety over declining birthrates. “Where,” I asked, “are large families less welcome, or where do they seem more culturally transgressive, than on American campuses?” I quoted briefly from Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth by Catherine Pakaluk, who describes the book as “motivated by a single intuition: that if a phenomenon is sufficiently consequential, then its absence must also be consequential.” Current birth rates and their own responses to surveys suggest that one-in-three Gen Z...

One of my most memorable experiences as a college student was an insult I received from my professor. I had missed an exam due to work, and I asked him if I could make it up on another day. He reluctantly agreed. But when the day for the make-up arrived, I forgot about it. I needed an excuse: if I got a zero, I’d fail the course. I should have told him the truth and asked for mercy. But I lied. I told him that I had to work again. To my surprise, he looked at me and said, “If...

WASHINGTON—It’s no secret that America’s college campuses are in crisis. From violent protests and woke groupthink paralyzing free speech and rigorous debate to sky-high tuition rates, the average student faces too many challenges in pursuing higher education. To help identify why higher education isn’t working well and how to fix it, Encounter Books today published “Higher Education in America: It’s Worse Than You Think,” edited by Heritage President Dr. Kevin Roberts and featuring an introduction and conclusion by Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Christopher F. Rufo. The book draws on insight from college presidents, professors, researchers, and education policy experts to...

Also looking to hire a librarian using the H1-B visa worker program The University of Notre Dame says it cannot find any American to teach English and so it must fill the job with a foreign worker visa. The Catholic university in South Bend, Indiana filed a “Notice of Intent to Hire,” indicating it plans to hire a professor of English under the H1-B visa program. The assistant professor job pays just over $87,000 and that is not including benefits. It pays more than the chemistry professor position the university is also seeking to fill with foreign workers. Other jobs...

In a new research brief, The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Education found that only 44 percent of American high school students expected to earn a bachelor’s degree in 2022, down from 72 percent in 2002. The study also revealed a parental gap among high school students, with only 33 percent of first-generation students aspiring to a bachelor’s degree in 2022, compared to 60 percent two decades earlier. What are Americans, particularly those concerned about the state of higher education, to make of these findings? Are they just one of many societal indicators of an “empire in...

College is extraordinarily expensive and becoming less useful, and those who insist otherwise are working from a model of the labor market that stopped describing reality sometime in the 1990s. Four-year courses at private institutions often cost more than $70,000 a year, and it should come as no surprise that student debt has tipped over $1 trillion . This situation is ridiculous for a film student, but it is also ridiculous for a computer science graduate whose program could not keep pace with the industry it was preparing him for – and who learned more in four months on GitHub...

Robert Kelchen of the University of Tennessee, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently, described the most dire problem facing higher education today: “The list of institutions trimming academic programs, implementing furloughs, and laying off employees is long and growing…” A massive financial crunch has hit many schools because of sagging tuition revenue growth (reflecting falling enrollment or more aggressive discounting of tuition fees) and reduced public financial support in the form of federal and/or state aid and stagnant private philanthropy, all occurring in an environment of heightened inflationary pressures increasing the dollars needed to operate. While the problem...

It was once common to suggest people who lose their blue-collar jobs should “learn to code.” This is no longer very good advice, if it ever was, since coding is now something you should definitely not learn if you want to keep up with progress. (AI tells me that the number of jobs for programmers has declined by 27.5 percent since AI came along.) But “learn to code” remains a pretty good metaphor for what we faculty will have to do if we want to keep doing our jobs. Higher ed is a broken thing, and if we’re going to...

It is a running joke with my repeat students that “it depends” is the phrase most likely to set me off during a classroom discussion. Don’t get me wrong, I understand context matters, and we should strive to see as much of the picture as possible. Still, repeated appeals to “it depends” by the same student reveal a very different intent. In most cases, the student is using “it depends” as an excuse not to think carefully, substituting feelings for reason. Such students risk nothing in class discussion, insulating their beliefs and ideas from challenge in precisely the place where...

WATCH: Unions Join Newark Anti-ICE Protests as the Left MOBILIZES Against Trump’s Immigration Enforcement VIDEOS AT LINK.............. Anti-ICE protests in Newark, New Jersey, are exposing a much larger problem than opposition to one detention facility. The demonstrations show how organized left-wing groups, labor activists and even teachers unions are joining forces to fight President Trump’s immigration agenda. On the latest episode of The Patriot Perspective, the hosts discussed the protests outside the Newark ICE facility and the broader movement behind them. The concern is not simply that activists are protesting. Americans have a right to protest. The concern is that...

Two nonprofits are demanding an investigation into Oregon’s allegedly anti-white education grants. Defending Education and Do No Harm (DNH) filed a joint complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights against Oregon’s education department and Higher Education Coordinating Commission (HECC) on May 28, according to a Defending Education press release. The complaint accuses an Oregon grants program of being racially discriminatory. The U.S. Department of Education, Oregon’s Department of Education, and HECC did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment. “What stands out most about Oregon’s system of public school funding is the...

Diversity, equity, and inclusion have gotten a lot of attention over the past decade. In these pages, we’ve often lamented that universities’ focus on superficial measures of diversity undermines merit and overlooks viewpoint diversity. A new book by Duke professor Adrian Bejan, Diversity Through Freedom, emphasizes a different kind of diversity: the organic, inevitable, and beneficial diversity found in nature. He calls it “a phenomenon that has a mind of its own” that can’t be “shoehorned into a few distinct (antagonistic) classes.” The Martin Center sat down with Professor Bejan to discuss his book and its implications for higher education....

Why do public university officials do the things they do? What drives their decisions to allocate scarce resources in some ways and not others? In his recent book The University Unfettered, Ian F. McNeely offers a lot of insight into those questions. McNeely is a former (and current) faculty member and administrator, and he’s writing about his experiences at a state flagship university. He doesn’t say which one, although it’s easy to figure it out if you want to. But which state flagship doesn’t really matter, as there’s nothing unique about “The University” and those who run it. It is...

Tom Steyer was in the groove last Saturday as he prepared to court black voters in historic Leimert Park, the cultural hub of Los Angeles’s Black community. Directed by R&B singer Howard Hewitt to clap “on beat,” the billionaire Democrat stood and closed his eyes, biting his lower lip and raising his arm overhead as he swayed with the crowd. He would tell the packed room of voters that he’d been a leader in pushing for reparations for the descendants of enslaved people. He would describe the Black community as “the moral leader of the United States” for as long...

A professor of international affairs and comparative literature at Penn State believes soon-to-be canceled late-night talk host Stephen Colbert will go down as one of the “most important satirists” in the history of the country. Writing in The Conversation, “scholar of political satire” Sophia McClennen (who over a decade ago opined that conservatives are just too dense to grasp Colbert’s “smart comedy”) puts Colbert in the same class as Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and … Benjamin Franklin. This is because the “best satirists do more than entertain […] they influence public discourse and leave lasting marks on political life,” she...

A European friend approached me today, asking about guns in the US, saying, “There are so many guns in your country. It will take a long time to collect them all and get rid of them.” She was shocked when I responded, “We don’t want to get rid of them.” Young adults ages 18 and 19, along with gang-related shootings and suicide, not school shootings, account for most of the gun deaths attributed to people under the age of 20. Photo courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. ==================================================================== After she got over her immediate horror and confusion, she asked,...