Bloomberg:

Several Chinese graduate students and academics told Bloomberg News in recent weeks that they found the U.S. academic and job environment increasingly unfriendly. Emory University dismissed two Chinese-American professors on May 16, and China’s Education Ministry issued a warning Monday on the risks of studying in the U.S. as student visa rejections soar.

“I’m nervous, worried, even saddened by the unnecessary conflict,” said Liu Yuanli, founding director of the Harvard School of Public Health’s China Initiative and now serves as dean of Peking Union Medical College’s School of Public Health in Beijing. “The restrictions on Chinese scholars and students are irrational and go against the very core value that makes U.S. a great nation.”

Liu is a participant in China’s controversial “Thousand Talents” recruitment program, which began in 2008 as a way for Beijing to encourage its brightest citizens abroad to help develop the economy back home. More recently, China has sought to play down the program as U.S. concerns about its activities grow.

Negassi Tesfamichael:

“It’s really difficult after all of these years to look and see no academic improvement in outcomes, and it’s not because people aren’t working hard or don’t have the right intentions or all of these things,” said board member Mary Burke. “But I’d like to hear we’re looking at how we reimagine the middle school (program). But the status quo for none of us is acceptable when we come to reading proficiencies or math proficiencies for students of color, and we need to look at our partnerships and also say the status quo is not enough.”

Burke, who does not plan to run for re-election when her term ends in 2021, said the board and district shouldn’t wait until the next renewal to find ways to improve and better track outcomes for students in Schools of Hope.

Superintendent Jen Cheatham and MMSD staff emphasized that programs like Schools of Hope give students a chance to build their social-emotional learning and non-cognitive skills through their interactions with tutors.

WHY ARE MADISON’S STUDENTS STRUGGLING TO READ?

It ain’t working so let’s do more of it.

David Barash:

These circumstances can be stressful for youngsters, their parents, and their grandparents. But there is another way of looking at it: Today’s grandparents are doing exactly what their biology has prepared them for.

In pretty much all other species, individuals reproduce until they can’t anymore, and nearly always, this coincides with the end of their lives. Human beings are extraordinary, by contrast, in that long after we’ve stopped reproducing, we just keep on living. In particular, we appear to be the only animals in which half the population loses the ability to reproduce, through menopause, while they still have roughly one-third of their lives ahead of them, much of it quite healthy.

Natural selection rewards reproduction, and the mathematics show that a woman who produces an additional child will be favored over one who stops ovulating. (Reproduction offers the biological equivalent of compound interest; having just one more offspring means the potential of a whole lot of enhanced fitness, so selection should always favor giving it one more try, even if the would-be mother dies in the attempt.) As a result, the existence of menopause as a species-wide trait presents a species-wide mystery. Why don’t people, like other perfectly good mammals, keep on reproducing until they die? Or, another way of looking at it, why do women stop reproducing in late middle age, and yet keep on living? The answer that is emerging from a productive confluence of evolutionary theory and anthropology is that these old people—too old to reproduce, too young and healthy to kick the bucket—are highly biologically relevant.3

Roger Kimball:

People used to talk about the ends of the university and how the academic establishment was failing its students. Today, more and more people are talking about the end of the university, the idea being that it is time to think about closing them rather than reforming them.

Last month at a conference in London, the distinguished British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton added his voice to this chorus when responding to a questioner who complained of the physical ­violence meted out to conservative students at Birkbeck University.

There were two possible responses to this situation, Sir Roger said. One was to start competing institutions, outside the academic establishment, that welcomed conservative voices.

The other possibility was “get rid of universities altogether.”

That response was met with enthusiastic applause.

Perry Link:

We remember June Fourth because the glint of bonfires on bayonets is something one does not forget, even if one did not see it personally.

We remember June Fourth because it taught us the essential nature of the Communist Party of China when all of the clothes, every shred, falls away. No book, film, or museum could be clearer.

We remember June Fourth because of the ordinary workers who died then. We cannot remember most of their names because we do not know most of their names. We never did. But we remember them as people, and we remember that we never knew their names.

We remember June Fourth because the worst of China is there—but the best of China is there, too.

We remember June Fourth because it was a massacre—not just a crackdown, or an “incident,” an event, a shijian, a fengbo; not a counterrevolutionary riot, not a faint memory, and not, as a child in China might think today, a blank. It was a massacre.

We remember June Fourth because, as Fang Lizhi noted with his characteristic wit, it is the only case he has heard of in which a nation invaded itself.

We remember June Fourth because Xi Jinping’s fat smile is a mask.

Annie Nova:

Chad Haag considered living in a cave to escape his student debt. He had a friend doing it. But after some plotting, he settled on what he considered a less risky plan. This year, he relocated to a jungle in India. “I’ve put America behind me,” Haag, 29, said.

Today he lives in a concrete house in the village of Uchakkada for $50 a month. His backyard is filled with coconut trees and chickens. “I saw four elephants just yesterday,” he said, adding that he hopes never to set foot in a Walmart again.

More than 9,000 miles away from Colorado, Haag said, his student loans don’t feel real anymore. “It’s kind of like, if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it really exist?” he said.

Some student loan borrowers are packing their bags and fleeing from the U.S. to other countries, where the cost of living is often lower and debt collectors wield less power over them. Although there is no national data on how many people have left the United States because of student debt, borrowers tell their stories of doing so in Facebook groups and Reddit channels and how-to advice is offered on personal finance websites.

Jane Coaston:

This is a highly unusual level of disdain for a word that until several years ago was a legal term in relative obscurity outside academic circles. It was coined in 1989 by professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how race, class, gender, and other individual characteristics “intersect” with one another and overlap. “Intersectionality” has, in a sense, gone viral over the past half-decade, resulting in a backlash from the right.

In my conversations with right-wing critics of intersectionality, I’ve found that what upsets them isn’t the theory itself. Indeed, they largely agree that it accurately describes the way people from different backgrounds encounter the world. The lived experiences — and experiences of discrimination — of a black woman will be different from those of a white woman, or a black man, for example. They object to its implications, uses, and, most importantly, its consequences, what some conservatives view as the upending of racial and cultural hierarchies to create a new one.

But Crenshaw isn’t seeking to build a racial hierarchy with black women at the top. Through her work, she’s attempting to demolish racial hierarchies altogether.

Tom Bartlett:

Founded in 2015 by Claire Lehmann, an Australian writer and former graduate student in psychology, Quillette initially maintained a more straightforwardly scientific focus but later morphed into a vehicle for a distinctive brand of cultural critique. Its three most popular articles as of this writing are a story on a scholar drummed out of the University of Cambridge for writing about race and IQ, a think piece on the decline of elites, and an essay headlined “How Anti-Humanism Conquered the Left.”

Quillette has also become the house journal of sorts for the Intellectual Dark Web, that highbrow variety pack of academics, journalists, and miscellaneous pundits who pride themselves on a clear-eyed commitment to evidence over emotion. It published multiple pieces by and about James Damore, author of the infamous “Google memo” that questioned the company’s diversity policies, and came down squarely on the side of the so-called grievance-studies hoax, in which three scholars punked humanities journals by submitting creative nonsense cloaked in social-justice buzzwords.

James Lileks:

When you leave the shoe-rehabilitation establishment run by one Robert Napoleon Steele the Third, you will walk a bit taller, stride a bit quicker. You’re guaranteed to be well-shod and shiny, for you’ve just visited the Lazarus of Leather. The man who can bring the most battered, hopeless, despairing shoe back to its showroom state.

You might say he did the same for himself. Ask Napoleon about his life story and he might ask which part you want — the stand-up comedian days, or the 19 years on the street, homeless?

“I remember when I was homeless, sleeping in an alley on a stinking mattress, didn’t matter, when you’re homeless, you don’t care how it is,” he said.

“I saw this family coming back from church. I was praying — God, get me off crack. Get me off drugs. And I did! And now I got kids, and it’s ‘Sit down! Boy, leave your brother alone! Don’t set the cat on fire!’ And I think, ‘God, get me back on crack.’ ”

Eric Boehm:

“We teach our children that money doesn’t grow on trees, and then they grow up watching politicians pretend otherwise,” Paul said before the vote. “Meanwhile, our debt soars past $22 trillion, endangers our country, and artificially limits what our nation can achieve.”

Paul’s proposal called for cutting 2 percent from all federal line items for each of the next five years and would reduce federal spending by about $11 trillion over the next decade—even though spending would rise after the first five years. It’s an adaptation of the so-called “Penny Plan” that Paul has been pushing for several years, though he now says an additional penny in cuts for every federal dollar spent is necessary to get the budget to balance.

Indeed, the gap between what the federal government spends and what it takes in is growing wider. During the first seven months of the current fiscal year, which began in October 2018, the federal government ran a $531 billion deficit. That’s a 38 percent increase over the same period of time last year.

According to an analysis from the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, about 60 percent of this year’s expected deficit is the result of policies—mostly last year’s huge increase in spending that shattered those Obama-era budget caps—put in place by current legislators and signed by the current president.

Matt Sheehan:

Debates over Chinese and American artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities have been long on bombast and short on data.

That’s why at MacroPolo we have created an original dataset based on published papers at what many experts deem the top annual AI conference, NeurIPS 2018, bringing more data to bear on assessing the quantity and quality of AI research talent in China and the United States.

Research talent is often overlooked but is in fact a core building block of any AI ecosystem (see our ChinAI project). Given that leading AI research is relatively open source, talent is one of the most directly quantifiable of those building blocks. Insights gleaned from the data on published research can better inform a well-grounded and data-driven public debate around the state and flow of global AI talent.

The charts below are a first look at the raw data, followed by key takeaways from the data.

Valerie Strauss:

In 2018, the sole indicator was participation by high school seniors in an Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exam, meaning 100 percent of the rankings were based on standardized tests.

As it turns out, the six factors used by the magazine for its 2019 rankings mostly involved standardized test participation or scores (90 percent) with graduation rates accounting for the remaining 10 percent. But different tests are included and so are different ways of looking at them. (We won’t dwell on the fact that standardized test scores provide a very limited look at what students know and can do. Nor will we fixate on the fact that graduation rates can, and have been, fudged in the past.)

U.S. News said that in addition to the changes in the indicators used in its calculations, it ranked more than 17,000 high schools this year, compared with 2,700 in 2018.

As a result, U.S. News said, “Since the methodology changed so significantly this year, a school’s ranking in the 2019 Best High Schools ranking can’t be compared with its rankings in any previous U.S. News ranking.”

Here’s the 2019 Top 10, followed by the 2018:

Richard Vedder:

As America’s oldest and wealthiest university, Harvard University has been a source of national pride, indeed a national treasure, always very high on the list of the world’s top schools. Yet recently it committed a blunder of breathtaking proportions, one so egregious that it calls for action not only by Harvard but possibly even beyond.

The Dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, fired Ronald Sullivan, longtime faculty dean of Winthrop House. Sullivan was recruited to Harvard Law School by now Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, and is Jesse Climenko Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Criminal Justice Institute. Sullivan is well known for his work in defending literally thousands of individuals accused of major crimes, such as NFL football star Aaron Hernandez. What heinous act led Sullivan (and, by extension, his wife, another Harvard Law instructor, Stephanie Robinson) to be fired from their Winthrop House position? He agreed (although later changed his mind) to represent accused rapist and sexual harasser, Harvey Weinstein in forthcoming criminal proceedings.

Students started protesting, even proclaiming that this act was “deeply trauma-inducing” and threatening. Admittedly, based on numerous news accounts, Weinstein appears to be one of the world’s most morally flawed individuals. But a basic core value of American liberal democracy is the rule of law, with all accused, even the most heinous, entitled to representation by competent legal counsel. It’s as if Dean Khurana said the opinions of unhappy Harvard students count for more than hundreds of years of legal precedent.

Fortunately, many famous liberal icons on the Harvard Law faculty are appalled. Writing in the New York Times, Randall Kennedy said Harvard “has never so thoroughly embarrassed itself as it did.” Laurence Tribe said, according to Peter Berkowitz’s account in Real Clear Politics, “Of many blunders, Harvard has made in my 50 years …here, I recall none worse.” Alan Dershowitz weighed in: “feeling ‘unsafe’ is the new mantra for the new McCarthyism….. It is a totally phony argument.” Some 52 members of the Harvard Law faculty, in a letter to the Boston Globe, strongly condemned the action as well.

Ross Douthat:

The Thomas argument, common inside the pro-life movement but startling to many, is that the present “reproductive rights” regime may effectively extend older eugenic efforts to reduce populations deemed unfit. His dissent cited the eugenic inclinations of progressive icons like Margaret Sanger, while pointing out that today’s abortion rates are highest among populations — racial minorities and the disabled — that the older eugenicists hoped to cull.

This argument prompted multiple rejoinders. First, that many past progressives were racist but today’s pro-choice progressivism isn’t, and it is a “genetic fallacy” to link the two. Second, that the original eugenicists, Sanger included, did not usually favor abortion, so it’s a mistake to connect their views to the pro-choice case. Third, that the original eugenicists wanted governments to practice “collective biosocial engineering,” while the contemporary effects Thomas decries are the result of dispersed individual choices, a very different thing.

Fresh Air Weekend: Mental Health On Campus; How Eugenics Shaped Immigration Policy

Marisa Peryer:

Established in 2015, the school is part of a nationwide network of 35 Cristo Rey Jesuit schools that predominantly reach students from low-income families. Students spend four days a week at the school, then one day a week at businesses across greater Milwaukee as part of the work-study program. The students are not paid; instead, their “pay” goes to the school to pay down the cost of tuition.

Almost all the students are Hispanic, and almost all attend the school on taxpayer-funded vouchers through the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. The school continues to grow. Now at 1215 S. 45th St., it soon will double its space as it moves into a vacated Pick ‘n Save store at 1818 W. National Ave.

A few hundred parents, family members and friends gathered in Marquette University’s Church of the Gesu for Friday’s ceremony.

After speeches from salutatorian Wendy Gutierrez-Perez, who will attend College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, and from commencement speaker the Rev. John P. Foley, chairman emeritus of Cristo Rey’s board, Vera took to the podium to give her valedictorian address.

Rob Shimshock:

“On a regular basis, the University of Illinois sends a clear message to students who wish to engage in political and religious speech: there are some views that are welcome, and others that are not,” Speech First President Nicole Neily said in the press release. “Students deserve to be able to express themselves and voice their opinions without fear of investigation or punishment – which is why these policies must be reformed.”

[RELATED: Think things are bad at Berkeley? Here’s why I’m suing UIllinois (OPINION)]

Speech First took issue with UIUC’s leafleting policy, which says that students cannot “post and distribute leaflets, handbills, and other types of materials” that are “promotional materials of candidates for noncampus elections” without approval in advance from the school. The nonprofit also cites UIUC’s 2017-2018 Bias Assessment Response Team report, which asserts that the university received 265 bias reports of 128 separate bias incidents for FY 2018.

Chris Arnade:

I wasn’t in the mood to listen to anyone, especially other bankers, other academics, and the educated experts who were my neighbors. I hadn’t been for a few years. In 2008, the financial crisis had consumed the country and my life, sending Citibank, the company I worked for, into a tailspin stopped only by a government bailout. I had just seen where hubris—my own included—had taken us, and what it had cost the country. Not that it had actually cost us bankers, or my neighbors, much of anything.

I was in the habit of taking walks, sometimes as long as fifteen miles, to explore and reduce stress, but now my walks began to evolve. Rather than setting out with some plan to walk the entire length of Broadway, or along the length of a subway line, I started walking the less-seen parts of New York City. Along the way, I talked to anyone who talked to me. I used my camera to take portraits of people I met.

What I started seeing and learning was just how cloistered and privileged my world was—and how narrow and selfish I was. Like most successful and well-educated people, especially in New York City, I considered myself open-minded, considerate, and reflective about my privilege. I read three ­papers daily, I watched documentaries on our social problems, and I voted for and supported policies that I felt recognized and addressed my privilege. I gave money and time to charities that focused on ­poverty and injustice. I understood that I was ­selfish, but I rationalized. Aren’t we all selfish? ­Besides, I am far less selfish than others. Look at how I vote (­progressive), what I believe in (equality), and who my colleagues are (people of all races from all ­places).

When I first came to Hunts Point, I was determined to be respectful. I knew that HBO had done an early and salacious documentary called Hookers at the Point. Other documentaries had likewise focused on the drugs and the sex work, not on the lived realities of the majority of the residents. So I spent most of my time talking to and photographing the bike clubs, the pigeon keepers, the graffiti artists, and the workers from the nonprofits. My focus changed during a rare, quiet moment in the industrial part of Hunts Point on a Sunday afternoon. The truck traffic was light and most of the shops were closed. Takeesha was standing alone by a trickling fire hydrant, washing her face. She was working, wearing thigh-high faux-leather red boots and leopard-print tights, waving at every car or truck that passed by. She yelled to me, “Hey, take my picture!” When I asked why, she said, “Because I am a sexy, ­beautiful ­prostitute.”

Over the next half hour, she told me her life story. She told me how her mother’s pimp had put her on the streets at twelve. How she had had her first child at thirteen. How she was addicted to heroin. I ended by asking her the question I asked everyone I ­photographed: How do you want to be described? She replied without a pause, “As who I am. A prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of God.”

David Blaska:

The school district lives and breathes identity politics because they teach it at UW-Madison and at all leading schools of education across the country. That includes Harvard, from which superintendent Jennifer Cheatham received her doctoral degree and at which she will grow future crops.

Even at a school as left-wing as UW-Madison, its school of education is radical left. Perhaps only the sociology department is more “woke.”

Four UW faculty members are the brains behind the Freedom, Inc. cadres who have been disrupting school board meetings these past two years. Freedom Inc.’s Bianca Gomez boasts that she hold’s a master’s degree in race and gender studies. They also staff MMSD’s TEEM Scholars Program.

The four faculty members operate what they call the “Mobilizing Youth Voices Project.” Its stated purpose:

Related on Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results

Dianna Douglas:

Public schools in gentrifying neighborhoods seem on the cusp of becoming truly diverse, as historically underserved neighborhoods fill up with younger, whiter families. But the schools remain stubbornly segregated. Nikole Hannah-Jones has chronicled this phenomenon around the country, and seen it firsthand in her neighborhood in Brooklyn.

“White communities want neighborhood schools if their neighborhood school is white,” she says. “If their neighborhood school is black, they want choice.” Charter schools and magnet schools spring up in place of neighborhood schools, where white students can be in the majority.

“We have a system where white people control the outcomes, and the outcome that most white Americans want is segregation,” she says.

In a recent episode of The Atlantic Interview, Nikole Hannah-Jones and The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, discuss how integrated schools are good for white children and black children.

“If one were to believe that having people who are different from you makes you smarter, that you engage in a higher level of thinking, that you solve problems better, there are higher-level ways that integration is good for white folks,” Jones says.

Benjamin Schneider:

If I asked my neighbors in San Francisco if they’d support a policy that reduces fossil-fuel consumption, protects unspoiled wildlands, increases economic mobility, and creates more affordable housing, they would probably all say yes.

But if I told them such a policy would legalize small apartment buildings in our neighborhood of charming, million-dollar single-family homes, many of them would balk. That would make parking even harder, increase traffic, block views, bring rowdiness and crime, make our schools worse, they’d argue.

Soon, a series of proposals to increase urban density in California, Oregon, Seattle, Austin, and numerous other places will shed light on whether liberal America is willing to live according to its purported values. Neighborhoods like mine can welcome apartment buildings and their residents and be part of the solution to our society’s big collective-action problems—or they can remain as they are: fundamentally conservative spaces defined by an “I got mine” philosophy.

Much of the debate surrounding zoning proposals like this one focuses on the pressing issue of housing affordability: more units would, down the line, mean lower costs. But these ideas have much wider implications, too. Allowing a lot more people to live in the places with the most jobs, educational opportunities, and transportation options will reduce segregation and inequality, enable more people to live an environmentally friendly lifestyle, and create the kind of homes that conform to current demographic realities.

Chandan Rauniyar:

After Google’s announcement, I was curious to see what type of location data is stored against my account. I downloaded my data in JSON format at https://takeout.google.com. The zip archive was around 45 MB. I wasn’t surprised at this point but little did I know, I was about to be blown away. I downloaded the file and unzipped it. There was an 800 MB JSON file named Location History.json

Jonathan Cook:

It is astonishing how often one still hears well-informed, otherwise reasonable people say about Julian Assange: “But he ran away from Swedish rape charges by hiding in Ecuador’s embassy in London.”

That short sentence includes at least three factual errors. In fact, to repeat it, as so many people do, you would need to have been hiding under a rock for the past decade – or, amounting to much the same thing, been relying on the corporate media for your information about Assange, including from supposedly liberal outlets such as the Guardian and the BBC.

At the weekend, a Guardian editorial – the paper’s official voice and probably the segment most scrutinised by senior staff – made just such a false claim:

Ryan Mac:

Princeton University and the US’s largest public pension plan are among a number of stateside organizations funding technology behind the Chinese government’s unprecedented surveillance of some 11 million people of Muslim ethnic minorities.

Since 2017, Chinese authorities have detained more than a million Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in political reeducation camps in the country’s northwest region of Xinjiang, identifying them, in part, with facial recognition software created by two companies: SenseTime, based in Hong Kong, and Beijing’s Megvii. A BuzzFeed News investigation has found that US universities, private foundations, and retirement funds entrusted their money to investors that, in turn, plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into these two startups over the last three years. Using that capital, SenseTime and Megvii have grown into billion-dollar industry leaders, partnering with government agencies and other private companies to develop tools for the Communist Party’s social control of its citizens.

Also among the diverse group of institutions helping to finance China’s surveillance state: the Alaska Retirement Management Board, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Rockefeller Foundation all of which are “limited partners” in private equity funds that invested in SenseTime or Megvii. And even as congressional leaders, such as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, have championed a bill to condemn human rights abuses in Xinjiang, their own states’ public employee pension funds are invested in companies building out the Chinese government’s system for tracking Uighurs.

Teresa Ghilarducci:

The federal debt limit expired on March 1. Why does it matter? Markets didn’t move and the holders of the $22 trillion in national debt didn’t utter a peep of worry that the U.S. government wouldn’t pay its interest or redeem its bonds. The government is now taking temporary measures to pay its bills—delaying intragovernmental transfers and probably looking for coins in the couch cushions. The U.S. loses its legal authority to pay out cash in fall 2019.

Not many nations can announce they legally can’t pay all of their debts and yet avoid a wiggle in the credit risk of their bonds. Imagine a nation, say Argentina or Italy, signals the government can’t legally pay debt; their interest rates would soar. When the limit is reached, the U.S. Treasury can’t borrow any more, which one would think would cause a crisis of confidence, severely impacting the real economy for fear the government would default on our debt. But the risk premium on U.S. Treasuries did not budge much.

Investors:

What do we mean by fraudulent? How about this: NOAA has made repeated “adjustments” to its data, for the presumed scientific reason of making the data sets more accurate.

Nothing wrong with that. Except, all their changes point to one thing — lowering previously measured temperatures to show cooler weather in the past, and raising more recent temperatures to show warming in the recent present.

This creates a data illusion of ever-rising temperatures to match the increase in CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere since the mid-1800s, which global warming advocates say is a cause-and-effect relationship. The more CO2, the more warming.

But the actual measured temperature record shows something different: There have been hot years and hot decades since the turn of the last century, and colder years and colder decades. But the overall measured temperature shows no clear trend over the last century, at least not one that suggests runaway warming.

Sean Hamill:

David Garrow confesses that while doing research for his 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King Jr., he came to more than just appreciate the late civil rights leader.

In particular, Mr. Garrow, a former University of Pittsburgh professor of law and history, said listening to every sermon he could find from King “had a very deep, profound impact on me.”

“I always had a very, very high opinion about his humility and self-sacrificing qualities,” Mr. Garrow said from his Squirrel Hill home Friday, “and I still have that.”

Ilya Somin:

In a recent dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch warns of the dangers of the modern expansion of criminal law to the point where “almost anyone can be arrested for anything”:

History shows that governments sometimes seek to regulate our lives finely, acutely, thoroughly, and exhaustively. In our own time and place, criminal laws have grown so exuberantly and come to cover so much previously innocent conduct that almost anyone can be arrested for something. If the state could use these laws not for their intended purposes but to silence those who voice unpopular ideas, little would be left of our First Amendment liberties, and little would separate us from the tyrannies of the past or the malignant fiefdoms of our own age. The freedom to speak with-out risking arrest is “one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation.” Houston v. Hill, 482 U. S. 451, 463 (1987).

John Byrne:

The University of Illinois’ Gies College of Business has become the latest school to announce that it is getting out of the full-time, on-campus MBA market. Instead, Gies will focus more aggressively on its online MBA option, the $22,000 iMBA, which has seen big growth since being launched in 2015 (see Illinois To End Full- And Part-Time MBA Programs On Campus).

Why is Gies giving up on its full-time MBA? For one thing, the school admits it is losing money on the program. While it may surprise many observers given how high tuition rates are for MBA programs, many of these programs are actually loss leaders or “show” programs to get a U.S. News ranking. Secondly, applications to most MBA programs have been declining for years, evidence that there is less interest in the degree.

Just look at the numbers at the University of Illinois’ full-time MBA, ranked in the top 50 by U.S. News. Applications to Gies’ full-time program fell to 290 this year from 386 in 2016. The school actually enrolled fewer than 50 full-time students in each of the past three years. Even when apps were nearly 100 higher in 2016, Gies was only able to enroll a class of 47 students.

Sam Sweeney:

Every night, several times a night, Uber and Lyft drivers at Reagan National Airport simultaneously turn off their ride share apps for a minute or two to trick the app into thinking there are no drivers available—creating a price surge. When the fare goes high enough, the drivers turn their apps back on and lock into the higher fare.

It’s happening in the Uber and Lyft parking lot outside Reagan National airport. The lot fills with 120 to 150 drivers sometimes for hours, waiting for the busy evening rush. And nearly all the drivers have one complaint:

“Uber doesn’t pay us enough, what the company is doing is defrauding all these people by taking 35-40 percent,” one driver told ABC 7.

“They are taking all this money because there’s no system of accountability,” another unidentified driver said.

ABC7’s Sam Sweeney asks: “Do all you guys agree with that?”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes!!!!,” the driver says.

Alyson Klein and Maya Riser-Kositsky:

The presidential candidates may not be talking much about education so far, but they’ve all had personal experience with it. After all, they were students themselves at one time or another. And the parents among them choose schools—public or private—for their own children.

So what did that experience look like? Did the candidates go to public schools, religious schools, or private schools? Where did they decide to send their own kids? And how much does any of it matter, when it comes to both politics and actual policymaking?

Jill Patton:

Imagine a student posting satirical flyers around his dorm that mock undocumented students who fear deportation. Or flyers that say, “Racism lives here.” Or posters advertising a controversial speaker’s visit—which another resident rips down.

Now picture a classroom discussion about police shootings of African Americans. Some students attribute the deaths to cops’ racist attitudes. Another student counters that claim, saying a more likely explanation is that violent crime rates are higher among blacks. “Now, that was particularly uncivil!” the professor replies. Another student stands, as if to storm out in disgust at his classmate’s rebuttal. The professor slams his hand on the table, crying, “Sit down!” as he tries to regain control of the room.

Out in White Plaza—a Stanford free speech zone—a student group staffs a table in support of a Supreme Court nominee. Detractors try to steal the group’s signs, prompting the supporters to film the sign stealers and the taunting that ensues on both sides.

There are no easy answers to how a university should address conflicts in which students feel attacked or silenced—sometimes on both sides simultaneously. As Debra Satz, a philosopher and the dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, says, “A central aim of the university—to generate knowledge—depends on the free exchange of ideas.” But, says Satz, who expands on her view in an essay below, “The classroom is not a street corner: No classroom can be a place of learning without abiding by norms of civility and mutual respect.”