But this spring semester, I suspect that more than half of my students cheated their way through the course. And even after I reported it, it took Brown far too long to get involved.

Here’s how it happened: In part due to the tragic shooting that took place at Brown on December 13 during a review session for a final exam, I decided to move my course’s two exams—the midterm and the final—from an in-class exam to a take-home, closed-book format. I thought that would help students deal with exam anxiety. The exams would be made available to students through an online portal, and they would have 11 hours (for a two-hour test) to complete and submit each. Unsurprisingly, the course enrollment jumped to 86, far above 30, the highest maximum in previous semesters.

The results from the midterm were immediately suspicious. The average grade was 96, with 40 students obtaining a perfect score. That compared to a midterm average ranging between 65 and 80 in previous years. In addition, I detected irregularities in many exams, including passages that matched the answers I received when I provided the exam questions to ChatGPT. I told the class I was convinced there had been massive cheating, but I decided not to void the results of the midterm: If the grade distribution of the final exam looked roughly similar to that of the midterm, I would count the midterm; otherwise, I would declare the midterm void and reweight the final. But I also told the class that the final exam was going to be an in-person, closed-book, three-hour exam.

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That phrase has been agonizingly stuck in Tammy Poirier’s head since October 16, 2023. That day, her 15-year-old son Owen, a star on the local high-school soccer team, was kicked out of school by the superintendent and principal for allegedly touching a 16-year-old girl’s crotch on a school bus three days earlier.

“I didn’t do this,” Owen said when his parents arrived at school to pick him up. All they knew was that their son had been accused and suspended that morning, and that he was facing a criminal investigation.

Owen’s parents drove him home. In the car, he expressed the fear of letting his soccer team down because he wouldn’t be allowed to play in the state championships that week. That afternoon, he died by suicide.

Had I known. Had I known. Had I known.

Tammy Poirier said it again and again while we sat in her husband Chad’s office at the family’s heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning business in upstate New York. Owen’s suicide happened just outside the building. As she spoke, tears fell from her cheeks and landed on her jeans.

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He took nearly every advanced class his high school offered and earned stellar grades, including an A in AP Calculus AB as an 11th grader. He seemed like the kind of student targeted by Governor Gavin Newsom’s Higher Education Compact: a multibillion-dollar agreement pressuring the UC system to close racial and socioeconomic gaps in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by admitting students like Diego into premier programs. But Diego also scored a 1 out of 5 on his AP Calculus exam. That’s why he was exactly the kind of student the Compact is likely to fail.

What does an A grade in AP Calculus mean when it is paired with a score of 1 on the national exam? Exactly what a recent UC San Diego report revealed: In too many public schools, grades have become completely decoupled from learning.

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The public liberal-arts school long had a reputation for being far left, with an intellectual culture centered around identity politics. New College also had just been upended by Republican governor Ron DeSantis, whose supporters wanted to shape it into the “Hillsdale of the South,” a nod to the proudly conservative college in Michigan.

Hogsed was worried about both extremes, including what he described as the false premise that “serious academia is primarily a ‘conservative’ effort.” He came to New College anyway—and just finished his sophomore year. What he found turned out to be very different.

“It’s really not a battlefield of political views,” said Hogsed, who is from Orlando and studies literature and philosophy. He sees “divides in a few different ways,” but “none of them are political.”

This college of fewer than 1,000 students has been the subject of countless op-eds and think pieces since DeSantis packed the board overseeing New College with conservative allies in 2023. Depending on your point of view, it is either a blueprint for how to save American higher education from progressive ideological capture or a foretaste of where the Trump administration’s crackdown on academia will lead.

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A patient had accused him of asking her inappropriate questions about her relationship status during his ob-gyn clinical rotation a few days prior. She also said Duggal followed her on social media after the appointment.

Duggal denied that he had said anything unprofessional—he claimed he followed protocol typical for an STD screening. But he admitted to following her on Instagram, and then blocking her an hour later once he realized it crossed a boundary.

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“Every day we say our job is to come here and to make this become true,” Tate told me of the sign, which he had made two years ago.

On the surface, the Classic Learning Test (CLT) doesn’t seem all that revolutionary. It’s a two-hour test of reading, grammar, and math, taken by high school seniors as an alternative to the SAT or ACT. There are a few important differences though. Unlike the better-known tests, the texts are Western canon, not news article clips or the Common Core. There is no calculator. The reading passages are more than a few hundred words. The test does not get easier every year if students perform poorly.

The point of the CLT is to make college entrance academically rigorous again, so kids rise to the challenge—and so, ultimately, every high school classroom in America starts teaching the classics again. Tate says he’s “in a battle to save Western civilization.” And he’s not afraid of the competition.

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As it turns out, Harvard really is a layup. A report released in October by the university’s Office of Undergraduate Education confirmed what those students had already sussed out: Grades at the university had been creeping upward for decades. In the 2024–25 academic year, three out of every five grades awarded to Harvard undergraduates were A’s.

Last week, Harvard’s faculty finally tackled the problem, approving a grade cap that will limit A’s to 20 percent of the undergraduates per course, plus up to four exceptions for extenuating circumstances. The changes will take effect in the fall of 2027. Nearly 70 percent of Harvard’s faculty voted in favor of the plan, and its dean of undergraduate education said that she hoped the grade cap would “encourage other institutions to confront similar questions with the same level of rigor and courage.”

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The Stanford Faculty Senate voted last week to extend Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE), a program of three general-education courses—Why College?, Citizenship in the 21st Century, and a Global Perspectives menu—that all undergraduates take in their first year. The vote was nearly unanimous. I voted no.

I did not take the vote lightly. Many colleagues have worked on this program for years, and I acknowledge these efforts. But I cannot support a program I believe will be detrimental to the education we offer our students.

My objection is not to general ed requirements. The humanities are indispensable to an undergraduate education, and a Stanford degree is incomplete without some exposure to the best of them.

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A new report out today accuses both the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) of spending tens of millions of dollars on electing Democratic political candidates, and prioritizing politicking over the needs and interests of their union members.

The report, conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), Gevura Fund, and Rutgers University, among others, found that of the NEA’s $450 million annual disbursement budget from fiscal year 2025, less than $46 million, or 10 percent, was spent on activities directly representing the union’s constituents.

“You read a stat like that,” said Tova Plaut, a New York City teacher and a member of both the NEA and AFT, “and you start to wonder, Where is all that money going?”

The NEA and the AFT are the two largest teachers’ unions in the country, representing around 4.6 million members across the country.

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I had arrived at Alpha, the most expensive private school in San Francisco, where there are no teachers, the academic day lasts two hours, and the kids love school.

The pitch is bold: Students complete all of their schoolwork each morning using AI-powered apps. The afternoons are for “life skills”—workshops on things like entrepreneurship and product design. On the day I visited, students participated in a “yapathon”—a public speaking exercise where they talked about a subject for three minutes and lost points for every filler word (“like,” “um”) they used.

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In a letter to Brown president Christina Paxson on Wednesday, the lawmakers said that the deaths and injuries “were not unforeseeable tragedies.” “Public reporting, sworn testimony, police union statements, Brown’s public records, and the assailant’s own words clearly establish that these deaths were made possible by more than a decade of deliberate policy decisions that prioritized activists’ radical demands over student safety,” said the letter.

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Six months later, Harvard University took up the cause when Harvard president Lawrence Bacow convened a faculty committee to excavate the university’s historical involvement in the Atlantic slave trade.

The committee, chaired by Harvard Radcliffe Institute dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin, ultimately produced a 134-page report confirming the ugly truth that Harvard, like many institutions in the North, was run by slaveowners—among them four university presidents—and that its professors had advanced so-called race science, including eugenics, to justify the trade.

The report, issued in 2022, called on the school to “take responsibility for its past” and “leverage its strengths in the pursuit of meaningful repair.”

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This image, along with many others circulating over the past few days, refers to a now-viral moment that occurred on campus last Thursday. After a campus event, Kotlikoff was followed and harassed by members of the anti-administration group Students for a Democratic Cornell. As he pulled out, surrounded by the protesters, he was accused of hitting a student and rolling over another’s foot. The event in question was part of an Israel-Palestine debate series sponsored by the Cornell Political Union. Thankfully, nobody was seriously injured.

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It also helped Beilock avoid the outrage from congressional lawmakers that cost the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania their jobs for failing to control anti-Israel chaos and antisemitism on their campuses after the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas.

Beilock, now 50, didn’t choke this time. Two hours after Dartmouth students pitched an encampment on the Green in May 2024, she called in the police. Eighty-nine people were arrested.

In an interview earlier this month in her office overlooking the same spot, Beilock told me without even a hint of equivocation, “Setting up an encampment on a shared space and declaring it for one ideology, where certain people can’t be or walk through—that’s disrupting someone else’s free speech.”

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The problems cited in the report will be familiar to readers of The Free Press, as they include nontransparent admissions standards, grade inflation, a culture that forces self-censorship, and outrageous tuition pricing. This year, George Washington University—hardly in the top tier of selective schools—started charging a sticker price approaching $100,000 a year for the privilege of studying there.

Those problems have been hanging over academia, and getting worse, for years. But a second strand of issues, though not stressed in the Yale report, concerns the rapid progress of artificial intelligence. To put it bluntly, the AIs know more than many professors, they do not tire of answering questions, they explain things clearly, and they keep unlimited office hours. They are also far cheaper and can organize a class syllabus and grade tests. So what exactly is higher education supposed to be providing us with?

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This should not come as any great surprise. In fact, you should expect many similar shutterings in the coming years.

It’s no secret that higher education is reeling. The litany of challenges is long. Among them: struggles over free speech, antisemitism, and ideological uniformity; President Donald Trump’s many attacks on the sector;, a replicability and peer review crisis in research, and declining public confidence in colleges.

Then there’s also student debt, a declining percentage of high school graduates enrolling in college, low graduation rates, increasing questions around a college education’s return on investment, and a free-for-all in college athletics.

I could go on. But there’s one piece of the puzzle that’s received relatively less attention, however: the fiscal health of many colleges themselves. To put it simply, a tremendous number of colleges and universities are on the fast path to insolvency, which stands to quickly transform not only America’s higher-education landscape but also the many communities built around these institutions.

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In 1950, the average GPA at Harvard College was 2.55, between a B− and a C+. But that norm has given way to one in which top marks are the norm, and any deviation from the top grade needs to be justified by professors pointing to some serious deficiency in students’ work. Today, the average GPA at Harvard is 3.8, between an A and an A−. Even when I was completing my PhD at Harvard about a decade ago, undergrads had the expectation that an A was the natural recompense for competent work. By all accounts, things have grown worse since.

For the past months, a band of courageous faculty members at Harvard have been trying to convince their colleagues to fix the problem. On Tuesday, however, that effort came to a standstill.

Here’s what happened: In February, a faculty subcommittee proposed a package of measures that would standardize grades across courses and limit how many students could obtain A’s. Instructors would be able to give A’s to no more than 20 percent of their students (though A− grades, notably, would still have been unlimited).

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Why? Because, according to the school, I had violated the administration’s values about LGBT inclusion—by reposting Brianna Wu, a trans woman, on X.

Let me explain what happened from the beginning.

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But as The Free Press’s Maya Sulkin reported last month, that pledge appears not to have been upheld. All four finalists under consideration for the Edward Said Professorship in Modern Arab Studies and Literature, a prominent position in the Middle East Studies department, had expressed overt animosity toward Israel.

Now, Columbia’s history department has made its choice. In a March 9 message that has not previously been reported, the selection committee “unanimously and enthusiastically” recommended Harvard professor Rosie Bsheer for the position.

Bsheer has a long history of anti-Israel activism. One year ago, she was removed as a leader of Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies for “insufficiently balanced” programming on Palestine. While she was associate director, the center hosted speakers who “appeared to justify Hamas’s actions” on October 7, 2023, according to Harvard’s antisemitism report. The Trump administration accused the center of fueling “antisemitic harassment” and reflecting “ideological capture.”

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The stern message from the United Auto Workers (UAW) was delivered to leaders of the Student Workers of Columbia (SWC), a union representing about 3,500 student workers, last month. Since then, SWC members have voted overwhelmingly in favor of authorizing a strike, but UAW officials have said that they will not allow it to happen or provide funding for a strike unless the students negotiate further with Columbia, according to internal union communications reviewed by The Free Press. SWC is a local branch of the UAW, which must green-light any strike.

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