Two recent news items from academia caught the eye. One is that Harvard might establish a new institute for the study of civics and the Constitution. Presumably, this would be a self-governing body within the university with enough independence to pursue a distinct mission—in this case, a relatively traditional approach to its discipline. If Harvard […]
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On August 20, the MIT Technology Review declared that artificial intelligence (AI) will help predict space weather. Yes, space has weather. Serious weather. It comes from eruptions from the sun called Coronal Mass Ejections (CME), which fling a vast quantity of mass into space. It can be dangerous to us if one of these solar […]
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This May, pro-Palestine protesters disrupted a commencement ceremony at the College of Staten Island. A crowd of students chanted, “Palestine will be free.” The next month, Liam Carey, a Williams College sophomore, tied himself to a Williams campus flagpole, replaced the U.S. flag with a Palestinian one, and wrote pro-Palestine graffiti on Sawyer Quad. The […]
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Harvard College has a grade inflation problem. But beneath it lies a deeper scandal: the faculty who have allowed, and even encouraged, the decay. The Atlantic recently reported that the average GPA at Harvard now hovers around 3.8—a number so inflated it renders distinctions meaningless. Students today can largely count on being graded as excellent, […]
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When Nemat “Minouche” Shafik became the first woman to serve as president of Columbia University, expectations were high. Yet, in just over a year, her tenure was dominated by controversy as Columbia emerged as the epicenter of pro-Palestinian protests following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. Demonstrators occupied campus buildings, even […]
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On September 1, 1775, George III refused to accept the Olive Branch Petition, Congress’s last attempt to avoid war. When John Adams heard the word back in America, he must have breathed a sigh of relief. On July 5, 1775, almost a year to the day before our Declaration of Independence, the Second Continental Congress had signed […]
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