RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
May 4 to May 10, 2025 In RealClearInvestigations, John Murawski visits Austin, the Texas state capital and bohemian mecca, to explore new flashpoints in America’s culture wars: two separate schools creating their own anti-establishment ethos as part of a national revival of classical liberal education. -
The town known for its motto “Keep Austin Weird” is being joined by two uncharacteristically odd bedfellows: the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas and a feisty startup calling itself the University of Austin. -
Now in their second semesters, the two schools – one public, one private – offer traditional academic subjects that have fallen out of favor as the ivory tower embraces “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and social justice activism. -
They represent a contrast to Austin’s uber-liberal South By Southwest Festival and are perhaps more compatible with recent ferment in the city, including the new global headquarters of Elon Musk’s Tesla and the arrival of the dissident political podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. -
As a public entity, UT’s School of Civic Leadership is more traditional, hiring tenure-track faculty and evoking the marble-and-mahogany solemnity of a present indebted to the past. -
The University of Austin leadership is brash and provocative, and tends to hire public intellectuals active on the podcast circuit and in other journalistic outlets. -
“We are a self-conscious rebel faction that’s offering a new university on the model of the old,” says an administrator. “Our movement is: We’re going to take their students, we’re going to take their faculty, we’re going to take their money – that’s how we’re going to win.”
In RealClearInvestigations, Christopher J. Ferguson examines the trend of schools banning cellphones and says hold the phone: Emerging results suggest that the increasingly popular prohibitions do not yield the boosted test scores, reduced bullying, and other benefits that educators are touting. Ferguson reports: -
Orange County schools in Florida saw serious bullying rise sharply, not decline, during the first year of its all-schoolday ban, from 2 incidents to 12. Grade-point averages largely remained static. And mental health referrals and suspensions increased rather than decreased as had been expected. -
Especially concerning is the rise in suspensions, which are well known to be harmful to youth, reducing academic engagement, and are even associated with adult arrests. -
The ban in Rhode Island’s Providence County turned up similar numbers. -
But schools in Cranston, R.I, which do not have a cellphone ban, saw high school GPAs actually rise, perhaps reflecting schools’ encouragement of cellphone use in education. -
A recent study in the UK found that cellphone bans in schools do not improve student grades, behavior, or mental health. -
Ferguson writes that the preliminary figures offer tantalizing clues that cellphone bans, at very least, do not appear to help, though it’s worth noting cellphones may have some value in emergencies such as shootings or fires.
Waste of the Day
by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books DeSantis, Medicaid Funds and Wife's Charity, RCI
Feds Ignore $4.6B of Sketchy COVID Loans, RCI
NYC Pays Contractors Who Bribed Officials, RCI
DNC, RNC Spent Millions on Parties, RCI
'Free' Tax Returns Are Quite Taxing, RCI Trump 2.0 and the Beltway Report: FBI ‘Misled Public’ About '17 GOP Baseball Shooting, Just the News
Trump Admin Offers Migrants $1,000 to Self-Deport, Guardian
Trump's 48-Hour Scramble to Fly Illegals to Salvador, Washington Post
Biden Gaza Pier Fiasco Killed American, Injured 62 Others, New York Post
Bloomberg Funds Top Government Climate Litigator, Washington Free Beacon
Texas Arrests Judge, 5 Others in Vote Harvesting Bust, Western Journal
Trump’s NJ Golf Courses Serve Booze Despite His Felony, New York Daily News Other Noteworthy Articles and Series The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is “orchestrating a widespread intelligence-gathering campaign at Stanford,” which the university is hesitant to discuss publicly, according to an investigation by student journalists at the California campus: Under its Made in China 2025 plan, China aims to unseat the U.S. as the dominant force in frontier technologies. Such a plan necessitates substantial technology transfers from America's research institutions. Given its dominance in AI, Stanford is academic target number one. … This March, Stanford’s President, Dr. Jonathan Levin, received a letter from the Select Committee on the CCP detailing the security risks China poses to STEM research. For years, concerns about Chinese espionage have quietly persisted at Stanford. Throughout our investigation, professors, students, and researchers readily recounted their experiences of Chinese spying, yet they declined to speak publicly. One student who experienced espionage firsthand was too fearful to recount their story, even via encrypted messaging. “The risk is too high,” they explained. Transnational repression $64 million in Chinese funding, and allegations of racial profiling have contributed to a pervasive culture of silence at Stanford and beyond. This article reports that some Chinese students on campus “are actively reporting to the Chinese Communist Party”; that China has tried to recruit American students who might be sympathetic to its aims, and that China works to gather information on sensitive research projects conducted at the school. Numbers often tell a story. This article reports China has been gradually disappearing data that might suggest the health of its economy and society: Land sales measures, foreign investment data and unemployment indicators have gone dark in recent years. Data on cremations and a business confidence index have been cut off. Even official soy sauce production reports are gone. In all, Chinese officials have stopped publishing hundreds of data points once used by researchers and investors, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. In most cases, Chinese authorities haven’t given any reason for ending or withholding data. But the missing numbers have come as the world’s second biggest economy has stumbled under the weight of excessive debt, a crumbling real-estate market and other troubles—spurring heavy-handed efforts by authorities to control the narrative. At about 1:30 in the afternoon on April 28, air-traffic controllers at Newark Airport lost contact with pilots they were guiding and their radar screens showing aircraft positions went dark. About 90 seconds later, this article reports, “the traffic-control systems started blinking back to life.” But small glitches continued and a few days later, the controllers’ radios briefly went out again. The meltdown symbolizes a much larger problem, this article reports: America’s air-traffic control system has been troubled for years, the culmination of years of anemic funding, archaic technology and staffing problems. A wake-up call sounded on Jan. 29 with a midair collision near the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport that killed 67 people. … The Government Accountability Office said last year that about three-quarters of the FAA’s 138 air-traffic systems were either obsolete or potentially too difficult to reliably maintain. [Transportation Secretary Sean] Duffy said he is preparing to unveil a plan this week to upgrade the FAA’s network of facilities, radars and other technology, which industry and government officials believe could cost $20 billion to $40 billion. This article reports that “the FAA has some 10,700 fully certified controllers, leaving it about 3,000 short of its target. Controllers have complained of fatigue from often having to work 10-hour days, six days a week as a result.” Industry and government officials have studied data and suggested fixes to address close calls, but the ingredients for a catastrophe involving air-traffic control remained. The Taliban took in $3.4 billion in revenue over the last year, some of it by selling military equipment the U.S. left behind in Afghanistan to terrorist groups, according to a government report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR): The United States left 78 aircraft, 40,000 military vehicles, and over 300,000 weapons in Afghanistan in a [2021] withdrawal that saw 13 American service members lose their lives. According to the SIGAR report – which the watchdog group delivered to Congress on April 30 – the Taliban transferred many of these arms directly to terrorist affiliates, while others made their way to the black market. The Pentagon assesses that of around $18.6 billion worth of U.S. equipment provided to the Afghan Army over decades of support, $7.12 billion in weaponry remains in the Taliban’s possession. As a result, "terrorist groups continued to operate in and from Afghanistan amid ongoing U.S., UN, and regional concerns that the country remains a terrorist haven." This article reports that more than two dozen terrorist organizations are currently active in Afghanistan, Utah’s Great Salt Lake once covered an area larger than Rhode Island. Today, more than half its water is gone and, this article reports, about “800 square miles of lake bed sits exposed, baking in the desert heat, sometimes billowing toxic dust plumes across the state’s urban core”: The effects would reach far beyond Utah. Minerals from the lake are used in America’s beverage cans and in fertilizer for much of the world’s organic fruits and nuts. The lake’s brine shrimp eggs support a global seafood industry. Dust laden with arsenic and other heavy metals could blow across other states. And as climate change intensifies drought across the West, it would also bring accelerated evaporation of the lake. The lake’s 20-year decline has stabilized thanks to recent snowfalls. It currently is five feet higher than its all-time low. But, this article reports, it will need to rise another five feet “to attain a minimum healthy elevation.” To reach that level in five years, all water users in the Great Salt Lake basin would need to cut their consumption by half. The shift would have enormous consequences for the state’s economy which stakeholders and residents seem reluctant to endure. |
