Aggie With a Spoon

The Big Plan on Campus

There’s a teachable moment taking place on campuses across the country. The lesson that will ultimately be learned will largely depend on who, in the end, is left doing the teaching. Politics isn’t just invading campuses; in many cases, syllabi-curious politicians (or the people who fund them) are taking over leadership roles at universities, playing god on the quad. Among the big changes taking place over just the past few years is the widespread surveillance of what teachers choose to teach, and the punishments doled out when those assignments fail to make the grade. NYT (Gift Article): “College professors once taught free from political interference, with mostly their students and colleagues privy to their lectures and book assignments. Now, they are being watched by state officials, senior administrators and students themselves.”

+ Nowhere has the control over a campus been more pronounced than at Texas A&M. The Aggies have seen five presidents in five years, high-profile firings and cancellations, and crackdowns on dissent. What’s so troubling about what’s taking place in College Station isn’t just the degradation of educational values, it’s the breathless pace at which things are changing. DEI, now considered a crime against the Humanities Department, was not only common at A&M, until quite recently, it was celebrated. “When the school was designated a Hispanic-Serving Institution in 2022, federal recognition that comes with additional funding for schools with a student population that is at least 25 percent Hispanic, interim provost Tim Scott said it was ‘indicative of how seriously we take our land-grant mission to serve all the citizens of this great state.’ ... But within a year or so of Scott’s statement, it became completely impermissible to talk this way.” Christopher Hooks in Texas Monthly: Texas A&M’s Melting Point. (Alt link just in case.) “The ... reason you should care is that the political questions facing Texas A&M are the most important questions facing the nation as a whole. In 2026, the university will celebrate its 150th birthday and the nation will celebrate its 250th. Who counts as a true Aggie? A true Texan? A true American? .... The frenzied political squabbling over buzzwords, both at A&M and in the nation at large, obscures what is really being debated every day now in a thousand different forms: whether we can keep a plural, tolerant, diverse republic, or whether those who currently have power can mandate ways of thinking, ways of being, and a social hierarchy based on difference.”

+ From WaPo (Gift Article): Before Trump ban, universities were slowly making faculties more diverse. Now, defending that diversity often leads to removal. Former Villanova professor says she was fired after accusing the law school of racial discrimination. The broader reason why these school brawls are important is because they represent what is a much larger battle over American truth and history, one that extends from the White House (where they just published a website that rewrites history of the Jan. 6 attack) all the way to visitor brochures recently pulled from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument. Medgar Evers’ killer was a Klansman, but Trump administration says stop calling him a racist. To you, that probably sounds ridiculous. To those who want to rewrite American history, it’s all part of the (lesson) plan.

2

We Didn’t START the Fire

“Despite a new era of superpower confrontation, talks over a new START treaty — or even an informal extension of the current one — never got off the ground, frozen by the war in Ukraine. When President Trump was asked in January why he had not taken up President Vladimir V. Putin’s offer for a one-year informal extension, he shrugged. ‘If it expires, it expires.’” (The same, apparently, goes for us.) NYT (Gift Article): Nuclear Arms Control Era Comes to End Amid Global Rush for New Weapons.

+ According to Axios, there are talks of extending the pactbetween the Russians and Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. (Which sort of makes me think it’s not a bad time to build a bunker...)

3

Pop Goes the Measles

“In 2026, the U.S. is facing the possibility of more and bigger measles outbreaks, as federal leaders have actively shrunk vaccine access, dismissed vaccine experts, and sowed doubts about vaccine benefits. Under these conditions, many experts are doubtful that facing down more disease, even its worst consequences, will convince enough Americans that more protection is necessary.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Only Thing That Will Turn Measles Back. (Spoiler alert: It’s gonna take a surge in vaccinations encouraged by the government. Spoiler alert part two. Uh...)

4

Five Ring Circus

There really doesn’t seem to be much hype around the Olympics or the Super Bowl. Let’s try to get a little excited with the story of Dick Hammer. Sam Darnold’s grandfather, Dick Hammer, is the stuff of LA legend.

+ The Athletic: John Biever has photographed every Super Bowl. Here are his 5 favorite shots.

+ “While the Opening Ceremony isn’t scheduled until Friday, the first event of the Milan Cortina Games was held Wednesday with a set of mixed doubles curling matches.” About five minutes into the event (and the Games), the lights went out. (I guess it’s a good thing Don Meredith didn’t sing in Italian...)

+ ‘Penis injection’ claims in Winter Olympics ski jumping investigated by Wada. (Interesting. I would have assumed that the penis injections would have been related to the dick hammer story...)

5

Extra, Extra

You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Hard Drive: “The Department of Homeland Security has been quietly demanding tech companies turn over user information about critics of the Trump administration, according to reports.” This fits in with many other reports we’ve been reading about. Like this one from David Wallace Wells in the NYT (Gift Article): ICE’s New Surveillance State Isn’t Tracking Only Immigrants. “In video after video recorded by protesters and observers in Minneapolis, you can see that the agents are also filming the observers, in a sort of mutual surveillance state.” (One side has better tech...)

+ Prime Suspect: If you missed it yesterday, here’s my take on a sad for journalism. The Washington Post was murdered. And we have a Prime Suspect.

+ Contain Yourself: “The first signs of the apocalypse might look a little like Moltbook: a new social-media platform, launched last week, that is supposed to be populated exclusively by AI bots—1.6 million of them and counting say hello, post software ideas, and exhort other AIs to ‘stop worshiping biological containers that will rot away.’ (Humans: They mean humans.)” The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Chatbots Appear to Be Organizing.

+ Take This Job and Gov It: “I am here with you, Your Honor. What do you want me to do? The system sucks. This job sucks.” Surge in Immigration Cases in Minnesota Pushes Prosecutors and Judges to Brink. There was a lot more to the exchange between judge and lawyer. The unfathomable Minnesota transcript that must be read, as it tells the reality of America today. “’I am not white, as you can see,’ Julie Le — a government lawyer — told a federal judge on Tuesday. ‘And my family’s at risk as any other people that might get picked up too.’” (Julie Le is no longer a government lawyer...)

+ Carpet Bombing: “The full story of Georgia’s power structures prioritizing a prized industry over public health is only now emerging through dozens of interviews and thousands of pages of court records from lawsuits against the industry and its chemical suppliers. Those records, including testimony from key executives, emails and other internal documents, detail how carpet companies benefited from chemistry and regulatory inaction to keep using forever chemicals. All the while, the mills still hummed.” AP: Inside America’s carpet capital: an empire and its toxic legacy.

+ Booking Business: Spotify has been in the audiobook business for a while. That seems to fit the brand. But now they’re going to sell physical books as well.

+ Ticket Snub: “The situation in which fans find themselves today—looking out at a screaming chasm between what they have to pay for an in-demand ticket and what feels fair—might be the result of how a ticket gets into their hands in the first place.” GQ: The Great Ticket Crisis: How Attending Live Events Became a Luxury Sport.

+ Caught Red Handed: “The patient had just arrived at the hospital with nine fingers. The three cops standing in front of him were confident they had the other one. ‘I heard you’re missing something,’ Officer Andrew Richardson said.” WaPo (Gift Article): He lost a pinkie trying to kill a man. From prison, he made things worse.

6

Bottom of the News

“The influx of tourists to the town of Fujiyoshida has led to chronic traffic congestion and litter, while some residents say they’ve experienced tourists trespassing or defecating in private gardens.” Japan cherry blossom festival cancelled over badly behaved tourists. (I’ve suffered from travel IBS my entire life. I never even realized that just defecating in someone’s garden was an option...)

+ Yesterday’s bottom of the story link was a dud. Here’s one that should work. Whatever you do, don’t mess with Pittsburgh’s parking chairs.