Colleges advise some international students to return to U.S. before Trump takes office [ PBS NewsHour ]

The Scientists Versus Dartmouth: Inside a Sexual Harassment Scandal That Shook Science to Its Core [ Scientific American ]

On aging and wisdom

Personal note from Frank Bruni's newsletter today:

I was told I’d be wiser. I heard that all the time. When I grew older, I’d more accurately judge people and more quickly size up situations. That’s what adults in their 40s said when I was in my teens and what retirees said when I was midcareer. And they were mostly right.

I was told I’d know myself better, and indeed I do, but that seems to me an unimpressive function of simple arithmetic: I’ve had more years with the person in question and collected more evidence of his triggers and tics. He was a haiku to me at 13, a short story at 24, a novella at 35. He’s “Middlemarch” now. I guess he’ll be an encyclopedia in the end. I hope it’s the kind with illustrations and artful fonts.

I turned 60 this year — on Halloween, to be exact. That was hardly the main thing about my 2024 but it was a thing, milestone-wise. Days later I went to the movies at a multiplex where, I discovered, I qualified for the senior-citizen discount. I’ll consider that a silver lining to go with my increasingly silver hair.

But while I’ve matured in many ways, I feel less different than I thought I would, and I don’t mean physically. (On that front, the passage of time is palpable.) I mean emotionally.

Whatever wisdom and self-knowledge I’ve gained pale beside the lingering gremlins in my head and stubborn butterflies in my gut. I’m still needled by so many doubts, roiled by so many fears. At some point, I thought, I’d get a break.

There are moments when I’m 60 going on 16, and none of my elders ever told me about that. They never explained that a certain inextinguishable tremulousness isn’t an affliction of youth but an affliction of being alive, and that “forever young” is at once an aspiration and a curse. If turning 60 taught me anything, it’s that the magnitude of clarity and degree of confidence that I’ve long craved aren’t the rewards of aging, waiting for me if I just hung on. They’re pretty myths.

Campus D.E.I. Programs Under Fire After Supreme Court Ruling on Race [ TIME ]

Texas professors self-censor for fear of retaliation, survey found [ The Texas Tribune ]

The flava:

University professors across the political spectrum in Texas are preemptively self-censoring themselves for fear of damaging their reputations or losing their jobs, according to a new survey from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a First Amendment advocacy group. . . . 

The article:

https://www.texastribune.org/2024/12/12/texas-university-survey-self-censor/

University of Michigan leader speaks out after home is targeted by vandals [ WDIV ]

Meet Khanmigo: The student tutor AI being tested in school districts [ 60 Minutes ]

US College Closures Set to Soar Amid Prospective Student Slowdown [ Bloomberg Television ]

About college football

"The violent character of football is not limited to cases of immediate fatality. Studying American football players, Boston University researchers have found that every 2.6 years of participation in football doubles the chances of contracting the degenerative brain condition chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and that football players have a 61% higher chance of developing Parkinson’s disease compared to other athletes. These consequences have been and will be suffered by participants in college football. And they are unquestionably a form of violence, even if one we seem all too willing to endorse."

--Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva, co-authors of “The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game”

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-12-07/football-college-ohio-michigan-fights

DHAKA UNIVERSITY: Beyond the Books | Documentary [ Dhaka University ]

William Hague elected new Chancellor of Oxford University [ Channel 4 News ]