The Exam Carl Sagan Gave His Students [ Tibees ]

What's the REAL Value of Going to College? [ Bret Weinstein ]

The US used to be a haven for research. Now, scientists are packing their bags. [ CSMonitor.com ]

The flava:

This isn’t the first time James Gerber and Lisa Hilbink have packed up their things and left.

In the past 23 years, the married pair of academics have rented out their two-story house in Minnesota a handful of times – during sabbatical stints or fellowships. They’ve tucked away in boxes the family photos, handicrafts from trips to Latin America, and leather booties their children wore when they took their first steps.

But this time feels different.

“We’ll do what we’ve always done in the past: Pack things up and leave it,” says Dr. Hilbink, sinking into a leather armchair in their St. Paul home. “But this time, I’ll bring certain special things with me, like my favorite photos.”

In a matter of months, the two will move to the south of France, where they’ve been offered spots within Aix-Marseille University’s Safe Place for Science initiative. Dr. Gerber is a climate researcher; Dr. Hilbink is a tenured professor of political democracy. They don’t know whether they’ll be welcome in the United States when they return.

“I hope it’s just paranoia,” says Dr. Hilbink, offering a pained glance at Dr. Gerber sitting beside her. “You prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”

The couple are part of a growing number of academics and researchers leaving the United States. As government funding for scientific research dries up, and as President Donald Trump wages pointed attacks against some of the nation’s top universities, more academics are looking to Europe and Asia as safe havens.

A recent survey of U.S. college faculty by the journal Nature found that 75% were looking for work outside the country. Some are doing so to protect their research, while others are trying to safeguard their individual freedoms. The result is a reverse brain drain that has not been seen since European scientists sought refuge on U.S. shores before and during World War II. For the researchers who have chosen to leave, it is bittersweet – and professionally risky. But they say the future of science depends on it. . . .    

The article:

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2025/0825/trump-science-brain-drain-europe

Is ChatGPT killing higher education? [ Decoder ]

Professor at the end of 2 years of struggling with ChatGPT use among students. [ reddit ]

The flava:

Professor here. ChatGPT has ruined my life. It’s turned me into a human plagiarism-detector. I can’t read a paper without wondering if a real human wrote it and learned anything, or if a student just generated a bunch of flaccid garbage and submitted it. It’s made me suspicious of my students, and I hate feeling like that because most of them don’t deserve it.

I actually get excited when I find typos and grammatical errors in their writing now.

The biggest issue—hands down—is that ChatGPT makes blatant errors when it comes to the knowledge base in my field (ancient history). I don’t know if ChatGPT scrapes the internet as part of its training, but I wouldn’t be surprised because it produces completely inaccurate stuff about ancient texts—akin to crap that appears on conspiracy theorist blogs. Sometimes ChatGPT’s information is weak because—gird your loins—specialized knowledge about those texts exists only in obscure books, even now.

I’ve had students turn in papers that confidently cite non-existent scholarship, or even worse, non-existent quotes from ancient texts that the class supposedly read together and discussed over multiple class periods. It’s heartbreaking to know they consider everything we did in class to be useless.

My constant struggle is how to convince them that getting an education in the humanities is not about regurgitating ideas/knowledge that already exist. It’s about generating new knowledge, striving for creative insights, and having thoughts that haven’t been had before. I don’t want you to learn facts. I want you to think. To notice. To question. To reconsider. To challenge. Students don’t yet get that ChatGPT only rearranges preexisting ideas, whether they are accurate or not.

And even if the information was guaranteed to be accurate, they’re not learning anything by plugging a prompt in and turning in the resulting paper. They’ve bypassed the entire process of learning.

The source:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kzzyb2/professor_at_the_end_of_2_years_of_struggling/

UT System nixes faculty senates, approves restrictions on campus protests [ Texas Tribune ]

The flava:

The University of Texas System Board of Regents authorized campus presidents on Thursday to replace faculty senates with less independent versions of the bodies.

The decision is a turning point for the state’s largest university system that shifts academic and hiring decisions once left to faculty and university leaders into the hands of lawmakers and governor-appointed regents. . . .    

The article:

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/21/university-texas-system-faculty-senates-protests-campus-speech/

‘A nightmare': Students and faculty respond to Villanova campus shooting hoax [ NBC10 Philadelphia]

A desk with the greatest view [ CBS Sunday Morning ]

Caring Relationships Drive Revenue [ Get Down to College Business ]

Why does Reading University have a nuclear bunker? [ Chris Spargo ]

How College Financial Troubles Could Reshape the Student Experience [ NYTimes ]

The flava:

American higher education is lurching into an era of austerity. . . .   

The article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/us/college-financial-troubles-student-experience.html

Fraudulent Scientific Papers Are Rapidly Increasing, Study Finds [ NYTimes ]

The flava:

For years, whistle-blowers have warned that fake results are sneaking into the scientific literature at an increasing pace. A new statistical analysis backs up the concern.

A team of researchers found evidence of shady organizations churning out fake or low-quality studies on an industrial scale. And their output is rising fast, threatening the integrity of many fields.

“If these trends are not stopped, science is going to be destroyed,” said Luís A. Nunes Amaral, a data scientist at Northwestern University and an author of the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.

Science has made huge advances over the past few centuries only because new generations of scientists could read about the accomplishments of previous ones. Each time a new paper is published, other scientists can explore the findings and think about how to make their own discoveries.

“Science relies on trusting what others did, so you do not have to repeat everything,” Dr. Amaral said.

By the 2010s, journal editors and watchdog organizations were warning that this trust was under threat. They flagged a growing number of papers with fabricated data and doctored images. In the years that followed, the factors driving this increase grew more intense. . . .   

The article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/science/04hs-science-papers-fraud-research-paper-mills.html