Education & Schools – MILESFORTIS

MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT FILED IN CASE CHALLENGING UNLAWFUL SEARCH

BELLEVUE, Wash. — July 16, 2026 — The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) has filed a motion for summary judgment in a case challenging the unconstitutional search of an 18-year-old high school senior’s vehicle that was based solely on the knowledge that he is a legal gun owner.

The case, Harrington v. Crawford, stems from an unlawful search of Hillsboro-Deering High School student Jack Harrington’s vehicle while it was parked on school grounds. Based only on an overheard conversation that Harrington lawfully owned a firearm, he was subjected to aggressive interrogation which culminated in his vehicle being searched without consent. No firearm was found during the illegal search as it was safely stored at his home, nowhere near the school campus.

“Entirely lawful and constitutionally protected conduct cannot be the grounds for a search,” said SAF Senior Director of Legal Operations Bill Sack. “School officials, especially when accompanied by law enforcement as was the case here, need at minimum reasonable suspicion to search a student’s vehicle. Here, those officials learning that our client was a gun owner gave them that suspicion. They are mistaken. If that were the case, student gun owners all over the country could be subject to repeated and endless harassment.”

As noted in the motion, “Defendants relied upon a week-old, stale report of a single comment made by Jack and overheard by an assistant coach…relating to Jack’s storage of his handgun in the glove box of his truck while at a gas station nowhere near campus – indisputably legal and constitutionally protected conduct. At no point during the interrogation, the search, or at any time since, have defendants brought forth a single shred of evidence of unlawful conduct by Jack. Moreover, defendants confirmed that they did not view Jack as a threat to school safety; they did not believe Jack had a weapon on his person during the interrogation; and Jack had no previous disciplinary issues.”

“District officials – and even a school resource officer who should know better – took it upon themselves to violate the constitutional rights of a peaceable, adult, firearm owner for no other reason than they learned of his status as a gun owner,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “This young man was interrogated and coerced into allowing school officials to search his vehicle because he chooses to exercise his rights as a private citizen. Law enforcement and school officials are required to understand the law and to follow it, and in this case, it appears they failed at both.”

Study finds nearly 90 percent of students fake progressive views to appease liberal professors.

College students at Northwestern and the University of Michigan increasingly hide their conservative beliefs, with 88 percent admitting to faking progressive views to succeed academically or socially.

Researchers warn that this climate of ideological conformity suppresses authentic expression and encourages performative morality among both students and professors.

Patrick McDonald ’29 | Michigan Correspondent

A new study has concluded that college students are increasingly faking conformity to liberal opinions in order to academically succeed.

The study, published on Aug. 12, was spearheaded by Northwestern University researchers Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman.

Between 2023 and 2025, the researchers conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduate students at both Northwestern University and the University of Michigan to examine how ideological pressure influences students’ beliefs.

They found that 88 percent of students admitted to pretending to harbor more progressive views than they genuinely endorse with the aim of succeeding academically or socially.

“We do not fault students for perpetuating a climate that is hostile to intellectual integrity,” Romm and Waldman wrote about the results. “We fault the faculty, administrators, and institutional leaders who built a system that rewards moral theater while punishing inquiry.”

More than 80 percent of surveyed students reported submitting classwork misrepresenting their true beliefs.

Regarding controversial topics such as gender, politics, and family, students consistently censored themselves. While 77 percent said they disagreed with the idea that gender identity should override biological sex in contexts like sports and healthcare, virtually none felt safe voicing that view.

Romm and Waldman argue that the climate of compliance in higher education undermines identity formation—replacing conviction with performance.

“These students were not cynical, but adaptive,” they wrote. “In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe.”

Waldman told Campus Reform that one of the “most compelling” findings of the study is the “role of fear” in the findings, and that the same influences affect students and professors alike.

“Our data suggest that many professors, concerned about professional repercussions or cancellation, engage in performative displays of progressive orthodoxy rather than authentic expression,” said Waldman.

Romm added that, without open inquiry, “we risk continued erosion of social cohesion, growing distrust, and a decline in the cognitive skills necessary to navigate complex societal challenges.”

Conservative students have historically faced backlash for their beliefs on college campuses. Last year, Fox News interviewed college students who said they felt unable to express conservative opinions at their respective institutions.

Belmont University student Mya Conrad described being “yelled at” by professors, while Wisconsin students William Blathras and Gaby Gerard reported fearing academic consequences.

Campus Reform has contacted Forest Romm for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.

Ohio: 116 School Districts Now Allow Armed Employees

Four years after Gov. Mike DeWine (R) signed legislation allowing school boards to choose to allow teachers and other employees to be armed, 116 school districts have chosen to allow armed employees for classroom defense.

WOWO reported that the figure of “116 school districts” is derived from state data “as of June 17.”

The Ohio Capital Journal noted that the 116 districts include “more than 70 Ohio school districts and 15 Christian schools…[with] staff members who are authorized to carry weapons on school grounds.”

Ohio Federation of Teachers President Melissa Cropper criticized the training requirements for the growing number of armed school employees, saying, “It’s not a sufficient amount of training. We’re talking about highly intense situations that require a lot of not only tactical training on how to use weapons, but how to deal with making split-second decisions.”

She did not provide an instance where an armed teacher or employee has harmed someone since the law was signed by DeWine.

Antwerp district superintendent Marty Miller explained that his district chose to arm teachers and employees because they are in a rural setting with a longer police response time.

He said, “It’s just letting the public know that your children are protected.”

American universities’ Chinese Students and Scholars Associations are Communist Party’s foreign missions in disguise.

‘At a time when China is escalating its attacks on our republic and the rest of the free world, the risks of not acting to restrict these associations far outweigh the benefits.’

Erik Durneika Opinion Editor

China is aggressively expanding its influence operations across the United States, with higher education acting as a major conduit for such malign activity. Most attention has been focused on U.S. universities accepting Chinese funding and China-linked researchers receiving taxpayer money. However, there’s another aspect of Chinese infiltration that deserves more attention: Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSAs).

There are 150 CSSA chapters at colleges and universities across the country. Though they appear to be harmless cultural groups at first glance, these organizations play a central role in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) united front work, which aims to monitor Chinese students abroad, stifle any form of opposition to the regime, and co-opt individuals who aren’t affiliated with the party.

CSSA constitutions, websites, and members reveal that Chinese consulates supervise and provide direct support to these groups. For example, the University of Connecticut CSSA chapter’s website says that it is an “official Chinese association supported by the Consulate General of the P.R. China in New York,” while the University of Michigan CSSA’s constitution states that it is accredited by the Chinese consulate in Chicago.

And in a Chinese social media post that has since been deleted, the University of Pittsburgh’s CSSA apparently admitted to receiving $6,000 per year from the Chinese consulate. These associations are doing as much as possible to obfuscate their ties to the CCP.

So, what’s at stake? First, and perhaps most immediately apparent, academic freedom and free speech.

There are countless instances of CSSAs censoring and intimidating students, researchers, and groups that challenge Beijing’s propaganda machine — a CSSA member assaulting an anti-CCP student protester at a Harvard University event, Columbia University canceling a human rights panel after CSSA backlash, a group of Chinese students disrupting a Brandeis University virtual event, and Chinese students taunting an Uyghur student speaker at Cornell University.

This type of behavior is a direct assault on our national sovereignty and seeks to create an environment of fear, all while pushing Beijing’s narrative. But I’d expect nothing less from America’s top adversary that operates in the gray zone, below the threshold of armed conflict.

These groups also pose a threat to U.S. national security. They act as another channel through which Beijing can recruit and mobilize Chinese nationals to steal intellectual property and sensitive information to aid its military buildup, which has accelerated in recent years. Intellectual property theft costs the U.S. economy anywhere from $400 billion to $600 billion per year, with China being the primary offender.

The response from American higher education to Chinese malfeasance through these associations has been abysmal and outright infuriating.

Columbia University suspended its CSSA branch in 2015 due to financial and student policy violations, only to reinstate the group’s club status not long after.

And at Harvard University, the Office of Academic Integrity and Student Conduct placed three anti-CCP undergraduate protestors on disciplinary probation and sent the CSSA-affiliated student who forcibly removed one of the protestors from the event an apology letter.

Caving to CSSAs’ demands to cancel events that the CCP considers sensitive counts as compliance. It serves only to legitimize these groups.

Given American academia’s lack of interest in addressing this issue, it’s time for the Trump administration to take action. The next best thing to banning these associations would be for the U.S. Department of State to label them as foreign missions under the Foreign Missions Act, coupled with aggressive enforcement. Such a designation is deserved considering CSSAs’ sources of funding and the manner in which they operate.

A foreign mission label would require chapters to receive official government approval for public events and to disclose information about financial transactions and personnel. In other words, CSSAs would be put under the federal microscope.

For too long, foreign adversaries have exploited the openness of American higher education. CSSAs are merely one part of the CCP problem on campuses across the country, but they’re an important one. At a time when China is escalating its attacks on our republic and the rest of the free world, the risks of not acting to restrict these associations far outweigh the benefits.

Washington must rise to the occasion as colleges and universities choose to look the other way.

Missouri Making Moves to Bump School Safety Up a Notch or 12

Keeping students safe is as universal of a goal as you’re going to find in such a divided country. The problem, however, is that we’re divided to a point that we can’t even agree on how to keep them safe. Some people want to restrict the rights of ordinary people to such a degree that they can delude themselves into thinking students can’t be hurt by violent people.

The rest of us recognize that violent people aren’t going to be stopped with laws. If they were, the laws against hurting kids would be more than enough.

So, in that vein, it seems Missouri is stepping up the game a few dozen notches and really taking the goal of keeping kids safe seriously.

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School president cites study finding guns don’t increase crime to oppose campus carry.

UPDATED – President Elizabeth Chilton’s opposition to campus carry included a study that found no link to increased crime

New Hampshire lawmakers should vote down campus carry because some people might feel less safe, according to a university president.

Editor’s note: The article has been updated to show the legislation is dead.

Legislators were considering House Bill 1793, which would prohibit public universities from regulating guns on campus and establish a commission to study campus carry. The bill officially died last Thursday, however.

According to a student government survey cited by The New Hampshire, a majority of respondents said they would be less likely to attend UNH if campus carry were allowed. In response to the perceived campus climate, the student senate passed a resolution opposing the bill.

President Elizabeth Chilton also took an institutional stance against the law, sending out both a campuswide message and testifying to the state senate judiciary committee. She (pictured) submitted testimony along with Don Birx, president of Keene State College and Plymouth State University, and Mark Collopy, the police chief for UNH.

They said “research from states that have adopted campus carry has found increased fear of crime, lower perceptions of campus safety, and reduced confidence in campus police.”

But neither study found a link to actual crime and campus carry.

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Student Injured in Antioch Shooting Sues AI Detection Company

We’ve written a lot about the use of AI to detect firearms. Proponents of the technology claim it not only works but can work faster than any other tool available to prevent school shootings. Some of these systems call the police immediately upon noticing a gun, even if it hasn’t been drawn.

Assuming, of course, they don’t misidentify a bag of Doritos as a firearm. Or a clarinet.

The problem with AI is that it’s more artificial than actually intelligent. It makes massive mistakes, and because of how it works, it can create panic and confusion when it creates a false positive.

But a student injured in the Antioch High School is taking aim at the company the school used for its AI gun detection system for failing to recognize the threat.

A student injured during the deadly shooting at Antioch High School has filed a lawsuit against the company behind the school’s AI-powered gun detection system, alleging the technology failed to detect the shooter’s handgun before shots were fired.

The lawsuit, filed May 1 in Davidson County Circuit Court, was brought by Antonyous Henin, who was 17 years old at the time of the Jan. 22, 2025 shooting at Antioch High School. The complaint names Virginia-based Omnilert LLC and Lebanon-based System Integrations, Inc. as defendants.

On January 22, 2025, 17-year-old Soloman Henderson opened fire in the Antioch High School cafeteria, killing 16-year-old Josselin Dayana Corea Escalante before taking his own life.

According to the complaint, Henin was injured and another student was wounded.

At the time of the shooting, Antioch High School did not have traditional metal detectors in place. Instead, the school had AI-powered security cameras designed to identify weapons….
The lawsuit alleges Antioch High School had an Omnilert gun detection system installed and operational at the time of the shooting. The system was designed to use artificial intelligence to detect visible firearms and trigger emergency alerts.

Henin’s attorneys claim Omnilert marketed the system as technology that could “detect firearms — both indoors and outdoors — before a shot is fired” and “turn passive cameras into life-saving tools.”

Yeah, well, that worked out swimmingly, didn’t it?

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Missouri schools could hire armed ‘rangers’ under bill sent to governor

A bill to create a new faction of school protection officers with “physical fitness superior to a U.S. Marine” got final approval from Missouri lawmakers in the final days of the legislative session.

The legislation seeks to allow schools to hire volunteer or paid guards called “Missouri Rangers” who could carry a gun on school grounds.

The bill’s sponsor, Republican state Sen. David Gregory of Chesterfield, told senators he wanted to give schools “a choice to have a higher trained armed guard.”

He compared current protection-officer requirements to that of a “Walmart guard with a gun.” Currently, schools can appoint teachers and administrators as school protection officers, allowing them to carry a gun or “self-defense spray device” with training and a concealed carry permit.

School protection officers must undergo a minimum of 112 hours of training, according to a Department of Public Safety rule. The state also has school resource officers, which are law enforcement officers with an additional 40+ hours of training related to school safety.

Gregory’s legislation proposes a maximum of 160 hours of training, specifying that the program must include lessons on “close-quarter combat,” bomb and arson training, de-escalation and others.

Prior to training, rangers must pass a physical fitness test. For those 35 and younger, they must “complete a minimum of 40 pushups in less than one minute” and be able to run 1½ miles in less than 12½ minutes. The legislation asks the state’s Peace Office Standards and Training Commission to identify lower standards for older applicants.

The bill’s first pass through the Senate brought little opposition, garnering the support of groups like the St. Louis County Police Association in its first committee hearing. In early April, just two senators voted against the proposal, but Senate Democrats unanimously voted against it when it returned to the chamber last week with less than a day before session adjourned for the year.

House Democrats unanimously rejected the proposal, uncomfortable with the proposition of having more firearms in schools.

“The answer to guns in schools is not more guns in schools,” said state Rep. Elizabeth Fuchs, a St. Louis Democrat, advocating instead for mental health support for students.

Their arguments did not sway House Republicans, who unanimously voted in support of the bill.

State Rep. Burt Whaley, a Republican from Clever, has experience training school staff on what to do in case of a shooting. The key benefit of having a ranger, he said, was being able to quickly respond to threats.

In one school he trained, the local law enforcement estimated that it could take up to 45 minutes for them to arrive.

“It is typically another person with a gun that knows how to use it, that’s trained how to use it … they’re usually the ones that are able to subdue (a threat),” he said.

The bill follows other proposals passed last year addressing security concerns, like laws directing schools to share emergency operations plans with local law enforcement and report school safety incidents to the state’s education department.

Some of the provisions passed in last year’s legislation have yet to be implemented because of a lack of funding, such as a requirement to equip schools with bleeding control kits and train staff on how to apply a tourniquet.

Gov. Mike Kehoe has until mid-July to sign or veto bills before they become law.

DeSantis Signs Law Arming Trained College, University Faculty After FSU Shooting

A year after a gunman opened fire on Florida State University, trained college and university faculty can carry guns onto campus under a bill Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Friday.

“It puts the bad guys on the defense — they don’t know who’s going to be able to offer them resistance,” DeSantis said during a Miami press conference. “We’ve taken this more seriously than probably anyone else has … in our state’s history.”

He referred to Florida’s guardian program, a state initiative allowing schools to train certain staff or hire security to wield firearms for self-defense. It was created for public K-12 schools in 2018 following shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 dead. The tragedy unfolded while a sheriff’s deputy delayed confronting the gunman for nearly five minutes.

DeSantis later removed him from office.

Under the new law, HB 757, the program will be extended to colleges and universities. Staff hoping to become guardians must complete 144 hours of training — 132 hours with firearms. Although the program isn’t mandatory, college and university presidents have the power to appoint their school guardians.

“Sadly but undeniably, institutions of learning have become targets of violence in our state and other states,” Senate sponsor Don Gaetz, a Republican from Crestview, said in a written statement.

“As parents and grandparents, we want our students to be safe and secure when they are on campus. This legislation ensures our institutions will use commonsense safeguards as well as high-tech systems to prevent violence where possible and respond quickly and effectively when needed.”

The measure comes 13 months after 20-year-old Phoenix Ikner shot to death two and wounded five others outside FSU’s busy Student Union in the middle of final exams. Police shot him in the jaw three minutes after he opened fire, and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

Despite the speedy response from law enforcement, lawmakers agreed new reinforcements were needed. This included funding for more locks on classroom doors — after some students reported that they couldn’t lock themselves away from the shooter — and increased security measures.

Other provisions in the package signed Friday include:

Makes it a second-degree felony to fire a weapon within 1,000 feet of a school.
Promotes the use of a mobile suspicious activity reporting tool, like FortifyFL, to quickly alert law enforcement to dangerous circumstances.
Requires a student’s threat assessment reports and psychological evaluations to be transferred from a K-12 school to their college or university upon enrollment.
Mandates schools create family reunification plans, active assailant response plans, and threat-management teams.
Requires schools to annually conduct security risk assessments.
Increases training for faculty and staff to identify and respond to mental health problems.
Further connects students with mental health services.

Oops…Class Cancelled After High School Resource Officer Leaves – And Loses – His Gun in a Bathroom.

“Classes have been canceled Tuesday at Forest View Educational Center in Arlington Heights [Illinois] after a school resource officer lost their firearm in a restroom, the school said. Arlington Heights police said a school resource officer removed his service weapon while inside a restroom just before dismissal Monday. He realized it was gone moments later.”

As a trained law enforcement officer, that can be…awkward. But remember, our betters in the gun control industry tell us — with monotonous regularity — that only LEOS have the training, skills and mindset necessary for the awesome responsibility that is carrying a firearm.

Still, you have to wonder how long after his constitutional it took for Officer Snoozy to realize that his pistol wasn’t in his holster. Long enough, apparently for someone to have grabbed the gat before the cop could double back and check the stall.

Officers searched the building, reviewed surveillance video, and called in multiple K-9 unites trained to detect weapons, but the gun was never found. A school officials said they received confirmation that the gun is not in the building.

We certainly hope it turns up soon. The students will love the free day off today on a suburban Chicago spring Tuesday, but those young skulls full of mush need some educating. Because after all, the children are our future. We need to teach them well and let them lead the way. And it would be really great if that curriculum covers gun handling basics like… it’s a really bad idea to unholster your firearm and leave it in a bathroom stall.

BLUF
“Social-justice education is harming the very students it was meant to help,” Wilson concludes. “America’s most marginalized children are being left less educated, more excluded, and more vulnerable.” That’s not justice.

Focus on teaching kids to read — not fixing ‘root causes.’

Democrats “lost the plot on schools,” writes Charles Barone in Education Next. He suggests a “credible, student-centered education agenda” to regain leadership.

Democrats can “rejuvenate public education,” and “strengthen ties with Black, Latino, and suburban women — voting blocs that care deeply about school quality,” writes Thomas Toch in the Washington Monthly. But progressives and centrists have start talking to each other — and not just in insults.

Fordham’s Mike Petrilli spotlights the discussion on Schooled. In a follow-up, Vlad Kogan challenges Barone’s statement that, “public education desperately needs strengthening, but policymakers must address root causes by addressing the many hurdles in students’ lives that compound their challenges in classrooms.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong, writes Kogan. As he writes in his book, No Adult Left Behind, “people have been saying the way to fix urban education is to fix “root causes” since at least the 1960s.”

“It’s much easier to teach an elementary school child how to read than to fix poverty, racism, and other root causes,” Kogan writes. “If we don’t know how to use public policy to ensure that all kids how to read by the end of third grade, the idea that we’ll figure out how to use policy to fix much more difficult issues underlying ‘root causes’ is just implausible.”

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There are things that are too stupid to be said by anyone but a professor of education. – Charlie Martin

It’s called ‘algebra’ because the Arab who figured it out called it “al Jabr”

Prof: Algebra, geometry perpetuate “whiteness”, “unearned privilege” in society.

A math education professor at the University of Illinois has argued in a recently published academic book that algebraic and geometry skills perpetuate “unearned privilege” among white people.

Rochelle Gutierrez, a professor at the University of Illinois, made the claim in a anthology for math teachers, arguing that teachers must be aware of the “politics that mathematics brings” in society.

In the book chapter, the professor explains that she sees her role as a math educator not just in the way of an educator, but that of an activist against whiteness, which she claims facilitates “microagresssions” and “privilege” between those who excel in math and those who do not.

“On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White,” Gutierrez argued.

Gutierrez also worries that algebra and geometry perpetuate privilege, fretting that “curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans.”

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Arizona Moves Forward With K-12 Firearm Safety Education Bill

Arizona Senate Bill 1424 has passed the Senate and has passed the House Education Committee and the House Rules Committee. The bill requires school districts and charter schools to provide age-appropriate firearm safety awareness training in all grades, kindergarten through 12th grade.

The instruction is to be objective and not promote firearms ownership or any political position. The instruction is to be limited to accident prevention and personal safety awareness. It is to include guidance on safe firearms storage in homes and vehicles. The instruction is to provide guidance on what to do if a firearm is encountered, including not touching it and notifying an adult.

Inside the bill, there is a long list of restrictions on six things that may not be included in the instruction:

3. NOT INCLUDE ANY OF THE FOLLOWING:

(a) A LIVE FIREARM.

(b) AMMUNITION OR SIMULATED AMMUNITION.

(c) A DEMONSTRATION THAT INVOLVES HANDLING, OPERATING, LOADING, UNLOADING OR FIRING A FIREARM.

(d) INSTRUCTION THAT IS INTENDED TO TRAIN STUDENTS IN THE USE OF FIREARMS.

(e) A MORAL JUDGMENT REGARDING LAWFUL FIREARM POSSESSION.

(f) AN INQUIRY, SURVEY OR REQUEST FOR INFORMATION ABOUT WHETHER A STUDENT, STUDENT’S PARENT OR MEMBER OF THE STUDENT’S HOUSEHOLD OWNS, POSSESSES OR MAY POSSESS A FIREARM OR ABOUT THE FIREARMS STORAGE PRACTICES OF A STUDENT, STUDENT’S PARENT OR MEMBER OF THE STUDENT’S HOUSEHOLD.

The Arizona Citizens Defense League (AZCDL) supports the legislation.

An advocate for gun storage legislation made the argument that the legislature should pass a bill requiring safe storage of guns instead. The SB 1424 is considered a partisan bill, supported mostly by Republicans, according to Legiscan.

Fatal firearms accidents have declined greatly since the 1930’s high mark. The number of firearms per person has increased about 3X during that period.

Firearms are among the many hazards children encounter as they grow up. Education, not prohibition, is the surest answer to their safety.

The bill has passed the Arizona legislature, which is narrowly controlled by Republicans. Republicans have a 17-13 advantage in the Senate and a 33-27 advantage in the House. SB 1424 might avoid a veto from Governor Hobbs (D), but it seems unlikely. Governor Katie Hobbs has earned a reputation for the number of vetoes she has given. Governor Hobbs is facing serious re-election challenges. She might sign SB 1424 to claim she is not against rights protected by the Second Amendment.

SB 1424 severely restricts what may be taught to students. This may be necessary to secure passage in a legislature with a very small Republican majority.

The bill is a step toward greater understanding of firearms safety. It makes students more aware of firearms. It has the advantage of not being overtly against the ownership or use of firearms. As “age-appropriate” instruction on firearms safety, later grade levels might include information about the legal status of firearms in Arizona. It is difficult for people to obey the law if they do not know what the law is. Firearms are among the many potentially hazardous items children encounter as they grow up.

It is far better to gun-proof the child than to attempt to create a gun-free environment.

Functional Illiteracy

The Age of Functional Illiteracy

Functional illiteracy was once a social diagnosis, not an academic one. It referred to those who could technically read but could not follow an argument, sustain attention, or extract meaning from a text. It was never a term one expected to hear applied to universities. And yet it has begun to surface with increasing regularity in conversations among faculty themselves. Literature professors now admit—quietly in offices, more openly in essays—that many students cannot manage the kind of reading their disciplines presuppose. They can recognise words; they cannot inhabit a text.

The evidence is no longer anecdotal. University libraries report historic lows in book borrowing. National literacy assessments show long-term declines in adult reading proficiency. Commentators in The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The New York Times describe a generation for whom long-form reading has become almost foreign. A Victorian novel, once the ordinary fare of undergraduate study, now requires extraordinary accommodation. Even thirty pages of assigned reading can provoke anxiety, resentment, or open resistance.

It would be dishonest to ignore the role of the digital world in this transformation. Screens reward speed, fragmentation, and perpetual stimulation; sustained attention is neither required nor encouraged. But to lay the blame solely at the feet of technology is a convenient evasion. The crisis of reading within universities is not merely something that has happened to the academy. It is something the academy has, in significant measure, helped to produce.

The erosion of reading was prepared by intellectual shifts within the humanities themselves—shifts that began during the canon wars of the late twentieth century. Those battles were never only about which books should be taught. They were about whether literature possessed inherent value, whether reading required discipline, whether difficulty was formative or oppressive, and whether the humanities existed to shape students or merely to affirm them. In the decades that followed, entire traditions of reading were dismantled with remarkable confidence and astonishing speed.

The result is a moment of institutional irony. The very disciplines charged with preserving literary culture helped undermine the practices that made such culture possible. What we are witnessing now is not simply a failure of students to read, but the delayed consequence of ideas that taught generations of readers to approach texts with suspicion rather than attention, critique rather than encounter.

This essay is part of a larger project to trace that history, to explain how a war over the canon helped usher in an age in which reading itself is slipping from our grasp, and why the consequences of that war are now returning to the academy with unmistakable force.

Montana Accidentally Made Things Right on Gun-Free School Zones

I don’t think that schools should be totally gun-free zones. While I get that Bruen said that sensitive places could be gun-free, and schools are probably about as sensitive a place as you can name, I don’t think that barring lawful carry in schools for staff and parents is a winning strategy. After all, how many school shootings have we seen despite the schools having this status?

Yeah, plenty.

But the truth is that in most places, schools are as off-limits as they come. At least they are when it’s K-12 schools. Colleges are a different matter in many states, but below that level? The rules are firm.

And those rules include a “buffer zone” of sorts that prohibits the carrying of firearms around the school, regardless of most any other factor.

And Montana accidentally exposed a loophole and made things right, even if that’s not quite what they were trying to do.

Sometimes the most consequential gun control stories don’t start with a bill banning firearms. They start with lawmakers trying to expand freedom — and discovering that the Constitution doesn’t bend the way critics expect it to.

That is exactly what just happened in Montana.

In an effort to strengthen the right to carry, Montana lawmakers may have effectively erased gun-free school zones everywhere except on school property itself. Not through activism. Not through litigation designed to gut federal law. But through their own permitless carry statutes — and a federal court noticed.

The result is a ruling that has left gun-control advocates furious, school administrators uneasy, and Second Amendment supporters pointing out an inconvenient truth: when the state recognizes the right to carry as a right, federal carve-outs start to fall apart.

It all boils down to a guy who would go for a walk near a school. Sometimes, he’d carry a gun openly, and other times, it would be concealed. Local police told the school that he wasn’t breaking any state law, so they couldn’t do anything about it. The school moved kids away from the man and tried to erect visual barriers so no one would see him.

Eventually, the feds stepped in, arrested him, and saw the whole thing thrown out.

Why?

The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that because Montana statutorily authorizes concealed carry for eligible citizens, those citizens qualify for the federal licensing exception.

In plain terms: if everyone is licensed by law, then everyone qualifies for the exemption.

The court dismissed the charges and made it clear that the outcome wasn’t an accident; it was the logical result of Montana’s legislative choices.

The ruling emphasized that Montana did not delegate licensing authority to agencies or local officials. The Legislature itself granted the authority. Congress, the court said, did not clearly prohibit states from doing that.

As a result of that ruling, though, gun-free school zones are confined exclusively to the school itself, not the area around the school.

If schools are going to be gun-free zones, this is how it should be. The idea that the area around the school is also gun-free is a major problem because, frankly, people travel by those schools all the time. They have to in order to get to where they’re going, and unless they’re licensed under state law, they may be committing a felony.

The “buffer zone” thing has always been wrong, but Montana accidentally fixed it for residents there. Instead of just saying a license isn’t needed, they licensed everyone, which had an unintended but positive effect regarding the whole school zone thing.

Maybe other states should address this via their own constitutional carry laws. Most didn’t take quite the same approach as Montana, but they could make that happen and change things once and for all.

It would be a win for gun rights, sanity, and everything else decent in the universe, and the anti-gunners would still have their allegedly gun-free schools.

Again, not that it seems to do much good.

Brown Lawyers Up After Bungled Response to Mass Shooting, Retaining Former US Attorney
Security lapses have drawn scrutiny as Brown faces mounting questions over its response to the attack

Brown University has retained former federal prosecutor Zachary Cunha as it bolsters its legal team in the aftermath of last week’s mass shooting that killed two students and wounded nine others.

“Brown works routinely with outside counsel whose expertise complements that of the University’s Office of the General Counsel. In this case, we retained Zachary Cunha, the former United States Attorney for the District of Rhode Island, to assist the University in coordinating with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies,” Brown said in a statement.

Cunha, who stepped down earlier this year as U.S. attorney for the District of Rhode Island, joined the law firm Nixon Peabody in March.

The decision to lawyer up comes after Brown faces increased scrutiny over its security policies in the wake of the shooting. Emergency sirens never sounded after the attack, and campus services took 20 minutes to send an alert out to students. Students then received a flurry of alerts that repeatedly conveyed incomplete or inaccurate information.

In recent months campus security received many complaints, including frustrations from law enforcement that security was not disclosing information surrounding bomb and shooting threats across campus. In October the school’s Security Patrolperson’s Association issued a vote of confidence in the university’s director of public safety and emergency management.

The public safety department also decided to decrease the number of field officers to make room for more administrative positions. The Patrolperson’s Association said this decision “directly contributed to an all-time low in morale and has strained the department’s ability to effectively serve the Brown University community.”

Brown could face legal issues over these lapses. At least two law firms have begun soliciting potential plaintiffs for civil lawsuits tied to the shooting, Providence Journal reported.

Anti-liberty/gun cracktivist’s
By Mike McDaniel

Some things, death and taxes among them, never change. In the same category are the specious arguments of anti-liberty/gun cracktivists. Whenever a horrific crime like a mass shooting occurs, they blame the gun and the Americans who would never commit such a crime.

They also have additional narratives they hope Americans can be tricked into believing, such as virtually every mass attack is carried out by white men, all of whom are domestic terrorist, racist, transphobic white supremacist, Ultra-MAGA, Nazi, haters determined to destroy “our democracy.”

One such cracktivist is apparently John Davenport:

Graphic: Fordham University Faculty Site. Public Domain.

Dr. Davenport tells us the idea of greater security for students and the public at large is a “fallacy,” and “would not make us much safer.” He should know. He’s a professor of peace and justice studies, which obviously makes him an expert about peace and justice and stuff.

Think about it for a minute. How much would it actually cost to put armed guards in every single store and restaurant, every 300 feet or so on beaches and at open air events, in every movie theater and every 200 feet at concerts, at every entrance to every building at any hospital, college, school, church, temple or mosque, at all streets junction where lots of traffic piles up – and so on?

Actually, he’s sort of right. In 2013 even the NRA was advocating armed guards in every school. The usual suspects were against that, and the idea eventually died because the costs were—and are—simply too high. The numbers aren’t exact, but there are more than 110,000 K-12 public and private schools in America. missiongraduatenm.org/number-of-schools-in-the-us/ Putting even one, full-time armed guard in each school is prohibitively expensive, and far more than one would be necessary.

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BLUF
The infrastructure of American decline is operating at full scale right now. The mechanisms are completely visible to anyone willing to look. The solutions are clear and well-defined. The only remaining question is whether enough Americans will demand action before the window of opportunity closes permanently.
Which will America choose?

How America’s Education System Became a Weapon Against Itself
Manufacturing Hatred: How $13 Billion Taught a Generation to Despise Jews and Their Country

When college students tore down posters of kidnapped Israeli children in October 2023, parents asked: where did this come from? The answer lies in curriculum materials developed at Brown University. These materials reached approximately one million students annually in roughly 8,000 high schools across America. What teachers didn’t know, and what parents never learned, is that the professor who shaped these materials was funded by a Middle Eastern government. His purpose was to advance one specific narrative: Israel as a settler colonial project. Not to debate it. Not to present multiple perspectives. To establish it as fact.

“This is not a debate,” Professor Beshara Doumani told a Brown audience in 2016. “And it’s not meant to be a debate.”

This is the root of American antisemitism’s resurgence. But antisemitism is just the visible symptom of something larger. The same infrastructure that taught a generation to hate Jews is now teaching them to hate America. The same foreign funding mechanisms that delegitimized Israel are delegitimizing Western civilization itself. America is being systematically dismantled. One classroom at a time. One algorithm at a time. One generation at a time.

The Hidden Infrastructure

Eleven Middle East Studies centers at America’s elite universities receive $260,000 each annually from the Department of Education under Title VI. That totals $2.9 million in taxpayer funding (National Association of Scholars, 2022). The Cold War-era program was originally designed to develop regional expertise for national security purposes. It became a pipeline for foreign influence when universities discovered they could supplement these federal grants with something far more lucrative.

Since 1981, American universities have accepted $13.1 billion from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait (Bard, 2024). Qatar alone contributed nearly $6 billion. Roughly 73% of these contributions are worth approximately $10.7 billion. None of these billions have any publicly stated purpose despite federal disclosure requirements (Bard, 2024).

The scale is staggering. Cornell received $2.3 billion. Carnegie Mellon took $1.05 billion. Georgetown and Texas A&M each accepted over $1 billion. When you look at Georgetown’s records, you find more than $1 billion with no stated purpose. Just blank spaces where explanations should be.

Here’s what we do know. Saudi Arabia gave Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center $20 million. The funding was structured to “follow” the center’s director. This gave the Saudi government effective control over who held the position (Middle East Forum, 2020). Qatar Foundation International sponsored K-12 teacher training sessions. They covered travel and expenses for American educators attending workshops on Middle East history (Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, March 2025). At least one donation explicitly funded a Palestinian Studies professorship at Brown. The position went to someone who supports boycotting Israel (Bard, 2024).

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This is the easily discredited (as all Marxist ideas)”Labor Theory of Value”
Robert Heinlein illuminated this in Starship Troopers:

“Of course, the Marxian definition of value is ridiculous. All the work one cares to add will not turn a mud pie into an apple tart; it remains a mud pie, value zero.

By corollary, unskillful work can easily subtract value; an untalented cook can turn wholesome dough and fresh green apples, valuable already, into an inedible mess, value zero.

Conversely, a great chef can fashion of those same materials a confection of greater value than a commonplace apple tart, with no more effort than an ordinary cook uses to prepare an ordinary sweet.

These kitchen illustrations demolish the Marxian theory of value — the fallacy from which the entire magnificent fraud of communism derives — and to illustrate the truth of the common-sense definition as measured in terms of use.

ASU professor calls traditional grading racist, suggests ‘labor-based grading’ instead

Arizona State University professor Asao Inoue recently ranted about “White language supremacy in writing classrooms,” during which he called for abolishing traditional grading in favor of “labor-based grading.”

The latter method scores assignments based on the amount of effort students put towards in the work, devaluing quality and accuracy in the grading.

During Nov. 5 lecture at the University of Tennessee titled “The Possibilities of Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies”, Inoue claimed that “White language supremacy in writing classrooms is due to the uneven and diverse linguistic legacies that everyone inherits, and the racialized white discourses that are used as standards, which give privilege to those students who embody those habits of white language already”.

In order to rid the classroom of the “Habits of White Language”, Inoue advocated for grading to be based on the time spent on assignments, a move he claims “structurally changes everyone’s relationship to dominant standards of English that come from elite, masculine, heteronormative, ableist, white racial groups of speakers,” The College Fix reported.

Inoue paused several times throughout the speech, according to The College Fix, to allow the audience to practice being “anti-racist” by observing themselves “participating in racism, engaging in white fragility, in white rage, or in white language supremacy”.

Inoue has spent a considerable amount of time promoting his grading philosophy. As Campus Reform reported in March, he wrote a 358 page book titled Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom.

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