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Category: Education

Stanford University’s dirty secrets, according to the student who exposed them

Stanford University’s dirty secrets, according to the student who exposed them

  How does a college freshman take down the president of Stanford University? Theo Baker became the youngest-ever recipient of the George Polk Award after exposing research misconduct tied to former Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Now, in his new book How to Rule the World, Baker argues that the story goes far beyond one university leader—and reveals how Stanford became the training ground for Silicon Valley’s most powerful people. Kara and Theo discuss Stanford’s secretive power networks, the university’s no-boundaries…

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How Big Tech steers the public school system in the service of its commercial interests

How Big Tech steers the public school system in the service of its commercial interests

Natasha Singer writes: One humid afternoon in the summer of 2025, representatives from Microsoft were waiting as some 200 teachers trooped into a conference hall in downtown Manhattan. The educators were there for a workshop on the school technology of the moment: artificial intelligence chatbots. The Microsoft team gave a presentation on their Copilot chatbot and asked the teachers to practice using it for tasks like generating emails to parents and customizing lesson plans. Microsoft instructors also screened an A.I….

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U.S. military family schools will indoctrinate kids on Western civilization and Christianity

U.S. military family schools will indoctrinate kids on Western civilization and Christianity

The Associated Press reports: The Department of Defense is introducing a course centered on Western civilization and Christianity this fall in the schools it operates for military families, part of an effort by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to redirect the education system toward patriotic values and classical learning. The Department of Defense Education Activity operates about 160 schools across 11 countries and educates roughly 70,000 students who are children of active-duty military or civilian service members. Conservatives have eyed the…

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Forget DeepSeek. China’s real ‘Sputnik moment’ is happening on campus as U.S. universities lose their advantage

Forget DeepSeek. China’s real ‘Sputnik moment’ is happening on campus as U.S. universities lose their advantage

Fortune reports: When DeepSeek unveiled an AI model last year that rivaled America’s best at a fraction of the cost, or when a Chinese hypersonic missile test caught U.S. intelligence off guard to the point where a top U.S. general called it “very close” to a “Sputnik moment”, the reaction each time was the same: that a handful of Chinese firms had suddenly pulled ahead. But a sweeping new National Bureau of Economic Research study of nearly 14 million Chinese…

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Can we stop AI from flooding scientific journals?

Can we stop AI from flooding scientific journals?

C&EN reports: “Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic,” begins a retracted paper in the Elsevier journal Surfaces and Interfaces. This is one of ChatGPT’s standard openers when responding to a user prompt. The researcher submitted the manuscript beginning with this line, and it passed peer review. No one noticed the mistake until after publication. Publishing is crucial for many scientists’ careers, especially those in academia, and a key part of securing jobs, funding, and tenure. The pressure…

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Diversity in graduate school linked to higher starting salaries

Diversity in graduate school linked to higher starting salaries

PsyPost reports: Recent research indicates that attending graduate school with a racially diverse group of peers is linked to higher median starting salaries upon graduation. The large study examined decades of data from business and law schools across the United States. The results were published in Nature. The United States Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action in college admissions in 2023. Justices opposing the practice argued that the educational benefits of diversity were too abstract for courts to evaluate…

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France becomes first EU country to ban social media access for under-15s

France becomes first EU country to ban social media access for under-15s

The Guardian reports: France’s parliament has approved a bill banning social media access for children under 15, making it the first EU country to bar children from apps such as TikTok. The president, Emmanuel Macron, has championed the ban as a key reform of his final term in office and pledged to enforce it by September. “France is leading the way in Europe when it comes to protecting our children and teenagers,” Macron said in a video posted on social…

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Reading is the ultimate cognitive enhancer

Reading is the ultimate cognitive enhancer

Neuroscience News reports: In his new book, Falk Huettig, Senior Investigator at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, brings together research spanning psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and education to answer that question. The result is a systematic account of how literacy reshapes memory, attention, language processing, and reasoning – and even abilities readers might not expect, like face recognition. Cognitive enhancement is having a moment, with people turning to better sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress management, and tools like caffeine or neurostimulation…

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Why science needs the humanities more than ever

Why science needs the humanities more than ever

Xin Fan writes: A narrative has taken hold that science and the humanities are at odds. In universities around the world, investment in cutting-edge technologies often comes at the expense of retrenchment in philosophy, history, literature and the arts. Contraction of the humanities is presented as an unavoidable cost of modernization. But that ‘zero sum’ logic is flawed. As science and technology race ahead, the world needs humanities research to understand the reasons and implications. My experience at ShanghaiTech University…

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Rising diesel costs from Iran war strain U.S. school budgets

Rising diesel costs from Iran war strain U.S. school budgets

Reuters reports: Soaring diesel prices since the onset of the Iran war are draining already tight U.S. school district budgets, making it more expensive to bus students and run generators in a shock officials say they will not be ​able to afford for long. School districts from Yakima, Washington, to Waco, Texas, are tapping emergency funding reserves to keep buses running. In remote Alaska, officials are scrambling to secure enough ‌fuel to keep the lights on, according to Reuters interviews….

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Epstein and his academic friends bonded through male supremacy

Epstein and his academic friends bonded through male supremacy

Lydia Wilson writes: When I read through many of the email threads between [John] Brockman [host of Edge], Epstein and various intellectuals, what was most jarring wasn’t the crude codes about women and sex that wouldn’t have been out of place in messages between teenage boys — the mass media coverage had to some extent prepared me for this boorish childishness of successful men. What unsettled me was, in fact, the familiarity of how these men were speaking to each…

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While fighting against regulation of social media, tech billionaires shield their own children

While fighting against regulation of social media, tech billionaires shield their own children

The New York Times reports: In November, Kim van Sparrentak, a Green Party lawmaker from the Netherlands, grabbed her headphones and headed for the exit of the European Parliament building. Moments earlier, she had participated in a heated debate over whether to bar young teenagers in Europe from social media platforms. Then a statement on a podcast she was listening to stopped her cold. It was a message from Meta opposing the social media ban proposal, Ms. van Sparrentak said…

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Technology is eroding the learning capabilities of children

Technology is eroding the learning capabilities of children

Fortune reports: In 2002, Maine became the first state to implement a statewide laptop program to some grade levels. Then-Governor Angus King saw the program as a way to put the internet at the fingertips of more children, who would be able to immerse themselves in information. By that fall, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative had distributed 17,000 Apple laptops to seventh graders across 243 middle schools. By 2016, those numbers had multiplied to 66,000 laptops and tablets distributed to…

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George Orwell called for a new way of thinking about science

George Orwell called for a new way of thinking about science

By Robert Colls, De Montfort University In October 1945, George Orwell responded to a letter from Mr J. Stewart Cook in the leftwing weekly newspaper Tribune calling for more science education. The call can hardly have come as a surprise. War had brought science and engineering to the fore – from the Spitfire fighter plane and radar to Bletchley Park’s codebreakers – and now that war was over, many thought it was time to build a brave new world. Science…

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University of Illinois Republicans club adopt slogan used by white supremacists

University of Illinois Republicans club adopt slogan used by white supremacists

Chicago Tribune reports: The Illini Republicans club at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is facing backlash after posting an illustration on social media of a masked gunman holding a weapon to a kneeling man’s head — alongside the caption, “Only traitors help invaders.” The Instagram post, published Friday, also says Alex Pretti and Renée Good — who were both fatally shot by federal agents in Minneapolis last month — had “voided their liberties the moment they decided they were…

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The shakedown: Trump’s DOJ pressured lawyers to ‘find’ evidence that UCLA had illegally tolerated antisemitism

The shakedown: Trump’s DOJ pressured lawyers to ‘find’ evidence that UCLA had illegally tolerated antisemitism

By Peter Elkind, ProPublica, and Katherine Mangan, The Chronicle of Higher Education This story was originally published by ProPublica On the morning of Thursday, July 31, James B. Milliken was enjoying a round of golf at the remote Sand Hills club in Western Nebraska when his cellphone buzzed. Milliken was still days away from taking the helm of the sprawling University of California system, but his new office was on the line with disturbing news: The Trump administration was freezing…

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