August 17, 2026

TO ASK THE QUESTION IS TO ANSWER IT: Why Is the University of Michigan Hiding Grades?

Starting in fall 2027, the University of Michigan will exclude first-semester grades from overall GPAs for first-year students in its College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, purportedly to curb a “mental health crisis.” The university declined to tell the Wall Street Journal how it decided to launch its “grade covering” pilot program. But university documents suggest that grade covering is part of a larger effort to reshape the university around the students it admits rather than expecting those students to adapt to a demanding academic environment.

Starting in fall 2027, the University of Michigan will exclude first-semester grades from overall GPAs for first-year students in its College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, purportedly to curb a “mental health crisis.” The university declined to tell the Wall Street Journal how it decided to launch its “grade covering” pilot program. But university documents suggest that grade covering is part of a larger effort to reshape the university around the students it admits rather than expecting those students to adapt to a demanding academic environment.

It looks to me like the school is just setting at-risk student up to fail later rather than sooner.

Posted at 2:46 pm by Stephen Green

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Hollywood’s Climate Change Campaign Falls Flat with Voters?

You can’t blame Hollywood for not trying.

Actors have done more than commit their time and energy to Climate Change projects. They’ve used their bully pulpits to push the green movement and support progressive politicians to further the cause.

Leonardo DiCaprio, whose carbon footprint makes him vulnerable to hypocrite charges, used his Oscar speech to promote the Climate Change agenda.

The actor also produced multiple documentaries on the subject and starred in Adam McKay’s Climate Change satire “Don’t Look Up.” That film earned multiple Oscar nominations, another way the industry promoted the green cause.

All that messaging. All that money. All those films. Speech after speech after speech.

The issue appears to either be shrinking the minds of the public or, perhaps, only holding steady.

Environmental author Bjorn Lomborg has a theory as to why this is happening.

Movie genres die off on a regular basis. Hollywood made comparatively few westerns, and musicals where actors sing and dance with an unseen orchestra behind them, after the early 1970s, despite both genres being a staple of the industry for the previous four decades. That same decade, prior to Star Wars,  science fiction was Hollywood’s preferred way to communicate a looming environmental doomsday, via movies such as Silent Running and Logan’s Run. Most of those films were middling successes at best. Alongside the hypocrisy of  Leonardo DiCaprio lecturing us on climate change when he routinely jets off in his private plane to star in films that have the budget and carbon footprint of a South American country, there’s something very unseemly about using all those resources to lecture us on a looming environmental apocalypse only to expect the audience to all hop in their cars and sit in an air-conditioned theater. As the original movie moguls reportedly told their writers, “We’ll make the pictures; let Western Union deliver the messages.”

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: SCOTUS takes up pre-K religious discrimination case against Colorado.

One consequence of Colorado’s lurch to the political left has been the adoption of massive new state and regulatory programs. (This has led, predictably enough, to large budget deficits and neglect of core government services). Among the new programs is one that enables residents, including undocumented immigrants, to send children to pre-kindergarten (pre-K) schools at taxpayer expense.

However, Roman Catholic pre-K schools found themselves excluded from participating because the law mandated that “each preschool provider provide … an equal opportunity to enroll and receive preschool services regardless of … sexual orientation [or] gender identity.”

Of course, requiring acceptance of non-binary gender ideology directly contradicts most traditional religious teachings, including Catholic doctrine. Moreover, at the pre-school level, one might suspect that gender dysphoria is more likely the product of adult mismanagement than the child’s real proclivities.

As if this were not enough, the Colorado Department of Early Childhood, which administers the pre-school program, adopted regulations permitting schools to discriminate in ways favored by “woke” ideology. For example, they are permitted to give preferential treatment to certain racial groups and, in the phrase of the program director, “the LGBTQ community.” The program director justified this by saying that the beneficiaries of this treatment were groups that, in America, historically faced discrimination.

Stay tuned…

Posted at 1:44 pm by Stephen Green

STEPHEN MILLER: The Media Strategy to Turn Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Into Taylor Swift.

The TMZification of our media will seize on the opportunity to make Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s personal love life the center of cultural curiosity of the presidential race. Who she is seen out on the town with, who she is having dinner with, who she just broke up with, or who she is engaged to. They see this as an opportunity to do the impossible — to finally rescue control from Donald Trump, who has had a stranglehold on media attention for the past decade.

We know this because she’s already opened the door and let the media and her audience into her home.

Get ready for it. Get ready for “AOC 24/7” — who she’s dating (an athlete or musician or actor, maybe?), “AOC spotted court-side,” “AOC spotted on the red carpet,” “AOC spotted backstage” — and the press to create a media and political phenomenon that cannot be countered by other Democrats in a presidential primary.

Just as Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce tie the knot and exit into the background of American pop culture, the ground is ripe for someone to take Taylor’s place, and it appears as though someone already has.

The DNC-MSM’s transformation of someone who seven years ago wanted to ban “farting cows and airplanes” into the second coming of Taylor Swift will be astonishing to watch.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

KURT SCHLICHTER: The Death of Academic Fraud Jason Arday Won’t Shut Us Up.

Regardless, it was entirely predictable that the left would use his unfortunate demise to try to shut us up, to place all criticism of woke charlatans off limits because the subject of the critique might decide to do something desperate. They can’t help themselves but act out irrationally, you see. The fact that this tactic deprives the minority of any agency is no shock; there’s no racist like a leftist, who considers minorities to be nothing more than political marionettes unable to control their own actions. We’re supposed to give them a pass because the targets of our criticism have no agency. It’s like that NSFW scene in Blazing Saddles where the sheriff keeps the townspeople from lynching him by sticking a gun to his head—“He’s just crazy enough to do it!” Except this time the townspeople were not trying to lynch an innocent man and didn’t back off, and he did pull the figurative trigger.

We’re not going to play their game. We’re not going to hold fire for fear of feelz. We’re not going to ignore the truth lest the liar lash out at himself or others. Sometimes the truth hurts, but the only people the truth hurts are people exposed doing something they shouldn’t be doing. The truth is more important than feelings. And the truth is more important than Arday’s life. If the choice we are presented with is that Jason Arday will go on living a lie and degrading our civilization by doing so, or that Jason Arday might hurt himself, it’s Option 2 every day of the week. We’re not going to be held hostage or intimidated or shamed into silence and, therefore, complicity.

Related: Cleverly: Cambridge used Arday for bragging rights.

Jason Arday was used by the University of Cambridge for “bragging rights”, Sir James Cleverly has claimed.

The shadow communities minister said that the late 41-year-old would not have been in such a “terrible” and “personally exposed position” had universities done their due diligence.

Sir James added that higher education establishments presented Mr Arday with “glee” because of his age and ethnicity rather than his talent.

British media rushed to make Arday a superstar with similar “glee” and absolutely no checks into the accuracy of his research or his preposterous claims about his life experiences:

Related: The Trouble with Hiding the Faculty.

In a move that I find completely and utterly shocking, but not truly unexpected, the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education staff list is now offline.

Try to access it and you get a simple message: “You are not authorized to access this page.”

While this is hugely important to me as a professor, it wouldn’t be odd to ask why should anyone in America care that the faculty directory of an education school at a British university has disappeared? My answer is that what is going on with a former professor at the University of Cambridge represents a much bigger problem that has gone wrong in higher education.

The omertà — it’s not just for the mafia anymore.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

I WENT TO AN ANTI-ISRAEL DINNER PARTY. IT DID NOT GO AS PLANNED. They described it as “a safe space for difficult conversations.” What they really wanted was an Israeli who would sit quietly and confess:

“Hysterical? I am the calmest person here. I am merely no longer cushioning the information for people who consider contradiction a hate crime.”

“You are proving every stereotype about pro-Israel people,” Nadia said.

“You mean Jews? Which stereotype? That we eventually lose patience after being lectured by people who discovered the Middle East six months ago?”

“You’re impossible.”

“No. I’m inconvenient. There is a difference.”

I picked up my jacket. The room watched me with the shocked resentment of aristocrats who had just discovered the footman could read. At the door, Oliver made one final attempt at magnanimity: “I’m sorry you didn’t feel heard.”

“I was heard perfectly well. That is why everyone is upset.”

“We may simply have to agree to disagree.”

“No. You may have to agree to read.”

He folded his arms. “Do you genuinely believe you’re the only person here who understands the issue?”

“No,” I said. “I believe I’m the only person here who has made the vulgar effort.”

Beatrice opened the door. The conversation, she said, had become unsafe. I thanked her for the meal.

Outside, the night air was cool and gloriously free of moral vocabulary. I walked home reflecting on the strange burden of being “pro-Israel” in polite society. One is expected to arrive with evidence, history, nuance, empathy, military expertise, legal precision, and a detailed alternative strategy for every available course of action. The other side need only arrive with adjectives: colonial, genocidal, apartheid, brutal.

“Hannah Arendt had it right,” Patrick Moynihan once said. “She said one of the great advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

“WELL, YEAH,” SAY AMERICAN LEFTIES:

Posted at 12:24 pm by Stephen Green

THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA Administrator ‘extremely confident’ in Artemis 3 mission in 2027. “The Artemis 3 mission will begin with the launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which will send a test version of its Blue Moon Mark 2 lander into low Earth orbit. That will be followed days later by the launch of the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, which will rendezvous and dock with Blue Origin’s vehicle.”

Posted at 11:40 am by Stephen Green

FROM THE ONGOING “WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO TUCKER?” CHRONICLES:

It helps to remember that Greenwald is a commie and Carlson is… whatever the hell he is now.

Posted at 11:22 am by Stephen Green

POP YOUR CORN: It’s Billionaire vs. Billionaire for the Future of California. “Disagreements between a couple of Google billionaires over how to best fight California’s so-called billionaire tax might just help the ballot initiative become law in November, according to a New York Post report this weekend — but there’s so much more to it than that.”

Posted at 11:09 am by Stephen Green

AND THIS IS AT BERKELEY: I teach calculus at Berkeley. Some of my students can’t do middle school math.

I teach mathematics at UC Berkeley. Three days a week, I stand in front of lecture halls with 500 to 1,400 students. By the second week of the semester, I already know who is in trouble. Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics. Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school.

That is why this spring and summer, thousands of faculty members across all 10 UC campuses — including more than two-thirds of UC’s mathematics faculty — signed open letters urging the system to restore the SAT and ACT in admissions. Five Nobel laureates joined us, along with professors from across the university, including Beatriz Manz, Berkeley’s first Latina full professor.

We did so because what an admission letter is supposed to mean — that a student is ready to attend the school — no longer matches what we see in our classrooms.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 10:38 am by Stephen Green

TO BE FAIR…:

…reality is offense to people living in denial of it.

Posted at 10:20 am by Stephen Green