One Solution for the AI Dilemma

The U of Chicago Law School has a solution to the AI dilemma. Here it is:

Rethinking Legal Education in the AI Era

Overview

Artificial Intelligence is already impacting higher education and the legal profession, and the pace of change appears only to be accelerating. It is thus critical for us to use this moment to carefully reflect on how legal education should adapt. This memo describes the approach we are taking to legal education in the AI era.

The University of Chicago Law School has long been committed to providing our students with the most rigorous legal education possible. This commitment manifests itself through our faculty's dedication to teaching, our culture of challenging ideas through Socratic questioning and debate, and our grading policies that motivate students to engage with the material and that convey informative assessments of student performance to prospective employers. With AI disrupting higher education, our commitment to rigorous legal education also must mean openness to even rapid adaptation.

A willingness to rethink our practices is consistent with our law school's long history of innovation. We were the first law school to conceive of legal education as a graduate-level program and award the Juris Doctor degree. We also made pioneering contributions to interdisciplinary legal education that incorporates insights from the humanities, social sciences, and other academic disciplines, and to the creation of legal aid clinics that brought students into real-world cases.

We began the process of reflecting on how we should adjust our teaching in response to AI shortly after OpenAI publicly released ChatGPT at the end of 2022. Our law school formed an AI committee in early 2023 and began releasing policies and guidance on the use of AI. Since then, we have added an AI module into our first-year legal research and writing program, introduced several upper-level courses on AI and the law, founded an AI Lab to teach our students how to develop AI tools to help improve access to justice, and negotiated licenses with leading AI companies so that our students, faculty, and staff have access to the resources used by practicing lawyers.

Over the last year, we embarked on a more ambitious effort to reflect on how we should adapt our curriculum and policies in response to AI. This effort included extensive consultation with our community, including alumni, leaders of law firms, business leaders, legal technology executives, and law firm associates, as well as internal stakeholders at the Law School, including our faculty, staff, and students. We also surveyed the emerging academic and professional literature on how AI is changing legal practice and student learning, and how law schools can and should respond. And we have had steadfast support from our University of Chicago leadership, who have championed a skeptical, ethical, and ambitious approach to AI.

The feedback we have received throughout this process has been consistent: We need to ensure that our students actually learn to think critically, strategically, and independently without relying on AI; but we also must face the reality that AI tools are already widely available to our students, and our graduates will be expected to be prepared to use them in legal practice.

Our Strategic Vision

Based on what we learned from our consultations this year and our experience over the past three years, we have developed a strategic vision of how we should adapt legal education to the AI era. That vision has three themes:

1. Developing AI-resilient pedagogy and assessment;

2. Elevating the "essential human" skills that distinguish excellent lawyers; and

3. Teaching the responsible, effective, and ethical use of AI.

First, rather than attempting to ban AI or to ignore its risks to learning, our pedagogy and assessment should be designed to ensure our students learn how to think critically and solve legal problems with sound professional judgment. We thus need to ensure that our students do not rely on AI-provided shortcuts that help them produce easy answers but stunt intellectual growth. This requires rethinking the technology we allow in our classrooms, the tasks we assign our students, and the way we assess our students' performance.

This requires developing AI-resilient pedagogy, by which we mean modes of classroom interaction and performance evaluation that reward students' effortful and sustained engagement with the material, and discourage the offloading of work to AI tools. AI-resilient pedagogy does not mean trying to prevent all student use of AI. We do not want to deter uses of AI that can increase students' effort and engagement, such as asking AI to clarify background concepts while reading before class or asking AI to generate practice problems while studying.

Second, AI may transform the legal profession, but many aspects of legal practice are likely to remain the domain of humans, not merely because humans are good at them, but because clients, employers, judges, and society will want humans to perform them. Among others, these aspects of legal practice are likely to include oral advocacy, strategic judgment, critical thinking, and developing and maintaining relationships with clients and stakeholders. To be sure, there are ways in which AI can assist humans with these tasks. But legal education should renew its focus on training students for the aspects of legal practice for which humans are likely to remain essential.

Third, AI is already a pervasive part of legal practice and will become more so. It is simply unrealistic to think that students and lawyers will not use AI. But legal technology is changing rapidly, and there is no guarantee that the specific AI tools or techniques that are ascendant today will be useful when current students enter practice. Thus, AI skills training requires more than producing students who can use the tools that are currently part of legal practice. Law schools must give students the analytical skills and theoretical toolkit to adapt as technologies change. This is how we will ensure that our students learn how to use AI responsibly, effectively, and ethically.

We believe that these three components of our strategic vision are consistent with the Law School's longstanding commitment to rigorous legal training and with emerging scholarship on the role of AI in education. They are also consistent with the University of Chicago's broader goal of ensuring that we teach our students to think 1vith, without, and about AI.

Putting the Vision into Practice

The Law School is implementing this vision through policies that apply to the major elements of the law school curriculum: required 1L core courses, 1L legal research and writing, elective courses, upper­ level writing requirements, and clinical education. We outline these policies below.

Required 1L Core Courses. The 1L year is a crucial, formative period for law students. It lays the foundation for the development of critical thinking, legal writing skills, and strategic judgment throughout law school and in professional life. During the 1L year, the value of effortful struggle, even with concepts that are second nature to experienced lawyers, is paramount. Student expertise at judging the quality of AI output is at its nadir. The need for faculty to work together to create a consistent, AI-resilient approach to pedagogy is especially acute in this setting. For this reason, the Law School is adopting rules that set consistent norms for AI-resilient teaching and assessment across all 1L sections in all 1L core courses (Civil Procedure, Torts, Elements of the Law, Contracts, Property, Criminal Law, Constitutional Law, Statutory Interpretation, and Transactional Lawyering).

We will be piloting a coordinated approach to classroom and examination policies for the core 1L curriculum during the 2026-2027 academic year. Across all 1L sections, we will prohibit the use of electronic devices such as laptops, tablets, and phones in the classroom. There will be some limited exceptions to this policy. For instance, professors can designate classroom "scribes" who can use electronic devices to take notes for the class, professors can authorize electronic device use for specific tech-enabled activities (such as interactive in-class polling), and we will ensure that disabilities are accommodated in conformity with applicable law, as appropriate for the program of study.

 Additionally, examinations will be in-class without access to the internet, electronic files, or apps. And most of all, we will continue our longstanding tradition of emphasizing the Socratic Method as part of these courses. This coordinated approach reflects our experience, and an emerging scholarly consensus, that active, in-person engagement is conducive to learning. Reliance on devices to take notes or assist with answering questions tends to inhibit reflection and reasoning.

1L Legal Research and Writing. We are taking a different approach to 1L Legal Research and Writing (LRW). Many (if not most) students will spend their 1L summers in professional environments where they will be expected to use AI tools for research and writing tasks. Thus, the LRW curriculum must also include instruction in the responsible, effective, and ethical use of AI. At the same time, even AI skills training must itself be AI-resilient. By the end of their 1L year, our students should have the ability to review, assess, and improve the output of AI tools. Developing these skills requires human interaction as much as it requires AI tools. Hands-on work with AI tools in classroom settings and individualized feedback on writing must be components of instruction on the use of AI in legal research and writing.

We will thus be piloting a new structure to the LRW curriculum during the 2026-2027 academic year. Our approach will treat writing without AI as the foundation and will layer writing with AI onto it. Throughout the year, students will write without AI, while also using AI for research, revision, iterating on drafts, and preparation for oral argument. Students and their instructors will review together both their writing and their use of AI. In this way, students will develop their own writing skills independent of generative AI tools while also developing their ability to supervise AI and critique its output.

Elective Courses. As students progress from their foundational training in required 1L classes to elective courses, the need for coordination across sections abates, and the benefits of heterogeneity increase. Thus, in the upper-level curriculum and the elective courses that 1Ls take in the Spring, the goal of our AI policies shifts to providing guidance and fostering experimentation. For these courses, the use of the Socratic Method, no-device policies, and in-class, no-access exams will remain, but as default rules rather than required policies.[1]

In all elective courses, we will encourage instructors to experiment with pedagogy. Some methods of teaching and evaluation have enhanced value as AI-resilient methods. These include modes of formative assessment such as midterms, group projects, oral presentations, and peer-to-peer feedback. At the same time, AI itself creates opportunities for new forms of teaching and assessment. Our faculty have already begun experimenting with tools such as custom chatbots that serve as study aids, AI-generated practice problems, and the like. None of these particular modes of teaching and evaluation is required, but we will support experimentation with modes such as these.

Finally, as students advance in their legal training, the need for classes that explore responsible, effective, and ethical use of AI grows. To this end, we have already added a number of courses that explicitly focus on the use of AI (and even the creation of AI tools for legal work). These courses are all offered as electives, so that students can select how many AI-focused classes, and which of these classes, they wish to take. We plan to continue to grow our upper-level offerings on AI.

Upper-Level Writing Requirements. Writing is crucial to lawyering. Not only do most lawyers do a considerable amount of writing, but the practice of writing cultivates the practice of deep, sustained, and critical thought. Yet the primary modes of writing in the upper-level curriculum-research papers and reaction papers-are under stress in a world in which AI can produce plausible and substantial academic papers without the kind of human input that paper-writing is intended to involve.

This is a particularly difficult challenge. Some responses, such as requiring writing to take place in supervised, in-class settings, address the need to cultivate practice while ensuring original human effort. Yet such requirements lose an important aspect of the exercise of writing, which is sustained and independent effort across hours, days, and weeks to create a significant piece of work. This is a valuable formative exercise for thinkers and lawyers, and we cannot wholly abandon it in favor of writing methods that are easier to administer in AI-resilient ways.

Thus, we are developing an approach that introduces elements of AI-resilient design while sustaining the project of training students to undertake ambitious and independent writing projects. The rule­ based element is a change to our "SRP" (substantial research paper) requirements, which will take effect beginning with this year's class of rising 2Ls. Writing an SRP is a requirement for completion of a JD degree, and the criteria for an SRP already include (roughly) substantial length, independent research, original ideas, incorporation of feedback from faculty, and iteration across drafts. These requirements incorporate elements of serious academic and legal writing. We will be adding one additional requirement, which is that all students will be required to engage in an oral discussion of their SRP with their supervising professor, in an in-person setting. This discussion will occur after a complete draft (or final version) of the paper has been submitted to the professor. The discussion could take place one-on-one, or as a class presentation in the style of an academic workshop. Either way, the oral exchange will involve the student answering questions that probe the reasoning of the paper and the implications of its arguments.

The motivation for this new requirement is twofold. First, this requirement makes the SRP more AI­ resilient by providing a test of a student's thinking about what they have written in a setting where they cannot lean on technology. It does so without sacrificing any of the unsupervised, independent effort that must be a part of serious, sustained writing.

Second, this requirement imparts valuable skill-building for both legal practice and academic life that is justified on its own merits, without regard to AI. We are training students for a profession where they will be called upon to explain and defend their ideas in person and in real time, whether in the courtroom, during negotiations, when counseling clients, or when working in collaboration with other lawyers. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of intellectual life at the University of Chicago Law School is our robust workshop culture, in which faculty regularly present their own research paper drafts and address questions, suggestions, and criticisms from colleagues. An oral discussion component to the SRP is a way to formalize a piece of that workshop culture for all students.

Experimentation is the other element of our approach to upper-level writing assignments. For all upper-level writing, we encourage faculty to experiment with different modes of structuring writing assignments in AI-resilient ways. Some examples could include:

• In-class student workshops of their papers;

• Writing reaction papers or portions of longer papers in supervised, in-class settings;

• Group presentations or panel discussions by students with related reaction paper topics;

• Students, individually or in groups, leading portions of class discussion relevant to their reaction paper topics; and

• One-on-one discussion of a research paper with the professor outside of class.

Many other possibilities exist, of course, and the point of experimentation is to find the options that best ensure our students learn writing and critical thinking skills.

Clinical Education. The role that clinical education plays in preparing students for practice will be even more important in the AI era. Client needs and expectations will create pressure for graduates to be able to immediately use AI responsibly, effectively, and ethically. As a practical matter, this means that for many graduates, law school clinics are the best opportunity to receive close and careful supervision of their use of AI tools.

Further, clinical work often goes to the heart of what is essentially human about lawyering: advocating to judges, juries, and policy makers; understanding and being present to clients; strategizing about both the doctrinal and the practical aspects of a case; and developing rapport with counterparties and adversaries. These are all skills that our students learn from our clinical faculty. Thus, clinics are a crucial site for learning 1vith, without, and about AI.

To these ends, we have been obtaining access to AI tools for our clinics. These include general­ purpose legal AI tools and tools that are specifically designed for transactional work, immigration work, and litigation discovery. We are also in the process of procuring additional tools. Further, the clinics are each developing their own policies, tailored to their practice areas, for appropriate use of AI and to safeguard against AI-created errors in court filings and other work product. As these tools and policies are implemented, the goal is to ensure that all students in clinics are working both with AI and without AI for real clients in real practice settings.

Final Thoughts

Beyond these changes to our curriculum, three additional principles will inform our thinking.

First, we will strive to ensure that our AI policies are transparent, explicit, and explained. To that end, each instructor must state their AI policy explicitly in the course syllabus and describe the policy in class. And, as we confront new circumstances that require changes to our policies, we will communicate those clearly to our students.

Second, we will try to stay up to date on new AI tools and the best practices for how to use them. We have already been working with alumni and other employers to understand how legal practice is incorporating AI, and we have been partnering with technology firms to secure access for our students, faculty, and staff to the AI tools that leading firms are using. We have also been having regular conversations among our faculty to share information about the use of AL We are committed to continuing to do what we can to stay current in this time of rapid change.

Finally, we will regularly reconsider these policies with ongoing input from our faculty, students, and alumni. We recognize that no statement of an AI strategy or vision can be final. Technology is changing too fast. Thus, all the changes we are currently making will be subject to review, reconsideration, and revision as we learn more and as both technology and the practice of law evolve.

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[1] We will continue to offer courses that are cross-listed with other units, and students will still be allowed to enroll in courses offered by other units. Depending on the rules of the other units, these courses may have different policies than the electives offered solely within the Law School. \Ve will work with instructors and other units to navigate any conflicts that may arise in the policies of different units.

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Source: https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/ai-strategy-statement.

Straws in the Wind - Part 322

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: A state legislature says a new ban on “staging walkouts” at public universities will protect free speech by preventing protesters from disrupting campus speakers. But some faculty members and speech advocates believe it’s inappropriate to prohibit what they see as a legitimate form of protest at public campuses. That, and they argue that a walkout is one of the most peaceful and least disruptive forms of protest. The Tennessee legislation, sent to Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s desk Friday, is dubbed the Charlie Kirk Act — adding to a growing number of red states that are using the conservative activist’s legacy to reform campus speech. Despite HB 1476’s name association, Tennessee Rep. Gino Bulso, a Republican and the bill’s sponsor, said it is nonpartisan in nature.

The legislation directs public colleges to formally adopt certain elements of the University of Chicago’s policy on free expression, including one stating that students and others “may not obstruct or otherwise interfere” with viewpoints they don’t like. The Chicago Principles have been embraced by a number of colleges in the past dozen years. The bill then describes what it considers to be obstruction, including “staging walkouts” during an event or in the middle of an invited speaker’s remarks. It defines walkouts as “considerable disruption or distraction or the need to pause the event for any period of time, however short.” If a student or faculty member violates the walkout provision, they may be subject to disciplinary probation, followed by suspension and expulsion for subsequent violations, according to the legislation.

HB 1476 also prevents colleges from disinviting speakers due to their beliefs or in response to opposition from students or faculty...

Full story at https://www.chronicle.com/article/sit-and-stay-seated-walkouts-at-one-states-public-universities-could-soon-be-banned.

Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 128

From the NY Times: After Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced last month that the Pentagon would cut ties with Harvard University over ideological differences, Harvard is trying to create a workaround for students in the military. The Harvard Kennedy School, one of the schools at Harvard attended by service members, is offering to let them defer admission or help them pursue spots at four other institutions if they are accepted to the Kennedy School for the 2026-27 academic year.

Secretary Hegseth announced the Pentagon’s break with Harvard in a video released Feb. 6, in which he called Harvard “one of the red-hot centers of hate-America activism” and accused “too many” military members who graduate from Harvard of developing radical ideologies. Mr. Hegseth, who graduated from the Harvard Kennedy School in 2013 with a master’s degree in public policy, said that he would “discontinue all graduate-level professional military education, fellowships and certificate programs” between Harvard and his department, beginning with the next academic year...

If they are not allowed to attend, military members accepted this spring to the Kennedy School will be able to defer their admission for up to four years, according to a copy of a letter to applicants...

Officials at four other graduate schools have agreed to give quick consideration to applications from active-duty military members who are accepted to the Kennedy School but who don’t want to put off their education... Those programs are the Harris School at the University of Chicago, the Fletcher School at Tufts University, the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Gerald R. Ford School at the University of Michigan...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/us/hegseth-pentagon-harvard-military.html.

Straws in the Wind - Part 240

From Inside Higher Ed: George Washington University is pausing admissions to five Ph.D. programs for fall 2026, citing financial hardships. According to social media posts, applicants to the programs received emails last week alerting them that the programs “will not be reviewing applications for the 2026–2027 academic year.” The emails went on to say that their application fees would be refunded and offered them the opportunity to be considered for master’s programs instead. The Ph.D. programs affected are in clinical psychology, anthropology, human paleobiology, political science and mathematics. A university spokesperson attributed the pauses to financial difficulties.

...The suspensions follow other instances of high-profile institutions slashing admissions to Ph.D. programs due to budget concerns, including Boston University, the University of Chicago and Harvard University. In a recent Faculty Senate meeting, GWU president Ellen Granberg asked the university’s schools and divisions to prepare “budget contingency plans” amid declines in applications from international students, the student newspaper, The GW Hatchet, reported. International students accounted for about 13 percent of the institution’s enrollment this fall, a decrease from the previous year...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/graduate-students-and-postdocs/2026/01/26/george-washington-u-pauses-admissions-5-phd.

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From the Daily Princetonian: ...The University [has] released its annual Report of the Treasurer. Following a tumultuous year for higher education across the country, the report emphasizes the University’s lab partnerships with federal departments, close ties to active-duty soldiers and veterans, and involvement in AI and public service. The report, entitled “In the Nation’s Service,” comes after approximately $200 million in research-specific funding was suspended last year by the Trump administration, then partially reinstated over the summer... 

Princeton spent $283 million in total financial aid contributions in 2024–25 and saw its largest ever number of Pell Grant recipients. Most families that make less than $250,000 per year pay no tuition. The University is potentially facing a new 8 percent endowment tax from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which applies to universities with endowments of over $2 million per student and a tuition-paying population of at least 3,000. 

With a projected increase of financial aid spending to $327 million in 2025–26, there is a possibility that the University will avoid the endowment tax by having under 3,000 tuition-paying students. The University has previously declined to comment on the endowment tax and the number of students that pay tuition...

Full story at https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2026/01/princeton-news-adpol-2025-treasurer-report-emphasizes-princeton-nations-service.

Straws in the Wind - Part 186

From The Atlantic: Administering an exam used to be straightforward: All a college professor needed was an open room and a stack of blue books. At many American universities, this is no longer true. Professors now struggle to accommodate the many students with an official disability designation, which may entitle them to extra time, a distraction-free environment, or the use of otherwise-prohibited technology. The University of Michigan has two centers where students with disabilities can take exams, but they frequently fill to capacity, leaving professors scrambling to find more desks and proctors. Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago, told me that so many students now take their exams in the school’s low-distraction testing outposts that they have become more distracting than the main classrooms.

...Over the past decade and a half, however, the share of students at selective universities who qualify for accommodations—often, extra time on tests—has grown at a breathtaking pace. At the University of Chicago, the number has more than tripled over the past eight years; at UC Berkeley, it has nearly quintupled over the past 15 years.

The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier. The change has occurred disproportionately at the most prestigious and expensive institutions. At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent. Not all of those students receive accommodations, but researchers told me that most do. The schools that enroll the most academically successful students, in other words, also have the largest share of students with a disability that could prevent them from succeeding academically...

Full story at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/elite-university-student-accommodation/684946.

Straws in the Wind - Part 184

From the NY Times: The University of Chicago was where fun went to die. Tulane University was where you could die from too much fun. Neither place liked its reputation, but in 2016, both felt confident enough in changes on their campuses that they started offering an early decision option for student applicants. Apply by November (or January for the “Early Decision II” option) and get an answer weeks later. You just had to agree to attend if you got in.

Within a handful of years, two-thirds of Tulane’s first-year class had taken the deal. The University of Chicago found so much success that it recently added an opportunity to apply even earlier, in some cases before the senior year of high school has even begun. The enrollment chiefs who made this all happen also found success. According to federal filings from 2023, Chicago’s vice president for enrollment and student advancement, James G. Nondorf, received $967,000 over a year from the university and “related” organizations. At Northeastern University, the executive vice chancellor and chief enrollment officer, Satyajit Dattagupta, got $1.079 million in compensation after decamping in 2022 from Tulane, where he had a strong run in a similar role.

If you’re the gatekeeper at schools like these, where over a third of the students will pay full price — $400,000 or so over four years — you earn your keep by landing just a few more of them each year. Miss your number, however, and the shortfall can cascade through four years of revenue shortages. You could also be out of a job. Vice presidents of sales at high-performing organizations make the big bucks, and thousands of teenagers now sign up each year to say Chicago, Northeastern or Tulane is their true love always...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/business/tulane-university-chicago-early-decision.html.

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From Inside Higher Ed: House Republicans held a hearing [last] Wednesday broadcasting long-standing conservative allegations of a left-wing bias in the small, prestigious Truman Scholarship program. Witnesses called by the GOP said the winners disproportionately espouse causes such as promoting racial justice and fighting climate change—and wind up working for Democrats and left-leaning organizations—while few recipients profess interest in conservative aims.

...Rather than counter the allegations, Democrats and their invited witness largely called the proceedings a distraction from the issue of college unaffordability, which they accused the GOP of exacerbating...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/financial-aid/2025/12/04/house-republicans-accuse-truman-scholarship-liberal-bias.

Straws in the Wind - Part 126

From Science: After months of anticipation, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) today released its instructions for the next round of applicants to its Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). To the dismay of many, the prestigious program, which funds more than 1000 promising STEM graduate students each year, will now exclude a key group of students, as second-year Ph.D. students are no longer eligible. The students who are still able to apply—undergraduates, bachelor’s degree holders, those in joint bachelor’s-master’s programs, and first year Ph.D. students—aren’t in the clear either, as some must decide whether to throw their hats in the ring with an unusually narrow timeframe to apply...

Second-year students who had put in significant work on their applications prior to the solicitation release now feel abandoned. “I had already completed several drafts of my personal statement and research proposal,” says University of Chicago molecular engineering Ph.D. student Ben Broekhuis. After receiving an honorable mention when he applied as an undergraduate, he opted to sit out the application process the first year of his Ph.D. after being advised to wait. “Now, seeing from the solicitation that I’ve been cut out of my opportunity to apply, I’m completely shattered.”

There are no publicly available data on what proportion of GRFP applicants, who typically number more than 13,000 per year, are second-year Ph.D. students. But Susan Brennan, a former GRFP director who now works at Stony Brook University, says in her experience the bulk of applications come from people at that stage. “It's completely unconscionable that NSF is pulling the rug out from under these students.” She adds that for students coming into graduate school from less well-resourced universities, having an extra year to get publications and other research experiences under the belt can be particularly important...

Full story at https://www.science.org/content/article/completely-shattered-changes-nsf-s-graduate-student-fellowship-spur-outcry.

Straws in the Wind - Part 125

From the Financial Times: The University of Chicago, renowned for producing world-leading research in economics and finance, is selling a prized research centre as it struggles with heavy debt and lacklustre endowment returns. Proceeds from the $375mn sale of the Center for Research in Security Prices — founded in 1960 by two UChicago professors — would be added to the university’s endowment and invested to boost returns, a spokesman said... “The fact that they have to sell a celebrated part of the university now is very telling of how poor their fiscal situation is,” said Hunter Lewis, co-founder of Cambridge Associates.

UChicago’s strains came after its $10bn endowment — a critical source of revenue — delivered an annualised return of 6.7 per cent over the 10 years to 2024, among the weakest performances of any major US university. The private university has taken a more conservative investment approach than many peers, with greater exposure to fixed income and less to equities since the global financial crisis in 2008...

An aggressive borrowing spree to expand its research capacity also weighed on the university’s financial health. UChicago’s outstanding debt, measured by notes and bonds payable, climbed by about two-thirds in the decade ending 2024, to $6.1bn, as it poured resources into new fields such as molecular engineering and quantum science...

Federal funding cuts have exacerbated the university’s financial situation. Since President Trump took office, federal agencies have rescinded about 65 grants awarded to University of Chicago faculty. The immediate impact on fiscal year 2025 revenue was projected at $10 million to $15 million, with the longer-term shortfall potentially exceeding $40 million beginning in 2026. “The profound federal policy changes of the last eight months have created multiple and significant new uncertainties and strong downward pressure on our finances,” said UChicago president Paul Alivisatos in a message to faculty last month...

Full story at https://www.ft.com/content/4501240f-58b7-4433-9a3f-77eff18d0898.

Straws in the Wind - Part 114

From Inside Higher Ed: Carnegie Mellon University is tapping its strengths in computer and data science to reframe one of its humanities doctoral programs in hopes of preparing graduates to navigate an increasingly tough job market. Starting next fall, the English department at the Pittsburgh-based institution will offer a Ph.D. in computational cultural studies, which it says is the first program of its kind in the country. The program will replace the traditional literary and cultural studies program and will train students to use computational methodologies to produce historical, theoretical and cultural scholarship...

Students in the program will still take standard literature and cultural studies courses, but they’ll also be required to take two computation-focused courses—one in the English Department and one from an outside department—and complete a series of projects guided by computational experts...

But that doesn’t mean the English Department is abandoning the current program’s core focus on literature and culture. “There’s a common misconception that this is pushing us to sell out to computational studies, but it’s not,” Richard Scheines, dean of CMU’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, said. “It’s just seeing if there’s interesting tools that we can apply to some of the questions humanists are asking, but get much more robust answers from the data than we’ve had before.” ...

Over the past decade, humanities enrollments have declined, more and more tenure-track professors have been replaced by adjuncts, and budget cuts have forced many programs across the country to downsize or close altogether. In 2023, West Virginia University eliminated numerous faculty positions and humanities programs, including all of its foreign language degree programs. In 2024, Boston University suspended admissions to its humanities and social sciences doctoral programs. And last month, the University of Chicago paused new Ph.D. student admissions for the 2026–27 academic year across all arts and humanities departments except for philosophy and one program in the music department...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/teaching-learning/2025/09/24/how-one-university-reimagining-humanities-phd.

Straws in the Wind - Part 83

From the Chicago Maroon: ...The University of Chicago’s Division of the Arts & Humanities will reduce or pause Ph.D. admissions across all departments, accepting smaller cohorts in seven and suspending admissions entirely in the remaining eight. The Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice will also pause Ph.D. admissions, and the Harris School of Public Policy will pause admissions to its Harris Ph.D., Political Economy Ph.D., and M.A. in Public Policy with Certificate in Research Methods. 

“These unit-level decisions reflect each program’s specific context and long-term goals, with the aim of ensuring the highest-quality training for the next generation of scholars,” a UChicago spokesperson wrote to the Maroon. “The University remains fully committed to supporting rigorous and impactful graduate education.” 

...UChicago’s preexisting financial challenges, including a $221 million budget deficit as of last October, have been compounded by cuts to student loan programs and federal funding from the National Institutes of Health, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Science Foundation...

Within the Division of Arts & Humanities, departments pausing enrollments entirely include Classics, comparative literature, Germanic studies, Middle Eastern studies, Romance languages and literatures, Slavic languages and literatures, South Asian languages and civilizations, and visual arts. Ph.D. enrollment will be limited for the art history, cinema and media studies, East Asian languages and civilizations, English language and literature, linguistics, and music departments...

Full story at https://chicagomaroon.com/48307/news/uchicago-to-cut-some-ph-d-masters-admissions-for-2026-27/.

From Inside Higher Ed: The National Institutes of Health’s director ordered employees to “conduct an individualized review of all current and planned research activities,” including active grants and funding opportunity announcements, according to images of a document provided to Inside Higher Ed. The review comes amid concerns that the NIH won’t distribute all of its allocated grant money by the time the federal fiscal year ends Sept. 30, meaning those dollars will return to the U.S. Treasury. ..The order is part of a larger memo in which [NIH director Jay] Bhattacharya outlined “select agency priorities” and said projects that don’t align with these priorities may be “restricted, paused, not renewed, or terminated.” 

...Joanne Padrón Carney, chief government relations officer for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said in a statement to Inside Higher Ed that the president’s budget request for fiscal year 2026 already outlined a set priorities for the rest of the current year. “Switching gears at this stage reinforces confusion, diminishes trust, and increases concerns within the scientific community,” Carney added. “It joins the long list of tactics risking impoundment of congressionally appropriated funds rather than funding biomedical research that is essential for the people’s well-being.”

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2025/08/19/nih-director-orders-review-all-current-planned-research.

Straws in the Wind - Part 82

From the Forward: ...Admissions officers at six universities — including Columbia — are using a new tool to assess how prospective students might navigate this increasingly charged campus political climate. Schoolhouse Dialogues, hosted on the nonprofit tutoring platform Schoolhouse founded by Sal Khan, pairs high schoolers with opposing viewpoints to discuss controversial issues one-on-one and give feedback on each other’s civility. A handful of schools will use that feedback, dubbed “civility transcripts,” in admissions.

The participating schools — several of which are engaged in high-profile disputes with the Trump administration over alleged campus antisemitism — say they are seeking applicants willing to engage in respectful civil discourse across political divides...

Six schools — Columbia University, Colby College, Johns Hopkins University, University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and Washington University in St. Louis — are allowing students to optionally submit Schoolhouse Dialogues portfolios as part of their application for the upcoming admissions cycle. Neither recordings nor transcripts of conversations are sent to admissions officers. Instead, students who choose to submit will send colleges their “dialogues portfolio,” which shows how many sessions the student has attended, what topics they discussed, their self-reflections, and the feedback they received from other students...

Not every institution has embraced the use of Dialogues in admissions. Both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Vanderbilt ultimately decided not to continue after initial trials — with Vanderbilt stating it withdrew from the program “after careful consideration and hearing some concerns.” ...

Full story at https://forward.com/news/762715/columbia-university-antisemitism-schoolhouse-dialogues/.

Straws in the Wind - Part 81

From Inside Higher Ed: The University of Chicago’s Arts and Humanities Division is reducing how many new Ph.D. students it admits for the 2026–27 academic year across about half of its departments and completely halting Ph.D. admissions elsewhere. Multiple language programs are among those affected... Arts and Humanities dean Deborah Nelson told faculty, staff and Ph.D. students, “We will accept a smaller overall Ph.D. cohort across seven departments: Art History, Cinema and Media Studies, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, English Language and Literature, Linguistics, Music (composition), and Philosophy.” The university didn’t tell Inside Higher Ed how many fewer Ph.D. students would be accepted across those departments. “Other departments will pause admissions,” Nelson wrote.

Andrew Ollett, an associate professor of South Asian languages and civilizations, said that means no new Ph.D. students for these departments: classics, comparative literature, Germanic studies, Middle Eastern studies, Romance languages and literatures, Slavic languages and literatures, and South Asian languages and civilizations, plus the ethnomusicology and history and theory of music programs in the music department. While the university didn’t provide an interview or respond to multiple written questions, a spokesperson did point out that the UChicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice is also pausing Ph.D. admissions, while the Harris School of Public Policy is pausing admissions for the Harris Ph.D., the political economy Ph.D. and the master of arts in public policy with certificate in research methods...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/business/academic-programs/2025/08/14/uchicago-freezing-phd-admissions-multiple-programs.

From Inside Higher Ed: The University of Texas System Board of Regents voted... to disband the system’s long-standing faculty senates in compliance with Senate Bill 37, the sweeping Texas higher education law that gives university boards and presidents control over faculty governing bodies. The UT board also voted... to create faculty advisory groups, which will “perform the work of faculty governance bodies”—such as reviewing degree requirements, suggesting curricular changes, coordinating campus events and revising the faculty handbook—while keeping all decision-making power in the hands of the administration. The University of Houston system Board of Regents did the same..., voting to create faculty councils that will “provide structured, meaningful avenues for faculty to help shape academic priorities, strengthen excellence and contribute to decisions that guide our future,” a university spokesperson said in a statement.

But the groups won’t give the faculty independent representation or any real power. In accordance with SB 37, the board bylaws now state, “a faculty council is advisory only and may not be delegated the final decision-making authority on any matter.”

...The president will also choose the presiding officer, associate presiding officer and secretary for each group. Appointees may serve for six years before taking a mandatory two-year break from the group, while faculty-elected representatives may only serve for two years before the two-year break...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/shared-governance/2025/08/22/tex-boards-abolish-faculty-senates-create.

Straws in the Wind - Part 55

From the Chicago Tribune: The U.S. Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security have requested information on admissions practices and international students at the University of Chicago. The university disclosed the inquiries in bond issuance documents dated July 11. Bloomberg first reported on the documents Friday... A spokesperson for U. of C. declined to comment. The documents provided no additional details on the timeline or subject of potential investigations. The Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment...

International students make up 18% of undergraduates at U. of C., and 32% of the total student body, according to the bond documents... U. of C. is also one of 45 universities under investigation by the Education Department for alleged Title VI violations for a program aimed at increasing the diversity of doctorate students. The university relied on $543 million in federal grant funding in 2024, which accounted for 18% of its revenue, according to the bond documents. Several of the school’s grants have been pulled by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other organizations, the documents said.

Northwestern University has also been targeted by the Trump administration. More than $790 million in federal research funding has been paused while it faces multiple federal probes for alleged civil rights violations against Jewish students. President Michael Schill is slated to testify for the second time before Congress in August.

Full story at https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/07/18/university-of-chicago-federal-inquiry/.

Straws in the Wind - Part 43

From the Wall St. Journal: ...The University of Michigan’s alumni association... told students it was canceling the Lead Scholars program, a week before the school announced it was closing its DEI offices. The alumni group said it ended the scholarship to comply with the law and with guidance from the federal government. 

More than 800 students have received awards since Lead Scholars began in 2008. It was meant to support minority students after the state of Michigan banned using racial preferences in public-college admissions, and offered at least $5,000 a year as well as community events... 

Other scholarships have dwindled or are on pause. The Justice Department... said that the state of Illinois and six schools—including Northwestern University, Loyola University of Chicago and the University of Chicago—suspended a scholarship for minority graduate students called Diversifying Higher Education Faculty in Illinois after the department threatened a lawsuit over racial discrimination...

The Illinois Board of Higher Education said the program wasn’t suspended, but the state had agreed to evaluate the fellowship—which is enshrined in state law—along with the Illinois General Assembly.

Northwestern withdrew from the program in March, a school spokesman said. Loyola and the University of Chicago didn’t respond to requests for comment. The University of Illinois-Chicago on its website said its participation in the program was paused because of “funding restrictions from sponsor.” ...

Full story at https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/anti-dei-minority-scholarships-a721ba1b.

The 15% Cap - Part 5

From an email received earlier today:

To: Faculty, Graduate Students, Postdoctoral Scholars and Staff

Dear Colleagues:

As you may have already read, the Federal Court in Massachusetts acted quickly to issue a temporary restraining order in the lawsuit that California joined as one of 22 states seeking to stop the National Institutes of Health from reducing their Facilities and Administration (also known as Indirect Cost (IDC)) rates to 15%. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) along with the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health, Conference of Boston Teaching Hospitals, and Greater New York Hospital Association took similar steps today and that restraining order was approved by the Massachusetts court as well.

To add to the chorus of institutions in opposition to the NIH reduction in F/A (IDC), the Association of American Universities (AAU), the American College of Education (ACE), and the Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities (APLU) have now filed their complaint and motion for a temporary restraining order. The University of California is a named plaintiff in the lawsuit, along with 12 other institutions (Brandeis, Brown, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, University of Chicago, Cornell, George Washington, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Penn, Rochester, and Tufts).

It is heartening to see this degree of unity in the higher education sector, across so many different states. We know there is a longer road to travel before this issue is resolved, but we are working overtime on it. And, as you probably also realize, this is not the only issue the University faces. The recent announcement that grants from the Institute for Education Science have been cancelled represents another area of concern and we are tracking/responding there as well.

So as not to take up additional space in your inbox, I recommend that you consult this site for weekly updates on issues in Washington, DC developed by our Federal Relations colleagues: UC Federal Updates website:

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/federal-updates

Going forward, that will be the best place to find updates.

Thank you, once again, for all that you do for UC. It has never been more important.

Cordially,

Katherine S. Newman

UC System Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs

UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy

Toxic Econ - Part 2

We have in the past posted stories about the website EJMR https://www.econjobrumors.com/ (now XJMR) which caters to academic economists, originally to help job candidates, but has limited moderation. Bloomberg is the latest source of information about the website in a very lengthy article. Some excerpts: 

...Started in 2008 as a website to help Ph.D. students and professors navigate academia’s opaque job market, it soon became a forum for everything from ivory tower gossip to chatter about food or personal technology. (Recent, less inflammatory topics: “Canadian school flyouts,” “Headline CPI increases to 3.2%” and “Pokemon is morally evil.”)

Over the years, the site has also developed a reputation as a swamp of misogyny and racism, with a strict moderation policy but lax enforcement that’s earned it comparisons to 4Chan, the ugly online forum. (Recent, more inflammatory topics on EJMR: “Would you ever hire a hot grad student as a postdoc?,” “Why do feminists, critical theorists, postcolonial writers, etc know so little” and “Does tenure allow me to refuse teaching black people?” Those are just the printable ones.)

By the mid-2010s, the site had hundreds of thousands of visitors a month...

The culture war over EJMR has had implications for the profession, too. For decades, advocates for equality in economics have argued that the lack of women and minorities results in blinkered, narrow-minded policy (for example, not prioritizing research on child care or on the effects of incarceration). Economics as a field can’t address real-world problems, they say, unless it first looks like the real world. Over the years, EJMR had become a symbol of that imbalance as well as a bastion of resistance to change. Its targets have included Melissa Kearney, a University of Maryland economics professor who’s won recognition for her research on families and inequality, and Claudia Sahm, a former senior economist at the Federal Reserve who in a 2020 blogpost titled “Economics Is a Disgrace” denounced the profession as sexist, racist and elitist.

EJMR’s influence has grown despite attempts to shut it down or create sanitized alternatives. In some cases, anonymous attacks that started on the site eventually broke through into mainstream discourse. In December 2023, conservative activists published what they said was evidence that Harvard University’s president, Claudine Gay, had plagiarized her dissertation, which added to an already-raging firestorm over the school’s response to the war in Gaza and led to her resignation. An anonymous post on EJMR had made a similar claim months before. (Gay has said she’s never misrepresented her findings or took credit for others’ research.)...

[The article then goes on to describe how a subset of supposedly anonymous posts were traced to specific institutions.]

-----------

Posts on Economics Job Market Rumors

Share of all posts from US universities or research institutions on the site

Sources: Ederer, Goldsmith-Pinkham, Jensen; U.S. News & World Report

Share is the percentage of posts accounted for by the school or institution among all posts originating from IP addresses associated with US universities or research institutions. U.S. News economics graduate school rankings are for 2023-24.

-----------

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-03-15/ejmr-economics-forum-posts-unmask-field-s-racism-and-sexism.

-----------

Our earlier post on EJMR-XMJR:

https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/07/toxic-econ.html. It features a chart based on the percent of posts from various universities were classified as "toxic." The website has expanded to math, poli sci, and sociology, but seems less comprehensive and active in those fields. A still earlier post from 2017: https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2017/08/bias-in-econ.html.

The Duke Data Manipulation Branch of the Harvard Data Manipulation Affair

Much of the media attention concerning the behavioral science data manipulation affair has focused on Harvard. But there is a branch - which is the focus of a lengthy (very, very lengthy) - New Yorker article that recently appeared.

The story is the similar. "Interesting" results turned an academic into a celebrity, until the Data Colada folks began to take a look. Now there is a university investigation of Dan Ariely at Duke, although so far no lawsuits.

Excerpts:

The half-bearded behavioral economist Dan Ariely tends to preface discussions of his work—which has inquired into the mechanisms of pain, manipulation, and lies—with a reminder that he comes by both his eccentric facial hair and his academic interests honestly. He tells a version of the story in the introduction to his breezy first book, “Predictably Irrational,” a patchwork of marketing advice and cerebral self-help. One afternoon in Israel, Ariely—an “18-year-old military trainee,” according to the Times—was nearly incinerated. “An explosion of a large magnesium flare, the kind used to illuminate battlefields at night, left 70 percent of my body covered with third-degree burns,” he writes...

Note: But this origin story apparently is not quite true. 

Ariely came to owe his reputation to his work on dishonesty. He offered commentary in documentaries on Elizabeth Holmes and pontificated about Enron. As Remy Levin, an economics professor at the University of Connecticut, told me, “People often go into this field to study their own inner demons. If you feel bad about time management, you study time inconsistency and procrastination. If you’ve had issues with fear or trauma, you study risk-taking.” Pain was an obvious place for Ariely to start. But his burn scars heightened his sensitivity to truthfulness. Shane Frederick, a professor at Yale’s business school, told me, “One of the first things Dan said to me when we met was ‘Would you ever date someone who looked like me?’ And I said, ‘No fucking way,’ which was a really offensive thing to say to someone—but it weirdly seemed to charm Dan.” 

From that moment, Frederick felt, Ariely was staunchly supportive of his career. At the same time, Ariely seemed to struggle with procedural norms, especially when they seemed pointless. Once, during a large conference, John Lynch, one of Ariely’s mentors, was rushed to the hospital. Ariely told me that only family members were allowed to visit. He pretended that his scarring was an allergic reaction and, once he was admitted, spent the night by Lynch’s side. In his telling, the nurse was in on the charade. “We were just going through the motions so that she could let me in,” he told me. But a business-school professor saw it differently. “Dan was seen as a hero because he had this creative solution,” she said. “But the hospital staff, even though they knew this wasn’t a real allergic reaction, weren’t allowed to not admit him. He was just wasting their time because he felt like he shouldn’t have to follow their rules.” ...

At talks, [Ariely] wore rumpled polos and looked as though he’d trimmed his hair with a nail clipper in an airport-lounge rest room. He has said that he worked with multiple governments and Apple. He had ideas for how to negotiate with the Palestinians. When an interviewer asked him to list the famous names in his phone contacts, he affected humility: “Jeff Bezos, the C.E.O. of Amazon—is that good?” He went on: the C.E.O.s of Procter & Gamble and American Express, the founder of Wikipedia. In 2012, he said, he got an e-mail from Prince Andrew, who invited him to the palace for tea. Ariely’s assistant had to send him a jacket and tie via FedEx. He couldn’t bring himself, as an Israeli, to say “Your Royal Highness,” so he addressed the Prince by saying “Hey.” ...

Ariely and [Francesca] Gino [of Harvard] frequently collaborated on dishonesty. In the paper “The Dark Side of Creativity,” they showed that “original thinkers,” who can dream up convincing justifications, tend to lie more easily. For “The Counterfeit Self,” she and Ariely had a group of women wear what they were told were fake Chloé sunglasses—the designer accessories, in an amusing control, were actually real—and then take a test. They found that participants who believed they were wearing counterfeit sunglasses cheated more than twice as much as the control group. In “Sidetracked,” Gino’s first pop-science book, she seems to note that such people were not necessarily corrupt: “Being human makes all of us vulnerable to subtle influences.” ... 

Near the end of Obama’s first term, vast swaths of overly clever behavioral science began to come unstrung. In 2011, the Cornell psychologist Daryl Bem published a journal article that ostensibly proved the existence of clairvoyance. His study participants were able to predict, with reasonable accuracy, which curtain on a computer screen hid an erotic image. The idea seemed parodic, but Bem was serious, and had arrived at his results using methodologies entirely in line with the field’s standard practices. This was troubling. 

The same year, three young behavioral-science professors—Joe Simmons, Leif Nelson, and Uri Simonsohn—published an actual parody: in a paper called “False-Positive Psychology,” they “proved” that listening to the Beatles song “When I’m Sixty-Four” rendered study participants literally a year and a half younger. “It was hard to think of something that was so crazy that no one would believe it, because compared to what was actually being published in our journals nothing was that crazy,” Nelson, who teaches at U.C. Berkeley, said. Researchers could measure dozens of variables and perform reams of analyses, then publish only the correlations that happened to appear “significant.” If you tortured the data long enough, as one grim joke went, it would confess to anything. They called such techniques “p-hacking.” As they later put it, “Everyone knew it was wrong, but they thought it was wrong the way it’s wrong to jaywalk.” In fact, they wrote, “it was wrong the way it’s wrong to rob a bank.”

The three men—who came to be called Data Colada, the name of their pun-friendly blog—had bonded over the false, ridiculous, and flashy findings that the field was capable of producing. The discipline of judgment and decision-making had made crucial, enduring contributions—the foundation laid by Kahneman and Tversky, for example—but the broader credibility of the behavioral sciences had been compromised by a perpetual-motion machine of one-weird-trick gimmickry. Their paper helped kick off what came to be known as the “replication crisis.” Soon, entire branches of supposedly reliable findings—on social priming (the idea that, say, just thinking about an old person makes you walk more slowly), power posing, and ego depletion—started to seem like castles in the air. (Cuddy, the H.B.S. professor, defended her work, later publishing a study that showed power posing had an effect on relevant “feelings.”) Some senior figures in the field were forced to consider the possibility that their contributions amounted to nothing.

In the course of its campaign to eradicate p-hacking, which was generally well intended, Data Colada also uncovered manipulations that were not. The psychologist Lawrence Sanna had conducted studies that literalized the metaphor of a “moral high ground,” determining that participants at higher altitudes were “more prosocial.” When Simonsohn looked into the data, he found that the numbers were not “compatible” with random sampling; they had clearly been subject to tampering. (Sanna, at the time, acknowledged “research errors.”) Simonsohn exposed similar curiosities in the work of the Flemish psychologist Dirk Smeesters. (Smeesters claimed that he engaged only in “massaging” data.) The two men’s careers came to an unceremonious end. Occasionally, these probes were simple: one of the first papers that Data Colada formally examined included reports of “-0.3” on a scale of zero to ten. Other efforts required more recondite statistical analysis. Behind these techniques, however, was a basic willingness to call bullshit. Some of the papers in social psychology and adjacent fields demonstrated effects that seemed, to anyone roughly familiar with the behavior of people, preposterous: when maids are prompted to think of their duties as exercise, do they really lose weight? ...

Ariely maintained that the [Ten Commandments] study had been conducted at U.C.L.A., by a professor named Aimee Drolet Rossi.* When I spoke to Rossi, she told me that she had never participated in the study: “I thought, well, first, what a joke! I don’t believe that study, and I certainly didn’t run it.” U.C.L.A. issued a statement saying that the study hadn’t taken place there. Last year, Ariely, having learned that an Israeli television program was investigating the case, wrote to Rossi, “Do you remember who was the RA that was running the data collection sessions in 2004 and 2005?” Rossi replied, “There was none. That’s the point.” Ariely says that the study took place, and it’s possible that it did, in some form. He told me he now remembers that the surveys were collected at U.C.L.A. but processed by an assistant at M.I.T., which might explain the mixup. He could not provide the assistant’s identity...

---

*Refers to a study in which asking people about the Ten Commandments supposedly made them more honest.

---

[Data Colada participant] Joe Simmons has been working on a blog post, which Data Colada will probably never publish, called “The Fraud Is Not the Story.” He notes, at the outset, that there is “a very large body of behavioral research that is true and important.” But, he says, there is also a lot of work that is “completely divorced from reality, populated with findings about human beings that cannot be true.” In the past few years, some eminent behavioral scientists have come to regret their participation in the fantasy that kitschy modifications of individual behavior will repair the world... “This is the stuff that C.E.O.s love, right?” Luigi Zingales, an economist at the University of Chicago, told me. “It’s cutesy, it’s not really touching their power, and pretends to do the right thing.” ...

The Data Colada guys have always believed that the replication crisis might be better understood as a “credibility revolution” in which their colleagues would ultimately choose rigor. The end result might be a field that’s at once more boring and more reputable. That sanguine attitude has been tested by a cascade of corruption. In the weeks after the Gino revelations, some of her co-authors have audited their work, although Gino did not provide original data files for comparison. They wanted to figure out who had collected and analyzed which data, and to exonerate the innocent—especially young people, whose work for the job market or tenure might have been fatally tainted. In one paper, which had several co-authors, data of the apparently unnatural variety were newly uncovered. Although the details aren’t fully clear, Gino seems to have had nothing to do with it. The data may have been altered by another professor. The suspicions have been reported to the university. 

Full story at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/09/they-studied-dishonesty-was-their-work-a-lie.

===

Note: The Data Colada blog is at https://datacolada.org/.

Rank - Part 3 (comparisons and equivalencies)

As might be expected, the latest US News and World Report college rankings have created controversy, in part because of a shift in methodology that shifted ranks up and down compared with the prior year.

You can read more about the controversies - somewhat similar to the earlier controversies concerning law schools and med schools at:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/admissions/traditional-age/2023/09/22/us-news-rankings-changes-spur-complaints-and-apologies.

But rather than get into the weeds, yours truly thought we might benefit from looking at comparisons and equivalencies. As you likely know, both UCLA are touting themselves as the best public university. But the public qualifier actually means both tied for 15th. 

But that means the two are not quite so good as Chicago, but are a bit better than Rice.

Moving down the list we find that UC-Davis and UC-San Diego at #28 are equivalent to each other and also to the U of Florida.

UC-Irvine and UC-Santa Barbara are equivalent to NYU at #33.

 

At #60, we find that UC-Merced is equivalent to Renssalear and Santa Clara U.

At #76, UC-Riverside is like SUNY-Buffalo.

And finally at #76, UC-Santa Cruz is like Rutgers and the U of Illinois-Chicago.

Go figure.

Source: https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/search?_sort=rank&_sortDirection=asc.

Legacy and Related Issues

In the aftermath of the recent Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action at Harvard and the U of North Carolina, there has been analysis of Harvard's admissions data with a spotlight on so-called legacy admissions. Here is an op ed worth considering on that issue:

Junking Harvard’s Legacy Admissions Would Be Just a Baby Step

Adrian Wooldridge | Bloomberg | Washington Post

August 4, 2023

Sometimes a nation’s most cherished idea about itself can act like a slow poison. That is what happened in Britain after the Second World War with the idea that Britain remained a great power. This folie de grandeur not only produced the debacle of Anglo-French Suez intervention in 1956. It prevented Britain from becoming a founding member of the European Union (and thereby shaping it in a more liberal direction) and distracted it from the labor of rebuilding the economy.

The equivalent across the Atlantic is the idea that America is the world’s greatest meritocracy — and a living rebuke to the closed aristocratic societies of the Old World. This assumption was reasonable in the 19th century when millions of immigrants fled class-bound Europe in search of wealth and opportunity. It was a reasonable assumption for much of the 20th century — particularly after the Second World War — when an expanding economy created the world’s biggest middle class.

But over the past 20 years it has ceased to be true as inequality has increased sharply, and mass education has deteriorated. The US has lower levels of social mobility than most European countries. It is also generating a hereditary ruling class that is beginning to resemble the hereditary elite of old Europe rather than the open elite of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

Yet America’s conviction that it is a meritocracy has not only blinded it to this malign development, but has also led it to tolerate practices that would be beyond the pale in supposedly class-bound societies such as Great Britain. Old Europe is astonished by the practice of American ambassadors buying their political appointments with lavish donations to party funds, thereby leapfrogging over professional diplomats with sometimes embarrassing consequences. This is something that European powers abandoned a century ago. Old Europe is even more astonished by the preferences that America’s elite universities give to the children of alumni (“legacies”) or to people who donate mounds of cash to the institutions. Only a country that is convinced, deep down, that it is a meritocracy can tolerate such flagrant abuses of the meritocratic principle.

Is America finally waking up to the reality that it’s not as meritocratic as it thinks it is? The recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action for minorities has had the unexpected effect of igniting debate about affirmative action for the rich. The majority’s opinion included several swipes at legacy admissions in order to undermine the tone of moral superiority adopted by the defendants of the status quo. And surprisingly, the mainstream press devoted almost as much space to debating the merits of legacies as it did to lamenting the death of race-based admissions. Six conservative judges have done more to stir up debate about the flagrant abuse that is legacy admissions than an army of social justice warriors.

A new study by three leading economists — Raj Chetty and David J. Deming of Harvard University and John N. Friedman of Brown University — is perfectly timed to give this debate some analytical rigor and empirical heft.* The three economists establish two vital points by poring over a combination of anonymized admissions data to Ivy-Plus Colleges (the “plus” being Stanford, MIT, Duke and the University of Chicago) and income tax returns.

The first is that elite colleges make a big difference when it comes to admission to the very summit of American society — what might be loosely called “the establishment.”(1) Less than half of one percent of Americans attend Ivy-Plus colleges, yet these 12 institutions account for more than 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs, a quarter of US senators, half of all Rhodes Scholars, three-fourths of Supreme Court justices, and 13% of the top 0.1% of earners. The staffs of America’s leading newspapers, particularly the New York Times, are thick with Ivy graduates. By comparing two groups of waitlisted students — those who are admitted to Ivy-Plus universities and those who are rejected — they note that the successful are much more likely to reach the top 1% of the income distribution, attend an elite graduate school and work for a prestigious firm. When elite colleges talk grandly about shaping the leadership class, they are not just blowing smoke.

The second is that, for all their vaunted commitment to diversity and social justice, Ivy-Plus colleges are machines for perpetuating — or perhaps amplifying — class privilege. One in six students at Ivy League schools has parents in the top 1% of the income distribution. This is not just because the children of the rich are more likely to apply to elite colleges. Nor is it because the children of the rich have higher academic scores than middle class applicants: Children from the top 1% of the income distribution (more than $611,000) are 55% more likely to secure admission than a typical middle-class applicant with the same SAT or ACT scores, and children from the top 0.1 percent are more than twice as likely to get in. It is because elite colleges deliberately discriminate in favor of the rich.

The economists point to three mechanisms that perpetuate such discrimination: the preferences given to the children of alumni, to private schools that specialize in producing strong non-academic credentials, and to athletes. Legacy students from families in the top 1% are five times as likely to be admitted as the average applicant with similar test scores. This adds to other damning data on the subject: Evidence submitted by the plaintiffs in the affirmative action case reveals that 34% of legacy applicants were admitted to Harvard compared with 6% of non-legacies; last year, an Associated Press review found that “legacy students outnumbered Black students in freshman classes at four schools: Notre Dame, Cornell, Dartmouth and the University of Southern California.”

Applicants from private schools (such as Phillips Academy and Choate Rosemary Hall) are more than twice as likely to be admitted as those who attend public high schools with the same test results. This is largely because such private schools are so good at burnishing CVs with extra-curricular activities, flowery letters of recommendation and judicious phone calls.

The most flagrant abuse is with athletes, who are admitted at four times the rate of nonathletes with the same test scores. Forget about the idea that athletes are likely to be minority children from inner cities. They are almost always rich whites who specialize in sports — particularly elite sports such as fencing or golf — from an early age. One in eight students from the top one percent was an athlete. The comparable figure for the bottom 60% is one in fifty. In the days when Britain had a pipeline from the playing fields of the great public schools to Oxbridge colleges, such athletes were referred to as “flannelled fools and muddied oafs.” Today that dubious tradition is stronger in America than Britain.

Ivy-Plus universities have strong reasons for fighting for the status quo. Just as affirmative action for minorities gives them a moral boost, affirmative action for the rich provides them with a material boost. College sports teams solidify alumni loyalty (and donations) while reinforcing the college spirit more generally. A 2022 study of admission data for an anonymous elite northeastern college found that legacies are much more likely to give money and time to their alma mater and massively more likely to give big donations, with 42% of legacy graduates flagged as potential top givers compared with only 6% of non-legacy graduates. Big gifts not only help to keep America’s universities at the forefront of academic research, the argument goes; they also give them the wherewithal to fund poorer students.

But such arguments are hardly dispositive: What do fancy gyms or generous research grants count for if you pollute the academic ethic by selling places to the highest bidder? With an endowment of $53.2 billion as of June 2021, Harvard (“a hedge fund with a university attached”) could survive on its interest for an age without sending out any more begging letters to alumni. And Princeton has an even higher endowment per capita than Harvard.

The case against positive discrimination for the rich is gathering momentum. Wesleyan University recently announced that it will end legacy admissions, adding its name to an honor roll that now boasts Johns Hopkins, Amherst, and Carnegie Mellon and has long included Harvard’s meritocratic neighbor, MIT. Several advocacy groups are suing Harvard over the legacy admissions, citing the high proportion of legacy students who are white as well as rich. And there is no doubt where public opinion lies: An opinion poll conducted last year by the Pew Research Center found that 75% of Americans were against legacy admissions, up from 68% in 2019, and higher than the proportion of Americans who are against affirmative action for minorities.

The Chetty et al research can only add to this momentum. The economists demonstrate that Ivy-Plus colleges could easily diversify the pipeline into America’s elite — long their claimed intention — by the simple expedient of getting rid of “hooks” that benefit the already privileged. Doing so would increase the share of students from the bottom 95% of the income distribution by 8.7 percentage points, adding 144 students from families earning less than $240,000 to the typical Ivy-Plus college. Such an increase in poorer students is comparable to the reduction in the number of Black and Hispanic students that would follow from the elimination of race-based affirmative action. And it would increase social diversity without compromising economic outcomes. On the contrary: The proportion of Ivy-Plus students who go on to work for the most intellectually demanding elite firms should actually increase.

But simply removing unjustified privileges for the rich should only be the beginning given how skewed the admission to elite institutions is to the plutocracy, and given the price that America is paying for this in terms of social tension and lost ability. Several elite colleges now make attendance free for families who earn below a certain income — $100,000 at Stanford and Princeton and $85,000 at Harvard — though so far this has had surprisingly little impact on the class-composition of the universities. Chetty et al make the case for “need affirmative” admissions policies in which low-income students with high academic ratings are given an admission preference. Others point to the virtues of the Texas model in which students in the top 10% of graduating classes in all the state’s schools, in poor districts as well as rich, are guaranteed places in the University of Texas system.

The renewed debate is a sign that the US status quo — plutocracy diluted by affirmative action for favored minorities — is breaking apart. I would simply reiterate two arguments that I have made. The first is the case for planting elite academic schools in poorer areas. This strategy worked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when America was facing similar problems with social calcification, and progressive educationalists founded schools such as San Francisco’s Lowell High School (1856) and New York City’s Stuyvesant High School (1904) that proved extraordinarily successful in getting the children of poor immigrants into elite universities.

The second is the case for preserving standardized tests in the face of calls for holistic assessment.** There is certainly evidence that such tests favor richer children who can afford expensive test prep. But they are nevertheless much less class-biased than holistic assessments that give you points for doing community service in Guatemala or excelling at fencing. Highly selective public colleges such as the University of California, Berkeley, that follow more standardized processes in evaluating applications exhibit smaller disparities in admission rates by parental income than private colleges that make more use of holistic evaluations. In Ivy-Plus universities standardized tests are also “substantially better” predictors of success after college than the non-academic factors (polish or academic ability) — indeed, according to Chetty et al, such non-academic factors may “negatively predict” later success.

Standardized tests provide an invaluable way of holding elite universities accountable to an external measure of merit (which may be one reason so many admissions officers are so keen to get rid of them). The Chetty research would have been impossible without using SAT and Act evidence. They are also better predictors of academic performance at college than school grades, not least because accelerating grade inflation is now eroding the value of such grades.

Let us by all means start by abolishing obvious abuses such as legacies and athletic boosts. It is highly unusual for an economic research paper to point to such a clear-cut solution to a big social problem. But let us go further and use time-honored tools such as standardized tests and selective high schools to make a reality once again of one of America’s most cherished ideas about itself — that it is a country where ability can be matched with opportunity and where success in life is distributed according to the logic of merit rather than the lottery of parental income.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/04/junking-legacy-admissions-at-top-us-schools-is-just-a-baby-step/b4dda4ca-3303-11ee-85dd-5c3c97d6acda_story.html.

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*https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/CollegeAdmissions_Paper.pdf.

**This paragraph should - but probably won't - stir the interest of the Regents who got rid of test scores for admissions. Blog readers will recall that the Academic Senate originally recommended keeping tests as one element of admissions.