Netanal Crispe/TMX via REUTERS
Ed desk: Yale Profs Fight Back
“Nearly 100 Yale professors have signed a letter calling for the university to ‘freeze new administrative hires’ and conduct a ‘faculty-led audit’ of its sprawling bureaucracy,” cheers City Journal’s John D. Sailer. “While faculty have long complained about administrative growth and overreach, the Yale letter is a rare example of organized pushback.” “For decades, federal policy has been a tool for campus social-justice advocates” who use everything from “civil rights mandates to NIH funding requirements” to justify their jobs. Now, “federal policy has become a potential instrument for a different constituency: old-school liberal professors.” “The way forward for America’s universities, which remain the best in the world, will require a concord between two parties with little trust for one another: reform-minded liberal faculty and the Trump administration.”
Shark: We Need Higher Tariffs on China
President Trump needs to get tougher on China, Kevin O’Leary, the Mr. Wonderful of “Shark Tank,” argues at The Free Press. Beijing has “never complied” with World Trade Organization rules “guaranteeing intellectual property rights and cooperating with American producers” since joining in 2001. “The Chinese government repeatedly steals intellectual property” even as it ruthlessly breaks “the international rules of free trade” to gain market share in industries like steel. And “there is no major Chinese company that isn’t controlled by the CCP,” the Chinese Communist Party. But Beijing can’t win a trade war, as there’s “simply no substitute for the American consumer.” Best to “shut down trade with China completely” — “It might not be pretty in the short term, but it’s ultimately the only way forward.”
Libertarian: AI Bots Are Robbing Taxpayers
Data suggest that AI bots posing as California students stole “more than $10 million in federal financial aid and upward of $3 million in state aid between March 2023 and March 2024,” reports Reason’s Autumn Billings. “The scam is simple”: Fake an enrolled student doing “minimal online coursework — often AI-generated — to stay enrolled long enough to receive federal and state aid disbursements,” then disappear. “Cases surged after restrictions around financial aid were loosened during the COVID-19 pandemic,” and “California isn’t the only state experiencing this problem.” The cost of financial aid fraud was “over $100 million in 2023 — a tenfold increase from the annual average before 2020.”
Liberal: Will Dems Choose ‘All Resistance’ Path?
While “there should be no dearth of contenders for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination,” The Liberal Patriot’s Ruy Teixeira worries that “Democrats are quickly forgetting that we still live in a populist age and that there is a working-class sized hole in their coalition.” With anti-Trump animus “off the charts among college-educated Democratic partisans, exactly the voters most likely to show up in Democratic primaries,” many candidates will offer nothing else. “Politicians with a moderate profile,” such as Govs. Josh Shapiro and Gretchen Whitmer, may be unable to “dance all the way through the Democratic primary process.” Dems’ best hope is a nominee who can “rehabilitate their image among working-class voters and in vast areas of the country where their brand is currently toxic,” but “I am not optimistic.”
Conservative: Decolonizers Just Want To Kill
When “Islamic terrorists stormed across a tourist spot in Jammu and Kashmir and killed 26 people” this month, “often confirming the victims were Hindu before executing them,” antisemitic “influencers and campus groups” took a “holiday from Jew-baiting to justify the Muslim slaughter of Hindus under the blood-soaked catchall of decolonization,” fumes Commentary’s Seth Mandel. Some blamed Israel; others rejoiced that “both Jews and Indians have shed blood at the hands of Islamists.” Some attacked Indian students “for objecting to the massacre of Hindus.” It followed the Oct. 7 protest pattern “step-for-step.” This is a “world made and sustained by Western academia,” which provides “intellectual scaffolding” via the “barbaric pseudo-discipline of decolonization.” The result? Young adults maintain a “firm belief that lots and lots” of people “must be murdered.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board