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Florida loves the Classic Learning Test, an ACT/SAT competitor. It’s not about college applications though. High school leaders use it to pass students who failed the state’s exit exams. Grad rates are up, but some educators ask if that's good, my latest: www.usatoday.com/story/news/e...

Hegseth’s ‘gold standard’ college exam tests middle-school mathHeld up as a new route to college admissions, the Classic Learning Test has instead become a remedial high-school graduation test in Florida.www.usatoday.com

This is one of the most absurd decisions by higher ed administrators that I can recall in recent (or even longer) memory. This is an absolute, irrefutable signal that the leaders of Harvard puts no value in the student experience of LEARNING. It's a joke and should be seen as hugely discrediting.

What parts of a Harvard degree (I may be wrong that they grant the BA; AB, maybe) can be stripped away, then, without it compromising the public's sense of the degree's value? Which parts of the substance can you lose, and which students will complain about it?

It‘s quite possible that with this move, @harvard.edu could become the only Ivy League university without a writing center. www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

Harvard College Lays Off Writing Center Director, Consolidates Center | News | The Harvard CrimsonThe Harvard College Writing Center will no longer operate as a standalone unit after its director was laid off and its functions were consolidated as part of a restructuring in the Faculty of Arts and...www.thecrimson.com

This is mind blowing. It feels as though Harvard College is being DOGEd! I have been totally blindsided by this. WTF does an undergraduate education even mean to those who are carrying out this restructuring?

I have yet to teach a student where I’m convinced that they learned as much in AP US History as they would have in our lower division surveys. (Particularly the early material.) And I’ve had students who took AP US Government and Politics and…ugh. That course anti-prepared them.

Imagine this opening the door to Hall, Eagleton, Spivak, Dimock, Trouillot, Hartman. Imagine school boards debating theories of historicism and periodization. Some counties swear by Parrington. Others by the Cambridge History of American Literature. “What does it mean to remember the Alamo?”

Like are they going to require reading DH Lawrence on Hawthorne and “Classic American Literature” more generally? Italo Calvino? Harold Bloom? They’re all too subversive for today’s legislators!