Note: Around the College Town is my weekly links roundup article on urbanism and education. These posts mostly cover news that may have fallen through the cracks rather than the big events.

Waiting in Line Was Better Than Ticketmasterification

There are two big-time sporting events happening right now: the NBA Finals and the World Cup. While what happens on the court or pitch can be electric, tickets to get into the arena or stadium have proved elusive for many fans. The tickets are just unaffordable.

The cheapest ticket to get into Madison Square Garden for Game 3 between the New York Knicks and San Antonio Spurs was over $10,000 (though it dropped to half by tipoff). And those prices are for the nosebleed, last rows. I sat in those seats years ago for 50 bucks, and I sort of felt like they weren’t worth it. This is not even to mention the astronomical prices for the lower sections, adorned with celebs and mega-wealthy.

The same ticket price issue is proving true with the World Cup here in the US, which is co-hosted along with Canada and Mexico, perhaps related to pure greed from a corrupt FIFA. Nonetheless, the ticket price explosion in the US has touched events beyond the biggest. All tickets seem to be way overinflated from even just a few years ago.

Gone are actual physical tickets (although kudos to the Knicks for making an exception this NBA Finals). Instead, everything is online through third-party vendors like Ticketmaster. The promise of moving to digital and away from physical tickets was that it was easier and cheaper to run. It is true that ordering tickets has become relatively easy through these apps, but the ticket prices are just higher, including additional “convenience” fees.

Of course, part of this is just supply and demand. More people want to go to these events, so the vendors can just keep raising prices. Yet, there is more to it than just that. Hence, why prices dropped right before Game 3 of the NBA Finals and the World Cup has not sold out yet. Scalpers and third-party vendors try to take advantage of our open system.

This all got me thinking that the digitization of tickets is worse than the old system of waiting in line. Up until 15 years or so ago, if you wanted to attend some coveted event, you walked up to the venue and staked out your place in line. Some people would sleep outside all night just to be early in line to get guaranteed seats. You had to really want it.

The other option was to just show up on game day, scoping for scalpers. Yes, these deals could also be shady, but it was just par for the course of doing business in a previous age. Often, you could get good deals by waiting right before the game to start before purchasing. Scalpers do not want to be stuck holding the bag. I know some venues or sports still have this tradition; yet it is becoming less common these days.

Actually being in a place raised the stakes to buying tickets. People had to invest time and forgo commitments in order to wait in long lines. We all thought this was annoying back in the day, but it now seems preferable to the Ticketmasterification of the sector. Having to wait in line physically meant there was a natural barrier for some potential attendees. But it also meant that if you really wanted to attend an event, you knew exactly what you needed to do. Wake up at the crack of dawn, drive down to the stadium, plop down a lawn chair, and wait to be one of the first buyers.

In this Ticketmasterification economy, bots or automatic buyers can scoop up a ton of tickets with the explicit purpose of resale, jacking up prices way over the listed face value. They are mostly just middlemen, taking advantage of the ease with which the phone has given us. Some performers are going to extreme lengths to prove ticket buyers are humans, like scanning eyeballs.

In the end, it turns out lining up physically like we did before the 2010s was the optimal way to distribute tickets…

Despite the negativity around ticket prices, these events are bringing out the best of humans as only sports can do. The scenes around MSG look like a circus in the best possible way, highlighting all the eccentricities in the world’s greatest city. “My Mayor is Muslim, my bagel is Jewish, my Christian’s Dior… Knicks in 4!” Times like these make me wish I still lived there.

Likewise, travelers from across the world have descended on North America, exploring all of our local delicacies. Germans gorging themselves on Waffle House for the first time or Koreans getting silly in the Mexican party scene is exactly what the World Cup is all about. Sports diplomacy! I also love that the Europeans are trying to grapple with the American summer. Yes, it’s hot, but you will find the hotel AC extra frigid.

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Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• Locals are “fearful” of a student housing proposal in Columbia, Missouri, home to the University of Missouri. They are worried the housing will be unsafe and will ruin the “scenic roadway.” The “scenic roadway:”

• Despite the warnings of the “Enrollment Cliff,” college enrollment has actually increased recently.

• In population news from across the world, Korean birthrates rose for the first time in years.

• Some small US colleges have been turning to seniors as the population of young people thins. Going from seniors to seniors!

• New College in Florida is absorbing another university. This kind of acquisition is more often associated with private institutions, but the Age of Conquest knows no bounds.

• MIT shuts down some of its libraries. Bummer. If MIT cannot even maintain its services, what hope is there for other institutions?

• College football coaches' salaries are massive… and these are just the assistants

• UNESCO has a digital exhibit on the history of education.

• Children of immigrants dominate billion-dollar companies in the US.

• Austin public schools are struggling with enrollment via at .

Urbanism-ish

• Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD) drives across the entire country of Canada without human intervention. I have been skeptical of Tesla, but this is a welcome development.

• But a new report has also brought up questions around Tesla’s safety data and the company’s autopilot killed a man by driving into pond (though I should note this feature was not supposed to be full self-driving).

• Despite these issues, some believe that LiDAR is on its way out of self-driving cars, meaning Tesla was ahead of the game. I’m still dubious.

• It’s not just the US, a Chinese company launches a self-driving cargo and delivery vehicle line. The Chinese self-driving market is the space to watch right now.

• But in another example of how humans are going to ruin self-driving cars:

• In other car news, the new Ferrari designed by Apple legend has been getting mocked on the internet.

  

• Turning to cities, the stray dog problem is so bad in Houston they are airlifting them out ahead of the World Cup

• Hero goes around putting nets on basketball hoops so they are better for kids to play on.

• Cities are bringing back those statues we took down in the early 2020s.

• Brightline is offering extra service to the World Cup matches in Florida.

• But despite success, Brightline is about to declare bankruptcy. This seems to be mostly about the debt needed to build the infrastructure; their ridership numbers are good.

• In more train news, California is actually making progress in the high-speed rail line. Welcome if surprising news.

• In more California train news, a NIMBY town cost California taxpayers millions of dollars and delays in train electrification.

• For another idiosyncrasy of the state, 17-year-olds in California can drive their own car but cannot legally sit in a Waymo by themselves. Wild.

• In the other American metropolis, Mamdani kills the Queens subway line. First bad move of his tenure?

• But it’s not all bad news in the rail world: Omaha, Nebraska, may revive its once-glorious streetcar, even if not to the great heights that it was.

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Closing Time… Paris Syndrome in Japan

An author recently made the case that Japan is just not as cool as movies or anime. A city not living up to the imagined expectations of visitors is called Paris Syndrome, which funny enough originated from a Japanese traveler. The opening thesis of the argument in The Spectator:

Japanese cities can disappoint. Visitors stroll around hoping to be awe-struck by the dreamy spectacle of clip-clopping Geisha in their wooden geita, or barreling sumo wrestlers, or high-stockinged ninja girls (à la Kill Bill), and all against a Blade Runner backdrop, only to be confronted with mostly unremitting blandness. The constants are these: concrete, plastic, more concrete, more plastic, endless construction (one crappy shopping complex or mansion block replacing another), confusion, and noise. It can all seem dizzyingly homogenous.

The author is Philip Patrick, a writer and lecturer at the Sophia University in Japan, so he does live in Japan. His main target of ire was towards Japanese convenience stores or “konbini.” He goes after the familiar names like 7-11, Lawson, and Family Mart, saying that he hates these “soulless, ‘non-places’.”

For this take, he has been getting dragged online. People love Japanese convenience stores, and they have taken on somewhat of a cult following. So I am not surprised by the hate he is getting, especially since he is a foreigner in Japan. Some backlash responses (some that I could share on this page at least):

For my own take, I visited Japan last summer (see accompanying photos by me). I have gone on record that it lived up to every one of my expectations, no Japan Paris Syndrome for me. Given the tourism numbers, I think most travelers seem to agree with me, especially Americans. Americans are so gorged with banal suburban sprawl that we go nuts when we see a random convenience store or alleyway in Japan. We don’t see them as soulless, but rather as culture.

So I will have to disagree with Patrick in The Spectator. What do you think? Did Japan live up to your expectations? Have you ever had Paris Syndrome?

These in the 16% are the drivers who you see darting in and out of traffic, weaving at dangerous speeds on the highway. They are also the drivers who are constantly fiddling with and checking their phones. Every stoplight is a chance for them to get a hit on their addiction—perhaps not as dangerous, but certainly annoying delays.

This 16% concept encompasses drivers who are old, young, addicted, angry, and generally incompetent. In this article, I walk through the numbers and consider ways to grapple with this dilemma.

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Normal Distribution of Human Capabilities

This 16% number I landed on has been derived from the concept of the normal distribution. Plot any type of skill or trait and you will find a bunched-up portion of humans in the middle, with a spread of variation emanating out from the average, on both extremes. This is the normal distribution.

The normal distribution is the spread of scores or measures within a population. There will naturally be a majority of scores in the middle at the average, spreading out with fewer responses the further towards the extremes. Of course, there can be subset population variations.

With the normal distribution, half of the observations will be below the mean and the other half above the mean. One standard deviation from the mean in either direction is 34.13% of the observations. Within two standard deviations is 13.59%. From three, it’s just 2.14%, fourth is .13%, and anything beyond these extremes is miniscule. I get 16% from the percentages beyond one standard deviation: 13.6%+2.1%+0.1% = 15.8%. I round this up to 16% just for ease of the moniker.

The normal distribution pops up throughout everyday life. The most well-known application of the normal distribution likely comes from IQ or other forms of testing, which I recognize is controversial (where most people relate these principles to a Bell Curve). Nonetheless, these tests are meant to be normally distributed. But even throwing this one out, there are other examples to illustrate normality of human capabilities.

The normal distribution works for basic demographic traits such as height or weight. But also works for skills, such as basketball or other sports. Only about 3.4% of high school basketball players make it to play in college at the NCAA level, all according to data from the NCAA. Of those who made it to college, only about 1.2% make it to a top pro league like the NBA. College basketball players are in the 95th percentile, while NBA players are in the 99th percentile on the normal distribution of basketball skills.

These same breakdowns work with driving. Drivers for NASCAR are the same extreme end of the distribution for driving as their NBA counterparts in basketball. Like any skill, most people will sit near the average of the driving distribution. Yet, there will inevitably be a group at the end extreme end, opposite of NASCAR, that make up the 16% of dangerous drivers.

The driving test gives us one proxy for this concept. Data shows that 78.8% of American drivers pass the skills version of the test (the driving portion), only a few shades less than the 16% mark in terms of failure rates. Chalk some of that up to test nerves. Some may take multiple times to pass, too.

While we do not have great data on driving tests from the US, the UK provides national passing rates. In the UK, roughly 49% of drivers pass the practical driving test on the first try, aligning perfectly with the normal distribution. Drivers who pass the test in the second or third time account for almost 37%, which again aligns closely with the normal distribution between the mean and 1 standard deviation. Finally, a little over 14% needed four, five, six, or more attempts to pass. In fact, some drivers need 30 or 40 attempts to pass. Those in the extreme end are all the 16%.

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85% Rule

Another support for my 16% conception comes from the field of traffic engineering. When deciding what speed limit a street should have, traffic engineers do a study to see how fast drivers typically drive in the area. The engineers then average out all of the scores and set the limit at the 85th percentile of all driving speeds.

This means that speed limits in the US are explicitly tied to drivers at around basically one standard deviation from the norm. The practice tracks with the 16% conception. Traffic engineers quite literally believe in this range of human capabilities to successfully navigate roadways.

In recent years, the profession of traffic engineering has been heavily criticized for too much adherence to car-centric environments. Strong Towns, in particular, has taken aim at these tactics. The organization’s founder, , says that the 85th percentile rule can be useful for high-speed streets, but it is not a one-size-fits-all solution:

A road is different than a street, which is a platform for building wealth within a community. On streets, where there is vastly more complexity, the 85th percentile speed is almost always misapplied. Especially where a forgiving design approach is used for street design, drivers will not perceive the complexity of the environment. When engineers widen lanes, create recovery areas, make curves more gentle, and use other design features developed for highways, they give the driver the incorrect signal that the environment is simple, that they can relax and not be hyper-vigilant. Speeds go up and tragedy is the inevitable result.

Despite the critique, it shows that there is a logic to the 85th percent rule; it is just taken to the extreme in most of our built environments. This is not a test of driving ability, as I am suggesting with the 16% concept, but rather just of speed. It does, though, give us a practical proxy that is used in the real world. I’m sure traffic engineers would love to have some real driving test for their speed studies.

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Follow the Insurance Money

Insurance companies know all about the 16% already. They price in the fact that not every driver is the same as the other. It is industry standard to charge different rates for various driver types. Very young drivers get charged the most, then the rest of us pay some kind of standard, and there are a range of ways to reduce that with good driving record.

Insurance companies do this kind of pricing because they are not in the business of losing money. On the contrary, they are quite profitable, and part of that business success is recognizing the 16% of bad drivers. In general, they track with age as a proxy, with young drivers paying the most by far. There is a curvilinear relationship to age, though, as it goes up, insurance rates go down. This is true until about 60, then rates start ticking back up.

It is a crude measure of the normal distribution, yet still illustrates the concept tied to real-world money. Follow the money! There is a reason why young men in particular pay the most: they are more aggressive, irresponsible, and stupid behind the wheel. The insurance industry accounts for this disparity in driving skill.

According to Matt Timmons, author of State of Auto Insurance in 2025, insurers will offer sharp discounts to perceived good drivers. “This includes a 10-15% discount for drivers who take a defensive driving course, a 10% discount for safe drivers who’ve been accident-free for over 5 years and a 20% discount for drivers with low mileage use,” he said.

The insurance industry is very lucrative. They are not into losing money. Even they can see the 16% Dangerous Drivers Dilemma.

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Drivers, Young and Old

The 16% label is not a Scarlet Letter. Instead, we age in and out of being in the 16%. Most very young drivers are terrible drivers by dint of experience. There is simply a learning curve for learning to drive. But there is also an immaturity factor. Teenagers think they can live forever and nothing can hurt them, with tragic consequences.

Confession time: I was in the 16% when I was a teenage driver. So were most of my friends. We were all idiots. And my own high school experiences saw multiple vehicular deaths that still weigh on me to this day. After a few years, young drivers age more into the middle part of the distribution to safer and reasonable driving.

Luckily, young drivers usually age out of this irresponsible stage, which is what happened to me. However, on the other end, drivers can age back into the 16%. As we get older, we lose our faculties. Our eyesight gets worse, our reaction time slows, and our mobility diminishes. Driving skills regress. Data from AAA show that young drivers are the most dangerous, but senior drivers are more unsafe than middle ages.

This degradation of physical abilities is why a lot of senior drivers drive very slowly. Driving slowly is certainly safer than the maniac teenage driver, but mixing slow with fast speeds into traffic causes its own problems. Again, it goes back to the 85th rule. Likewise, even at slower speeds, vehicles can be deadly if the driver loses control of the 5,000 pound SUV.

But there are even more issues with seniors losing their ability to drive, yet continuing to drive out of necessity. There has been a slew of tragic deaths recently due to senior drivers losing control of their vehicles and plowing into innocent bystanders. This is becoming a growing issue as the Boomers enter these age ranges.

Super Speeders

Many cities have noticed that there is a small group of people who have an enormous amount of traffic violations. In fact, much of crime operates in the same way. Remove a small number of extreme end criminals, and a greater total percentage of crime will decrease, argued in the aptly titled paper “1% of the population accountable for 63% of all violent crime convictions.”

These are called “super speeders.” They make up a good portion of the 16%, and likely the least sympathetic. Often, this is not about physical ability, like rookie drivers or aging seniors, but just a total disregard for anyone else outside of their own car. States have been grappling with these super speeders across the country.

For instance, in New York, those labeled as “super speeders” average roughly 179 speeding-in-a-school-zone tickets, which equals a traffic violation every other day of the year. Georgia and Maryland recently passed "Stop Super Speeders" bills. Virginia and D.C. did something similar, too. The extreme end of the normal distribution for driving causes so much traffic violence and damage that states must make special efforts to grapple with this subset.

These laws usually target installing Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) or “governors” that throttle a car’s speed. Yet, advocates argue that the penalty of a short license suspension is not enough of a deterrent. '

Automatic ticketing cameras are another tactic against super speeders. A pilot program in Oakland installed 35 speed cameras at 18 locations. The results showed that 64.4% of drivers who received a warning did not get another ticket. But 30% of drivers received two to five tickets, 3.7% six to 10, and 11 or more at around 1%.

These types of cameras do work to a degree. “San Francisco’s speed cameras slashed excessive speeding from 25% of traffic to just 2% to 6% within a year,” according to the LA Times. But in New York City, the automatic ticketing has a lower fine than if written by a cop, hindering some of the sting to super speeders.

Not dealing with these super speeders has serious consequences. Speed is the biggest factor in fatal vehicle crashes. According to a study in the Journal of Safety Research by Walton and Hendy (2024):

Ticket accumulation need not be considered the best predictor of crash likelihood, but around 1 in every 8 persons (12. 66%) who accumulate more than four tickets within an observed two-year period are later involved in a CAS-recorded crash, where they are the driver at fault. This represents a large concentration of risk compared to the overall base estimate of 1.22% incidence over three years. This risk is clearly identifiable in a particular portion of the driving population because records are kept for every ticket.

While speed is the most important factor, these 16% go beyond just one measure. There is a general flippant demeanor to dangerously driving a 5,000-pound vehicle. In Maryland, one driver had over 900 unpaid parking tickets.

We could lop off some serious dangers if we just took these people off the road. Our laws are usually are forgiving to license suspension, even when they have some kind of horrible incident. And I don’t use accident here. Whenever someone like this kills or maims another person, it is not accidental; it follows a pattern of risky behaviors.

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The 16% Dilemma is Getting Worse

There are some aspects of the 16% dilemma that have been exacerbated in contemporary America. Our stroads do not help anyone, whether in the 16% or not. One of the key problems is the phones (I know, the root of so many modern ills).

I didn’t drive for almost 10 years, from roughly 2009 to 2019. This is the exact time period of the proliferation of the smartphone. The differences in driving then to now are stark. Everyone is on their phone. I am dumbfounded by just how often I see a fellow driver looking down at their phone. Given how dangerous it is, there should be more shame in it.

But people do not care, they simply look down at their lap, then snap back up like awoken from a delirium. In a traffic line, these phone drivers cause delays by limiting how many people can make it through a light. When they do snap up, they try to jam on the gas to catch back. This just creates more unsafe situations, all for a screen addiction that we have normalized.

On the extreme end, there are a lot of 16%ers who are simply driving around on their phones. It is stunningly dangerous. Yet, you will see multiple people doing on any commute. Next time you are driving, try to count how many you see on their phones. It should be about 1/16 drivers or so with their head looking down.

Another problem is that American cars have ballooned to ridiculous sizes. Bigger cars are simply more dangerous to everyone not inside of them. There are just realities of driving that relate to physical space. A person of smaller stature will have a more limited view in certain larger types of vehicles. They will be a danger to other people on the road because they have lower vision. There is no way to get around that other than simply driving a smaller car.

Height limits on certain types of cars would make sense. But there would be some kind of civil rights appeal. This is a very American problem, perceived personal freedom is a higher value than consideration to broader community, even if the behavior is risky or detrimental. See one example from Florida recently:

The Delirium of Dangerous Driver

As a society, Americans have been resistant to removing the 16% from out roads. Our overinflated, auto-centric design has limited our choices to everyone having to drive. Walking, biking, or taking public transportation is deemed too cruel and unusual for Americans. at recently published an article detailing just why it is so difficult to stop super speeders. In short: we aren’t allowed to.

Exasperated Infrastructures

This Is Why We Can't Ever Stop Superspeeders

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14 days ago · 5 likes · 4 comments · sam sklar

There are various laws that limit punitive measures. If someone doesn’t even hurt someone, just got caught driving in a dangerous manner, there is even more leeway. In one egregious case from Pennsylvania, an off-duty cop hit a family in a crosswalk because he was texting. He faced no real consequences, not even a suspended license, according to local news coverage. Stories like this can be found across the county.

There are arguments that speed governors are dangerous or too inconvenient. The problem with these arguments is that most of us cannot understand speed. “Quite simply, the faster you are going already, the less time you save by going 10mph faster still,” says Rory Sutherland for The Spectator. “Accelerate from 20-30 mph, and you save ten minutes on a ten-mile journey. Accelerate from 70-80 mph, and you save just over a minute.”

The 16% just make things worse with a lack of object permanence, jamming on the gas only to have to slam on the brakes because of cars in front of them. This creates more traffic because they end up bunching up with other cars when weaving in and out of traffic. We are too lenient on this subset of driver. They make everything worse. Yet even when states try to crack down, there are limitations. New York’s news Super Speeder Bill has been hailed as admirable, but it only installs governors for those with 16 tickets in a year. 16! That’s over one per month.

of has been critical of the unwillingness to punish these super speeders. He tweeted recently of the new New York law: “Don’t ever forget this story. Leading up to the crash, the killer had:”

• “21 speeding tickets in 2 years”

• “6 red light camera violations in 6 months”

• “70+ other violations in 2 years”

He closed, “She was still free to drive at a murderous speed.” I agree. We must no longer accept the scourge of the 16% on the rest of us. Do we really believe we can stop maniac driving like this by asking nicely? Of course not.

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To Stop the 16%, Design Better Streets

Despite the obvious problem, there is not much political will in the country to grapple with super speeders, reckless drivers, or the 16% in general. Democrats tend to lean away from more law enforcement due to equity concerns, while Republicans have become distrustful of more government control, even if traffic enforcement. Changing laws and adding more enforcement is just not always feasible electorally.

This is where the Strong Towns approach can come in to address the problem. In this conception, street design should dictate the comfort of driving. If we want drivers to slow down, we need to make lanes narrower, add bollards or barriers (real ones, not plastic flexipoles), cover with overhanging trees, and other general traffic-calming measures. I have advocated for these things myself (see my video essay on the topic),

What the Strong Towns approach does is take safety out of the hands of waffling politicians. In a properly designed street, a 16% driver will constantly show themselves by damaging their own vehicle. We want them to hit bollards and scrape concrete walls. This outcome is certainly better than flesh and blood of innocent pedestrians.

My guess is that anyone who gets mad at this 16% concept is in fact in the 16%. They likely cannot stay off their phone, have heated road rage, or just simply struggle with the basics of driving. No matter, getting bad drivers off the road should not elicit hate. It should elicit cheers. And since we cannot always do that, we can help protect the rest of us from the 16% of dangerous drivers through smarter street design.

Write for Summer School at College Towns

Graduation is in the rearview mirror, Memorial Day weekend is now behind us, and it’s getting hot outside; it is the official start of the summer. School’s out. Rejoice, teachers and students alike (sorry to those not in education).

It was a strong academic year for College Towns. I have continued my publishing schedule, and the site has gotten some media attention beyond just the Substack community. A recent Inside Higher Ed article, “Second Acts for Closed Campuses,” quoted me and my work here on shuttering college campuses. They also used some of my photos from my work, which I love sharing.

Ryan Allen, a professor of comparative and international education and leadership and author of the College Towns newsletter, has crisscrossed the country in recent years to visit closed campuses, traveling thousands of miles for a book he’s writing on the subject.

I want to keep this momentum up over the summer. One way to do that is to open up College Towns as a platform for other authors. I’m dubbing this call for articles the “Summer School at College Towns” series. Last year, I had some amazing guest posts from all walks of life and perspectives. We have had guest posts from former bus drivers on college town transit systems, professors and researchers on issues in higher ed and housing, and other writers on reviving dead malls.

I am broadly interested in issues at the intersections of education and urbanism, the theme of College Towns. So if you are interested in publishing something a little bit different that might not have a home elsewhere, my DMs and email are open (ryanmallen555 at gmail.com). I can work with you to craft an article or idea. Here are some things I would be interested in covering:

• Local issues in urbanism.

• Commutes to school.

• Colleges building housing.

• Movies/ TV through urbanism and education.

• Stories from studying/ living abroad.

Reach out if you want to be a part of Summer School at College Towns. And since it’s the start of summer, I remind you to rewatch the greatest end-of-school-year movie of all time, Dazed and Confused. Then check out my article on the education and urbanism of the film. It is an all-time classic.

Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• Alabama has a program to fully cover housing and childcare for student moms in university. This is the kind of policy we need to grapple with the birthrate issues.

• Michigan buys a dying college campus. The Age of Conquest marches on!

• Student housing portfolio sells for almost a billion dollars. That’s 12 properties with 7,578 beds across 12 universities.

• Texas State U is constructing a $280 million high-rise dorm project. The university has aggressive growth targets, hoping to go from 44K to 50K by 2030.

• And if you think student housing is lucrative, another firm has recently expanded senior housing to the tune of $5.4 billion.

• This gives me an idea: new way for colleges to survive? Become a senior home.

• Tulane backs away from student housing proposal that would have knocked down a dumpy post-war sprawl development. The university would have preserved the vintage sign and allowed the diner to operate on the first floor.

  

• UC Berkeley law school enacts a big ban on AI. Are these restrictions too strict?

• Wharton professor sounds the alarm bells that so many high school students reach out to him to do research. This kind of thing is a farce, agreed. It is mostly about padding college application stats, not real research.

• Christian colleges think Trump’s new policy is an existential threat. These changes to higher ed are not just hurting the Harvards and Columbias.

• Sam’s Club in Shanghai is selling Harvard-branded backpacks. The strongest American brand in the world is a university.

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Urbanism-ish

• LA and Orange County, where I live, have the lowest rates of young homebuyers in the country. Previous generations pulled the ladder up from behind them.

• Former IBM offices in LA are being retrofitted into housing. Good, more of this.

• I used to be skeptical that golf cars could be usefulness for good urbanism. But runs through the advantages that they bring. I have changed my mind and see their utility.

• Singapore is going through its own kind of social and cultural transition of the urban form via at Singapore Samizat. I was taken by how similar these yearnings for nostalgia are to what is happening in the US.

• Pew reports that a larger portion of websites are no longer available. Sad. At least there is a new digital graveyard for lost websites and apps. Fun to explore.

• On the flip side, I saw this interesting story on how print magazines can work if they are hyperlocal from . Maybe it’s not print that is dead, but the Internet.

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Closing Time… Did Phones Kill the Hostel Common Room?

I saw this question posed on r/solotravel on Reddit. The user was lamenting the lack of social interactions happening at the hostel where they were staying. “Socializing in hostel common room is slowly dying?” they asked.

My last night here at the hostel and I thought "oh why not stay a while in the common room and have a chit-chat with other fellow travelers. Lo and behold! Everyone is on their phones like literally every single soul in the common room! After half an hour of" dead silence", I decided to just give up, finished my tea and went back to my room.

A lot of users agreed with the thread. “I’m new to solo travel and this is the only experience I had in hostels. It’s good to know I’m not alone,” agreed another user with the most upvotes in the thread. Others, however, suggested that travelers should “sometimes you need to make the first step.” Some tips on the thread to help lubricate socializations are, no surprise, through alcohol:

I will say that I used to love staying at hostels when I was younger, especially when I was traveling solo. However, with age, I do not frequent them as much anymore, as my wife and I have raised our standards since our grad school days. I will say that we stayed in a hostel in Seattle’s Chinatown last summer. It was fun! And we hung out late one night in the common room, socializing with guests from around the world. Bringing some beers certainly helped, confirming the tips in the subreddit thread.

So is this something that you have noticed during your travels? Have phones killed the hostel common room? Or are we all just collectively getting older and doing this kind of thing less with age? Tell me what you think in the comments.

Graduating Into and With AI

It’s graduation season! Congrats to all those recent grads ready for a new adventure. This week, a lot of talk has happened around this graduating class having to grapple with AI. The job world for recent grads is indeed in massive flux due to the wide adoption of the technology.

Given the concerns over AI, it should not be surprising that students recently booed commencement speeches by speakers lauding AI. This happened at the University of Central Florida (thanks to for flagging this one) and the University of Arizona. Not even former Google guru Eric Schmidt could convince the students of the tech’s merits.

At the same time, there were a few high-profile op-eds from students on their cohort’s adoption of AI. Basically, most of them cheated, according to these writers.

“We are the first college class of the A.I. era — ChatGPT arrived on campus about two months after we did,” wrote Stanford graduate Theo Baker in a New York Times op-ed. “When we graduate next month, this technology will have altered our lives in very different ways.”

Indeed, these students were guinea pigs in the lab of AI higher education experimentation. The experiment has gone awry, and the test subjects know it. The ease and temptation to use AI to cheat have simply been too great. Baker wrote:

Cheating has become omnipresent. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t used A.I. to get through some assignment in college, yet the school was at first slow to realize how widespread this would become.

Given this one was in the New York Times, it received a lot of attention. But another newspaper with a lower profile echoed these same claims. The piece chronicles cheating at Western University, London, Ontario, Canada. One anonymous student admitted:

In certain situations people just want to do well, students, and I fall into this category, that knows cheating is not right, you just go along with it because the robot is going to be better at wording of a professional essay.

Both stories are especially concerning. Stanford is supposed to be a place for our best and brightest, an engine of innovation. The author does bring up the dubious ethics by past alumni, with several high-profile alumni in jail, such as Elizabeth Holmes. Further, the story from Western was regarding a health class. Look, I’m all for using AI to improve diagnoses, but I’d like my medical practitioners to have some competencies without the tech.

Over at the r/professor Subreddit, my fellow colleagues were lambasting these students and their cohort. Cheating with AI has been the bane of this group since the rollout of ChatGPT four years ago. It changed the profession forever, even if some professors refuse to believe it. Some harsh responses:

The message I got from this article is that while some students resort to booing commencement speakers at the mere mention of AI, they are quite happy to use AI during their education, even at hallowed institutions like Stanford.

Bingo-- they don't like the "we might have no jobs when we graduate" part… they sure love the "let me just use AI to do these assignments so that I don't have to learn anything" part. It's kind of a double-edged sword but both edges cut in a way that renders them unemployed.

Grim, maybe, but not much we haven't been chewing over in here for years. I think the hardest part for me is accepting that it's a whole culture of lying and thievery these days and that I can't trust even my best students. That if I get excited about anyone's work at all, there's a 50/50 chance I'm being played for a fool. At best, it's a waste of energy to care any more.

Tough quotes. But they represent very real frustrations from the faculty. Some have suggested we go back to older models of assessment: Blue Books, oral exams, and in-person proctoring, etc. Yet, there is pushback to these efforts.

At Stanford, professors are banned to “proctor in-person exams.” Baker wrote that some considered this practice to be a “nuclear option.” At Western, one professor said handwritten exams were not feasible. “A written exam by hand tests, first and foremost, a student’s handwriting skills which, in this generation, (are) almost absent,” he told The London Free Press. “It also means deciphering handwritten answers.”

Despite these barriers, universities (and professors) are realizing that the same ways of doing things can no longer remain. , a fellow educational Substacker who has been on this AI-higher ed beat for a long time, outlines some possible rules for institutions on Anecdotal Value. Universities need to get real and help these students help themselves.

The graduating class is right to be concerned with AI threatening their careers, even if many of them were using the tech to cheat. Universities should realize these temptations are too great, even for the best students. Our sector must adapt, or the boos at graduation will only continue.

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Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• Comedian Nate Bargatze is giving a student athlete a role in the next film to sign with Vanderbilt U. College football really is in the Wild West era right now. Anything seems possible.

• Oklahoma City U’s golf team won their division’s national championship, despite the school announcing the closure of the program. All too common in higher ed these days. Good quality and importance don’t always translate to survivability.

• In more closure news, Oakland City U, not to be confused with similar-sounding named institutions in the Bay Area and Michigan, but in Indiana, flip-flops on its closure. The school will remain open… for now. From my experience, reversing these kinds of closing messages cannot easily be put back in the bottle.

• Princeton gets around the endowment tax by giving students more money. Seems like the ideal way to incentivize.

• Would you want to live in an old school? Maybe this one in Seattle! But it does cost a million dollars, with another $2K per month for HoA. Ouch. Still cool adaptive reuse.

• California may loosen regulations on public university student housing. It seems absurd that private universities already have these privileges when the UCs, Cal-States, and CCs do not.

• In more housing news, Gainesville mourns dumpy abandoned gas station to be turned into student housing. Reading through the Facebook comments, I see so many locals harbor contempt for the University of Florida and its students. Sad.

  

• Is it time to end peer review? Some fellow researchers believe AI has rendered the old academic journal publishing system unsustainable. It is a convincing argument.

• Over in the UK, King’s College London and Cranfield University announced a merger. The vision for the merger is to create a “global university” brand. The Age of Conquest goes global.

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Urbanism

• Brookline, Mass., has an amazing high school that sits over a light rail line station. I love this kind of integrated design. Too few schools these days have good urbanism.

  

• New data on childhood immobilities in the US. Kids can’t do anything by themselves.

• Ebike company locks out customers from their bikes. Another example of all this “smart” tech making things worse.

• Giant novelty statues have been a fading tradition, despite their importance in Americana. But this lost art is making a comeback.

• ABC News has removed the entire archive of the election prediction site FiveThirtyEight. This kind of thing is becoming more and more common. Good reminder that we must protect the Internet Archive at all costs.

• Likewise, AI training means destroying old books. What a bummer to find out.

• In some California news, LA residents are angry at a proposed public restroom in a popular park. They think installing restrooms will attract more visitors so they would rather have none at all. Insane logic.

• But it’s not all annoyance here. LA’s new D-line subway is a game-changer for the city. Heading in the right direction!

• Brightline West, the high-speed rail line connecting LA to Las Vegas, is facing opposition from… Texas? Apparently, it is a lobbying group of angry farmers who hate trains (seriously).

  

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Closing Time… No One Can Escape My Research. Not Even Me.

This past week, Middlebury College released a plan to sell the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS) at Monterey to the Soka University of America. Hey, wait, that’s my university where I work!

I have been researching closing colleges for three years now, along with a decade of research on higher education broadly. I guess you cannot work in US higher ed these days without going through either some kind of institutional closure or expansion. I even covered the closure of MIIS here on College Towns when it was announced in August last year.

As someone who researches college closures, I am happy to hear MIIS will survive. It is an interesting and unique institution. In my own field, they have long done great work in international education (although they ended the MA in International Education Management in 2025). So I am glad that the institution will remain open.

As a faculty member here, it is also interesting that I am now within an institution grappling with closure/ merger. There are certainly questions that I have that are both professional and research-related, like How is this going to work? Since the announcement was just for these preliminary stages, there is still a lot to work out. The deal will not even be completed until the end of the 2026-2027 academic year.

For now, I am excited to learn that a great institution has been saved, even if not every program will make it. I am also excited to meet my new colleagues, even if I still have questions around the merger. C'est la vie in this Age of Conquest of US higher ed.

The July 1976 issue of National Geographic was a celebration of America. It was the time of the US Bicentennial, which captivated the country in the mid-1970s. While much of the issue looks backwards with exposés on George Washington or the country’s changing physical landscape, one article looks forward to the future.

Titled Five Notable Thinkers Explore the Future, the article outlines a meeting between intellectuals and writers of the day, as they prognosticated on what life has in store for Americans in the future. We are now 50 years out from the US Bicentennial and these predictions. With the upcoming Semiquincentennial, it is a good time to see how they did. Thinkers included in the piece:

• Gerard Piel - publisher of Scientific American.

• Richard F. Babcock - Lawyer and housing advocate.

• Isaac Asimov - Famed sci-fi and non-fiction writer.

• Buckminster Fuller - Architect, author, designer, and inventor.

• Edmund N. Bacon - City planner and urbanist.

So how did these illustrious thinkers do? Let’s dive in.

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Wait, It’s All Zoning? Always Has Been

One thing that immediately jumped out to me was how much focus there was on the urban form, cities, and our inhabitation. They dissected the ills of zoning, in particular, along with the criticisms of post-war urbanism. I was not expecting there to be so much to be about land use!

But the urbanism focus makes sense in retrospect. The 1970s were a time of the "urban crisis." Cities were struggling, hollowed out by suburban sprawl, and, in some cases, literally burning (see the Bronx). When this issue was released, the country was still a quarter-century out from the eventual urban Renaissance defined by the Millennial-Hipster-Bespoke Revolution of the 2000s.

Surprisingly, the thinkers were actually predicting these leaps in urbanism. “We’re going to see the American people resettle in the city,” said Piel. Bacon echoes the point: “It means that the center, which we think of at the moment as decaying and being abandoned, will have a resurgence and will again become the focal point.” Even in the midst of a chaotic era, they could still see the power and potential of cities and, likewise, the drawbacks of suburban development, including racial segregation.

By the year 2076, unless we achieve a racially integrated society, you are going to see our big cities substantially all white. In the next 20 years at the longest, the suburbs, where the jobs are already moving, will be open to blue-collar blacks. -Babcock.

Babcock, who is sometimes labeled “The Dean of American Planning Law,” published The Zoning Game way back in 1966. In it, he argued that American zoning laws were political endeavors rather than scientific or rational, especially that of the growing suburbanization trend. The conceptions of land use in the article almost sound like ’s Arbitrary Line (2022), published a half-century later.

On the question of land use, I think it is perfectly clear that we’re going to see the end of suburbia. The suburban dwelling is the most wasteful of resources and of energy. All of the public investment in highways, sewers, and all the rest that makes this system possible is accomplished for the more fortunate at the expense of the less fortunate. -Piel

The great illusion of the suburban experience was that man can experience nature by owning pieces of it. And that is fundamentally incorrect. Nature eludes ownership. Becoming more urban and less suburban will also reverse the rhythm of life, to our great benefit. -Bacon

In critiquing the “Low density of the suburbs,” Bacon foresaw the helicopter parenting that defines American childhood today. “They should not have to depend upon their mothers being chauffeurs in order to make contact with friends,” he wrote. Indeed, since the 1970s, children have been walking less and being chauffeured more, leading to the dreaded school car pickup lines.

Babcock even correctly identified state YIMBY movements. “I believe that by the year 2000 the states will have a significant voice in land-use policy,” he said. “The states will take back significant parts of the power they granted to municipalities.” While it took another two decades, the 2020s are certainly defined by states giving property rights back to owners, which were clipped away by obstructionists.

Although not everyone foresaw the battle lines that zoning had drawn. “New perceptions of land are going to make for a situation where private property versus control doesn’t become the main conflict,” exclaimed Bacon. If you’ve ever gone to a community meeting on a proposed apartment complex, you know these battles rage fiercely.

The urbanists were also shortsighted on the suburban experiment. There was a sense that it would eventually fail, with the rest of the country realizing the folly that they had already diagnosed in land use. “Are the suburbs dead?” posed the magazine. Yes, some have certainly failed, which is a central thesis to ’s suburban Ponzi scheme concept from Strong Towns. Yet, the country has not abandoned the overwhelming suburban form, to the chagrin of urbanists today.

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Peak Everything

This period of American history seemed to elicit thoughts on peaks and excesses. In 1968, Paul R. Ehrlich published the devastating book The Population Bomb. The central thesis was that the world’s growing population could not be supported by the food supply. His calamities never came to be. But his theory was influential. To the credit of the thinkers in this National Geographic piece, they went the other direction from Ehrlich’s alarmism.

Despite the imperfections of our society, however, we see in our vital statistics, and in those of every other industrial nation, the impact of industrial abundance. All the industrial nations are approaching zero population growth. First their death rates came down. Then, with surviving offspring assured, they reduced their birthrates. We have every reason to believe the same will happen in the developing countries, as they achieve economic expansion. -Piel

Piel was mostly discussing this population slowdown in terms of expected economic growth, or that we should not expect to see infinite growth in the future. His prediction is exactly the issue many countries are grappling with today, too few babies, not too many, as Ehrlich errantly predicted.

They were, though, concerned about aspects of energy use. The memories of the OPEC oil crisis and fallout were clearly fresh in their minds. Likewise, the notions of Peak Oil or running out of resources were starting to take shape during the era.

We are assisted considerably in facing up to the problems of urban settlement by the fact that the petroleum of the world is rapidly becoming exhausted. We are going to have to move from a petroleum-base mobility to an electric-base mobility. We’ve got to quit using petroleum for our basic way of getting around. -Bacon

His colleague Piel added, “It’s quite apparent we will be living in the post-petroleum age.” Obviously, the autocentric approach that inundated post-war America was seen as unsustainable. Bacon asserted, “The only reason for a vehicle will be to bring a baby home from the hospital or to take a casket out.” While we are certainly not anywhere close to car-free America, we are certainly on a rapid collision course with change through electric cars, self-driving improvements, better battery technology, and other renewables.

Even though the world was facing energy competition, Fuller foresaw a future of global cooperation in this area. He believed that somehow the world’s powers (US, China, USSR) would join forces for a global “intercontinental” power grid. He was obsessed with the wasted energy in the technology of the day. “I know it is highly feasible to take care of all humanity at higher standards than anyone has known,” he encouraged. Alas, we have not yet reached this peaceful Star Trek-like world unification.

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Isaac Asimov is Out of This World

While much of the guesses in the piece were rooted in some practical policy and societal questions. This is actually one aspect that I was slightly disappointed with the thinkers; there were so few fantastical sci-fi predictions. Of course, Isaac Asimov was the one exception.

“I have written about the world or global village, tied together electronically, with every citizen able to communicate instantly with every other,” said Asimov, who predicted the modern world of the internet and smartphone by then through his fantastical sci-fi stories. By 1976, he was already blending science fiction with science fact.

We will have to have a steady-state society, in which all innovations will be looked closely for possible evil side effects, because the big slogan of the 21st century will be: No More 20th Centuries! -Asimov

His concern that Americans will be apprehensive of new technologies was apt. The country has a kind of distrust for new innovations. We saw this with the rise of credit card transactions, the internet, smartphones, and now AI. The current rising opposition to data centers mirrors Asimov’s prediction.

At the same time, Asimov also made some bold predictions that never really came to fruition, not yet at least. In one, he posited that the human race would stop building up via skyscrapers, and instead drill down to subterranean cities.

We can live all year round in an equable temperature at all latitudes: We can have transportation not affected at all by inclement weather. We can establish our night and day the world over to suit ourselves and thus remove a great deal of what separates us. -Asimov

Challenging this subterranean point, he ended up arguing with himself, adding that the human race may much rather prefer going up. Not in high-rises, though, but to outer space. Of course, just standing pat terrestrially was not a listed option.

Going up, however, is perhaps the more attractive direction and the one that mankind is more likely to take. Our concept of land use now may include not only the land on the surface of the earth. We can colonize the moon or build space colonies. -Asimov

National Geographic seemed so intrigued by what the sci-fi writer was predicting that they gave him his own article in the same issue. Entitled “The Next Frontier?,” Asimov described what space life would be like for future Americans. I must say that it includes otherworldly illustrations by Pierre Mion. I love the optimism in post-war retrofuturism.

Colonies, whether they are on the moon or in near space, would fulfill functions that are now fulfilled by the cities on the surface of earth Properly handled, the earth may become a rather parklike world, a rather low-density world, with most of humanity living in space communities. And then, someday; there will undoubtedly be a panel talking about the future of space use. -Asimov

In the end, we did not reach these heights, even with the renewed interest in space exploration. He did make some astute predictions, such as the rise of the internet, but he would be disappointed at the advancements we haven’t really made in interplanetary exploration. We still seem very far from a Moon colony.

My Blurb for America in 2076

This has been fun to go back and see what the smartest people predicted for life today. They got some right, and a lot wrong. There were not even that many wild predictions (save Asimov). I guess it shows how serious these guys were, but it lacks imagination, even if proven correct.

Their guesses made me think of our own current expectations for the future. I see some parallels to the Peak stuff from the 1970s with the trendy term “late-stage capitalism,” basically peak capitalism, before everything comes crashing down. The futurists of today might make this kind of prediction, as did some of the thinkers then. But they could be wrong, and the system endures, despite its warts.

Some of the current discourse reminds me of the failed Population Bomb prediction of Ehrlich. Given these population concerns of yesteryear, I do wonder if our consternation over the nose-diving birthrate numbers across the world will somehow be worked out. Perhaps, like with farming, the technology will bring ease and efficiency to laborious situations, which was seemingly the innovation path that the thinkers in the piece leaned on for their predictions.

I guess the lesson from these futurists is that a lot of predictions are going to miss, while some will hit. The most pressing problems of the day may just fade into an afterthought. On the other hand, things that are salient right now may only become more so. Like Asimov with the internet, I can see similar shades of this with the rise of AI. No matter the Bicentennial of 1976, the Semiquincentennial of 2026, or the Tricentennial of 2076, the future always remains to some degree unpredictable, even by the smartest people in the room.

ALPR Cameras as a Campus Free Speech Issue

Are surveillance cameras on campus an academic freedom issue? Two Stanford University professors believe that they are. They pair wrote in The Stanford Daily:

It is crucial to understand that threats to privacy, academic freedom and freedom of speech and assembly are taking place in the context of extraordinarily weakened and severely compromised governmental institutions

The professors invoked the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), an association that organizes university faculty and academics, often against injustices of academic freedom. The pair echo a piece that came out early in the academic year by a post-doc calling for a cancellation of contracts with “dystopian” Flock Safety, an Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) company. He wrote:

ALPRs are tools of mass surveillance, indiscriminately capturing images of every vehicle that drives past them and storing the data for up to a month or more. It is equivalent to placing a GPS tracking device on each driver’s vehicle, providing time-stamped location data that can be used in warrantless searches to reconstruct your movements as you go about your lives.

I was ready to lambast this take when I first encountered it. I had mistakenly thought these cameras were the automatic ticketing variety. In my view, this kind of usage of traffic cameras is not a free speech issue, but rather a safety issue. However, the cameras at Stanford, and at many other universities, do not issue citations; instead, these Flock cameras are mostly about keeping tabs on who is coming and going to campus.

For me, these kinds of cameras are mostly a waste of resources if not used to actually enforce traffic rules. Despite what we hear from the media or from our paranoid neighbors on Nextdoor, students are more in danger of someone TikToking while behind the wheel than some random criminal predator or even an overstepping ICE agent.

Apparently, Flock cameras can be used in some cases to issue tickets, but the case seems more like a rare man-bites-dog type of article. It is not standard. I do agree there should be caution in over-surveillance. This is part of a broader safetyism in American culture, certainly a strong sentiment on college campuses.

While conservatives have long criticized safetyism in US higher education, Trump has certainly used these same fears to drive national policy. The Stanford professors explicitly cite the recent ICE raids as prime examples of overstepping. In general, there is a lot of distrust towards this company, not just at Stanford. There is fear that the technology will be used in corrupt ways. There’s even a Reddit group dedicated to tracking the company’s contracts, celebrating damaged units, and sharing tips on how to spot them.

What annoys me about this kind of Stranger-Danger safetyism is that there are real hazards that college towns just ignore. The area around campus can be quite dangerous due to the crowds of pedestrians or bikes mixing with off-campus car traffic.

There have been a range of deaths on and around Stanford recently. A woman was struck and killed in a crosswalk near campus in February of this year. Last year, a Stanford student died after getting hit by a car while riding a bike on campus. That same year, a popular coach was killed by a garbage truck a few miles from campus, and a 90-year-old woman hit and killed a cyclist. In 2024, a visiting student researcher was killed in the very same way near campus.

I could keep going. Palo Alto Online, a local newspaper, is full of stories like these I’ve already listed. The Stanford Daily even chronicled “bike accidents” on campus from 2014 to 2018, finding over 300 such incidents. Over a third, the highest percent, were related to incidents with other vehicles. The authors even highlight one part of campus called the “Circle of Death,” which is apparently notoriously unsafe. Other intersections, especially where the campus interfaced with roadways, proved similarly dangerous for bikers.

Further, the two professors argue that there is only a “dubious benefit these cameras add” and that “we have yet to receive any evidence that they actually make us safer.” I do agree with this concern when these are simply tracking people rather than trying to curb driver behavior. We have a use case right in the Bay Area. The city of San Francisco has released data on their speed camera intervention: they are a resounding success.

…data collected from San Francisco’s 33 camera locations and other traffic-sensing equipment, excessive speeding — defined as drivers going more than 10 mph above the speed limit — dropped nearly 80%. The number of repeat offenders dropped, too.

Localities in the state turned to speed cameras after an alarming increase in fatalities related to cars and drivers. Speed, reckless or inactive driving, and vehicle size are key factors for the increase. The claim that there is “dubious benefit” is true if not utilized in this way, as traffic cameras do seem to alter some offending driver behaviors.

Where I align with the anti-Flock cameras sentiment is that I would much rather turn to street redesign rather than enforcement—the Strong Town way. This would mean narrowing lanes, adding more barriers, and removing cars from places altogether. But localities have proven over and over again that all of this is too much to ask. Traffic engineering dictates that speed and ease of access for cars outweigh the safety and comfort of everyone outside of a car. See one example from College Towns:

To Stanford’s credit, the university has installed a range of roundabouts in recent years. However, students still report unease when walking. “I feel like sometimes I just have to be confident and pray I don’t get hit because otherwise I’ll be waiting forever to walk through when it’s busy,” said one student in a 2023 article in The Stanford Daily on the roundabouts.

In the end, I can see the fears of over-surveillance of an overreaching nanny state. At the same time, we cannot abdicate responsibility because there is an abuse of power in another arena. There is a real public safety issue; it’s just not the one the cameras purport to inhibit, nor the one the professors believe is an external threat.

Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• Princeton NIMBYs are once again up in arms over a proposed development on the site of former dorms of a struggling college. It’s only a 4-story building, too! Just shows how difficult it can be to repurpose college space.

• To help with the student housing crisis, one UT-Austin student came up with an innovative app. Instead of Rate My Professor, he created Rate My Rental. Cool initiative!

• Columbia sold a housing unit in the Bronx that was deemed too disconnected from the main campus. My alma mater apparently lost money on it! Imagine losing money on New York City real estate

• The financialization of youth sports is ruining a childhood pastime. The travel sports culture is also another aspect that connects to helicopter parenting.

• Northeastern completes merger with Manhattan-based struggling college. The Age of Conquest is still forging ahead in US higher ed.

• UC Davis gets a massive donation to expand vet school. No, not veterans, veterinarians. This field often seems forgotten in terms of funding and STEM initiatives, which is strange considering pets are only becoming more important in American culture.

• Harvard is making its students take an AI series. If the wealthiest and most well-resourced university is paying this much attention, other schools cannot continue to ignore (or simply ban) AI.

• More AI Wrangler job updates: OpenAI reported that its latest model was given a “Nerdy personality.” This resulted in an abnormal amount of mentions of “Goblins.”

Urbanism-ish

• I’ve covered dead colleges and malls here, but those aren’t the only disappearing institutions. What happens to a vineyard once it closes? Turns out, it’s also complicated.

• “Transit is only as good as its weakest link, at that weakest link is almost always the weekends,” writes in Car Free America. This is exactly my complaint here in Southern California (amongst many others).

• in writes on the rise of factory-built homes in Florida. I have long been curious about this housing innovation, but remain skeptical they can solve our problems.

• New library in Omaha, Nebraska, is emblematic of how ugly our car-centric design is. What an abominable aesthetic.

• at has a piece on practical steps Charlotte, NC, made to urge homeowners to support better housing policy. Always great to see a positive and practical writing in this space that is often doom and gloom.

• For some California news, it seems there is more trouble brewing in Hollywood? The film company site where they filmed The Office is shuttering. It seems the industry here is disintegrating.

• But it’s not all bad news in Southern California; LA college students are embracing the metro system. Ridership for young people is up considerably this year.

• In some news from China, the Chinese government thinks that hostile foreign powers are trying to make their young people lazy. Funny that we have heard something similar about American youth usage of TikTok.

• of covered the backlash for the new The Devil Wears Prada 2 film in China. Apparently, there is a Chinese character who is a frumpy, nerdy assistant. The controversy highlights the different perceptions of aesthetics in the US vs. China. Chinese netizens complained this was an offensive stereotype, and would prefer someone with more traditional beauty standards. US media often takes the opposite view.

Closing Time… PSA: Used Bookstores, Please Stop Doing This

I do not mean to denigrate used bookstores on Independent Bookstore Day. But I must highlight a complaint from Matt K. Parker, who highlighted an annoying habit: terrible stickers. He pleaded on X, “Why, God, why do used book stores use cover-destroying price stickers?” The photo shows a nice-looking Penguin Classics version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ripped to the spine.

Some book aficionados suggested that he try using a hair dryer on high heat next time (a trick I have also heard works). Others nodded approvingly, sharing their own examples from their collections. The most egregious example was from Joshua Penduck, who lamented, “This book survived for 250 years before a used-bookshop put its price sticker on it.” Indeed, what a sad accident of carelessness.

Since I collect old books and magazines, I am constantly annoyed by sticker habits. The worst offenders are the thrift stores such as Goodwill. I have found many books over the years maimed by an errant price. It’s frustrating. Here’s an example from my collection: The Organ-Cases and Organs of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 1883. It potentially sells for $1600. Granted, I love the price I got it at Goodwill, I just wish they had a little bit better practices.

We all agree that the adhesive on most stickers is too damaging to used books, especially quite old ones. The best practice for pricing seems to be to use a light pencil on the front-end sheet. I have noticed the best (and longest-running) used bookstores often use this method. I wish more would follow suit to help preserve our old books.

The Job of the Future is Here Today

Last year, I wrote the first edition of my Future Jobs series on what I called “AI Wranglers.” I described this type of job as “part IT guy, part psychiatrist, and part detective.” You can read the full article below. While it drew a lot of interest, it also had detractors skeptical of AI. There is considerable anti-AI sentiment in the US, especially in education circles. However, I recently found out that this future job is not really the future… because it already exists in the present.

There are now real AI Wranglers at top companies. Google has hired Henry Shevlin, a faculty member at the University of Cambridge, in the role of Philosopher at DeepMind. His role will center on exploring “machine consciousness, human-AI relationships, and AGI readiness.” He’s not alone. Amanda Askell is another philosopher working at a high-level company, Anthropic. She is tasked with shaping Claude’s personality and trying to understand how the AI works.

Askell described her job in a recent interview:

I’m mostly focused on the character of Claude, how Claude behaves, and I guess some of them were kind of like nuanced questions about how AI models like should behave, but also even just things like, how should they feel about their own position in the world?

So trying to both teach models how to be, like, good in the way that by sometimes think about it is like, how would the ideal person behave in Claude’s situation. but then also these, I think these interesting questions that are coming up more now around how they should think about their own circumstances and their own values and things like that.

Commenting on the interview, tech writer Ole Lehmann wrote, “[It] feels weird to tell an AI it's doing well, but it measurably shifts the next 10 responses.” He continued, “tone, trust, permission to take a position, the absence of threats… Claude picks up on all of it.” This kind of humanistic approach to AI is exactly what I described with the AI Wrangler. The job is already here.

My preferred AI Wrangler term, though, did not catch on. Instead, these kinds of skills are likely better known as something like “prompt engineering.” I still think AI Wrangler is a more apt label, given that these skill sets include not just STEM but also humanistic approaches. “Prompt engineering” sounds too technical. There is art to AI wrangling.

The full interview is worth a watch:

The Skeptics

I should add that there are skeptics who do not believe these kinds of skills are relevant or even real. “It just shows how disconnected we are from the small group of people making decisions that will impact our future heavily,” wrote the popular software developer and streamer ThePrimeagen. “These people have so much AI psychosis.”

Even (or perhaps I should say especially) my fellow professors are skeptical of these new developments. On the r/Professors subreddit, anti-AI sentiments are strong. Just offering a little bit of sympathy with AI brings the hammer of downvotes. A popular post recently complained, “‘Prompt Engineering’ is just a corporate rebrand of ‘Question Asking.’” Many applauded the rant:

The central point of my post is that there is nothing new to learn or teach. We’ve been formally teaching students how to question since the Hellenistic Era.

This is essentially Google on steroids. We didn’t have to teach students to use Google, students were usually better at it than their professors.

prompt engineering is far more insidious than question asking, imo

To be fair, there were professors in the group who defended the concept, pushing back on the assertion that the innovation is overblown. But the voices on the thread and in the broader academia usually coalesce around dislike for AI. A group of scholars even recently published an article that argues qualitative researchers should not use AI on ethical grounds.

Professors Cannot Bury Their Heads in the Sand

I do understand the disdain for AI from teachers. Students are 100% using it to cheat. It makes our job much more difficult. An example comes from the r/PromptEngineering subreddit, where one student admitted, “My professor told me my essay ‘finally sounded like me.’ I had just run it through an AI humanizer.” Of course, the group wanted to know which exact app he used.

I do also understand that there are broader environmental concerns. However, given that every company has shoehorned an AI feature into all apps, websites, or digital services, it is starting to become impossible to avoid interacting with them. The only way to avoid AI these days is to go totally analog, off the internet completely. Short of that, it is just making a showy complaint.

Just because we don’t like something doesn’t mean we can ignore or ban it. One colleague who agrees is , Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs and owner of Substack, who has been publishing a series entitled Academics Need to Wake Up on AI. He drew ire from the professorate with the first post in the series when he later revealed it was written by Claude. His interview on the situation in The Chronicle of Higher Ed is worth a read:

There is a big divide. You have senior folks, or folks who are not on social media, who have not heard anything about agentic AI. They just know ChatGPT as this thing that students use to cheat. They’re like, Let’s ban AI everywhere. Meanwhile, their junior colleagues run all their data through Codex. The closest analogy would be to imagine if half of your colleagues didn’t know the internet existed. This is not a stable equilibrium.

I am not saying that every class needs to have full AI integration, just that every teacher needs to understand the capabilities to some degree and how students may use the technology. Even if classrooms have not found much use for AI, the same cannot be said of the workplace. The Financial Times reported this week that the highest earners and most experienced are using AI at much higher rates than other workers:

Lawyers, accountants and software developers are using these tools at similar rates whether junior or senior but are using them much more than people in lower-paid occupations in the same industries.

The strong relationship between pay, education and AI use suggests the technology may increase earnings inequality by boosting the productivity of workers at the top but not at the bottom.

An example of the business sector’s embrace of AI comes from ChatGPT announcing an Excel add-on. I already use AI to remind me of macros. I think this is a good use case for AI. Any class that relies on Excel must consider the tool since Microsoft is putting it front and center. This obviously does not mean every class needs AI, just like not every class needs computers or other software.

While my concept of an AI Wrangler is still something we mostly see only at the very highest levels of the tech sector, I believe things will trickle down to the rest of the industry. There is already mass adoption of the tech, with high-paying industries expecting their workforce to use and understand AI capabilities. Educators must pay attention to this job of the present, whether we like it or not.

Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• In more closure news, Anna Maria College is shutting down. The second Massachusetts institution to shutter this month, joining Hampshire College.

• A community college in Washington is closing a branch campus. This is exactly the trend I have been seeing in my own research.

• There have been some new data sites popping up that explore closed or closing colleges. One comes from ’ personal website. The other from James Long, Chair of the Division of Business at Friends University, with a pretty cool interactive map. I may do a full article on these closure metrics, as AI has really supercharged analysis and data here.

• It’s not just the US making cuts to higher education; Shenzhen University in China is taking a buzzsaw to its major offerings. Bummer.

• On the flip side of budget cuts, Yale is considering expanding with a campus in San Francisco. The biggest continue getting bigger in the Higher Ed Age of Conquest.

• There is no end in sight for donations to big football programs. I have heard growing concerns that there will be donor fatigue due to players washing out or renegging on deals. This does not appear to be happening yet, at least not at the very top.

• In student housing news, an open house for a $4.6K per month rental in a California college town has a line out the door with eager applicants. Build more housing…

• Student housing in Belfast, Northern Ireland, may have reached a saturation point. I will be interested in seeing how rents are impacted.

• Community college student in Seattle protests the exorbitant housing prices by setting up a tent right in front of the campus.

• Tulane University is building new student housing. Locals are concerned it will bulldoze a historic restaurant. I understand nostalgia, but this is basically a dumpy strip mall with a cool sign (which the university is keeping up).

  

• My lone K-12 news today comes from , a writer and mother lamenting having to move to the US because it means she will have to give up on her kid’s independence, This is the sad reality that many parents find themselves in due to our terrible built environments.

Urbanism-ish

• Where did all the public benches go in American cities? One urbanist explores this lost amenity.

• Over here in California, Hollywood, the town, is in rough shape. High rents coupled with street degradation undercut the glitz of the supposed tourist destination. Some locals have a plan to fix it.

• In more California news, LAX gets a fancy new terminal upgrade. I’m not impressed. Call me when the People Mover starts moving people.

  

• In some global urbanism news, China is helping Brazil build its train infrastructure. The US has no answer to this other than to complain.

• China has selected two Pakistani astronauts to train on board the Chinese Space Station (CSS). The New Space Race continues!

• Dubai is planning a massive metro line as part of securing confidence after the disastrous Iran conflict.

• Going across the pond, Britain’s “UNESCO model village” shows the best of town-building. Saltaire in West Yorkshire, built in 1851, is really just the traditional model. Retvrn.

Closing Time… Rats Love Driving Cars

Rats love driving cars, even if not rewarded with a treat. Ok, this is an old video and story, but I just recently stumbled on it again and thought it was pretty fun. But rat urbanists worry this newfound love of driving will lead to rat urban renewal and the end of walkable rat cities.

In a parallel line of research, I have been trying to classify the kinds of closures witnessed in various countries or regions. In East Asia, Japanese and Korean institutions have recently seen threats of closures related to the prolonged birthrate crisis. In the Middle East, campus closures have come at the expense of war and conflict, including many foreign branch campuses questioning the long-term viability of these overseas outposts.

War and conflict have long led to shuttered colleges, including the one I am highlighting here: Fu Ren University, formerly located in the heart of Beijing. I recently toured the campus during a trip to China, and I draw on this experience, material from Beijing Normal University (BNU), and historical analysis for this exploration. All photos are my own.

Its long history is a fascinating tale of adaptive reuse related to closed and closing colleges. The university campus at No. 1 Dingfu Street, Xicheng District, Beijing, a stone’s throw away from the inner-sanctum of the country’s political and cultural center, survived in some forms under four different governments: Warlords, Nationalists, Japanese, and Communists, from 1925 to 1952.

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A Princely Palace

The site of Fu Ren University had a long (and prestigious) life before the college arrived. It sits on what is known as Prince Gong’s Mansion, sometimes referred to as a palace, part of the holdings of the Qing imperial royal family. In 1780, the Qianlong Emperor built a mansion at the site for his princess daughter. What became the campus also served as a garden and stables for the mansion.

The location is in the heart of central Beijing, close to the well-known cultural heritage sites like the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. The Imperial Palace was a sacred inner sanctum for the Chinese royals, so the prime spot the location holds illustrates its importance. As Chen (2003) describes:

Old capital, Beijing, know that the city was circular and divided by ranks in the Imperial Court. The center was the famous Forbidden City for the Emperor and his family; the next was the Imperial City, for the high-ranking officials. The third was the Tartar City where Catholic Fu Ren University located…

The grounds continued to see construction and other happenings during the turbulent mid-to-late Qing Dynasty, which lasted from 1644 to 1912. Some of the stories could be inserted right into Game of Thrones, with princes convicted of crimes and stripped of titles or wealth, including the Palace grounds.

As the Qing Dynasty was crumbling under internal strife and external pressures, the Palace location was in the hands of Puwei. Puwei was a relative and rival to Puyi, The Last Emperor of China, whose life was depicted in the beautiful, Oscar-winning film by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1987. Puwei actually had a partial claim to the throne through his lineage.

Even once the empire fell, the Japanese approached Puwei to gauge his interest in establishing the puppet kingdom of Manchukuo, carved out of Northeast China. Puyi, hearing his rival was being courted, decided to take the throne in his ancestral homeland himself, rather than moving abroad as encouraged by his former tutor, the Scotsman Reginald Fleming Johnston.

In 1912, Puwei sold all of the cultural relics of the palace to a Japanese company. Then, in order to raise money for his efforts in the restoration of the Qing dynastic rule, he offered the grounds to the Catholic church in 1920. It would take a few years for the deal to be finalized, moving the institution to the location. Its days of palace intrigue were over. The turbulent time of transition, though, did not subside with the handover.

The site consists of 41,000 square meters in Xicheng area of Beijing. Chinese Architecture: 1500 B.C - A.D 1911 (1962) by Andrew Boyd, from my personal collection, offers an illustration of the built environment of the era (also available on Internet Archive). The location of the college is near the lakes in the Northwest part of the map.

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Fu Ren University

Much of the in-depth history of the school comes from John S. Chen’s book, The Rise and Fall of Fu Ren University, Beijing (2003). He chronicles the very earliest days, as Pope Pius X announced intentions of opening the university way back in 1912, to its eventual closure at the onset of the Communist takeover of China. While the institution only lasted 27 tumultuous years from 1925 to 1952 (tough times for China), it reached heights in academia and education.

Led by the American Benedictine Order, the Church insisted that Fu Ren be a “University” rather than just a college. Its backers wanted the institution to be higher-level than what was already present in Beijing at the time. There was concern about competition from other recently-founded institutions, and they wanted Fu Ren to match the prestige of the Catholic Church at the time.

Finances were funded through a direct line to the Pope, among others. Local artisans were also brought in to restore the grandeur of the former palace after years of political uncertainty for the Qing landholders. “…designed by Dom Adelbert Gresnigt, [this] is a good example of the indigenous adaptation of the church university in this context,” says Lin Zou, professor at the School of Architecture Urban Planning, Construction Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in a piece on the historical architectural legacy of the school.

Immediately after taking over the palace in the end of July, the Benedictine Fathers began to renovate the buildings, install steam heat, modern plumbing, and electric wiring, and to convert the “Western Library” (Xi Shu Fang) of the palace into a school fit to house the long contemplated Fu Ren She or the Academy of Chinese Studies (Chen, 2003, p. 77).

According to Chen, the peak student population was 2,348 and 282 faculty, achieved in 1948. They came from all across China, and even a few from abroad. Some famous alumni include Wang Guangmei, the wife of future Chinese Premier Liu Shaoqi. She was awarded China’s first master’s degree in physics to a woman in the country.

Faculty were made up of mostly Chinese, with some foreigners, including missionaries. Many of the Chinese faculty had studied in the US or Europe though, such as the University of Louvain, the University of Berlin, the University of Munich, John Hopkins, Harvard, Wisconsin, Northwestern, and Michigan. Some of the former faculty and administration are still well known today, with Wikipedia pages to match: Ying Lianzhi, Yuan Han-qing, Zeng Zhaolun, Ying Qianli, Ma Xiangbo, and Chen Yuan.

The campus served as a gathering spot for intellectuals of the day. The writer Lu Xun even delivered an anti-Japanese speech at the campus in 1932, while Dr. Hu Shih, the famed educator, served on the university’s Board of Trustees.

The organization of the school and curriculum mirrored that of a typical American Catholic university, with added elements of Chinese culture, given the namesake of the university derived from The Analects by Confucius (in some places, I have seen it referred to as the Catholic University of Peking). It had four schools: School of Arts and Letters, School of Natural Sciences, College of Agriculture, and School of Education, along with a seminary called Saint Albert College. They even had graduate programs across a range of disciplines.

There was also a Women’s College, established in 1932 as the first Catholic girls’ school in all of China, where Wang Guangmei was educated. But the women were still mostly segregated from the main campus. The campus also boasted the Fu Ren Middle and Primary Schools.

Given its American liberal arts roots, extracurriculars were a prized facet of campus life at Fu Ren. One Father was quoted by Chen, “The fact is that the sports here are as much an element in making the school known as they are in America itself.” The school had soccer, basketball, tennis, track, and even an American football team eventually. They played in the so-called “Big Five” League of Peking, which included Yenching, Qinghua, Beijing Normal, and Peking Universities. The sports actually helped the university recruit. Hey, some things never change!

Partly thanks to its choice location near the Chinese power structures, Fu Ren became known for student political movements. However, for much of its history, the school steered hard against political entanglement, allowing it to survive through rocky governance of the day.

During the Japanese aggression against China in the 1930s, universities abandoned their Beijing campuses and moved operations to the hinterlands such as Chongqing. Throughout the war, Fu Ren remained the only campus to remain open in the city. The other holdout was Yenching, which was forced to relocate in 1942 due to the Americans joining the war efforts. Fu Ren was shielded by its relations to the Vatican rather than any Allied Powers. The school also had a long-running German rector.

This does not mean the Japanese viewed the institution as an ally. On the contrary, it faced the wrath of the Japanese Imperial aggression when it pushed back against the integration of Japanese material into the curriculum. One Father was tortured so vigorously by the Japanese that an Italian Franciscan had to intervene to get him freed, using a direct friendship with Benito Mussolini.

Fu Ren not only weathered the storm of World War II, it came out on top. But the new era meant the continued Chinese Civil War, wrapping up the Beijing institutions. Fu Ren students joined the revolutionary zeal of the moment, helping in mass protests across the capital and entire country. At one point, a group even confronted the then-American Rector, demanding the US remove troops from China. Well, the US did leave, rapidly the country was consumed by the Communist forces. It would be the beginning of the end for Fu Ren in Mainland China.

Along with Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Yenching University, Fu Ren was considered as one of the “Four Great Universities of Beiping.” It had the trajectory of being one of the world’s finest institutions. History does not always agree with trajectory though. And Fu Ren’s history certainly did not allow it to reach its promised potential.

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The Long Limbo

After the war with Japan, questions remained not just around what would happen to the university but also to all of China. In 1948, the American consulate in Beijing warned its citizens to leave the country immediately, prompting the school leadership to move all the university’s valuables abroad. A similar exodus was happening across institutions, organizations, and even governments across China. Chiefly, with Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government moving to Taiwan.

In 1949, the Communists took over China from the Nationalists, putting the future of Fu Ren into question. Indeed, the next year, the campus and college were commandeered by the Ministry of Education. It was the first private university in China to be taken over by the Communists, but it would not be the last. Zhou Enlai himself rejected the pleas from Fu Ren leadership to stop the CCP’s encroachment on its curriculum and mission. In 1952, much of the operations were merged with Beijing Normal University. Many of its students were sent to do labor in Guangxi Province under the auspices of the Land Reform Movement.

The closure in Mainland was not the end for “Fu Ren University.” In 1959, the spiritual successor to the namesake of the university was pushed to be reestablished in Taiwan by the Vatican via Pope John XXIII. The restoration was formalized in 1961 in New Taipei City. It is considered to be the oldest surviving Catholic Church-founded university in the Chinese-speaking world Its history, though, is claimed by multiple institutions. Along with the claims on either side of the Taiwan Strait, a journal that was founded at the institution called Monumenta Serica survives today as a German publication.

It is actually difficult to know what was happening at the campus space from the mid-1950s until recently. Much of the deep history of the space centers on the Qing-controlled era as a Princely Palace or during the Missionary university era. What is certain is that Beijing Normal took over most of the institutional legacy, including the property. Fu Ren’s President, Chen Yuan, was even appointed to the presidency of BNU.

At various points BNU’s Chemistry Department and the School of Continuing Education for Adults also operated within the space to some degree. However, it seems to have been a sleepy, quiet space during this period, far removed from the zeal of the Catholic university with thousands of students, faculty, and staff.

By the 1980s, after years of neglect, some buildings were starting to crumble under deferred maintenance, an ongoing issue for closed and closing colleges. It was soon designated as a Beijing Municipal Cultural Relic Protection Unit, ensuring its preservation and historical value. Apparently, since its fine piece of preserved architecture, the former campus was used in various Chinese media productions, including stunning Farewell My Concubine and long-running series My Fair Princess.

In the 1990s, as China was opening and continuing some rehabilitations of the past, the Fu Ren Alumni Association was established, receiving an office in the former college grounds. There is hope that they can continue the legacy in Beijing Normal’s new initiative in the space.

Just like on closed college campuses in the US, once the humans go away, the animals come out to play. A little orange tabby was keeping an eye on our group as we toured the facilities. No doubt that we dared disturb his kingdom. Even in a busy city, and in a very crowded tourist site (as shown below), the campus is peaceful enough for a catnap. Inside the walls, it’s peaceful. Outside, on the other hand…

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Colleges as Tourist Sites

In 2013, the site was elevated to the National Key Cultural Relic Protection Unit by the State Council of China, part of a broader reinvigoration of cultural heritage sites around Beijing. These efforts mean the area now sees massive crowds just a few blocks away from the campus. Fu Ren itself has even gained popularity as a stop on the so-called “red tourism.”

Houhai is a prime tourist destination in Beijing, a massive lake, with historical palace grounds, and a bunch of bars. Unfortunately, it is pretty miserable these days. There are massive crowds all trying to walk the same narrow, antiquated paths. It was a place designed for a handful of royals, not for the masses, yet the masses came out in droves.

My little group all got separated in the chaos as we tried to circumnavigate the chaos. Police eventually had to cordon off streets to funnel the crowds to the exiting thoroughfare. I could certainly see some kind of terrible accident happening eventually, a la the horrific incident in Seoul on Halloween from a few years ago. Eventually, we made it through the crowded mess.

As an aside, this experience at Houhai is just emblematic of overcrowding at popular tourist destinations the world over. Not just in China, I have personally witnessed the same thing in both the US and Japan. I also hear the same stories out of Europe. But the funny thing is, just one or two streets over from the main tourist sites are relatively quiet, or at least not dangerously crowded.

I don’t want to scare you away from visiting the old university. Going to the old Fu Ren campus and the local neighborhood around is quite a nice jaunt actually. You do not need to go to Houhai Lake area directly. The old houses and Hutong alleys where real people live are the real stunner. This is where I would suggest you go for a visit, not the famous bar area of Houhai.

Becoming Normal

In 2023, Beijing Normal University announced the creation of Jingshi Academy, an elite interdisciplinary institution that is housed at the former Fu Ren site. The Academy “centers its teaching and research around the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals,” with an Applied Master's Program in Global Development and Governance and the Nishan Confucian Studies Doctoral Program. Classes are taught in English. The university hopes to return the space to its long-running mission of elite academic excellence.

Just for clarification, this isn’t a paid ad by the university. But I am an alumnus of BNU, having done my visiting doctoral research on their main campus. So I have some interests in the ongoing activities of the university.

BNU is hosting an opening of the campus this summer, with Summer School on China’s Governance and Development, from July 4–20, 2026. The university will bring students from around the country and the world to the former Fu Ren U campus. This cohort will be part of the revival of high-level learning within those walls. The Application Deadline is May 17, 2026. So you still have some time!

Summerschool@bnu

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I should note that the Jingshi Academy does not seem to have any focus on Catholic education, not in the materials that I was able to see. But the campus space itself does have some historical signposts outlining its foreign roots. I have also been told by BNU that the institution has been looking to bolster relations with the Fu Ren Alumni Association. This legacy is viewed as important to cross-strait relations.

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Mapping Closed Colleges Abroad

There are stories just like Fu Ren’s across China. Shuttered institutions dot the long history of the country (see example in my book on Kuo Ping-Wen and National Southeastern University). I would love to do a mapping project of these institutions one day, especially those in the Shanghai area.

Many of the former missionary institutions were not abandoned, but integrated into national universities. Perhaps the most famous being Yenching University, which operated in Beijing from 1919 to 1952. Similar to Fu Ren, it shuttered soon after the Communist Revolution. Yet it was quickly incorporated into various other colleges, including Peking University, which took over the campus location. Peking U, or Beida as it is colloquially known, has become one of the top universities not only in China but the entire world. The legacy lives on there through the Yenching Academy.

I’m fortunate enough to have an old The Yenchinian yearbook from 1928, produced by the Students’ Government Association of the university. It is a fascinating insight into life at the college before chaos ensued. There are countless other tales such as Yenching or Fu Ren waiting to be told in China. I hope to tell more of these stories in the future.

Update on 4-20-2026: added clarification of new BNU program.

There is No New Internet Town Square

I have long written about my journey leaving Twitter to greener pastures. It was my very first piece announcing College Towns on October 11, 2024. I also wrote about my trial and ultimate failure in Bluesky. Sadly, the journey to find the new Internet Town Square continues, and I am only finding more dead ends.

Recently, I was threatened with a ban from my local subreddit because I linked to my site in a comment. It was relevant to the conversation, so I thought it might be some auto-mod issue, as I have successfully posted there before. However, when pressed further, the moderators made it clear that they do not want Substack links on the site.

Reddit mods have a stereotype of being pushy, control-freaks with a Napoleon complex. To be fair, it’s a pretty thankless job, and one done on a volunteer basis. But there are far too many cases where they take things too far, treating the subreddit like their own private fiefdom.

I have written articles that have not been covered locally, such as the closure of the OC Flex micro-transit program. Neither the Orange County Register nor the Voice of OC bothered to cover this service change. When you Google OC Flex, my site is the only source of information on what happened other than the public statement from OCTA.

My Substack, like many others on the platform, fills in the gaps that the corporate media does not cover. Yet, a large portion of subreddits essentially view anything not from the corporate media as spam. Funny enough, fellow urbanist Substack, , recently had a very similar situation in a subreddit. It is believed that any self-submission is out of bounds of the site. This is Reddit’s right as a private platform, they can do what they want. But the limitations also mean Reddit simply is not the Internet Town Square.

The Internet Town Square should be the connective tissue across sites, open to all kinds of sources and users. The old Twitter was a place where small blogs or publications could get massive attention. There are big name recognizable writers who rode that wave to massive followings, such as and , both of whom are successful writers here on Substack with their long-form writing.

Another writer who saw success in those early days of Twitter was . The founder of the blog FiveThirtyEight, Silver’s commentary would constantly go viral. Sometimes he would become the “Main Character” for the day, angering people with his data—both left and right. Recently, he wrote a takedown of the new X algorithm:

And “siloed” is on a good day: at other times, Twitter feels like a ghost town. It’s still useful for some topics: the AI discourse on the platform is often relatively robust, for instance. But for something like the war in Iran, it’s next to useless. Links to external websites are substantially punished, and none of the workarounds are particularly helpful. So the tangible rewards from still having 3 million followers can be surprisingly marginal. However, my account is hardly alone in this regard. The New York Times has 53 million followers, and yet its tweets often produce only a few hundred likes, retweets, and replies even when they reveal urgent, breaking news.

The full article is worth a view on his Silver Bulletin website. The link issue he brought up is something I have long been frustrated by. Other users have also commented on the demise of Twitter in terms of traffic generation. from offered actual numbers to back up the fall:

Elon Musk initially started throttling links after he bought the company in 2022, especially targeting Substack, who he considered a competitor. Due to the complaints, Nikita Bier, Head of Product X, claims that the platform no longer deboosts outside links. He and Silver got into a debate on the issue, with Bier arguing that posters just need to learn how to post better. Given what a lot of us have experienced, we are not buying this company line. New research from Nieman Lab confirms the suppression we are all feeling.

This issue is not even just a Musk and X problem alone; the conventional wisdom for social media platforms is to deboost outside links. All the big ones basically believe that outside links are bad because they pull users off their site to another site. LinkedIn certainly does it, so too does Facebook. To me, this is short-sighted, consultant talk. Deboosting links might maximize eyeballs in the short run, but the practice rapidly degrades the health and utility of a social media platform.

What deboosting links does is to hollow out the user base. Users start getting less and less useful information, they then spend less and less time on the platform, and finally leave the site completely. This scenario is very clearly what has happened to X. Another high profile exit from the platform illustrates this cycle; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), with over 470K followers, announced their exit this week due to low engagement.

While I’m still on X myself, I don’t use it as much these days. I have been trying to migrate most of my activity here to Substack. Ironically, Musk’s lame attempt to throttle Substack due to fear of competition just pushed more users to this site. But I did make a decision to leave my local subreddit and delete all my engagement there. I will no longer post or engage with content there. They will miss out on my original reporting.

I am still lost in the wilderness, looking for that elusive Internet Town Square. I know friend-of-the-page at likes Hacker News. Another friend and fellow educator thinks I’m crazy to not be on TikTok. What do you think? Are we just doomed to never have another Internet Town Square?

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Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• Hampshire College is closing down. There was an outpouring across the sector for this small Massachusetts college with experimental curriculum. RIP

• Even though we are losing these small liberal arts colleges, Nils Gilman argues that this style of education will only get more valuable in the coming age of AI. Hey, I couldn’t agree more!

• Some of these places can be saved through partnerships; one recent example comes from Messina College, also in Massachusetts, which was formed when Boston College bought struggling Pine Manor College. with the resources of BC, the college can offer affordable programs to a broad range of students.

• Speaking of university acquisitions, Nature has a new commentary on how these institutions are not just offering degrees but have become landlords. The Age of Conquest brings with it complications.

• On the international front, American institutions are losing their luster from students abroad. US fumbling dominance in international education is akin to the American automotive industry's downfall.

• At the same time, the US is running out of China Experts. The bottom dropped out of Americans studying abroad there. I have long warned of this issue!

• Continuing the US-China relationship, NASA squashes a planned Mars mission and experts now worry that China is in the lead on exploration of the Red Planet first. The new Space Race is heating up!

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Urbanism-ish

• High-tech plane company moves from the American South to California. Narrative Violation! We are not dead yet here on the Left Coast.

• Honda has no chance against China according to its own CEO. It’s sad to see this giant fall so hard. Honda was my first car that I owned and I have a soft spot for the Japanese company.

• But the company made some bad moves. The New York Times covered one problem in a recent infographic article. It used the Honda Civic as an example of how modern cars have become so bloated. The visuals are really worth a look.

• Even rival Toyota has felt some heat, with Prius sales lagging recently. Apparently, the Prius is manufactured abroad, meaning the car model gets dinged by the new tariffs. At the same time, the Camry has gained popularity, as the model is manufactured in the US and not subject to tariffs.

• has a breakdown on flight increases via . I may end up just canceling my planned trip back to China scheduled for later this summer. Bummer.

• New tool called Urban Fabric lets you customize a real urbanism wishlist for your town, with a generated proposal ready to bring to the next city council meeting. It comes from one of my subscribers, . Cool!

• San Diego finally sees rents drop after a long decade and a half of increases. Building more housing works!

• New research confirms these suspicions on US restrictive building, specifically showing how US codes are typically created without much cost-benefit analysis.

• Richard Florida has a new concept: Urban Knowledge Campus. I am a little skeptical of these rebrands; it’s basically just the rebrand of a traditional city that wasn’t dissected by zoning. But he is influential in the urbanist space, so need to at least think about it.

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Closing Time… How Much Did Professors Get Paid 500 Years Ago?

Misha Teplitskiy, a scholar who explores the “Science of Science” at the University of Michigan, had a fun note on faculty salaries in the 16th century. Look at that, the Classics at the top… by far! Unlike today, the STEM fields are somewhere in the middle. And like today, the language teachers are at the bottom.

It’s fun to see some details about my colleagues who lived a half-millennium ago. I wonder if they complained like we do now back in 1558? Perhaps about pay, admin, and students. I suspect that that they did. Time immemorial.

The Artemis II launch this week is an ambitious plan to explore the Moon, sending astronauts further than any human has ever ventured. The images seemed to have captured the attention of the nation. The sentiments harkened back to that of a previous age in the country, one that was defined by exploration and imagination: The Space Age.

The Space Age began in 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 into orbit. The Space Age was really about a Space Race, and the US began behind its rival. In 1961, John F. Kennedy boldly proclaimed, “This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth." When he made that proclamation, it seemed absurd and brash. Yet it gave everyone a common goal of Flags and Footprints.

I believe that the US needs another Space Race to capture the imaginations of Americans again. Most would also agree that the national mood is down. There is widespread belief that the US is heading in the wrong direction, that the government cannot do anything, and our best days are behind us. A new Space Race can turn us out of this funk.

I am under no illusions that everything was better in the past. That’s not what this is. By many indicators, so much about life is better right now than any time in human history. I think part of that progress, though, was elevated by the advances made through the Space Age. It was also a symbol, a symbol of hope. It told Americans and the world that there was a future, and we were leading it.

So much of our modern discourse is dominated by the negative. I understand why. There is division, malaise, and legitimate hostility in the national mood. It seems we believe that we cannot do anything as a country. But the current era does have parallels to those in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, with McCarthyism, Communist Containment, the Civil Rights Movement, and broader protests. The national divides are similar; the difference comes from the Space Race. The era was not a national utopia. Nonetheless, there was some kind of unity and hope bound by space and the progress of the future that we need to rediscover as a country.

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NASA as Americana Art

I am a casual collector of Space Race memorabilia. I have old Life or Newsweek magazines from the 1960s. I even stumbled on pins from across the NASA shuttle programs. A lot of my thinking on the topic comes from this iconography, along with the book NASA/ART: 50 Years of Exploration (2008) by James Dean and Bertram Ulrich. It chronicles the importance that art played in the development of NASA.

NASA has long understood the public perceptions shaped by the images coming from its explorations. They not only released incredible photos to outlets across the world, but also brought in artists to recreate the imagery and environment. These depictions framed the narrative around NASA with a future aesthetic that was somehow still relatable to the everyman. Sci-fi had become sci-reality, uplifting the sentiment of progress.

“Just what NASA should do in the field of fine arts to commemorate past historic events, such as Shepard’s and Glenn’s flights, as well as future historic events that we know will come to pass,” wrote NASA administrator James Webb in a 1962 memo. “Important events can be interpreted by artists to give a unique insight into significant aspects of our history-making advances into space. An artistic record of this nation’s program of space exploration will have great value for future generations.”

This drive for artists was in part due to that famous NASA necessity. The camera technology could not fully capture the majesty of the moment. Even today, the grainy footage of the era fuels conspiracy theories. Yet, NASA was always transparent in understanding the limitations of its technology, hence the creation of the NASA Art Program.

Artists were brought into NASA facilities and given space to document, create, and frame our exploration of space. These included titans of the art world, such as Norman Rockwell, Andy Warhol, and Annie Leibovitz. Norman Rockwell, the famed illustrator, even sketched the Moon landing two years before it even happened, with the Man on the Moon (1967).

Some may consider this endeavor propaganda; after all, this is what we call the Soviet version. One man’s propaganda is another’s PR. And the NASA Art Program has long done wonderful PR. They’ve painted our astronauts as real life superheroes; the rockets their chariots; and the efforts to belong to all of us.

NASA is America

The message that NASA sends is that America can still dream big. Can build big. Can do the unbelievable. It represents the country. After all, these are tax dollars. NASA is America. With tax dollars, comes oversight.

Unfortunately, the appetite for public funding has dried up in recent decades. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson argues in “We Stopped Dreaming,” the NASA budget is a fraction of our national expenditures. Yet he says the country gets so much back from it:

Meanwhile, however, that entire era galvanized the nation… it galvanized us all to dream about tomorrow. To think about the homes of tomorrow, the cities, the food of tomorrow. Everything was future world, future land. The World’s Fair. All of this was focused on enabling people to make tomorrow come. That was a cultural mindset that the Space Program brought upon us.

This public mission is one reason why NASA must be the leader of the US Space Race team, not private companies. Certainly, private businesses have provided invaluable service to the field of space exploration. Companies like Space X and Blue Origin are pushing the boundaries of the frontier. NASA has long partnered with the private sector in various capacities.

It must must must be humans, not robots. Our space program has long been successful with robots. The Mars Opportunity Rover captured the hearts of young people. “My battery is low and it’s getting dark,” the little guy’s last transmission was touching to many. But the impact was fleeting and limited with an anthropomorphic machine. Yes, we all love Wall-e, but real heroes are stronger inspiration. We must have human astronauts. They are a symbol. They are us.

Trump should get some credit for starting the Artemis program in his first term, starting Space Force. Luckily, Biden didn’t just toss out his rival’s space plan, continuing the mission, one of the rare things that wasn’t tossed out. In Trump’s second term, he obviously championed Artemis since it originated under him to begin with. Although there are now budget cuts to NASA coming from the Trump administration.

Given the gravity that attention to a new Space Race will generate, NASA could also play into the private-public partnerships in this space. Netflix is already getting in on the action by streaming the mission. Apple, another great American brand, should feel left out and find a way to get on board. There are some opportunities to recoup money via US business.

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We Need China

The foil in the original space was the Soviet Union. Er, actually, in the USSR, the Americans were the foil. Years ago, I had a Russian student who explained that they are taught the Soviets won the Space Race because they had so many first. Us Americans usually mark the Moon as the finish line. Either way, we both pushed each other with differing visions of the future, but both with space as a key human cultural dimension.

When the Soviets launched Sputnik, the entire country freaked out that the US was being left behind in this Great New Space Race. It caused a jolt to public support of science and education through massive increases in funding for such endeavors. We need such support for research, science, and progress again.

Having a clear, respected, and notable rival in this endeavor. China must play the role of foil in this new era. Just as the Soviets scared us into funding science, we must believe that China is a credible and worthy opponent. A recent Ars Technica article already proclaimed, “China appears likely to beat the United States back to the Moon.” In some ways, I hope that they do beat us. Like in the first Space Race, it will mobilize the entire country to action.

Given the appetite for budget cuts that has dominated the US in recent years, a new Space Race may again jolt support into research and development. After all, much of the national debt is centered on taking care of seniors. Very much the opposite of the first Space Race, which was young, exciting, and future-thinking. Those getting the lion’s share of US public investment actually felt the fruits of such educational spending in the excitement of the 1960s and 1970s. It’s time to turn back to the future, back to the kids, back to the space.

When the Soviet Union fell apart, the appetite for funding evaporated. The only thing that will bring back these sentiments is a rival seemingly beating us. It’s the old Flags and Footprints narrative. We lost the initial leg of the Space Race, but won the journey to the Moon in the end. The Soviets like to say that they won since they were the first, which just goes to show that its all about framing here rather than real fighting.

We need to ask Americans if they want China to be the first nation to go back to the Moon this Millennium, the first to establish a permanent base there, or, eventually the first to discover alien life. It’s a big universe out there. We need China to push our curiosity further than we are currently imagining.

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The Naysayers

Unsurprisingly, given the negative national mood right now, there are some critical of the country’s space exploration aspirations. They often argue that we have too many problems down here on earth, we shouldn’t be wasting resources in the heavens. Our recent struggles to build infrastructures also factors in to these critiques.

I am sure there are pockets of Americans who simply do not like this recent space initiative because it was initiated under Trump. Yet, Trump himself has slashed NASA’s budget in the most recent proposal. But researchers have also found that historically Republicans have been better funders of NASA and space exploration in general compared to Democrats. So the new Space Race has both potentially detractors and champions from either side of the political aisle. The good news overall, Pew reported that “Republicans and Democrats have much in common in their views on the U.S. role in space and NASA’s priorities.”

Americans are simply sick of the astronomical high costs to do anything. High profile cases such as a simple bus stop ballooning to over a millions dollars or the embarrassing La Sombrita mare the perceptions of governmental capacity. High speed rail from LA to San Francisco seems less likely to be done in my lifetime than an actual moon base. Blue State governance has some blame in these negative portrayals.

All of the critiques miss that the impact of NASA innovations is not just to space exploration. There are a vast range of critical inventions that trace their evolution back to NASA: smartphone cameras, Global Positioning System (GPS), non-scratch lenses, Memory Foam, Modern Insulation through Space Blankets, CAT Scans, LEDs, water purification, baby formula, wireless anything, Jaws of life.

Space travel forces us to innovate in ways that we would never do on the ground. Necessity is the mother of invention. Human survival in the vacuum of space brings out the ultimate necessity. NASA has long recognized the importance to bringing their innovations to the broader world. The agency has run a publication called Spinoff since 1976, which highlights various technologies and their uses to mankind. Now it is just a website rather than a magazine.

During the post-War boom years. there was a belief that the government could do things, and do things well. The incredible feats of the Space Race proved this perception to be true. Even though there were still criticism of our space initiatives then, the general sentiment was that of excitement in this government-led project into the future. Simply abandoning that assumption is moving away from that American principle.

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Proposal: University of the Moon

Since this is Space Race 2.0, we must now go behind the old “Flags and Footsteps” approach of just landing, planting the flag, and then leaving. NASA has already proclaimed the desire to establish a permanent moonbase. Forget critics asking if this is even legal, we need to colonize the Moon. A key part of the plan should be establishing the University of the Moon.

The Moon should center around a university. Moon University, another possible name, should be the most prestigious university in the world solar system, more so than Harvard, Oxford, or Beida. Admissions should center on some kind technical prowess and trajectory. The Best of the Best, just like NASA. But we should pull from the entire earth, even if still led and dominated by Americans

I understand a traditional campus does not work on the surface of the Moon, not with the technology of today. But universities are epoch surviving entities. What we establish today can have profound impacts human civilization—no different than John Harvard bequeathing his money to a school in a random outpost across the treacherous Atlantic Ocean way back in 1638. We are thankful for Harvard University today.

It should start small, run similar to some of the polar bases that we already have. But teaching and graduate student research should be key to fostering the next great space scientists. As the technology for livability improves, so too should students on Lunar State University (more name options). Hopefully, it could one day be a full standing free institution, a beacon of science and hope beaming down to the world. Just as 1638 is almost 400 years in our past, 2026 will one day be the same to 2426.

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Commencing Countdown, Engines On

There might be some reading this who lament the idea of a Space Race. More competition may just drive us down the same troubled roads as the Cold War adventurism. But I would counter that it was not the Space Race itself that brought on Containment Theory, nor the Global Policeman of the 1990s, nor the War on Terror of the 2000s. These global entanglements have been a feature of US foreign policy since World War II. I think most Americans would prefer their tax dollars going to the Moon that they look up to every night rather than to bombing a country they cannot find on the map.

A new Space Race does not bring more war. Just like space cooperation did not end adventurism. I do not mind some cooperation. The International Space station as a site for collaboration is an important symbol for civilization. It has even been a site where we have overcome terrestrial quarrels in interstellar space. Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot asked the world to reconsider the mutually assured destruction of the nuclear arms during the Cold War. We should continue this cooperation, just with some added rivalry.

Of course, the more the merrier. It’s not long just a two-man race. Instead, there are 60 other countries vying this time. India, the EU, and any other nation willing the suit up are all welcomed. We also have companies in the race this time, such Blue Origin and Space X. There will obviously be cooperation between the US space body, NASA, to the American private sector. But the lead should still be NASA as the national representatives. Those other entities are for-profit first, not country first.

The central theme of the coming space exploration should be a race. There should be competition to juice excitement for science, technology, and human progress. It will fuel new bleeding-edge advancements in both the Chinese and American contests. The winners of the Space Race 2.0 will write the rules of space exploration for decades to come. Innovations from the race will benefit all of humanity.

The goal for Artemis II was 252,757 miles, beating Apollo 13’s distance record from 1970. We are finally following up on the vision of the future not unsurpassed in 56 years. The images coming out of this recent mission are already iconic, matching some of the majesty of the old Space Age. We should not lose this momentum; instead, we should press further.

Christina Koch, one of the astronauts on board, was quoted on BBC’s 13 Minutes Presents: Artemis II podcast, “The question is not should we go, the question is should we lead or should we follow.” Americans want to lead, they want to be first, they want to win the race. We can do it through science, technology, and educational funding led by the people’s owned NASA. This new Space Race can kickstart us out of our current national funk. Artemis II is just the first step.

Dispatches from CIES

I have been in San Francisco all week for CIES. No, not the aviation tech company, but rather the education conference. It was the 70th Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES). It brings together thousands of researchers, scholars, students, and practitioners from around the world to discuss various issues in global education and development.

The big thing that everyone noticed this year was that CIES was not well attended. A lot of past attendees skipped the event, especially those coming from abroad. Stories of colleagues failing to secure a visa were rampant, along with reports that others were basically soft-boycotting the country.

CIES is not a large drop in US tourism, yet the absence of international travelers is indicative of the entire mood of the sector. The US is just not as attractive a place to visit as it once was; travelers are rightfully worried about visa rejections (wasted time/money), harassment by authorities, and general dangers of US cities. Inflation of the USD against other currencies is also a big part of this calculus. The downstream effects on tourism, restaurants, and other entertainment are clear for the entire country, but especially in a popular destination.

Given these concerns, the chatter around the conferences was that CIES should abandon the US for a few years. Next year is already scheduled for Madison, Wisconsin, and the following year in Seattle, Washington. Yet, in the past, it has been in Mexico City and Canada, so concerned attendees raised the question of possibly changing. However, contracts have already been signed, and a move seems unlikely.

Again, CIES is just small potatoes in the grand scheme of US tourism, but the insights can be extrapolated. The World Cup is just a few months away, which will be jointly hosted here. Likewise, the LA Olympics is two years away. The same soft protests of CIES are creeping into these global sports venues. International travelers seem to be eschewing the US leg of the World Cup, and there are rumblings that the tournament should pull out altogether. Similar calls have been made about the upcoming Olympics, which I do expect to have some kind of official boycotts similar to 1984.

In terms of CIES, admittedly, some domestic travelers did not want to visit San Francisco. Many Americans have a love-hate relationship with the Bay Area. It’s the site of so much innovation for the entire world, yet so much disruption to everyday space. The city, and really all of California, also has an image of being dysfunctional yet astronomically expensive.

I certainly saw my fair share of homeless individuals with psychosis on the streets. Attendees from small college towns kept telling me how surprised they were with the general degradation. If you are not used to this, it can be quite uncomfortable. There are obviously dangers involved, too. Perhaps these conditions would be more tolerable if there were hazard pay discounts, but the amenities of the place are still expensive. What’s the point of visiting then?

So the main takeaways of the conference were not even actual education innovations or developments. Instead, the global mood around the United States’ place in the world was the key debate. It certainly overshadowed my little event on higher education and urbanism. Bummer.

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Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• Newport Beach, California, is considering a ban on students riding e-bikes to school. It is sad that the US does everything it can to ignore the real problem of cars, even at the detriment to kids.

• In an even more extreme version, a Bay Area man arrested for installing stop signs and crosswalks to slow down dangerous drivers who almost killed his children. Wild.

• Despite booming growth, school districts in the Dallas Metroplex are looking to close schools. Some are blaming zoning—the Lone Star State is sounding a lot like its hated Golden State rival here.

The US Secretary of Education posted a random Tweet about a 20-year-old handheld gaming console (Sony’s PSP). It’s still up! Very strange.

• Florida governor hopeful wants to raise tuition on international students to a million dollars. It is a total misunderstanding of the higher education space.

• Brunel University of London in the UK is over 50 million pounds in debt! My guess is we see a wave of closures there soon, just like in the US.

• Kentucky and Northern Kentucky Universities join together for shared facilities. As construction prices continue to climb, I think we will see more joint projects like this in higher ed to share the risk burdens.

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  Urbanism-ish

• As Honda loses market share, the Japanese automaker pulls back from some of its ambitious plans. It is a pity that this once champion of smaller cars has fallen so hard.

• Amtrak announced a new service connecting LA to Phoenix. I am very much looking forward to this route!

• RIP to DC’s streetcar. Apparently a big waste of time and money.

• Taking away your parents’ car keys is becoming a generational struggle. It is a must to protect everyone else on the road.

• Vegas launches cheap deals again! Finally. Luxor and Excalibur all-inclusive experience: two guests, two nights, three meals daily, two show tickets, parking included. I am planning to test this out in the summer.

Closing Time… BTS is Back and in College

The K-pop band BTS has recently gotten back together after putting their careers on hiatus for mandatory military service to their country. Noble! The first concert back in Seoul is the kickoff of a new global comeback tour.

In part of this new world tour, the BTS team released a short animated film on Korean students at Howard U in the late 1800s. This was supposed to be an inspiring story to connect early international students who laid the foundation for the band to become global stars. The opening capture reads:

This video was inspired by the story of seven young Koreans as documented in The Washington Post on May 8, 1896 (“Seven Koreans at Howard”), some of whom captured the first known audio recordings of Koreans in Washington, D.C., on July 24 of that same year.

Unfortunately, some American commentators did not appreciate the depictions in the film. You see, the exchange happened at Howard University, a historically Black college (HBCU) in Washington, DC. But when the short animation panned to the crowd, there were only a few Black people. This faux pas elicited considerable backlash.

One headline in Inside Higher Ed read, “K-Pop Band BTS Misrepresents Howard University as Predominantly White in Video,” along with a scathing critique of the band. at broke down some of the consternation surrounding Arirang, the BTS comeback album:

Others are wounded by the visual and historical representation around the Howard University imagery and the presence of an American actress in the video, reading those choices as whitewashing or a flattening of Black history and Korean symbolism.

It is too bad that the controversy has tainted an interesting tidbit of history. The full sequence that people are mad about was literally just a couple of seconds long. It is frustrating that American sensibilities often center our own culture, history, and experiences. America’s Culture Wars are not World Wars. We should not expect BTS (or really most of anyone else abroad) to have a deep, nuanced understanding of every cultural issue in our country. We know little about other countries, yet we also demand that they know us well. It is American Exceptionalism Hypocrisy.

To be fair, Howard University itself released a statement mostly praising the video. Yes, they did mention the brief depiction, but most of the statement in The Dig was celebratory. “If you ever needed proof that Howard is a global cultural mecca, you can look back as far as 1896. That year, Howard opened its doors to house and educate seven Korean students during a time of political upheaval in their country,” wrote the authors. They also lauded Korean culture and relations to HBCU and broader Black culture, including the influence of rap and hip-hop in K-Pop. Kudos to Howard here.

Despite the few outraged, I think most will agree the video is a pretty cool celebration of US-Korean relations. I’m glad that higher ed is playing a small part in this global comeback tour. Cheers to BTS and Howard. See the video below:

Hoppers is NOT a NIMBY Movie

Note: Spoiler-free, with only light plot points.

I will just answer the headline question up front: No, Hoppers is not a NIMBY movie. I first reported on the outrage bubbling in the YIMBY community over this new Pixar movie trailer a few months back. But I pointed out that we urbanists need to chill out since we hadn’t actually seen the film yet. I was right!

I watched Hoppers over the weekend, and it is indeed not a NIMBY movie. It’s actually an urbanist movie, albeit somewhat complicated. The main controversy is not stopping housing, but rather stopping a highway from bulldozing a vibrant neighborhood (of sorts). There is even a scene with a proposed ring highway around the city of Beaverton (a stylized version of the Oregon city by the same name).

The scheming antagonist is Mayor Jerry, played by the always good Jon Hamm, who wants to build a highway through a local glade to connect the city with the white picket fence suburbs. The protagonist, Mabel, a young college student at Beaverton University, has fond memories of a pond and picks a fight against the highway plan. “Nobody even wants your stupid highways,” she yells. “Everybody wants my stupid highway. That’s why I’m going to get reelected," the mayor retorts.

I think the writers must have been sensitive to the possible NIMBY critique, so they inserted some talking points that urbanists often themselves champion. “The Beaverton Beltway, getting you where you need to go up to four minutes faster,” says the obtuse mayor, obviously lampooning the One More Lane Will Fix It meme. “People love highways. They love getting to places fast,”1 he adds, sounding like the real-life traffic engineers so lamented by urbanist communities.

I won’t get into any more specific plot details, but this basic setup shows how the film doesn’t really have a NIMBY message, even if it isn’t a YIMBY movie either. I see the film as more of Pixar’s version of the Jane Jacobs vs. Robert Moses fight, the legendary battle to save the soul of New York City. Mabel is the gadfly stand-in for Jacobs, while the Beaverton Mayor is the NYC Mayor. Although, the plot does get a lot weirder than this dynamic as the film progresses.

I will say Jacobs is complicated in urbanism circles. She is claimed by two different divergent sides. On one side, it is argued that she advocated against car culture and suburban sprawl. Another side says she illustrates the importance of community engagement and historical preservation. Sometimes these two sides do not get along, hence the divide in urbanist circles. So perhaps both will claim Hoppers as their own, along with environmentalists.

Finally, after confirming that Hoppers is not a NIMBY movie and, instead, labeling it as an urbanist movie, I must close with some bad news: Hoppers is just not very good. This new film is about as humdrum as they get. Very average. We are long gone from the Golden Age of Pixar. Hoppers is not going into the Urbanist Movie Hall of Fame alongside Roger Rabbit. No matter the NIMBY, YIMBY, or urbanist messages, I expect the film to be forgotten fairly quickly.

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Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• Universities are landlords now, a new role that brings considerable challenge.

• Losing public trust, elite universities look to pay more taxes (in the form of donations to local services).

• Princeton, NJ, is battling NIMBYs; many such cases in college towns. I do know a half-empty closed college campus right in the middle of town that could make a great affordable housing spot.

• Inside Kyoto University’s chaotic and magical student-managed dorm. This looks so fun.

• There are too many Americans studying at this Scottish university, say the Americans studying at this Scottish university.

• US slips to #3 in choice of study by Chinese international students. There will be large reverberations as these student pools dry up.

• The economic impact of H-1B visas has been massive for the US economy. More problems loom on the horizon as we continue our insular policies.

• Airports are classic college advertisement vectors. But how about the university press? Great idea! Kudos to University of New Mexico Press for this:

• has an interesting observation that state schools have better transfer rates, so it’s easier for college athletes to hop around and still (possibly) graduate.

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Urbanism-ish

• Trinity Broadcasting Network HQ torn down. Not that important, but I used to drive past this place all the time. Felt very out of place along a highway.

• The private passenger rail service Brightline is booming, as customers are looking for ways to get around skyrocketing gas prices.

• A driver fell asleep in a Tesla while on the highway. It’s this exact kind of irresponsible person we must get off the road immediately. Put them on the bus or a Waymo.

• Cool refabricated construction development in upstate New York. These kinds of new building methods don’t have to be ugly!

• A wildlife bridge in California cost $114M, almost $100 million more than comparable projects in other states. This was actually a much-needed project, but it’s frustrating that the state cannot do anything on a reasonable budget.

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Closing Time… March Madness Celebration

I love March Madness. It is one of the last American monocultures that unites so many people watching one shared experience. Writing for ’ , makes the argument that we “have a moral obligation to join an office March Madness pool to do your part to prevent the disintegration of the social fabric,” as explained in a Tweet from Yglesias. Hey, I’m doing my part by watching the games.

Beyond the basketball, though, I love March Madness because it celebrates the diversity of higher education institutions from across the spectrum. Colleges that most people have never heard of take down the giants in the sport. I first learned about universities like Gonzaga or Butler by following their Cinderella runs in the tournament as a kid. It is part of my love for colleges broadly.

This year’s Cinderella has been High Point, which upset Big Ten basketball power Wisconsin in the first round. Through the victory, audiences discovered that this rural North Carolina liberal arts college is basically a resort. Research has shown that doing well in the tournament can really boost an institution’s reputation:

Making the NCAA’s March Madness basketball tournament provides a national spotlight and advertising effect that is good for any school. Winning in the tournament is even better. But being a smaller, lesser-known private school that advances surprisingly far (winning at least two unexpected games) in the tournament is especially fruitful…

We find that making a Cinderella run in the tournament provides promotional buzz that increases freshmen enrollment by somewhere between 2.1% and 4.5% 2 years after the successful performance (Collier et al., 2020)

Sadly, High Point turned into a pumpkin a little early, losing to Arkansas in the second round. Yet the message seems to be out on the school now. The strength of US higher education is that we even have places like High Point. March Madness is a visceral and fun reminder of how great and diverse our sector can be.

AI and Robots Leading the Way

Innovations in AI, robots, or other high-tech areas were a central theme to the entire 15th Five-Year Plan. This focus goes well beyond higher education, connecting to all facets of Chinese society. In particular, AI was listed as one of the top national strategic tech targets. Of course, these innovations were explicitly mentioned alongside military capabilities, including unmanned intelligent combat forces. Universities, though, are seen as central nodes to the desired technological development.

The document states that "high-level research universities" (高水平研究型大学)…. are key to developing technological advancement. Specifically, “high-quality higher education (优质高等教育) is the lifeblood of engineering livelihood.” In this plan, universities must engage in industry collaboration, and vice versa, in these spaces. It notes that due to the “unconventional layout” of AI-related majors, higher education must be nimble and flexible to produce such specialists.

These collaborations explicitly mention both AI and robotics. The AI+ (人工智能+) initiative announced is geared towards the creation of high-performance AI chips and AI data governance, along with various software advancements. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) was also set as a goal, with targets of both general-purpose and industry-specific “agent-based” models.

Potentially, one of the most exciting proposals discusses the integration of AI with physical systems. In a word: Robots. The plan calls for building “humanoid robots” and developing “brain-computer interfaces” as new economic growth points. They especially mention medical breakthroughs related to these goals, such as surgical robots, medical diagnosis/treatment, and elderly or disabled care.

In this AI robot future, the Chinese government does have an eye on restraint and safety nets. The plan discusses a full risk management lifecycle system. Under these conditions, sectors must grapple with ethics, algorithm registration, and property rights for AI-generated content. Furthermore, there is concern over the impact on jobs with the so-called "employment creation effect."

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International Cooperation

Part of my interest in the 15th Five-Year Plan is to understand the direction of higher education in China will connect with sectors abroad. It is a somewhat selfish interest, since I do enjoy funded trips to conferences and events for educational and academic exchange. As I wrote before, after some COVID pullbacks, the country seems to be reaffirming these international connections.

The document explicitly mentions international professional exchange and cooperation among universities. They explicitly mention to “strengthen the ‘Study in China’ brand,” something similar to what I heard in Beijing back in November. There are expectations of high-level foreign science and engineering talent exchange, especially from Belt and Road partners. This likely means more funding for top researchers to come to Chinese universities, perhaps in similar efforts like the much-maligned Thousand Talents Plan.

Now, some may be concerned about these overseas talent recruitment efforts. Indeed, they have been the primary target of US espionage concerns at universities through the China Initiative. While some unlawful acts were uncovered, many of the investigations proved fruitless. Still, as China remains committed to these strategies, governments abroad will keep their guard up.

These concerns from the US will surely center on the proposed “Chinese solutions” for international rulemaking for AI and other sensitive areas. The government plan makes the case that its open ecosystem is a win-win for global cooperation. This juxtaposition is implicit in comparison to the closed systems of the US, underpinned by OpenAI or Anthropic (though this was not mentioned explicitly).

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Higher Ed Expansion (Conquest?)

China’s education vision for 2030 seeks an expansion of higher education. The explicit goal laid out was to reach 65% gross enrollment at this education level. These growth targets have been set for both “high-level research universities” and “application-oriented undergraduate universities.” At the same time, it stated a goal to boost the proportion of engineering master's and doctoral students.

There was an explicit mention of resource allocation moving towards the Western and Central regions, which have been historically marginalized in terms of elite Chinese higher education. The funding model called the "Double First-Class” initiative is set to be expanded, too. I expected some universities in these regions to be elevated to more elite levels of the hierarchy, at least in terms of funding and expectations.

The continued focus on expansion is interesting in the current era of higher education. Systems across the world, especially in the region, are contracting. Since China is still the world’s largest exporter of international students, there would seem to be an appetite for domestic development. Despite the looming birthrate crisis, China is still looking to expand. That may mean fewer students going abroad in the future. Universities around the world that overrely on Chinese students should take heed.

Probably the most intriguing (and concrete) development to come out of the plan is the Macao-Hengqin International Education (University) City. This initiative is set to create a kind of hub for higher education and international collaborations. There will likely be both domestic and international branch campuses, along with other institutional establishments. This project was already announced last year, but the high-level mention illustrates the importance of such development.

Macao-Hengqin International Education (University) City means the Pearl River Delta (aka China’s Bay Area) will only become strong in terms of education, an area that already boasts top institutions through these educational hub strategies, like the University Town of Shenzhen. Peking University HSBC Business School and Tsinghua–Berkeley Shenzhen Institute already operate in the area.

Below are some photos from my trip to Shenzhen in 2017. I was conducting research on world-class university conceptions. Then, the place was still a little green, and felt a bit empty. I have not been back since, but I have heard that the area has fleshed out, including the new campus of SUSTech. I hope to go back soon. The neighboring Macao-Hengqin space is likely expected to see similar growth by establishing "new research universities."

Given the chaos and instability in the Middle East, I wonder whether some institutions would consider relocating international branch campus operations from the Gulf states to Southern China. I would not be surprised if institutions made the move sooner rather than later. The investment into this Macao-Hengqin initiative may spur further conquest expansions that can cannibalize other such hubs already established.

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The Educational Takeaways

I do not want to paint a picture that higher education was the central focus of the 15th Five-Year Plan. It was merely one part of broader sociological developments. , Professor, East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore (NUS), broke down the entire 15th Five-Year plan on his Substack. Artificial intelligence was the number one topic, growing largely from the previous plans. His general impression:

Overall, the word count suggests a continued strong emphasis on innovation and technology, reduced emphasis on reform and opening (and market development), and still limited attention to “people first” and common prosperity. The Plan suggests also stronger emphasis on basic research, and a stronger link between technological innovation and growth… Also, the AI+ initiative of the government, based on a plan issued last year fall, receives abundant attention. It sees the main value of AI in its application, and in particular in its application to industry and business. The open access approach that China’s tech companies such as DeepSeek have taken fits this well and could lead to more rapid adoption of AI than in countries that rely on proprietary systems.

Hofman’s findings also showed that specifics on education, while present, were lacking. In a LinkedIn post, Qiang Zha, Associate Professor at York University, was more critical. “It's truly a pity (and a surprise) that education didn't excel in terms of word frequency in those Five-Year Plan documents,” he wrote. He suggested that other recently released plans did have more specific outlines for education.

Amber Wang, reporting at University World News, noted that there were significant promises made to boost and invest in education at the Two Sessions of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, concluding on March 11. “China has pledged a 10% boost in science funding and renewed support for its flagship elite university programme,” she reported. This includes increases in funding for science and technology development by 10% and basic research by 16.3%.

My take is that AI and education, particularly elite higher education, are welded together in China. Companies like DeepSeek cannot be separated from the Tsinghuas and Pekings. AI was central to the 15th Five-Year Plan, tied to national defense, social development, and, yes, education. Given the national focus on AI development, I expect these top institutions to remain central in these initiatives. I am not sure how this AI focus will impact the lower tiers of the sector, though.

Note: related articles from College Towns and the author can be found below.

The Monitor

RedNote, Deep Seek, and Education Exchange w/ Ryan Allen

Two quick announcements…

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a year ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · Miranda, Juan Zhang, and The Monitor

Recognizing the Age of Conquest

In September 2025, I labeled the recent era of American higher education as the “Age of Conquest.” The thesis was simple: the biggest schools are growing, while the smaller schools are fading. The piece has been drawing a bit more attention lately.

In February, it was featured in The Atlantic article “The Harvard of the South … Of the West?” by Rose Horowitch. I talked with Rose about the conception, history, and logic behind the Age of Conquest. I was happy to have offered my expertise and insight. Our conversations became the meat of that piece:

The population of American 18-year-olds is expected to peak this year, followed by a precipitous decline. Stokes’s consulting firm has identified nearly 400 private colleges that are at risk of closure in the next five to 10 years. Everyone’s jockeying to be in the best position on the other side of the crisis. ‘For institutions like Northeastern and Vanderbilt, taking advantage of this weakening and precarity that certain institutions are experiencing, that creates an opportunity for them to get real estate,’ he said. Small colleges in major cities or Sun Belt states, which have seen a population boom, are valuable sites for branch campuses. Aoun said that at least one college asks to be acquired by Northeastern each week. Ryan Allen, an education professor at Soka University of America, calls it higher education’s “Age of Conquest”: The big schools will get bigger, and the smaller schools will be absorbed. Soon, high-school seniors who get accepted into a top college might start having to answer a question that their parents never did: ‘Which location?’

The full article is worth a read.

That citation in The Atlantic prompted The Chronicle of Higher Education to reach out to me, soliciting an updated version of the Age of Conquest. Again, I was happy to oblige, and the piece was published there under the headline “Welcome to Academe’s Age of Cutthroat Competition.”

While I prefer my original title, I did appreciate the editorial guidance. I write free and loose here on Substack, so being reined in was both awkward and appreciated. One of the directions the Chronicle asked me to go was with an additional postscript. They wanted me to flesh out a theory of mind on the Age of Conquest. To be honest, I struggled with that reflection, as I am still working through all of my thoughts on the phenomenon (it will be a good portion of the final chapter in my future book on closed colleges).

The “Conquest” label is more of a description of what is happening rather than a value judgment. I actually do not fault singular universities for chasing these kinds of tactics. I don’t want to pile on the Vanderbilts or Northeastern. My thinking on this is that these conditions are not just about universities, but the entire US broadly. Higher ed is merely wrapped up in this American culture:

As costs and competition spike, many sectors, not just higher education, have grappled with their own versions of an age of conquest. We can see it in the news of a looming Paramount-Warner Bros. merger, in complaints that movies are now mostly just superheroes and sequels, and even in charges that restaurants across the country taste the same due to an industrywide reliance on one mega-provider. The boutique, novel, quirky, or technology-resistant firm, studio, or college struggles when confronted with onslaughts of efficiency and mandates for rapacious growth.

So I appreciate the Chronicle making me think more on these issues. Although, the timing of publishing wasn’t great. First, it ended up getting posted on a Friday. My first Friday News dump ever! (just kidding, only happenstance). Second, I was a little worried about publishing the piece on metaphorical “conquest” the very same week the United States started a global war with Iran. Perhaps it was a little gauche on my part. Nonetheless, the piece went up.

One of my favorite responses came from Carol Keese, Vice President for University Communications and Chief Marketing Officer at the University of Oregon. She offered a nice metaphor, calling it Moneyball’s Lessons for Higher Ed. She quotes from the baseball book and film, “The problem is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams… It’s an unfair game. If we think like the Yankees in here, we will lose to the Yankees out there.”

Keese’s reminder is a good one that it is not all doom and gloom. Of course, I also don’t mind paralleling myself with Billy Beane/ Brad Pitt either. Hedging my “Conquest” label, I ended the post-script with, “Or perhaps I just played too much Civilization II as a kid.” But the Chronicle cut that line. I’m glad they did. Seeing College Towns picked up by traditional media and shared with peers in the sector is affirmation for the work we are doing here. Even if I did, indeed, play too much Civ II as a kid.

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Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• The mission to Mars may run through Texas A&M, as the university sets to open a $200 million space institute.

• More higher ed space news, here are the universities with the most moonwalkers:

  • Army - 2

  • Georgia Tech - 1

  • Michigan - 2

  • Navy - 3

  • Purdue - 2

  • Texas - 1

  • USC - 1

• Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas, is trying “drone-delivered tiny homes” to help with its student housing crunch. These seem a bit more emergency rather than a solution, though. I’d love to review them one day.

  

• Narragansett debate change to town law on housing. Right now, it is illegal for more than 3 students to live in one house there. Crazy.

• Is the collective youth loneliness crisis just an individual choice? One young writer claims so.

• George Washington is selling its satellite campus. It’s going to become an Amazon Data Center. Tough fate for a dead campus.

• Wash U in Saint Louis has acquired another nearby struggling college. This is after last year adding the Fontbonne campus.

• Canadian universities are struggling due to caps on international students.

• A fellow academic made a free tabletop RPG that centers on AI in academia. Who wants to print one out and do a run?

Urbanism-ish

• Bert Kreischer discusses "The High Cost of Free Parking" with Pete Holmes (35-minute mark). The comedian famously studied abroad, too. I’d love to interview him here on College Towns one day. Thanks for spotting it.

• Chinese younger generations are finding cheap housing in the so-called zombie developments. The aesthetics are terrible but cheap housing is better than none.

• One rail enthusiast thinks DMU will save America. Cool project.

• at has notes from an autonomous transit workshop.

• , the walking master himself, posted an honest assessment of public disorder in the US that limits so many aspects of good urbanism.

• Favorite urbanist development, Culdesac Tempe, was featured on The Daily Show. Cheesy, but pretty good.

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Closing Time… Deleted Bluesky

My Bluesky experiment is over. I recently deleted my account on the social network after roughly a year and some change. In the end, the network effect just never really materialized. Even the CEO is stepping down, and fans of the social media are concerned:

There are still good people over on Bluesky. I know there are thriving academic and urbanist circles active there. But they are just smaller and more niche than what I was hoping when I first joined. There may just never be another Internet Town Square like what Twitter used to be.

That being said, I am still on X now. Funny enough, I lost my Blue paid account there (one gifted to me by a reader) and the experience actually improved. I have been getting more engagement and seeing more interesting posts, not just rage bait. Even though I agree Elon Musk largely ruined a good thing, I simply prefer the chaotic weirdness of X to the manicured suburban lawn of Bluesky.

I agree with the comparison of the two sites by British comedian Alistair Green, which made me laugh, too. He posted, “This is how I feel about Twitter vs Bluesky:”

What do you think? Are you still on Bluesky or X? You can follow my full journey looking for the next Internet Town Square below. I call this the College Towns - Twitter Chronicles. See below:

Should We Give Boomers a Break?

Generational warfare is constant between the Boomers and Millennials. There is a general antagonism across these cohorts that arises in our cultural discourse. It makes sense considering this is basically a parents and offspring relationship, e.g., the Boomers had Millennial kids.

Since I have written about this generational divide before, I was intrigued to see the headline “Don’t Blame the Boomers for Millennials’ Struggles” in the LA Times by . Kotkin is a faculty member at Chapman University (incidentally, my former place of work; though we never cross paths), a prolific author, and a highly cited urbanist. Or perhaps the label suburbanist is more fitting.

He is the champion of the master-planned city model à la Irvine, California. This model is a suburban-style development. While I have been critical of Irvine, I have come to appreciate the city more recently, at least the early visions of the city. I especially appreciate the neighborhood schools, and College Towns may have a future piece on this soon.

So Kotkin and I probably only half agree on things, and that was emblematic in his Op-Ed. Kotkin cites dim prospects for younger generations to buy housing in California as one of his key consternations in the piece. Likewise, he lauds rising trends in skilled trades and vocational education as positive movement.

But like my love-hate relationship with Irvine, Kotkin also took an asinine shot at my generation that I thought was unbecoming of the essay. He falls into the old trope of calling Millennials lazy and entitled:

Rather than blame the boomers, perhaps young adults need to do as the boomers did: Get real and work harder. Right now millennials are not impressing employers, notes the Harvard Business Review. Even the students know the score: More than half (53%) of recent college graduates feel unqualified for an entry-level job in their field, with nearly half (42%) admitting they did not have all the skills listed in the job description. A recent survey of more than 1,000 employers found that millennials and Zs had the worst work ethic of any generation, more concerned with their lifestyle and leisure than their careers.

This description is basically the tired stop eating avocado toast trope that was bandied against the generation in their 20s. For some, that age was 20 years ago, as Millennials have already entered their 40s. The essay lazily lumps “recent college graduates” data with Millennials. Some of my friends from high school literally have kids in college right now. The swipe at younger generations in the essay is a sophomoric take at best, and obtuse at worst.

American working hours had been on a steady decline since the 1950s, leveling off in recent years. That means Boomers worked fewer hours than their Greatest Gen parents. And while following generations followed these trends, the gains in efficiency and output dramatically climbed higher. Wages, though, did not remain parallel, and that was certainly a problem that hit Boomers when they dominated the workforce in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet this bifurcation has only exacerbated, hence the Millennial malaise.

What I find most entertaining about this discourse is that Boomers were once maligned in the same way as Millennials have been. In 1976, Tom Wolfe labeled "The 'Me' Decade" as a shot against the coming-of-age Boomers. In 1967, Time magazine claimed of the generation, “today’s young people are the most intensely discussed and dissected generation in history,” along with some labels like “alienated,” “uncommitted,” and “noninvolvement.” Certainly, the veterans of World War I and II were annoyed by the counterculture, “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” ethos.

There are numbers to back up the qualitative criticisms of the then-young Boomers. The following comes from Work in America (1972):

Yankelovich also found a shift in student opinion on the issue that "hard work will always pay off" from a 69% affirmation in 1968 to a 39% affirmation in 1971. This certainly was, in part, indicative of the conditions in the job market for college graduates in 1971. But more basically, we believe, it highlights a paradox inherent in a populace with increasing educational achievement. Along with the mass media, education and its credentials are raising expectations faster than the economic system can meet them. Much of what is interpreted as anti-work attitudes on the part of youth, then, may be their appraisal of the kinds of jobs that are open to.

A 1960 survey of over 400,000 high school students was repeated for a representative sample in 1970 and the findings showed a marked shift from the students valuing job security and opportunity for promotion in 1960 to valuing "freedom to make my own decisions" and "work that seems important to me" in 1970.

Given these results, my guess is that if we could go back in time to administer that same poll Kotkin cites in his op-ed, Boomers would be firmly at the bottom behind both the Silent and Greatest Generations. Like father, like son, I guess.

So did Baby Boomers work harder than younger generations? Absolutely not. Ahistorical nonsense. They were blessed with a post-War world in which the US had unimaginable dominance. From investment in building housing to cheap college, they reaped the success of the United States in that era. Kudos to Boomers for taking advantage of those conditions.

Those conditions, though, have drastically changed in modern America. Younger people are facing the brunt of these challenges. These generations, overeducated and underemployed, are locked out of housing and swamped in debt, all against the tide of inflation. But as Kotkin notes, these struggles are not just on youth alone. Aging Boomers are stuck in their suburban single-family homes, quickly losing their ability to drive, with nowhere in their unwalkable neighborhood to downsize, while their kids moved to Texas. Everything is downstream of housing, and the generational stereotypes just flatten complexity.

We have artificially constrained the solutions to many of our problems. The strict zoning laws and government regulations hampering construction have dried up the supply. This is a space where Kotkin and I find agreement: “scaling back regulations that make it difficult to build affordable, and family-friendly, housing,” he says. There are growing movements to make progress on these very issues—led by subsequent generations with movements like YIMBY, Abundance, and Strong Towns (founded by a Gen X).

Taking a cue from Boomers, these generations are looking to take power to remake society. Some of the new directions are scary to Kotkin’s generation, such as the rise of Mamdani in New York, while others are likely more palatable, like AB 1154, which makes it easier to build ADUs in California. “Without such changes,” Kotkin writes, “Boomers inevitably will face a generational war over their assets, one they will likely lose.” Us Millennials agree. So let’s start building housing together, Boomers.

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Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• About 10% of Cal State University system students are homeless. Awful.

• About 41% of all sociology BAs conferred in the entire country are given by California universities. This stat was surprising, and I am still processing, but I guess I have to ask: are there too many sociology majors?

• New College of Florida diverts housing budget to build new baseball field. The university already faces a dorm bed shortage, with its main IM Pei structure moldy and dingy.

• Stanford has a new database of historical policy reforms. I haven’t played around with it much yet, but looks intriguing.

• Harvard’s ugly new medical campus is turning into a billion-dollar boondoggle.

• NYU is now as selective as Harvard was a decade ago.

• China is getting rid of language majors in favor of Area Studies. Different from the US where we are just cutting both.

• The Atlantic cited College Towns in a recent article on universities trying franchise-like tactics with domestic branch campuses.

Urbanism-ish

• Traffic cameras are working in the Bay Area to change some bad driver behaviors. I’m usually more for street re-design, but doing so in tandem with these kinds of automatic cameras seems to be helpful.

• You know what else works? Protected bike lanes. San Diego’s bike ridership skyrockets with a newly installed network of protected bike lanes.

• Perhaps free buses, too? I’ve been against free buses, but here is one positive example from the small French city of Dunkirk. I’m always open to hearing other sides to these issues.

• Teens in NYC stole a subway train for a “joy ride.” This is incredibly dangerous, and I hope the city can get it under control.

• Speaking of reckless, Tesla has a higher crash rate than human drivers. This is one reason I’m concerned Musk’s bad choices will sully the broader self-driving tech.

• In California, inheriting housing makes up 18% of all such transactions! No wonder younger generations are revolting.

• LA spent 13 years on one bus stop shading. This kind of story is emblematic of so many problems in California:

Closing Time… Restaurants All Taste the Same Now

I recently spotted this viral video of cooks talking about how food in restaurants all tastes the same now. The reason? An overreliance on one-mega provider, Sysco. Watch the claim below:

I must confess, I don’t eat out a lot. If I do, it’s more to local mom and pop East Asian restaurants, which usually have their own unique supply chains. Likewise, I haven’t worked in the food industry since college, so my content knowledge on the topic might be dated. I am, nonetheless, intrigued by the phenomenon of standardization in broader American society.

Perhaps I am out of my element here in the restaurant world, but I have not noticed the trend of them all tasting the same. How about you? Is this something you’ve come across? Let me know what you think.

Short doc mentioned in the video above:

In the name of improving “public transparency,” the Donald Trump administration recently announced a “New and Improved Portal for Universities to Report Foreign Funding” that would include a searchable dashboard released this year. In the announcement, US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon blamed the Biden Administration for neglecting the management. Of note, the issue does seem to cover every administration dating back to 1986, including Trump’s first term.

The new portal and dashboard promise to remedy these oversight issues. The initiative is part of broader efforts by President Donald Trump to “end the secrecy surrounding foreign funds in American educational institutions and safeguard America’s students and research from foreign exploitation.” Last year, he signed Executive Order 14282, entitled “Transparency Regarding Foreign Influence at American Universities.”

Various media outlets and political commentators have pointed to the information released in this database as evidence of diabolical plots on American campuses. Trump himself made that very claim, too. There seems to be widespread belief that universities have been hiding foreign funding on a grand scale. I have published academic research on these kinds of influences and relations to national security, so I wanted to dig into these new data and dashboard myself. I was sorely disappointed.

What’s in the Dashboard?

The new dashboard provides an overall summary of the universities, funding total, and country of origin. There is also a label for various funding of “concern” via China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, or Venezuela. A total of 555 reporting institutions are included, with $67.6 billion in gifts or contracts. Qatar ($7.7 billion), China ($6.4 billion), Germany ($4.7 billion), England ($4.3 billion), and Saudi Arabia ($4.2 billion) were the top-listed countries.

Unfortunately, the dashboard does not provide a breakdown by year. So it is difficult to contextualize the scope. In fact, it is unclear what years this data even covers. In a comment thread on her reporting of the initiative, I asked about the dates, and she mentioned that “supposedly, the Ed Department's data should go back to the passage of the provisions, in 1986.” This seems like something very basic that is completely missing.

Furthermore, while the overall numbers are broken down by gifts versus contracts, each individual institution only shows overall funding with no distinction. Without being able to break this down by year or type, it makes the raw numbers seem more nefarious. There is simply too little information to make any reasonable judgments on the nature of this funding. It’s a contextless mess.

One example that stood out was Bryant University, which was one of the top institutions under the dubious distinction for “Universities by Total Value of Transactions with Counterparties of Concern,” second only to MIT. All $47.7 million of this funding came from China, which has been accused of abusing the international education system for covert technology transfer. I don’t want to disparage Bryant—I’m sure it’s a fine institution—but it is not a university that I immediately think of as bleeding-edge tech research.

Indeed, looking at the university website, the funding was not used for programs in areas of high concern like AGI development or nanotechnology, but rather a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a major in Accounting. In 2015, Bryant entered a partnership with the Beijing Institute of Technology for a branch campus called Bryant Zhuhai that focuses on international business. Much of the funding in the portal comes from this joint venture, as confirmed in the spreadsheet report:

Establishes a jointly operated academic program in China that is executed in accordance with a memorandum of understanding that has a term of fifty years (subject to cancellation by either party without cause). BITZH reimburses Bryant University annually for certain expenses that Bryant University incurs with respect to the program.

This kind of branch campus can be a boon for the home country in terms of international student pools. There might be some who argue that these Chinese international students may take seats from Americans. The reality is that Bryant has an over 65% admission rate and only about 5% international undergrads. Most likely, the endeavor has been helping to fund American students in Rhode Island, yet it gets labeled nebulously as a national security risk in reports.

Insider Behind the Labels

As I was looking through the data, I stumbled upon my previous place of work, Chapman University. The portal lists Chapman as receiving $2.6 million from China, labeled as “Funding from Countries of Concern.” By happenstance, I ran the program that this funding covered. Despite the label, I was not involved in some high-flying Cold War 2 espionage; instead, it was your standard higher ed people-to-people exchange.

Chapman’s partnership for this funding was through Shanghai Normal University from 2018 to 2024. The over two million in funding covered two cohorts of doctoral students in education with an emphasis on leadership studies. There were 13 students in the first and another 10 in the second. The total funding included tuition, fees, housing, extracurricular activities, and even some travel. My faculty line there was also directly funded through this program.

The students in the program were all instructors at private universities and colleges in Shanghai. Shanghai Normal University was helping the Shanghai municipal government boost the standing of the city’s private institutions. So the doctoral students came to the US to learn about pedagogy, leadership, and research methods in education.

The students went back to China to teach ESL, Global Business, or Museum Studies. I am very proud of what they accomplished, especially considering COVID derailed much of the planned programming. Clicking through the contextless data makes it seem like there was some sort of nefarious program happening. Instead, the Shanghai Normal program has helped fund scholarships for domestic PhD students at Chapman. It was also a job creation program for Americans. Well, at least one American: me.

Poor Governance Fuels Conspiracy

I do not have a problem with a policy to have universities list their funders—I would actually love to see all of them beyond just the foreign transactions. But I want this kind of program that works well and doesn’t confuse people further. Through this recent iteration, because the government had been doing a poor job of managing this data, the framing insists that universities were concealing sources.

Trump and his allies have repeatedly made the claim that the sector was hiding foreign influence and funding. On the contrary, universities publicize these partnerships. While being called a “secret” and “hidden”, the universities have announced these partnerships on their websites, posted about them on social media, advertised them in magazines, and held public events with them. It seems more likely that the lack of data was the fault of the US government not creating a system in the first place. And the new system has overpromised indictments against US higher education.

If the concern over this funding is real, then we should want better data and transparency, not worse. There is some useful data available; it’s just not on the dashboard. I found the actual spreadsheets with the data reported to the US government in prior years. The information is broken down by contract, with the years active included, going back to the late 2000s.

I was thinking that the data discrepancy likely indicated that the data simply had not been collected until 2020, basically the final year of Trump’s first presidency. I could not find the data before then, but I did stumble on records of a FOIA request by journalist Mitchell Bard that cited the data from then:

The Foreign Gift and Contract report currently available covers the years 2012-2018. I am interested in obtaining a report that begins with the earliest recorded data. I believe it goes back to 1986 so I would like a spreadsheet from 1986-2018.

Given the request, it seems likely that the older, pre-2012 data were never available or badly mismanaged. It also appears, though, that some data had been available via a searchable spreadsheet. However, I could not 100% verify because the Trump administration has deleted those pages from the DoE website. It was available throughout Biden’s administration, as per the Internet Archive. The current available spreadsheets start in 2020, but they are still a mess, with multiple years, duplicate labels, and mislabeled dates.

Real transparency is the government cleaning the data that it has and releasing it in a way that makes sense. The messy dashboard and deleted data are emblematic of the administration’s earlier DOGE disaster. Elon Musk was tasked with cleaning up government waste, but his efforts mostly just broke things through blind cuts, which later had to be amended. In a government geared towards efficiency, building a proper reporting mechanism, dashboard, and data repository would have been easy.

If there is a concern with foreign influence, why not tie foreign funding reporting to accreditation? Co-opt these agencies and systems we already have. So many decisions are made in higher ed in the name of compliance with the accreditors already. Instead, Trump has been actively antagonistic to these entities. What is going to happen is that next time a Democrat is in office, this foreign reporting effort will fall by the wayside again because it has not been incorporated.

International Ed is an American Success Story

There might very well be cause for concern over foreign funding. Intelligence agencies have made these claims for years. While some of the targeting has been false, there have been documented cases of Chinese espionage in highly specialized technical programs. We should want our intelligence working smarter to understand and manage these risks. That does not mean lazily categorizing everything under a “concern” label.

Of the $67 billion reported, gifts made up 25%. Gifts versus contracts are two very different things. I could more understand the scrutiny of straight gifts. That’s what Bard was researching when he filed his FOIA request that I cited above. Gifts bring with them an air of quid pro quo or other kinds of questions around influence. There has certainly been meddling by domestic donors at US campuses.

On the other hand, the 75% from the contracts seems overstated. These are services of trade—one of the few areas with a trade surplus for the US. Much of these contracts listed on the spreadsheet are paying for tuition and fees, considered a US export under the World Trade Organization's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). One of Trump’s primary goals in his second term has been to improve trade rates with countries. But cutting these programs only makes it worse.

For those arguing that we don’t want foreign interference in our institutions, then at the same time, the US is also trying to make the entire economy more dependent on foreign markets. This is why the Chinese targeted chicken feet imports, as there was little else to choose from. International students must also be vetted by USCIS before they arrive and heavily tracked once they get here, more so than those on visas for business.

Here are the Chinese importing accounting degrees and education PhDs, just as Trump wants them to do with our shoddy cars. These specific education exports have brought with them millions of dollars to the local Rhode Island and Orange County economies, allowing scholarships for more American students to attend college. Multiply similar programs across the entire country—this should be labeled an American success story. Instead, they get labeled as a security concern by a lazy and overpromised bureaucracy.

Since programs like those at Chapman or Bryant are far, far removed from actual concern, it puts the entire reporting endeavor into question. The overpromise here should be a concern to those who are actually worried about foreign influence. We need better, targeted initiatives, not blindly swinging a hammer.

Last week in my Crash Analysis of the Waymo that hit a child walking to school, I juxtaposed the incident with a tragedy down the road where an elderly woman crashed her car into a grocery store, killing 3 people. I also mentioned in that article that something similar happened in another part of LA, with an elderly driver killing a pregnant mother on an e-bike. Well, now another case is continuing the debate around seniors and driving.

This one also comes from San Francisco, where an almost 80-year-old woman crashed into a bus stop, killing an entire family. This happened in 2024, but it returned to the news this week when the judge let her off with just a light probation sentence. I am not here to litigate the case, rather I want to highlight the growing dangers Boomers are now posing to our roads.

The woman in this particular case was going 70 MPH when she crashed into the bus stop! Look at the area where it happened: it is not a suburb with wide open lanes, it is in the middle of a transit-rich walkable neighborhood. I can barely imagine getting to 40 MPH in this space, let alone 70. Going that fast here is incomprehensibly neglectful.

I see a lot of discourse demanding the removal of licenses for seniors or adding tests with age. While I actually do agree with these tactics, I am also realistic about what can happen legally. There is not as much political will to limit seniors because they are such a massive voter base. In fact, Illinois recently made it easier for seniors to keep their licenses.

Given the difficulties in legislative solutions to this problem, I think we should tackle the issues locally through street design. Our cities do not need to change any laws to install bollards everywhere. We need real protection basically everywhere cars interface with anyone outside of a car. Chintzy flexipoles will not work; the protection needs to be sturdy.

It is just a simple fact that as we age, we lose our faculties to drive. We essentially revert back to teenagers in terms of fatal crash involvement (see Cox and Cicchino, 2021). I wish we could all live in walkable communities where people weren’t forced to drive, but even then (as we’ve seen in LA and San Francisco), people still insist on driving. We should install protection now instead of waiting for more tragedies.

Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• The Tampa Bay Rays and Hillsborough College have unveiled a plan to build a stadium and mixed-use development on campus. Interesting deal that I have not seen with a college and pro sports team.

• Similarly, the University of Oklahoma in my home state is getting a new arena and sports district. I guess these types of districts are the new wave. Unfortunately, even the renderings look fairly car-dependent.

• According to a new study, academics are no longer on T̶w̶i̶t̶t̶e̶r̶ X. They are now on BlueSky. I tried BlueSky, it’s just not the Internet Town Square replacement that a lot of us were looking for.

• Too many As? Harvard proposes caps on top grades. Interestingly, I had this in grad school in Korea. It was pretty annoying, and I did earn a couple of Bs, but they did not affect me in any way after graduation. Much to think about there.

• Time magazine unveils a new university. It’s just as bad as the rest of them. Please do not take it seriously.

• A college announces three-year college degrees. I am generally against these short-term programs. I’ll have to write about my aversion to them in the future.

• There seems to be a continued exodus of elite talent in the US, as two high-profile Vietnamese researchers relocate to Hong Kong.

• There is a college cheater on Reddit where users trade strategies for cheating. They are mad r/professors found their little group. One fellow prof even asked them why they do it.

Urbanism-ish

• In more Olympic news, this time from the summer. LA gears up for Airbnb bonanza, as we likely don’t have enough hotel capacity.

• Similarly, the World Cup will be held in the US later this summer, and American stadiums are already issuing warnings against walking.

• In more sports news, China is getting into baseball. East Asia is already one of the top regions in the sport, with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. I could see the sport really catching on in Mainland China.

• Ford CEO admits expensive EV strategy was a failure. He promises the American automotive manufacturer will start producing more affordable cars. I find it interesting that he drove a Chinese Xiaomi years prior!

• China is also racing way ahead of the US in terms of AVs:

  ChinaTalk

  Is China Cooking Waymo?

  In terms of international expansion, Chinese firms are way ahead of the American competition. Chinese companies have worked out Autonomous Vehicle (AV) deployment deals with more than thirteen countries. The US: two. Chinese companies are also exporting something closer to a full autonomy stack — vehicles bundled with cloud services, AI traffic manageme…

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  4 months ago · 52 likes · 3 comments · Nick Corvino

• Bus stops in the US are too close together. I have been banging on this drum for years, so it is finally good to hear these critiques entering the discourse.

• What looks like the real-life house from Up is up for sale in Atlantic City. Just $775,000, not a bad deal!

• There’s a new book that got my attention called Paris is Not Dead about creating and maintaining a vibrant street life in the French capital. Thanks to for the tip.

Closing Time… Winter Olympics and College

The Winter Olympics are happening right now, and I have to be honest, I haven’t really been paying much attention to them this go around. I do love the Italian futurism aesthetic that has been used in some of the promotional materials in these games. Sleek. There are also some education-related stories that have piqued my interest.

The NCAA has a tracker of all the athletes who attend US colleges (American or international students). The list covers a range of universities in the sector, and the impact of higher ed can be seen globally. I will say it is only US universities, though. I’d love to see data on all the athletes and their college backgrounds. If I had more time right now, I’d just track that data myself and publish here. Alas, the Spring semester has been busy for me. Here are the top-10 US universities represented:

1. Ohio State - 13

2. Boston U - 12

3. Minnesota - 12

4. Wisconsin - 12

5. Clarkson - 11

6. St. Cloud State - 10

7. U of Maine - 10

8. Dartmouth - 9

9. Minnesota Duluth - 9

10. Northeastern - 9

Another story from the Winter Games that relates to higher ed came from the r/professors Subreddit. A user asked if they should give an extension to an athlete who had been competing in the Olympics. The story eventually got picked up by the media, too, confirming its authenticity. The athlete was figure skater Madeline Schizas, who is also a senior at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada.

I was pleasantly surprised that most professors in the group enthusiastically supported the extension:

I say I am pleasantly surprised because many professors are hostile to athletics. It is somewhat understandable when sports have come to overshadow institutional learning itself, such as the complaints about big-time college football. Yet, I still think sports can be a value-added to the broader liberal arts experience that defines much of US higher ed. I will have a deeper dive into this topic in the future.

To close, let’s check in on the medal tally so far to see who is in the lead:

Oh, wait, that’s not it. Wrong chart. Never mind. Enjoy the rest of the Games!

Critics of self-driving cars pointed to the case as a dangerous experiment on our streets, while defenders celebrated it as an example of how safe the technology can be compared to a human driver. This divide is especially acute in the urbanist community, where half are skeptical of anything with cars (whether robo or human driven) and the other half just want safer streets (whether robo cars or no cars).

I count myself in the latter half of urbanists, in which I have advocated for self-driving cars here on College Towns, such as through parking reforms. But there are a lot of people in the urbanist community with my respect who are on the anti-self-driving car side of the spectrum. I want to take these voices seriously.

To that effect, I ventured to Santa Monica this weekend to have a look at Grant Elementary School and the surrounding neighborhood for myself. I wanted to understand how this could have happened and what the implications are for self-driving cars, urbanism, and schools. This is my Crash Analysis of the incident.

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Note and UPDATE: I posted a YouTube video of my trip, with clips from that used in this written article. Other readers suggested that the spot of the hit was likely on 24th Street rather than Pearl Street. While the exact spot has not been released, media reports suggest this is likely the case. I have provided a photo of that location for contexts. It does not change any of the analysis in this article.

The Waymo Was Speeding

One of the key points in this incident was that the Waymo was speeding. The speed limit at that spot in front of the school was just 15 MPH, lowered to that speed “when children are present.” The self-driving car was going 17 MPH before quickly braking to just 6 MPH once the kid had been detected. The report from the company actually did not mention that the car was speeding. Even if it was only 2 MPH over the limit, I still think this is important context.

Being on Pearl Street and 24th Street in front of Grant Elementary showed me that 20 MPH really is basically the limit that any reasonable driver could even go on the streets. There are stop signs at each corner of the school and another in front of the main entrance. These are about 50 yards from each other. Going from a complete stop to even 20 MPH is already difficult on a Saturday afternoon without any kids running, parents waiting in minivans, or other school officials directing the madness.

What this tells me is that the Waymo that day was likely going a bit too fast. Yes, even by a couple of miles per hour. Really, in this area during school pickup and drop-off, cars should only be creeping through at just a snail’s pace. It should be annoying to drive through this space at these times.

, founder of Strong Towns, wrote about the psychology of driving in Confessions of a Recovering Engineer:

System 1 is automatic and largely unconscious. It is the fast reaction system — the one where we do not have to put effort into thinking… Things that require mental effort to resolve access System 2. This system is slower and more purposeful.

For streets, where we need complexity in order to build a productive place, traffic needs to flow at a neighborhood speed (15 mph or less is optimum) to make a human habitat that is safe and productive. To achieve this on a street, the street design needs to shift drivers from the passive awareness of System 1 to the mental state of heightened engagement found in System 2.

On a wide open highway, drivers can comfortably cruise on System 1. But when lanes narrow, trees overhang, and potential hazards appear, drivers switch into System 2. Driving in front of a school at 8 AM necessitates paying attention—a move from System 1 to System 2.

It takes either a certain kind of degeneracy to speed through such a place or possibly superhuman driving capabilities. Given the choice of the two, luckily, it was the robot car that day, saving the child’s life. But perhaps, in this specific case, an average driver who switched into System 2, just creeping through, would have been better off.

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Grant Elementary School: A Walkable School

There is a lot of discourse around why students no longer walk to school in the US anymore. Parents are fed up with the annoying car pick-up lines. One reason for the falling number of walks is that new schools are often built at the edge of town with no real way to walk. The school car pickup line is baked into the forever sprawl of our suburban development.

Grant Elementary is not one of these schools; it is tucked right into the middle of the neighborhood. It was built over 100 years ago, so there are no large parking lots or car line lanes for parents to sit in. The area flouts the unwalkable sprawl stereotype of LA. It is not dangerous, and there are no homeless encampments (not in the neighborhood at least).

The area the school sits in has a Walk Score of 85; I know the metric isn’t perfect, but that’s why I visited the area myself to corroborate these high scores. It has nice sidewalks with curb extensions, added just in the last couple of years or so. There are bike lanes, though not protected, and just painted green (so not perfect). There is a wonderful tree canopy covering the streets all around the school.

Outside of the neighborhood, there is a Whole Foods a couple of minutes down the street. The 26th St / Bergamot Station is less than a mile away, where residents can take a light rail into Downtown LA. The beach is a 15-minute bike ride in one direction, with UCLA another 30-minute bike ride in the other. It is within two miles of Downtown Santa Monica, which has some of the best urbanism in LA:

• Walker’s Paradise (93) - Daily errands do not require a car.

• Excellent Transit (77) - Transit is convenient for most trips.

• Biker’s Paradise (96) - Daily errands can be accomplished on a bike.

Tossing out the quantitative metrics to get more qualitative: I was physically there on a Saturday. The place was absolutely buzzing with people biking with their families, walking dogs, or just enjoying a general sense of a community that so many urbanists (and traditionalists) idealize. Oh, and in the perfect year-round weather. All of these amenities can be yours if you have the multimillions to buy a home there.

All that being said about the good urbanism, cars are still essential to the area. I doubt very many people live a car-free life. This cultural lifestyle spills over into the school. Presumably, most of the children who attend this public school live in this very walkable neighborhood. Yet, apparently, the pick-up and drop-off is still fairly hectic, with parents double-parking to drop off their little Billys or Suzys.

Without cars, this would be an easy pick-up and drop-off. Add in cars, and the walkable neighborhood gets messy. Cars simply complicate any space shared with people, especially with little humans running around. These specific human lifestyle habits were likely key to the Waymo incident that day.

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Tragedy 10 Minutes Away

The same week that the news dropped about the Waymo incident there was another crash in the area with a much more tragic ending. In Westwood, a 10-minute drive from the school, a woman in her 90s hit a cyclist and allegedly panicked. She then lost control of her vehicle and went careening into 99 Ranch, killing three people standing inside. This is a real tragedy.

I do not want to turn this into a whataboutism by showing every crash that happens with human drivers. But I could not help connecting both cases since they happened a week apart and were very near to each other. Locally, both events made the news, but nationally and internationally, only the self-driving car received much attention. After visiting the school, I went over to the grocery store.

The juxtaposition between Grant Elementary and 99 Ranch could not be more different. The school was calm, unassuming, normal. Most people probably would not even realize there was an international incident here just days before. Conversely, the store itself was closed, and plywood covered the massive hole that the driver left in the bakery section. Family and friends were standing around, crying and mourning their loved ones. There was a memorial for those who lost their lives. It was tragic to witness.

Continuing my comparison, the space where this tragedy happened is not a pleasant place to walk. There are certainly a lot of pedestrians or bikers, but they are clearly afterthoughts. The streets here are designed like a speedway, wide and forgiving for drivers. They are the classic stroad, seven total lanes for cars. There are even breakaway poles designed to fall over when drivers plow through them—safer for drivers, unsafe for pedestrians. There are no bollards anywhere, despite a constant flow of drivers flying through at unsafe speeds.

Westwood is a busy, urbanized area. It is home to UCLA and its almost 50,000 students, along with 31,000 employees. This is not a far-flung suburb; it is the middle of the second-largest metro in the United States. Two subway stations are set to open there in 2027. Yet, the area is uncomfortable for pedestrians at best and dangerous at worst. Sadly, last week, the space was at its worst.

While the hole left by the driver will eventually get patched up, the hole in the lives of the families and friends can never be replaced. They will forever feel the impact of the dangerous streets. The decision-makers failed the people who were killed. They need to slow down cars and add real protection for pedestrians; apparently, some of these changes are on the way.

Of course, the discourse brought with it the idea that senior citizens shouldn’t be driving. And I agree that we must be cognizant that people lose their faculties to drive as they age. It will only get worse as the Boomers give us a so-called Gray Tsunami. There was even another case this same week of an elderly driver killing a woman on a bike just 30 minutes away from the grocery store.

We should not wait for more tragedy to act. As seniors age, they should lose their privilege to drive when their ability slips past a reasonable point. Public transit and more walkable communities should be priorities, but self-driving cars will also have to be part of the equation, given how bad most places are for the first two options.

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The Verdict

I think the lesson for me here is that self-driving cars are not going to solve all of our problems. Visiting these sites was a good visceral reminder that the technology can assist in our efforts for good urbanism, but it is not the ultimate solution. We still have to make our streets better for people outside of cars. Conflict will always happen when cars and people mix, whether human or robot-driven. Redesigning our streets, neighborhoods, and spaces will be key.

I do agree that self-driving cars are already preferable to drivers with declining abilities to navigate the road like the one hitting 99 Ranch. They are also likely better than a lot of other human drivers, considering the road rage, aggression, or phone distractions on our roads. Human drivers already get annoyed when “stuck behind” an autonomous vehicle because the robots (mostly) drive by the rules. What we do not want is self-driving cars picking up on human bad habits, which is an urbanist concern for this tech. Perhaps this was a factor in the Waymo speeding.

The incident at Grant Elementary School was a rare case where the superhuman abilities of the self-driving car meant it could seemingly navigate a tight space at (slightly) higher speeds than what a (reasonable) human might do. We need self-driving cars to be better than humans at all times. Even if they mostly are already, some situations still call for System 2 driving.

Note: You can watch the full YouTube commentary of my analysis here:

Where Did the Coaches for Super Bowl LX Attend College?

It is now an annual tradition for me to explore where the Super Bowl coaching staffs went to university. In fact, it has become somewhat of a gimmick here on College Towns to do the same with other media properties. But I am actually curious about this kind of thing, and no one else seems to be doing it. AI also does a pretty bad job at compiling these lists, with a lot of mistakes or missing items.

So here we go, this is the most comprehensive list of the colleges attended by the coaching staffs in 2026’s Super Bowl LX: Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots. I do not care about graduation, just attendance, and I have included graduate school (as denoted by MA). The list also provides state and university categories1, which I created myself since the Carnegie Classification is sort of useless now. If I missed anything, please let me know.

I’m convinced that one reason Americans love football so much is that it breaks the mold of coastal and superstar-city stereotypes. In pretty much every other sector, cities like New York or LA dominate the discourse, led by people who graduated from a handful of Ivy League or elite universities. For football, it’s not that simple!

Of course, there are certain powerhouses that dominate the ranks of collegiate football, such as Ohio State or Georgia—both schools with alumni head coaches in this Super Bowl. Mike Vrabel played at Ohio State, but Mike Macdonald just worked his way into coaching during his time at Georgia, first coaching high school and then later becoming a graduate assistant at the university.

There are other large flagship universities on the list (accounting for almost 40% of the coaching educational experiences; see chart below), but none are dominant. The spread goes across the country, not even concentrated in just the SEC or Big 10: Virginia Tech, Texas Tech, Minnesota, Arizona, Nebraska, and Tennessee. Some coaches were former players, such as Josh Bynes and Neiko Thorpe at Auburn; others were coaches’ sons, like Jay Harbaugh at Oregon State (dad is Jim Harbaugh); others were both, such as Klint Kubiak at Colorado State (dad is Gary Kubiak). While rare, some coaches simply worked their way up the chain like Rob Caprice, who started out as an Equipment Manager at Penn State as an undergrad and is now a Defensive Intern for the Seahawks.

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Even more interesting than the flagships are the other schools that coaches attended. They range from programs that are considered “mid-majors” like Northern Illinois and Old Dominion or secondary institutions in the state hierarchies, such as East Carolina or UTEP. These types of institutions account for roughly 27% of all higher ed experiences from the coaches.

I was even surprised to find some Liberal Arts colleges on the list (roughly 18%), such as Lafayette, John Carroll, Assumption, and McMurry. Even as someone as invested in higher ed as I am, I admit that I had not heard of McMurry, which is a 102-year-old Methodist college in Abilene, Texas, and alma mater of Karl Scott, Passing Game Coordinator (Defense) for the Seahawks. There were only a couple of HBCUs, such as Alcorn State, attended by Leslie Frazier, Assistant Head Coach for the Seahawks.

Two coaches seemed to have run the full gamut of university types in their education careers: Quinshon Odom and Justin Hinds, both Seahawks coaches. Odom started his collegiate playing career as QB for Shaw, before doing MAs at Florida State and then Vanderbilt (HBCU → Flagship → Private R1). Similarly, Hinds was a lineman at Rowan before doing three graduate programs at Wagner, Mississippi State, and Florida (Liberal Arts → Liberal Arts → Flagship → Flagship). He has about as many grad credits as I do as a professor! In the age of the transfer portal, I’m sure more future coaches will end up with similar winding journeys.

Finally, two coaches that particularly stuck out to me were Aden Durde and Danny Van Dijk, both for the Seattle Seahawks and both from abroad. Durde is originally from Middlesex, England, and made his way into football through the now-defunct NFL Europe. AI reports he has no college experience, but digging a little deeper, I found he briefly attended North Iowa Area Community College, the only community college on the list this year. I wonder if he enrolled to get a visa/foot in the door in the US? Likewise, Van Dijk is from Australia, with two degrees from universities there: Australian College of Physical Education and Edith Cowan University (MA). He came to American football as a trainer in Rugby (and he was also a K-12 teacher!).

As per last year, the coaches in the Super Bowl come from fairly diverse educational backgrounds. Yes, those who played have a leg up, but playing time does not necessarily mean at the biggest football powerhouses. Plenty of guys from small schools are coaching in this game. Likewise, it helps to have famous relatives in the sport, but what industry doesn’t have some form of nepotism? Yet, even guys from across the ocean, where football is not a cultural phenomenon, can coach at the highest level of the sport. Truly interesting.

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Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• New England colleges are missing a certain kind of student: men. My guess is some of these trends are related to those migrating to universities in the South (perhaps related to campus life and, yes, football).

• That being said, in an age of chaos and uncertainty, Liberal Arts colleges may actually be the safest places in the sector. Plus, they are certainly best equipped to deal with AI cheating (and learning).

• Similarly, theater might be another way for students to overcome screens and digital addictions. As someone who was just three credits short of a theater minor, I say let more students take improv and stage combat classes.

• One place with booming student numbers: Atlanta’s HBCU scene, where there has been a housing boom recently to help quench demand.

• In more college area development news, Meta is helping to fund new development for Sacramento State in the downtown of California’s capital. I cannot help but think there is some lobbying influence here

• Likewise, Temple is building a new dental school, including dorms, in Tamaqua, PA. Good for the rural dentist shortage, but I just wish the structures looked better. Why build a dumpy suburban dentist’s office!

  

• In some international ed news, Duke Kunshan sees record applicants, including from Americans. Great to see young Americans might be going back to China again in large numbers.

• Korea launches study abroad office in Dehli, India. Top UK universities look to Indonesia for branch campuses. The next great landgrab is upon us in international ed, with South and Southeast Asia the prime target.

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Urbanism-ish

• Disneyland’s home city is ending bus service that helped with tourist overflow to the park. One tidbit, the report stated that more than 70% of operating costs went towards labor, a similar issue I found with another failed transit program in Orange County. Hungry for self-driving buses?

• Waymo released a report about how one of its cars hit a child who was departing from school. Urbanists were quick to point out that the superhuman reaction time of the AV likely saved a life. But this is worth more of an investigation, which I intend to do in the coming weeks, since it happened in LA.

• In more LA news, a by argues the decrepit roads here should partially be blamed on ADA requirements, which balloon costs and liability. Some in the urbanist community pushed back on the claims. It is certainly a space to continue watching.

  City Journal Substack

  Why Los Angeles Quietly Stopped Repaving Its Streets

  Los Angeles’s streets are in notoriously bad shape. Fewer than two-thirds are considered in a state of good repair, according to the city’s Department of Public Works. Broken sidewalks have spawned years of costly litigation, and Los Angeles pays out…

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  5 months ago · 38 likes · 12 comments · Shawn Regan

• The Kansas City Chiefs used bunk math for a new stadium deal. Taxpayers are still on the hook. Bummer.

• Christie’s recently launched a We the People: America at 250 auction, which brought in $35.5 million worth of patriotic icons up for sale. There were traditional items like a draft of the Constitution, but also newer things such as old Apple founding documents. Incredible items to scroll through.

• Cheaper than a lot of stuff at those auctions, the so-called smallest house in Denmark is for sale. It’s actually pretty big and not a bad price. Would you live there for $200K?

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Closing Time… 2 New Urbanists Tools

I made a bit of a name for myself on Twitter, back when it was good and still called Twitter, for posting before and after photos of American cities. I dubbed the project “We Ruined Our Own Cities,” critical of the auto-centric infrastructure and development style that hollowed out cities and towns across the country.

It seems everyone loves these before-and-after photos, but they are not always easy to come by. Oklahoma State U has made it easier! The university recently released a tool called Landscape Explorer that shows how land has changed since the 1950s until today.

Landscape Explorer uses Google Maps with U.S. Geological Survey satellite data to automatically stitch together before and after imagery. Users can poke around across the country to see various development patterns and changes. It is a powerful tool for the urbanist message.

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Another tool that I found this week came from Magnus Hambleton, who launched Anti-AI Rendering, a site that uses AI to bring renderings to their more realistic life. “No sunshine. No happy families. No impossibly green trees. Just cold, honest, depressing reality,” the promises.

I would like to see more realistic renderings, and many urbanists actually agree, especially the ones who care about beauty and aesthetics. Admittley, there is a divide in the community over these issues. Nonetheless, the truth of what is being proposed is always welcomed over fake renderings.

Perhaps some of this Anti-AI Rendering is more tongue-in-cheek than serious. There are certainly funny results floating around on urbanist social media. I still think it is a tool worth mentioning here (note that I could not actually get the site working today), and one possible toolkit for articles or posts used to advocate for better urbanism.

Last week, I wrote about Indiana University’s historic run to the National Championship in college football through the 1979 film Breaking Away. I figured I would be just one of many higher education-related outlets to cover the storybook season. I was wrong.

The day after the game, I noticed that none of the mainstream higher education outlets (Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Higher Ed Dive) covered the event. The Chronicle had a good article on university ads during bowl season the week before from . But it was just more general rather than specific to the game and feat by Indiana. Inside Higher Ed eventually posted a commentary by University of Southern California professor and IU alum Shaun Harper, but it was buried at the bottom of the front page.

This is not a critique of these outlets—they often do fantastic and important work for the sector, and I’ve provided quotes or even full articles to them in the past. Rather, I want to make a point about differing cultural tastes and audiences for these mainstream outlets vis-à-vis a place like College Towns.

The difference can be understood through the concept of High Culture and Low Culture. High Culture is that of the “writers, artists,” and the “highly educated people of upper and upper-middle class status, employed mainly in academic and professional occupations,” according to sociologist Herbert Gans; while Low Culture is “nonacademic,” everything else for the masses—pop culture.

College football is Low Culture wrapped in a High Culture institution. Places like The Chronicle or Inside Higher Ed are more geared to an audience plugged into that High Culture. For me here at College Towns, I’m not just doing Low Culture. I don’t want this place to turn into Stephen A yelling at Skip Bayless. Instead, I more see my value as a kind of bridge, connecting High and Low together.

Chuck Klosterman, an author I also admire for bridging these cultural divides, was on Pablo Torre’s podcast recently to discuss his new book on football. The entire conversation is worth a listen, but I was particularly taken by this exchange on the importance of football to American society:

Torre: This is why football is also this thing that people should be fluent in. It’s our language, just the practical and political and sociological motive of like, this is a passport to talk to the largest number of people available in our country. And if you abdicate that… then you’re also surrendering the ability to reach and communicate and plausibly be American.

Klosterman: I think people in a way cannot escape football in a way that can escape religion. Now it’s become very difficult to escape politics, but there was a time when you kind of could, you kind of can’t now. So now it’s like football and politics are these things and that has its own kind of meaning.

What Klosterman and Torre are talking about is something Substack offers, even beyond football. I want to use this space to do something different that may not be happening at the big outlets. Those education trade publications are better suited to cover the most pressing national events happening in the higher ed sector. This is why these Around the College Towns links round-up posts are sometimes devoid of Trump. Of course, I break this rule when I have something specific to say about an event, such as with international students.

What I see here on Substack is a value added to the sector through my site or others supplementing the good work from more mainstream media outlets. They can break news through investigative reporting or provide deep context to serious issues. We need that in the higher ed space. But there are things happening across campuses that are less High Culture and more Low Culture, like college football. And there are audiences for these stories, especially college football.

The Indiana University story is a prime example. The victory in the National Championship was not just a normal victory; it was part of a broader Cinderella run that captivated the country. Their games were among the highest-rated events on TV, not just for college football. IU going from one of the worst teams in the country to the best is movie-like, and there absolutely will be a movie about this team. Arguably, their victory was the biggest thing happening in higher education that week.

What this affirms for me is that there is a place for College Towns in the broader landscape of higher education outlets. But it is not just about this specific sector; Substack is providing a platform across every sector to fill these various gaps. It harkens back to an older media landscape of Zines or the early blog days. I am glad to be a part of it.

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Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• China may start giving entrance exams to international students who want to attend their universities. I will be curious how this actually plays out, as I am still seeing a lot of their institutions hungry for students from abroad. My guess is that it is selectively used depending on the country.

• In similar news, China’s foreign talent visa has proved lackluster so far. I figured this would happen, at least on a broader scale.

• More from abroad, some British universities are shutting down their Indology departments. Is K-Pop to blame? It does seem like Korean culture is taking over the world.

• Back in the US, Indian international students win lawsuit over microwave food punishment at U of Colorado. It was about the smell of palak paneer. Wild.

• University of Oklahoma is opening an extension campus in partnership with the Cherokee Nation. Cool initiative in my home state.

• California College of the Arts is set to close and be absorbed into Vanderbilt’s new West Coast campus. The Age of Conquest continues!

• In more closing news, I had missed the reports that the University of North Carolina plans to close its area study centers. Bummer.

• A mini-doc explores the so-called MAGA for Mamdani. One of the subjects was a young man who changed his mind about studying abroad in Japan. Interesting! More people should go abroad.

Urbanism-ish

• NIMBYs in LA are “sounding the alarm” over a proposed Little Tokyo apartment complex. This is in a part of the city that is walkable to Union Station, already has skyscrapers around, and struggles with housing (seriously, it’s next to Skid Row). Absurd.

• In more LA news, someone in here is (essentially) scamming tourists with self-driving car tours. Look, I know some foreign phones might not be able to get Waymo, but $80 for what is a $12 ride is exploitation.

• World’s worst tourist destination? LA’s Walk-of-Fame. I guess the place is hyped up in pop culture, and it is just a street tile. Sorry, LA.

• New Jersey has radically restricted e-bikes, targeting teens, but the laws will impact everyone who rides one. This seems like the exact step backward.

• American cities often go for the big, flashy stadium projects over small neighborhood fields. I am seeing this problem in my own area here in Orange County.

• Dumpy post-war architecture is starting to come up as “historic” in local communities, like this one from my home state of Oklahoma. We cannot fall for it!

• Wikipedia says the site is not doing well, with large dips in page views recently. It seems like AI is siphoning off its viewers.

• A new game lets players live out their dream of being a park ranger. I have been thinking recently that this kind of job would be a pretty good career for the AI future. I don’t think we can replicate a park ranger with ChatGPT, so perhaps this game would make a good gateway:

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Closing Time… What Do You Think of Vancouver’s Skyline?

There was a bit of a controversy over on X recently that I got wrapped up in. There was a semi-viral post about how bad Vancouver’s skyline is; “absolutely hideous,” wrote the S.D. Wickett account.

I actually did not agree with the original poster; I think that the skyline looks ok, not great. “The problem is no iconic skyscraper. Just one would really bring the whole skyline together,” I posted. In the post, I included an AI image of the Empire State Building in the middle of the Vancouver skyline.

Of course, I was mostly joking about the specific skyscraper, but some people were perturbed. I was told that Vancouver doesn’t need tall buildings because they have mountains. Apparently, the city limits height due to this view corridor. Likewise, other urbanists told me they simply didn’t like skyscrapers and preferred European cities.

My response to these takes was that Vancouver is a city in North America, with a lot of tall-ish buildings already. They aren’t going to knock it all down and rebuild it into Paris. Since they already have a bunch of tall, mundane condos, they might as well add some good-looking buildings to the mix. Honor the mountains with the beauty of the built environment.

Another pushback came from people saying that Vancouver already had iconic buildings, like Harbour Centre. I can see how locals hold value in these buildings already there. That’s normal. Yet, little stands out in the skyline itself; a giant could better fill out the space. A skyline grows, towers get built, and they eventually become iconic. This is how cities work. Some did say that a few were on the way.

So what do you think? Do you think Vancouver’s skyline needs its version of the Empire State Building? Or am I wrong?