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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  3 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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  3 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?

Indiana University (IU) has made a historic run in college football, going from one of the worst teams in the sport to winning the National Championship. In recognition of this Cinderella turnaround, I wanted to write about a classic homage to the university with the movie Breaking Away (1979).

I’ve had Breaking Away on my list of movies to write about since I started College Towns. The film is a classic college town tale that won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1979. The life depicted in 1970s Bloomington, Indiana, can tell us a lot about the history of higher education, urbanism, and broader societal change in the US.

Note: If you are unfamiliar with Breaking Away, sorry, I may have to spoil this 47-year-old movie. But I think you can still read the article for insight into urbanism and higher education (the niche here at College Towns). It was directed by Peter Yates, and stars Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern, Jackie Earle Haley, Barbara Barrie, Paul Dooley, and Robyn Douglass.

The story centers on a group of friends from Bloomington, Indiana, who recently graduated from high school and are longing for what is next in life. One in the group, Dave, is obsessed with cycling and Italian culture. The crew ends up fighting with IU frat boys, and the president invites them to enter the annual Little 500 race. Given Dave’s cycling prowess, the locals end up winning. All based on a true story, too!

Becoming a Classic College Town

Breaking Away is essentially a movie about the town vs. gown relationship in a classic college town. Indiana University is central to Bloomington and all of Monroe County. Today, about 80,000 people live in Bloomington, while the university has an enrollment of around 48,000 students. Another some-odd 21,000 work for IU. In short, the university dominates the town’s population, civic culture, and economy, but it wasn’t always this simple.

Indiana had long been a strong mining state, with the area around Bloomington dubbed the “Limestone Capital of the World.” This mining sector provided stable and well-paying jobs to blue-collar workers in the state. Stone from Indiana quarries was used in state capitals, colleges, and other iconic structures from around the country, including at IU, as depicted in the film and with the townies dubbed Cutters.

By the late 1970s, though, these quarries began to shutter as the country began its long deindustrialization. Jobs were lost and regions like the Rust Belt dilapidated. Yet this kind of spiral did not happen in a place like Bloomington. Instead, the growth of IU bolstered the town and the surrounding area, a development style sometimes called Eds and Meds.

The more white-collar careers at the university replaced the old blue-collar workers of the quarries. This transition is the central struggle in Breaking Away. The fathers of all the boys in the crew had lost their jobs. The boys themselves had nothing but the service sector to fall back on. Despite Bloomington being their home, they felt alienated by the college and the community, which was only growing and encroaching on blue-collar Bloomington. The frat boys diving into the old quarry swimming hole is a visceral illustration of the takeover.

The time period of the film was part of a massive boom in US higher education enrollment, including at IU. From 1950 to 1970, the school tripled its student body, going from 10,715 to 31,877, peaking as a percent of the town’s population then (see Graph I). Although, only about 20% of American students went on to college then. Bloomington itself was growing as a city, with just over 28,000 residents at the start of that period, tripling to over 52,000 by 1980, including several land annexations.

Bloomington’s growth was coming from the expanded university staff and the various service sectors around campus. Not every blue-collar worker could transition, sending them looking for work in other parts of the country. They were replaced by a more educated workforce. It’s not that there are zero working-class people in Bloomington now, but the town and gown divide today is more about affluent landowners or retirees annoyed by loud students rather than split along class divides.

Breaking Away's depiction of the college looming over the town, slowly engulfing all civic, economic, and social aspects was real. The Cutters faded and Bloomington became a classic college town.

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Little 500 and Vehicular Cycling

Breaking Away is certainly a bike movie. One of the few bike movies! But the biking in the film is not what most urbanists revere. Instead, what is depicted is mostly akin to a hobbyist activity, with the big race as the finale. Yes, the frat bros race in the Little 500, sure, but they also drive around town when they aren’t training.

Biking is actually portrayed as kind of a weird thing in Breaking Away. No one bikes around the college town for transport, except for the weird kid who fakes being Italian. In the end, the dad does adopt his son’s hobby, but it is played more for laughs. After all, this is the state that is home to the Indy 500.

The character who does bike around town is essentially a vehicular cyclist, à la John Forester. Just like vehicular cycling in real life, Dave is bold and aggressive on his bike, but his style is obviously dangerous. Early in the film, he chases down a girl on his bike through the campus area, darting across traffic and pedestrians. At one point, his dad almost smashes into him when he runs a red light. Dave even bikes down a freeway at one point, racing a semi-truck.

Bikes are simply an afterthought in the auto-centric world of 1978. His dad sells used cars, one friend (very) briefly works at a car wash, and both townies and frat bro crews are always cruising. There are no bike lanes or other infrastructure that we might associate with a good biking culture today.

Many college towns across the country have better urbanism for walking, public transit, and biking. Not being as auto-centric as typical American suburban sprawl is one reason why people love college towns. Bloomington certainly fits the bill today. It is now one of the top small cities in terms of biking or walking to work. The town has built a network of bike lanes. IU has a strong bike culture that goes beyond just the hobby.

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Italian Foreignness

Steve Tesich, the screenwriter, based Breaking Away on his time as a student at IU in the 1960s. Tesich’s experience highlights just how much ethnic perceptions have changed since the Boomers were in college. By the late 1970s, much of the post-War White ethnic homogenization was already in full swing, if not mostly complete. The film shows the residue of the enclave culture that defined US ethnic lines before the suburbanization efforts that really boomed in the 1950s.

Perhaps the film’s depiction of distrust in Catholicism and related ethnicities was overexaggerated by the time of filming. But these were real experiences and sentiments in the US at one point, which did not just disappear until several generations of the suburbanization that forced the various ethnicities out of their tight urban enclaves. It reflected the time of WASPs with different sensibilities.

Dad: What is this?

Mom: It’s sauteed zucchini.

Dad: It’s I-ty food. I don’t want no I-ty food.

Mom: It’s not. I got it at the A&P. It’s like... squash.

Dad: I know I-ty food when I hear it! It’s all them “eenie” foods... zucchini... and linguine... and fettuccine. I want some American food, dammit!

It seems incomprehensible that the dad would be unfamiliar with Italian food. But the father was roughly a Greatest or Silent Gen (the actor Paul Dooley was born in 1928!), meaning he grew up in an America before Italian food had become our national staple.

Few Americans had passports during this time, and certainly fewer studied abroad. Going to Italy would be reserved for the wealthy, as depicted in the film with the sorority girl. Dave’s mom having a passport would have been rare, so it perhaps makes sense that he himself was a little odd. His dad represented a more traditional working-class America, where going abroad, even to Europe, would have felt very alien when only a fraction of Americans applied for passports each year (see Graph II).

One idea that stuck out to me from the film was that Italy was poor. “Italians are all poor but they’re happy,” said Dave. This was well before the recent Europoor meme war that has gone around in the US recently. Yet at the same time, there was awareness that they were happy, driven by family, community, and structure, just like the memes about their urbanism today, too.

Pop culture is a whisper of our history. Memories. The screenwriter, who was born in Nazi-controlled Yugoslavia and immigrated to the US after the war, likely felt animosities targeted at non-WASP ethnics like himself, even as these have eventually faded. Likewise, Americans are similarly aware of how different Italy is compared to here; only now it’s more common to yearn for that lifestyle abroad, unlike with Breaking Away’s outcast protagonist.

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The Checkered Flag

Breaking Away is often called a coming-of-age story. The boys in the town were portrayed as losers before winning that final Little 500 race. Yet they were different from the conception of losers today, typified by the modern incel concept (sitting in the basement, no outside hobbies but Internet posting, no friends, no romantic prospects). The loser of 1979 Bloomington was depicted as having a group of friends (the Cutters), who had a hobby (cycling), a romantic interest (sorority girl), and an intellectual pursuit (studying Italian).

The boy in real life who inspired the story did make good; Dave Blase raced, gained celebrity, graduated college, went abroad, and eventually became a teacher. He and his lore will forever be legendary in Indiana, where the Little 500 has remained a raucous tradition.

I was lucky enough to attend the festivities back in the late 2000s (see video above). Though not at the race itself, the campus was absolutely bonkers. That experience always made me wonder why more students didn’t clamor to attend the university. It’s a beautiful campus, in a fun college town, with exciting traditions, yet IU’s admission rate has long hovered around 70-80%. Given the recent trend of college applicants looking South, I wonder if the recent success by the school’s football team will start to juice those admission rates.

As Indiana University added a College Football National Championship in 2026, Breaking Away lives on as a real story change in Bloomington and broader America. Even IU being in the game itself represents vacillating changes in wealth dynamics between various regions, just as the blue-collar stonecutters got pushed out by white-collar university workers before. IU has now pushed out former dominant schools with new money.

The team’s star quarterback, Fernando Mendoza, won the Heisman and praised his Cuban ancestry, thanking his grandparents in Spanish. “Por el amor y sacrificio de mis padres y abuelos, los quiero mucho. De toda mi corazón, de toda gracias,” he said. The 2026 versions of the Breaking Away dad were left confounded, just as he was confused by Il Barbiere di Siviglia and fettuccine back in 1979. But like Italian heritage has normalized into the Americana melting pot, so too will the more recent emigres, despite current constraints and sentiments.

I see Breaking Away as more than a coming-of-age story for a singular individual, or even just a group of townies. Instead, it’s a coming-of-age story about a college and town becoming a college town. The backdrop is the rise of Indiana University. Beyond that, the film reflects changes in demographics, geography, economics, and educational growth nationally. Both Breaking Away then, and IU’s football team now, represent these constant changes in broader American society.

UPDATE: On January 20, 2026, the article was edited to show IU won the National Championship.

Is Academia Only a Job?

An article in Nature Human Behaviour recently made the bold proclamation that academia is only a job. It caused quite the debate through academic circles, with professors, PhDs, scholars, and others who spent way too long in school on the opposite sides of the argument.

For me, academia is a job. But I disagree that it is just a job. For most, academia is a dream job. People basically ruin their lives to get an academic job. I am not joking. Remember the Homeless Professor I interviewed last year?

Not counting the BA, that’s a given; let’s start with an MA. This first graduate degree is likely to set someone back roughly two years and a $70,000 price tag of attendance. These programs are typically cash cows for universities, meaning students often receive little financial support and instead need to take on loans. In many cases, these programs are full time, limiting the possibility of a full-time job, leading to lost wages in the prime working age.

After the MA is the doctoral program. It used to be fairly typical that PhD programs were basically jobs unto themselves, even if very low-paying jobs. A stipend, some kind of housing, menial TA or RA duties, but a job nonetheless. Unfortunately, even these versions are going away in many fields and are instead being replaced by unfunded PhDs.

Pretty much every professor I know tells students not to do an unfunded PhD. And yet, it is becoming the most common type of PhD out there. People are willing to pay the university to allow them to do a PhD. Maybe there can be some work here and there, but things are limited (especially depending on the locale). Nonetheless, someone spends five years (or more) working through coursework and writing the dissertation. A lot of people end up dropping out here.

Say they don’t drop out and eventually earn the PhD (congrats, Doctor!). Dream job imminent! Not so fast. Now, they just face an academic job market that was already terrible 15 years ago, which has only gotten much much worse in recent years with budget cuts and university closures.

One of the best results is to land a post-doc, a short-term and low-pay quasi-still-a-student position that often asks candidates to move across the country (or world!). While trying to research and settle in, post-docs will still be looking for a (real) job this entire time, too.

One of the most insidious results comes from the adjunct position. Sometimes these positions get dangled with the hope of converting to a full-time professor eventually. Sorry, good luck, but so many get stuck in adjunct purgatory for the rest of their life, driving to 5 different universities just to make half the salary of an assistant manager at a local Panda Express.

All of this is why people see it as more than a job. The pathway to becoming a professor (or even just the possibility) drives the narrative. The opportunity costs of entering academia are astronomical, and there is little guarantee of success on the other end.

Why do people do it? Because if you are lucky enough to get a job in academia, a real one with real money, benefits, and protection, then it is a great job. Yes, there are annoying things about it, but so too does every other job. It is intellectually engaging to research, write, and read for a living.

I should note that becoming a professor is not the only career with these kinds of intellectual characteristics. Even though I love my job, people have realized that there is a bigger world outside of academia (see conversations in r/LeavingAcademia). I often try to highlight those pathways like in my interview with , chief economist at Redfin.

So, yes, I feel lucky to be able to have this job. But I know that I have had a lot of luck to end up where I am, not to mention various personal sacrifices for years along the way. It is for these reasons why I warn students against doing a PhD. The eight-year lottery ticket is too risky for just a job, even a dream job.

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Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• Indian international student in China draws ire for showing off a luxury dorm. That would be an amazing facility in the US, too!

• New university space in Russia is not totally ugly but also doesn’t feel like a university. Am I being too harsh?

• Stamford, Connecticut, is looking to loosen zoning rules to entice university expansion, including reducing parking minimums and height limits for campus facilities. Good idea.

• The best school system in the US is run by the Department of Defense, according to at . I may have to explore these a bit more (my guess is that a lot of this is self-selection, though).

Urbanism-ish

• Chinese cities are launching new metro lines and stations across the nation. When I see this kind of announcement, I am embarrassed at how little we can muster here in the US.

  

• The viral Tesla Diner sensation is now merely a ghost town. I may have to go out and see this failed spectacle myself.

• Some Japanese companies are starting employee dating apps to help boost the birthrate. American HR professionals must be in shambles.

• Americans are losing the Southern drawl. I lost it myself after I left Oklahoma. While I can still hear it when I go, it is certainly eroding.

• San Diego recently removed some height limits, allowing for taller buildings in the city, but a court recently overruled this loosening regulation on environmental grounds. California is such a parody.

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Closing Time… The End of the Class Reunion?

Over on the r/Xennials, a user tells the community that their high school class didn’t have a reunion. The post prompted a conversation about the practice of reunions. Many agreed that this practice was basically over for a variety of reasons.

This last comment mirrors my own experience. We had a 10-year reunion, but few people showed up, and it caused a lot of trouble for the organizers. When the 20-year mark rolled around, no one even bothered to try. We didn’t have the COVID excuse.

I left Oklahoma, but most of my fellow Choctaw High School peers stayed around the area. Not only do they see what everyone is doing on social media, but they just see each other in person around town. There is little incentive for anyone to plan a reunion under such conditions.

It’s sad to think that we may be losing another American tradition (this one we cannot blame on urbanism either). There have been some fun pop culture references around the concept of returning to town for a class reunion. Potentially, I need to do a deeper dive into the phenomenon, since it has long been a time-honored American tradition that is seemingly fading with the Boomers.

What do you think? Is this the end of the class reunion? Did you have one?

The International Education of Venezuela

Over the weekend, the US started a conflict in Venezuela. I am sure you can find a lot of foreign policy discussions elsewhere, but it got me thinking about the international education components between the two countries. Education policy always takes a back seat to foreign policy, so it is no surprise that this space has not gone swimmingly in recent years.

Just last year, US President Donald Trump suspended visa processing for students from Venezuela (F, M, or J), with only very limited exceptions. Even before this proclamation, visas to the US were not easy to come by for Venezuelans. For instance, a Little League team was rejected from playing in the Little League World Series.

In 2016, there was a peak of 8,540 Venezuelan international students in the US, according to the Institute of International Education (IIE). That number kept sliding each year until this last year, where there were just 3,886. Presumably, there will be even fewer Venezuelan students in the next academic year, as even the refugee and asylum pathways have been closed.

What was even more surprising to me is that despite the tenuous diplomatic relations between the countries, there were some American students who still studied abroad in Venezuela. Of course, the number is very very small though. The peak was way back in 2000 with 206 students, according to IIE’s Project Atlas, mostly sliding over the years to just a handful. Still, in the 2023 academic year, 13 American students went there to study abroad! I am so curious about who they were and what they were doing.

My mind went straight to this classic, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (1987), by Robin W. Winks. International education has certainly been used by various intelligence agencies around the world (I have written about that, too). But there are other reasons beyond espionage for someone to want to study abroad there. I laud the brave adventurers who called Venezuela their home for a semester. We actually need more people like them (I’ll have a future article related to this).

In terms of programs, there are basically no American branch campuses nor study abroad centers in Venezuela. These kinds of international education programs have all disappeared. James Madison University used to have the El Sistema: The National Youth Symphony and Choir Program of Venezuela, which allowed students to study music in Caracas and Mérida. The University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin had a partnership with VENUSA College of International Studies and Modern Languages. I cannot find when it officially closed. Tulane even had some kind of joint grad programs with IESA in Caracas. It looks like the MBA was moved to Guatemala.

It remains to be seen what will happen after the US strikes and military excursions in the country. My guess is that academic and educational relations will be even more strained in the coming years. Not much of a limb, I know. The situation is a good example of how foreign policy always trumps educational endeavors.

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Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• University of Akron is outsourcing management of its dorms for the next 50 years. My biggest fear with these kinds of deals is that service quality gets much worse and students get squeezed by the for-profit managers. Though in this case, some of the refurbishments will be done by a nonprofit.

• Native American groups are concerned about proposed dorms in Charleston. I’m normally skeptical of such claims, but graves from these groups are more relevant than Boomers calling students pollution.

• California State University-Channel Islands campus was used for filming the new season of Fallout. It is actually a solid show, too, especially for a video game adaptation. Pretty cool! I may have to do a future article on colleges as film and TV shooting locations.

  

• Duke University released Public Domain Day! Notable is Betty Boop. No, I’m not going to do a series on the character like I did last year with Tintin. Sort of disappointing what we got in the public domain this year actually.

• Top 500 rare books, maps, and other paper collectibles auctioned off in 2025. It makes me chuckle how #4 is the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, but #2 is some autographed cards from Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan. Fun list to peruse.

• Another change coming this year here in California is limits to phones in schools. This is the very near future for pretty much all schools, which I agree with. I guess the question for us educators is when does this make its way to higher ed?

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Urbanism-ish

• A billionaire wants to build a new utopian city in Appalachia. Connects to the very real strain of utopianism in American culture, but I’d rather see someone like that fix what we have.

• Dallas downtown isn’t booming like the rest of the city. If you look at the space, it is a lot of dead space, modernism, and company HQs. This is basically Le Corbusier’s vision of a city, and it just doesn’t work well for the human senses. We need livable downtowns.

  

• Waymo looks for big expansion in 2026. Did your city make the list? When I was back in OKC during the holiday, people there still didn’t seem to believe the technology existed.

• A large number of Americans would like to live car-lite or even car-free. These kinds of places are so expensive because we do not let the market give us more, so walkable spaces are artificially inflated. Build more!

• Top ridership growth from the previous year is pretty interesting. What sticks out for you? For me, it’s how well Vegas has been doing despite pretty much every leadership decision there geared towards cars. has a good article on his Substack.

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Closing Time… Worst College Towns Ranking

I am a fan of the CityNerd YouTube channel, aka Ray Delahanty. He covers a broad range of topics related to urbanism, which I have linked to before. This week, he crossed streams over into my territory with a ranking of Awful College Towns in the US. Welcome to the Worst Four Years of Your Life is the video tagline.

His ranking took the 136 schools that make up the FBS football Division I (e.g., the highest level of college football). He then used Walk Score, Bike Score, and National Transit Database to calculate a ranking (there are a couple of other steps that you can watch in the video).

Given that I have long critiqued rankings, I must say that he commits at least one of my sins. He also missed all the small liberal arts colleges. But I do think that CityNerd is not trying to create some impactful metric like US News, and instead is just giving the world some insightful commentary. So his sins will be forgiven by me as granted by the powers in my Papal Ranking of World Universities.

Here is the CityNerd final ranking of Awful College Towns:

1. Troy University.

2. Jacksonville State

3. Arkansas State

4. Kennesaw State

5. Liberty University

6. Sam Houston State

7. Western Kentucky University

8. Coastal Carolina University

9. Middle Tennessee State

10. Louisiana Tech

I must say, I pretty much agree that most of these places are not the ideal college town. The only thing I may correct him on in the video is that Liberty comprises mostly of online students, so they are not living near that campus like with the others.

Additionally, I did spend a little bit of time at Louisiana Tech, the only one on the list, during my very first job out of undergrad as a leadership consultant for my fraternity (great job for a 23-year-old, by the way [perhaps a future post]). I actually did not hate Ruston! There are some neighborhoods around campus that have a more college town-vibe, with a tiny walkable strip. There are some cool bars in that area, and I had one of the best crawfish boils of my life there. I don’t actually think it would be the worst place to spend four years.

Nonetheless, the video/ ranking is pretty fun. Perhaps I will have to do my own version one day. You can watch the full video below. What do you think of the ranking? What is the worst college town that you have ever been to?

Don’t Trust Google’s AI Overview in 2026

I recently wrote about the sad saga of Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey. The article tapped into my visit to the campus last winter, along with some recent developments, as the town acquired the space through eminent domain. I used Google to find local media reports to see what the town was planning next. That’s when I noticed something was off.

Google’s AI Overview said that the campus was sold to Princeton University, which was something that I had not heard in any of the many articles I read on the case. “Wait, did I miss something?” I asked myself. I did not, in fact, miss something.

Instead, it was Google, the former world-leading search engine, that was wrong. The AI Overview had confused Princeton the university with Princeton the town. The result was simply misinformation. Google had even embellished that the university was building new colleges on the site, with supporting links. Yet, none of the links actually stated what the overview was claiming.

The unfortunate thing about this one case is that more and more people are relying on these kinds of AI summaries. Google places this AI-created info in the most prominent position, at the top of the page. Before AI, the top couple of Google results were basically the only links people clicked on. Now, people are getting even lazier, not even clicking on the supporting links, and just assuming the AI is correct.

But the AI is often wrong! I see it all the time.

In another case, I was looking for the number of international students in China for another article. Google confidently gave me a number that turned out to be basically double the reality, pulling from a source on Australia instead of China. To Google’s credit, I just searched this again as I was writing this article, and the summary now does say estimates are difficult to come by rather than citing the incorrect information. So there is room for improvement.

The point isn’t that these summaries are always wrong, only that they are wrong enough that it is impossible to rely on them. AI summaries are fine for arguing with a family member in a bar during a holiday break. But they cannot be used for academic work or professional writing.

It’s not just Google, this is the case for all AI. I have had similar issues with Grok in the past, too. Take this as a warning: relying on AI for information means a high risk of misinformation. In 2026, we still need to teach digital literacy, including search engine skills, perhaps now more than ever.

Happy New Year! Thank you for all the support in 2025 by reading College Towns. Expect more content on urbanism and education as we enter 2026. I have a lot of articles for the year planned already. If you’d like to continue supporting us, keep reading, subscribe, share, and consider becoming a paid funder through the College Towns Research Grant. Thank you!

Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• NYU and LSE launch joint master’s in Media, Culture and Global Cities. Probably a very expensive program, but nonetheless quite interesting to do a degree in New York City and London.

• With college sports becoming even bigger businesses, smaller programs must spend more, raising so-called sports fees on their students, such as San Diego State, James Madison, or Wyoming.

• In more big business college sports news, here are the top-10 universities in terms of alcohol sales for (most of the) Fall semester. Any surprises?

1. Texas A&M

2. LSU

3. Nebraska

4. Oregon

5. Mississippi

6. Michigan

7. Minnesota

8. Indiana

9. Kentucky

10. Texas Tech

• Inside the closing of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. One tidbit revealed is that faculty are hoping that the institution can be spun off to another entity. In the Age of Conquest, perhaps we might expect someone to swoop in.

• 4-year universities are expanding into more 2-year associate degree programs. No surprise in the Age of Conquest. Just remember, we already reached peak students, so the students must come from other pools.

• Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia, is seeing some major development. Some of these spaces are quite handsome.

Urbanism-ish

• Given the holiday, vacation is on my mind, but it seems many are leaving Vegas out of their travel plans in recent years. I took an unofficial poll during my Christmas gatherings, and pretty much everyone agreed that they have stopped going because of the costs. Can the City of Sin turn it around in 2026? I have my doubts.

• On the flip side, China launched an impressive visitor app to help attract travelers in 2026. I have been critical of traveling to China for those unfamiliar with the country in the recent past, but they have made some good changes and I am more bullish on their tourism prospects going forward.

• Tesla's door flush handles are dangerous, with some documented cases of emergency services being unable to open the car. China has even banned these hidden or retractable handles. To me, these were always a solution looking for a problem. Good riddance.

• While not my favorite politician, give credit where credit is due for my Governor, Gavin Newsom, with this recent quote: “Huntington Beach needs to end this pathetic NIMBY behavior… They are failing their own citizens by wasting time and money that could be used to create much-needed housing. No more excuses, you lost once again — it’s time to get building.” Hear, hear. Get building, California.

• Boston has been putting homes above the library. This is pretty cool. I hope it becomes a trend in 2026.

• Rome, Italy, has just completed a new metro line with 31 stations. Commentators pointed out the $8.3 billion price tag is a steal compared to similar infrastructure in the US, especially considering the degree of difficulty in building around all the antiquities.

Closing Time… SimCity for Parking Lots

I was a big fan of SimCity as a kid (I think most urbanists today can say the same). So I was excited to see someone made a game that reflected that childhood classic, with some added realism from the post-War American experience: Car Park Capital.

“I didn't have $1 million for a Game Awards Trailer so I'm posting my parking lot simulator trailer here instead for free!” wrote Hilko Janssen, the creator of the game, who concedes that Car Park Capital is a “satirical retro-styled” game. It is even published by MicroProse (publisher of another childhood favorite of mine: Civilization).

The trailer certainly got my attention, but I do not have Steam. If a reader would like to write a review upon the game’s release later in 2026, reach out to me. I’d love to hear your thoughts, and perhaps we could post a write-up here on College Towns.

The supposed dead choral college was in the middle of a bustling town, tucked into an affluent neighborhood, where the Christmas spirit was alive and well. Indeed, Westminster Choir College was not dead. Instead, the almost 100-year-old institution had been bought out by nearby Rider University in 1992, yet complications had long been brewing by the time of my visit.

But after a few decades of marriage, the relationship between the couple was on the rocks. By 2020, Rider had moved almost all of WCC's programming to the main campus, roughly 20 minutes away in Lawrenceville. By the time COVID hit, Rider had already been struggling itself, with the pandemic only exacerbating issues. Divorce was imminent.

By April 2025, the separation was finalized. Rider kept the classes, programming, and history from WCC, but the Princeton Town Council took over the campus space. The town actually forced the sale through eminent domain.

The saga and my visit illustrate the tenuous relationship that can happen via a merger, especially one where one institution essentially acquires another that is dying. In particular, the rocky relationship shows that dead colleges cannot simply be viewed as real estate assets or investments. Yes, IPEDS labels campuses and structures as ‘assets’, but they are more complicated in the real world beyond the scope of real estate.

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Troubles at Rider U

Last week, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article entitled “After Rounds of Budget Cuts, Rider U. President Says It Was ‘Nowhere Near Enough’”, chronicling the downward spiral of the New Jersey university. Rider has made massive cuts recently and is under threat of losing its accreditation. Even with these reforms, the financial situation remains dire.

One part of the story that caught my attention was this claim:

Much of Rider’s financial woes trace back to its attempt to shed itself of Westminster Choir College, a small music conservatory in Princeton, N.J., it acquired in 1992. In 2017, administrators tried to sell the campus worth $40 million to a Chinese education-technology company and move the college’s programs to its main campus in Lawrenceville. Princeton Theological Seminary and advocates of Westminster sued, claiming the terms of the merger required that Westminster stay on the original campus.

The quote makes it seem like offloading the college was central to the university’s financial stability. Key to the claim was that Rider only received $13 million of the total $42 million due to a lawsuit filed by Princeton Theological Seminary regarding the initial agreement in 1992.

The Seminary believed that the original stipulations in the donation remained in effect from the 1930s, even in the handover to Rider in the 1990s. The courts agreed:

[I]n 1935 when philanthropist Sophia Strong Taylor donated the property to the choir college “to advance the training of ministers of music of evangelical churches,” according to the Mercer County Superior Court records. In Taylor’s stipulation, she specified that if WCC could no longer carry out her requirements, the title would be passed to Princeton Theological Seminary….

In 2018, the Princeton Theological Seminary sued Rider, claiming that once the university stopped operating a choir college on the land, the property should revert to the Seminary, per the wishes of the original donor of the land…

…To uphold Taylor’s terms, the agreement stated Rider must “preserve, promote, and enhance the existing missions, purposes, programs and traditions” of Westminster.

Despite the accusation that the acquisition accentuated the downward spiral, the WCC programs had reportedly operated with a surplus of $3 million per year as recently as 2017. Much of the programming had already long merged with the offerings at Rider’s main campus since 1992 under the College of Arts and Sciences. Over that span, Rider saw steady enrollments and peaked in 2009 at just over 6,000 students, as shown on Table 1.

The real problems began entering the 2010s, as Rider started seeing a steady decline in enrollment. The university ended the decade with just over 4,600 students in 2020, right before COVID decimated the sector. By 2023, enrollment had fallen even further to just over 4,000 students. The university had lost 2,000 students over this span, a third of its peak enrollment!

As I showed in a previous piece, US higher education hit peak enrollment at the exact time Rider did, with a slow and steady decline in the overall sector since then. Rider’s experience mirrors that of broader US higher ed. This means that the university had been growing for over a decade after acquiring the choral college. It was the Age of Conquest that doomed the Rider-WCC partnership, not the acquisition itself.

Contested Asset

If Rider’s purchase of WCC was a simple real estate asset, the university could just sell to the highest bidder. The campus, all of the buildings, and any other infrastructure were appraised at a little over $40 million. At one time, the president had even hoped that the sale could go as high as $60 million, which would have basically doubled the university’s endowment.

I could see the logic from higher ed administrators looking to trim the budget during lean times: keep the financially successful bits and shed the costly upkeep/maintenance of a satellite campus.

The problem with this kind of asset strategy is that campuses and colleges are not mere real estate. They come with expectations from the community about the buyers, lost (and found) history, and entitlement to the space. These concerns bring together a confluence of alumni, neighbors, and even politicians from the area.

Rider found all this out the hard way when it tried to sell the WCC campus to a Chinese company in 2017. Their announcement brought fury from these various stakeholders, arguing the sale to Beijing Kaiwen Education Technology Company (formerly Jiangsu Zhongtai Bridge Steel Structure Company) violated the original agreement. There were also concerns about a foreign entity with for-profit motives taking over the college.

During this time period, there was a wave of Chinese entities buying up colleges or educational institutions with varying success (or failure). One of those failures was Dowling College, in the next state over in New York, which has sat derelict for years after a similar purchase. I covered the community’s plight with the blight in a previous article.

After years of battling, the deal fell through in 2019. Rider decided, at that point, to pull all academic programs from the satellite Princeton campus to its main Lawrenceville campus. While the move upset some community members, there was never a chance to recover due to COVID in 2020. Likewise, the market for Chinese buyers dried up when the pandemic hit.

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Christmas Choir and Community Connections

Moving WCC classes and academics out of Princeton did not mean that the campus sat empty. Rider had been leasing the space to local civic groups, such as Music Together, Princeton Pro Musica, and the Greater Princeton Youth Orchestra.

To its credit, Rider had also done a nice job of maintaining the space, as far as I could tell during my visit. I saw landscapers finishing up some work before heading out for the day. There was some initial construction happening under a sidewalk where pipes and wiring were being fixed. Given its financial burden, Rider could have neglected these kinds of things. They did not.

WCC remained a nice place even during rocky times. The campus was flanked by Princeton High School on one side and an affluent neighborhood on the other, which is, I am sure, one reason the protests against the Chinese purchase worked. This tucked-in old suburbia gave WCC a classic American small liberal arts campus vibe. This town-gown relationship was a good partnership, too.

The fenceless wide-open spaces were a clear third place for the local community. I saw loads of people running through and biking around, even though it was barely 30 degrees. I met one young fellow training his dog between campus buildings who told me he loved coming there. “I don't know anything about the college,” puzzled, he asked me, “Oh, it's not a choir college anymore?"

I guess I could see the confusion, since the signs of both Rider University and Westminster Choir College remained. There were also kids everywhere. And when I say kids, I don’t mean the way we call college students kids. I mean, actual children and their parents for Christmas recitals.

“Oh yeah, this one’s at 10, and the other one’s at 11,” a parent told me, who was waiting for their kid’s Christmas recital to begin. That particular day was Music-Fest’s Winter Carnival Recital, an organization with the following mission:

offers students and adult learners in central New Jersey an inspiring and collaborative weekly music experience. The program welcomes all instrumentalists, vocalists, and pianists. Our curriculum nurtures creativity, musicianship, and ensemble skills in a supportive, welcoming environment.

It has been reported that these programs will remain at this campus with the sale to the town. I am sure the dog walkers, runners, and parents are happy to keep their third place. Even the space that was still being used by the Westminster Conservatory, which is still a part of Rider University, may remain at the site for now.

Just because the investment of Westminster Choir College didn’t pay off for Rider University, doesn’t mean the asset is valueless. To the community, the space and campus are invaluable.

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What Happens Next?

The sale of the WCC campus to the Princeton Town Council does not answer every question. The campus is still 23 acres with both old and new buildings in various states. While the recital and performance space was still in use and kept in good shape, there were questions in other parts of campus.

In some of the older buildings, there appeared to be offices that had not been used for a long time. There were also some dormitory or classroom spaces on another side of campus that looked from about the 1970s, which clearly did not have regular use. These kinds of spaces can quickly degrade, especially in the cold of New Jersey winters, piling up deferred maintenance costs. Rider seemingly kept the place looking nice, the town now takes over those duties.

The municipality has apparently hired a consultancy firm to help decide what to do with the campus. It is prime real estate in Princeton, but as Rider found out, the asset is limited. I do think the town itself likely understands the limitations. Some have suggested expanding the public school, public arts center, or even mixed-use developments (prepare for another bitter fight if for that last one!).

I cannot help but wonder why Princeton University does not swoop in to use part of the space at least. The campuses are only a 15-minute walk from each other. There is perhaps some inner working of both Princetons (the town and university) that I am not seeing.

In the end, the Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, is no more. The ethos of the college is now wholly under Rider University within the College of Arts and Sciences in Lawrenceville. That space where WCC once sat for 80 years will live on, probably still holding onto some relation to music.

Unfortunately, like so many other institutions in US higher ed, Rider looks to be in some serious trouble. They are making massive cuts and the future is in question, as made clear by the Chronicle article. The lifeline that allowed Westminster Choir College to survive for over 30 years after it almost died in the 1990s may now be facing down its own demise. If it happens, the assets lost will be much greater than any real estate value.

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Seinfeld Teaches Us to Shame Driving While on the Phone

This week, 33 years ago, on Dec 16, 1992, the Seinfeld episode ‘The Pick’ first aired. This Christmas episode opens with Jerry receiving a personalized holiday card from his traveling girlfriend and Elaine trying to replicate it with Kramer’s help—with disastrous results.

The title of the episode comes from Jerry’s plot in which his girlfriend sees him driving his car, waiting in traffic, and then picking his nose. She is disgusted. Jerry spends the rest of the episode denying wrongdoing, but he and George defend nosepicking as something that should not require shaming.

I’m not here to argue nose-picking as a social faux pas; instead, the episode got me thinking about shame and traffic. My take: There should be more shame associated with using a phone while driving. Seeing someone messing with their phone while driving should bring about the same kind of disgust as Jerry’s girlfriend seeing him pick his nose.

Every single time I drive, I spot another driver on their phone. Every. Single. Time. Head straight down, neck strained, eyes glued to whatever is viral on social media that week. If you don’t notice this, start paying attention to other drivers around you, especially while waiting at a stoplight. You will not be able to unsee it after you first notice it.

Why do I think we need to shame this behavior? At best, driving while using a phone is annoying to everyone else driving; at worst, it’s dangerous to everyone anywhere, including other drivers, pedestrians, and even nearby buildings.

When I say annoying, I mean the scenario where you might be stopped at a red light and a driver ahead of you somewhere delays moving through a green light because they were staring down into oblivion. This creates more traffic because the light is timed with a sensor to get waiting cars through (meaning the light might be longer). Or, probably more infuriating, you end up missing the light completely and have to sit through another cycle, making the line longer behind you because someone was on the phone.

Very very annoying!

Being annoying is bad enough, but using a phone while driving is actively dangerous. Thousands of people die each year in the US because someone took their eyes off the road to respond to a text. I even see people driving down the highway laughing it up to some TikTok video. It is a death waiting to happen.

Despite being both annoying and dangerous, people use phones while driving all the time. Phones are so ingrained into our lives, coupled with driving has been made so comfortable, that there is no longer shame to this behavior.

But there should be shame! Because using a phone while driving is both annoying and dangerous, it really does deserve much more social stigma. Staring down at your phone while driving should be akin to a finger up your nose.

Sure, like Seinfeld pleads, there should be grace for scratching or similar incidental nose-to-finger interactions. Quickly hiding a notification that blocks the map or pushing skip on a podcast should not hold that much stigma. But there should be fear that the action could cause disgust, so drivers would only check sparingly and quickly. No lingering on your phone to actually read a message.

Yes, we should still have enforcement, but enforcement has taken a dip in recent years. We need self-policing that only comes from social stigma. Normal people who do not typically exhibit any antisocial behaviors often still use their phone while driving. They do it right in front of their passengers! It is so normalized that no one seems to think this is a problem.

Given this danger and annoyance, seeing Jerry scrolling TikTok in traffic should have disgusted his girlfriend and warranted a breakup. So this holiday season, let’s make our roads a little less annoying and much safer by not using our phones while driving, or at least be grossed out by the other drivers you might see doing so.

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Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• Pacific U and Willamette U are merging. It’s good that two fairly strong institutions are doing this; my only concern is the terrible name they have chosen: University of the Northwest. This sounds like a generic university name from a TV show or movie. We also already have Northwestern and Northeastern. For this merger, I would have gone with the University of Pacific Northwest to match the region.

• A recent report shows the US is running low on Merchant Marines, despite lucrative careers. Students are just reluctant to enter the attached academies. I visited one in California and was really impressed. But I could see why students may not like the military lifestyle (such as morning Reveille).

• The story of the Japanese international student (aka the“Tokyo Toe”) who joined Hawaii’s football team this year keeps getting better: he’s officially an All-American and was nominated as the top kicker in NCAA football.

• South Korea now has over 300,000 international students. I am glad fellow students are following my lead, as I am an alum of a Korean university (Yonsei).

• More research to support smartphone bans in schools. The positive effect, it seems, shows up on grades two years after the bans. I am really starting to wonder if we will look back at this era like we do with cigarettes.

• Point Park U in Pittsburgh is remodeling an old downtown YWCA for student housing. It got me thinking that we are losing our YMCAs (and the W variant). These used to be prevalent in cities as cheap short-ish term housing. I don’t see many of them anymore

• Portland State is tearing down old dorms to build new ones, which is concerning some locals. Normally, I am skeptical of such concern, as it is often just obstructionism. In this case, the area around PSU already had really nice urbanism, so I am distrustful of modern architectural sensibilities. The renderings do not give me hope. Wish they would just basically keep the aesthetics.

  

• Cal State-Monterey Bay has started converting an old office building to dorm space. I often hear about the challenges of office-to-housing conversions, such as no kitchen/ bathroom and weird layouts, but those issues are not a big problem for college students. Good test case here.

• Providence, Rhode Island, is debating a tax on student housing. It would be $300 per year for every tenant. I do think it’s an example of towns putting too much blame on students, but I also recognize universities themselves are tax-exempt. There are complications to running the city beyond NIMBYism in this case.

Urbanism-ish

• Seoul is seeing a wave of anti-Chinese sentiments due to overtourism from its neighbor. In part related to the tension between Japan and China.

• Waymo data shows most rides are just one passenger. This is one cause for concern by urbanists wary of the tech. I take these and other issues seriously, and will address them in a future article on self-driving cars.

  

• Not being able to walk to a theater has killed the movie industry, says the Netflix CEO. This American reality, coupled with giant TV screens and inflated theater ticket prices, means people just stay at home to watch movies.

• Congrats to Toronto for opening their first new metro line in over two decades. The final stop listed is Humber College, a massive (over 80,000 students) polytechnic on the edge of town.

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Closing Time… The Education of Physical: Asia

Note: This is a spoiler-free write-up of the show Physical: Asia.

If you need a good show to binge this winter, I suggest Physical: Asia. It is a Korean series on Netflix that originally stemmed from the popularity (and format) of Squid Game. While Squid Game depicted a scripted game show, the Physical series is a real game show bringing together top athletes to compete in gruelling challenges.

Physical: Asia is the third season of the series, with the first two seasons being one-on-one competitions with competitors mostly from South Korea. This new third season switches the format to national teams from around Asia. Each country has a team of top athletes competing from a wide range of sports, such as Olympians, rugby, CrossFit, and even well-known fighters like Manny Pacquiao for the Philippines and Robert Whittaker for Australia.

I’m always thinking about a higher ed angle when I consume media. Since Netflix didn’t have university backgrounds listed in the bios, I compiled the results with the help of AI (sorry I used AI!)… UPDATE: and r/Physical100 community suggestions. Given these are not (all) celebrities, some of the educational data was hard to find or corroborate (entries from both AI and Reddit were confirmed through links). Of the 50 total contestants, I found 22 29 with confirmed university educations.

Unlike in the US, where universities are the training grounds for sports, including Olympians, many other countries have a more centralized system or academy program to produce athletes. And, frankly, I am not as familiar with these other systems. An American university, though, did pop up on the Philippines team with the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa alum Robyn Lauren Brown.

In Korea, where they have specific sports-themed institutions, a couple of contestants attended the Korea National Sport University: Yun Sung-bin, Olympic gold medalist in the skeleton, and Jang Eun-sil, national wrestler. Likewise, the Japanese team included alumni from some of their top institutions, Waseda (Katsumi Nakamuram, Olympic swimmer) and Keio (Nonoka Ozaki, Olympic bronze medalist wrestler). Other national teams seemed a bit more sparing in terms of university education.

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In some cases, I found through the very active subreddit group that some of the competitors worked in menial labor, and even as a garbage man. It’s funny because an American version of the show would have made these hardships central storylines. Physical: Asia did not mention them at all, and the focus was completely on the tasks at hand and the national teams.

One debate from the r/Physical100 caught my attention: “Why is Australia there? The top comment clarified that Australia does compete in the Asian Football Confederation, so the inclusion made sense. But I do think the producers tried to play up the Australians as a kind of Goliath due to their physically imposing size. Later, through media interviews, the Big Three on their team revealed they all have heritage from smaller islands. Refreshing that these backgrounds were not played up in the show at all. Instead, they were just the Australian team.

This national team angle was another aspect that I really enjoyed about the show. Again, as an American, it was funny that each team was really playing up national stereotypes. We often try to eschew stereotypes or break the mold in the US, but these places have different cultural sensibilities. The Mongolian team was consistently referring to their conquering heritage. The Japanese and Korean teams leaned into their rivalry.

It was all, though, played in good fun. There didn’t seem to be animosity, just competitive spirit. This was especially apparent after the show ended and all the cultural exchanges happened with the competitors visiting each other’s countries. There will even be another spinoff season just for the Mongolian team.

Physical: Asia is just a fun, light-hearted, yet intense show that highlights different national sentiments. There is a lot more I could write about it, too! (like the simultaneous translation, no China/ India, etc.). If you and the fam need a show to binge this Christmas season, this is a good one.