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This is on the Opinion page of today's Wilminton News Journal: "A Post editorial this week criticized our organization, the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy, suggesting that we meant to chill academic freedom through a state Freedom of Information Act request that we filed with three public universities."

People who believe in academic freedom have got to take these incidents seriously and get active before it's too late. "The perfect case is never going to come along," my old friend the historian Joshua Freeman told me. "Nobody is going to fire their Nobel laureate." Actually, City College almost did that: Ten years after losing his CCNY post, Bertrand Russell won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He certainly had the last laugh, but others weren't so lucky.

"The Pioneer Fund, Inc. is a New York 501(c) (3) not-for-profit foundation established in 1937 to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences. Named to honor the early pioneers who built America, our mandate is to support pioneering research in those fields. We solicit contributions, which we use to fund vital research projects into the basis and correlates of human ability and diversity, and for the dissemination of that research to the public. "

"As angry teachers in the Midwest shut down more than a dozen school districts in protest Thursday, Republican officials across the nation have made teachers' unions "public enemy No. 1" in a battle to trim budgets and rewrite the rules on how unions and states work together."

The story explains that the language affecting textbook adoption would replace the state's formal review committees-which include lay citizens, teachers, teacher supervisors and a school board member-with a trio of subject-matter experts appointed by the state education commissioner. School districts would appoint teachers and content supervisors to rate the practical usability of the texts recommended by the state's experts, the story says.

Said Washburn, author of University Inc., a book on industry's ties to academia: "This is an egregious example of a public university being willing to sell itself for next to nothing."

Just the sort of thing that we were talking about in the first part of last night's class: The influence of a conservative movement that would apply a greater business orientation to Texas higher education came into stark relief this week, when the chancellor of one of the state's university systems unexpectedly resigned and the other seemed to push back against regents who have embraced what some call a heavy-handed ideological agenda.

The bill would create "higher education curriculum review teams" to review and make recommendations to the State Board of Education on all proposed curriculum revisions. We believe this would be an important step in correcting the problems with recent curriculum adoptions - including science standards.

Beck University is a unique learning experience bringing together a variety of experts in American History. So don't miss out on this amazing experience.

Missouri has passed a law making it illegal for state teachers to friend their students on Facebook.Governor Jay Nixon signed Missouri State Bill 54, which bans students and teachers from communicating and being "friends" on the social networking site. The law was created to prevent inappropriate relationships between children and teachers.

The Customer Reviews are interesting. For one thing, I've never seen such polarized reviews for a non-political book. Speaking of which, I checked the day before publication of Bill Clinton's thousand-page memoir, and hundreds of people had already posted their reviews, about 50/50 positive/negative, with comments like "there's not a single thing that's new in this whole book."

"In investor parlance, the price-earnings ratio on investing in higher education seems to be rising sharply. Where markets operate without external interference, there would be a correction. Sensing lower returns on their investment, the demand for higher education would fall and, with that, enrollments. "

""I had never imagined that the test would someday be turned into a blunt instrument to close schools - or to say whether teachers are good teachers or not - because I always knew children's test scores are far more complicated than the way they're being received today.""

"Science claims it's working to cure disease, save the planet and solve the greatest human mysteries, but Aasif Mandvi finds out what its really up to."