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James S. Murphy

@jamessmurphy.bsky.social
1.2K followers 198 following 1.6K posts

Sometimes I write slow, sometimes I write quick. Mostly about college stuff. Weak on crime. Email: jstephenmurphy@gmail.com Website: www.jamessmurphy.com

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Reposted by James S. Murphy
Christopher Webb @cwebbonline.com · 15h
This is priceless. Check out how local news is reporting on Sen Eric Schmidt’s clown-show grilling of Jack Smith. They found Jack Smith at the game… “Top corner, section 109, row 1. In fact, that seat doesn’t even exist in Atlanta.”
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W. Carson Byrd @wcbyrdphd.bsky.social · 6h
Nice overview of research by the Urban Institute & AIR about the burdens of ACTS reporting for institutions. ‘Ultimately, many institutions surveyed said they were concerned about how the ACTS data would be used—& whether their difficulties compiling it would lead to erroneous conclusions.’
insidehighered.com
Institutions Outline Challenges Collecting ACTS Data
About two-thirds of institutions needed at least the 200 hours that the Education Department anticipated they would require to compile ACTS data. Difficulty remedying errors and unclear definitions ma...
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Paul Bruno @paul-bruno.com · 23h
"Unless [Federal Scholarship Tax Credit] funds are targeted towards low-income areas outside the communities where the money is being donated, we expect the FSTC to become a regressive funding source, even where those funds go to public school students." www.brookings.edu/articles/who...
brookings.edu
Who is likely to benefit from the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit? | Brookings
Jon Valant and co-authors assess who will benefit from the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit—and why policymakers should be worried.
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Reposted by James S. Murphy
Matt Zoller Seitz @mattzollerseitz.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
"It’s the kind of movie about evil billionaires that evil billionaires would enjoy, which makes it the worst kind of movie about evil billionaires." @williambibbiani.bsky.social is one of the greats
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Merle Eisenberg @merleeisenberg.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
AI teaching for today: www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/o.... The author's approach makes sense: students write an essay followed by a 45 minute oral discussion. But he teaches small seminars at Williams College, whereas most professors teach 30-200+ lectures. The solution is a structural non-starter.
nytimes.com
Opinion | I’m a College Professor. Writing Isn’t as Important as We Think. (Gift Article)
If I do not treat writing as essential for achieving thought, it is not clear why I should force my students to.
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James S. Murphy @jamessmurphy.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
It's wild that an editor at the Chron could ask this question for any other reason than to point out that Yglesias is completely wrong and has no idea what he's talking about.
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Phil Klinkner @pklinkne.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Great research by @tesler.bsky.social on the GOP man crush on testosterone. I really loved this chart.
goodauthority.substack.com
Republicans’ fascination with testosterone in three charts
Why depictions of testosterone as a measure of manhood resonate with Republicans.
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Eric Kelderman @erickelderman.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
One big question I have about this entire endeavor is: Was this report itself an act of advocacy, given the way it was compiled and the people chosen to do the writing? Did the authors use scholarly methods to address the issues?
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Sarah Cohodes @cohodes.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I love when @douglasharris9.bsky.social gets cooking on vouchers. I would say "vouchers are a special-interest carve-out for rich people."
Private school vouchers 
Make all or nearly all families eligible for taxpayer money to pay for private school or home-schooling. For example, $9,000 per student to pay for private school.
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EXPERTS SAID
Most experts described minimal academic benefits for the cost, including because many families who use vouchers are already enrolled in private school. A minority of experts were supportive, citing evidence that competition improves schools writ large.
"The main certain effect will be to substantially reduce costs for wealthy families."
Douglas Harris, Tulane University
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Chronicle of Higher Education @chronicle.com · 28/09/2026
Dartmouth is conducting a review of Provost Santiago Schnell after he admitted to using AI to write academic articles and newspaper opinion pieces. chroni.cl/4rCxBl8
chronicle.com
Dartmouth Opens Review of Provost Over AI Use in Scholarly and Public Writing
The college is conducting a “rigorous, objective review” of Santiago Schnell after he admitted to using artificial intelligence to write academic articles and newspaper opinion pieces.
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Merle Eisenberg @merleeisenberg.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Budget fun fact #2. After removing medical schools and hospitals (more on this later), the largest sources of research funding for the Top 50 universities are: HHS (the NIH) at 31.5%, DoD (Department of Defense) at 25.5%, and the NSF (National Science Foundation) at 16.1%.
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James S. Murphy @jamessmurphy.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Policymakers at speech time: We need more college students going into high-paying STEM programs. Maybe wipe out some other stuff? Policymakers at budget time: We definitely can't provide more money for high-cost STEM programs. Maybe wipe out some other stuff?
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James S. Murphy @jamessmurphy.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I love this time of year when the leaves change and you can almost smell the end of baseball.
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Dana Stevens @thehighsign.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
By far the closest Zuck has ever stood in proximity to something called “charm”:
bloomberg.com
Meta Debuts Dedicated ‘Charm’ Device for Using Muse AI
Meta Platforms Inc. unveiled a palm-sized, dedicated gadget for using Muse, the company’s popular new artificial intelligence assistant, pushing deeper into the AI devices market with a surprise annou...
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Ezra Klein asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about AI making kids worse at math and reading. Huang’s reply: “Does it matter?” Then he said he doesn’t know his own address or phone number. “We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...
So the message of this research out of China, where you were seeing a lot of kids using A.I. to help them, was that when they were using the A.I., they were getting things done faster. But it turned out that the skills they were learning were not holding, that their actual personal performance, at least in the way we traditionally measure it, was degrading.

What do you think when you hear that?

The last part — I completely agree. Try to get a kid to do long division right now. The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness. Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter?

That’s my question for you.

Yeah. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does.

But there must be some set of skills that matter.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But maybe not those. We’re going to discover new ones. Just maybe not those.

There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address.And I ——

I don’t really believe that to be true.

It’s completely true. Janine will tell you and Lori will tell you.

One day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.

But let me take the other side because I don’t want to fall into a thing where, because some skills can be safely offloaded ——

Yeah.

I also can’t get anywhere without a mapping system now. Never could, frankly. But I’m a big reader. And one of the skills I really value, one of the capacities I have that I really value is an attention span formed on physical books.

You’re a big reader. I’ve read about the kind of reading you do. And there is, prior to A.I., a lot of concern and noticing among college professors and others that the way people use the internet has probably shortened attention spans.
Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.

Yeah. Well, I think that we’re going to lose some finer intellectual dexterity, but we’re going to be better systems thinkers.

Today’s engineers are far better systems thinkers than I was when I graduated from school. But I was a much better transistor thinker.

What do you mean by systems thinker?

They think of large systems. Today’s computers have trillions, hundreds of trillions of transistors in them. When I first graduated from school, the first chip I worked on had 200 transistors. I knew every one of them by name. No engineer does that today. Most engineers now work well above the transistor, well above the functionality, and they’re cobbling things together to do things.

So you need to think much more about systems and interactions of systems. So some of the lower-level knowledge is gone.
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James S. Murphy @jamessmurphy.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I had a great time talking about the impact of the SFFA decision with @juliejpark.bsky.social @angelbperez.bsky.social Jasmine Davis-Randolph and Dakota Pawlicki on the @luminafoundation.bsky.social podcast.
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James S. Murphy @jamessmurphy.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
The loss of international students is probably the single biggest factor in who gets admitted where this year. It's never a bad year to be full-pay students. This year is likely to be better than ever.
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David H Feldman @dhfeldman.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I just noticed that I was cited in the Yale Report. The person who wrote this paragraph clearly did not understand what Bob and I were trying to express about the reasons why college price (and cost) have risen over long stretches of time. This is a wonderful example of a defensive citation.
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Robert Kelchen @robertkelchen.com · 24/09/2026
George Washington University is reporting a 6.7 percent drop in enrollment this fall, primarily driven by international graduate students.
gwhatchet.com
Granberg warns GW will face continued financial challenges as enrollment slides nearly 7 percent
University President Ellen Granberg said during the meeting the anticipated decline of nearly 1,000 students this year is concentrated in the international graduate student market after visa restricti...
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Lee Gardner @leegee.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
John Coltrane was born 100 years ago today. We should all get off work and schools should close.
An image of a young John Coltrane in the studio with his tenor, later used on the cover of Blue Trane
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James S. Murphy @jamessmurphy.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Batwitdaflop metalinjection.net/news/another...
metalinjection.net
Another Kid Rock Festival Gets Cancelled Due to No One Buying Tickets - Metal Injection
Freedom Fest, the MAGA event set to feature Kid Rock this Saturday, has been cancelled due to incredibly low ticket sales.
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James S. Murphy @jamessmurphy.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
The fact that USN puts the military academies in the same category as Bowdoin and Bryn Mawr tells you pretty much all you need to know about how seriously to take the rankings.
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Charlie Barone @charliebarone.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
What Happens on Education After the Midterms? Competing proposals from progressives and the center-left foreshadow 2027 education policy debates at all levels of government charliebaroneedu.substack.com/p/what-happe...
charliebaroneedu.substack.com
What Happens on Education After the Midterms?
Competing proposals from progressives and the center-left foreshadow 2027 education policy debates at all levels of government
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Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
I am also a parent who has opted not to peergroup-max by son’s education and for a whole bunch of reasons I feel like it’s been a pretty different outcome than what NHJ describes. www.slowboring.com/p/why-i-send...
slowboring.com
Why I send my kid to low-income urban public schools
Not every school with unfavorable demographics is a dysfunctional mess — policy matters!
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James S. Murphy @jamessmurphy.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Fixed it.
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James S. Murphy @jamessmurphy.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
High school graduation cheat codes don't help anyone. edtrust.org/blog/low-aca...
edtrust.org
Low Academic Standards Spare Adult Feelings at the Expense of Students’ Futures
As states lower the bar for graduation and grade-level tests, students can pass without mastering almost any high school skills
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Hakeem Jefferson @hakeemjefferson.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Nikole Hannah-Jones w/ a sobering follow-up on her decision yrs ago to enroll her daughter in a poor, majority-Black public school rather than a wealthier, whiter private school. You leave heartbroken for the kids being failed by this grossly unequal system. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/m...
nytimes.com
In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? (Gift Article)
A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice.
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Victor Luftig @vl1959.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
This disheartening thread seems to me very well worth reading to the end: "shame tolerance is built into the business model. Federal legislation may be the only way to get rid of this unethical & embarrassing ritual..." (State legislation did in UVA's.)
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Karen Benjamin Guzzo @karenguzzo.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
When Johns Hopkins (my alma mater) dropped legacy admissions a few years ago, I can tell you that many of college classmates (many of whom identify as liberal/progressive) were very displeased, some to the point where they stopped donating.
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Tim “Positive Subway” Smith @positivesubway.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Everyone who is crashing out over the NYT guest op-ed (which has not been skeeted or gotten a push alert) about University of California admissions procedures: please report to this link immediately and take the test! akilbello.com/crisis-const...
akilbello.com
Take the Diagnostic: The Math 2 Skills Assessment
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James S. Murphy @jamessmurphy.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
What's going on with legacy preferences in 2026? There's really 2 stories. 1) The vast majority of colleges have stopped considering legacy status in their admissions practices, but...
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TrueRef by Abbey Esparza @trueref.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
My 95 year old Mexican grandmother receiving another angel figurine.
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James S. Murphy @jamessmurphy.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Almost half the people with education debt are under 35.
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mikenietzel.bsky.social @mikenietzel.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
The good news and the bad news on the current status of legacy admission preferences. #HigherEd #AcademicSky www.forbes.com/sites/michae...
forbes.com
The Good News And The Bad News About Legacy Admissions Revealed In New Report
Extending a legacy preference in college admissions has dropped sharply in the past decade, but many selective colleges continue to advantage the relatives of alumni.
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Betsy Wolf @betsyjwolf.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
$3500 is too much for researchers to pay out of pocket to have access to publicly owned data.
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Hadas Weiss @hadas.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
if they want to slow ai down they should submit to peer review
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James S. Murphy @jamessmurphy.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I'm grateful for this story that is so well reported, but reading it made me feel sick and hopeless. www.wired.com/story/burner...
wired.com
A College Girl Was Exploited on Camera. A Network of Anonymous Men Got to Work
Maddie Kowalski is one of countless young women who’ve had their lives destroyed by the burnerverse, a loosely connected online community of sports fans. Now she’s fighting back.
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James S. Murphy @jamessmurphy.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
As good a summary of all the administration's efforts to break this country as you'll find: "Notwithstanding the scale of the likely harm, the government’s proffered rationales for the rule are exceptionally weak."
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Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum.wsocial.eu · 14/09/2026
Some details: Kremlev, the Russian who sponsored Don Jr's wedding, is a former member of the Night Wolves biker gang, went to China with Putin and is personally sanctioned by Ukraine for his role in abducting children www.propublica.org/article/dona...
propublica.org
Donald Trump Jr.’s Wedding Bankrolled by Putin-Linked Russian Oligarch
The oligarch, Umar Kremlev, spent hundreds of thousands on expenses like renting out a private island. He appears to have met Trump Jr. only recently, but he attended the intimate wedding with a large...
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James S. Murphy @jamessmurphy.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Let's not forget the federal component in the scandal that is Alpha Schools.
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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
NEW REPORT ON ALPHA SCHOOL Last week, I reported on troubling activities at Alpha School's boot camp. This week, I report on the broader activities going on at Alpha School, and its culture. What I found is deeply disturbing. Children are at risk. I will now share some of what I uncovered.
buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com
“It’s pretty dystopian if you think about it”
New report on Alpha School’s activities and culture
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God @thegodshow.com · 13/09/2026
“DONALD TRUMP IS NOT WELCOME HERE!”
thegodshow.com
Bless The Irish For Standing Up To Donald
Dear Humans,
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Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 12/09/2026
The US President's new proposal to tax international students has been approved by the White House for release this week. It's an unprecedented $100,000 tax on int'l grads who stay to work after graduation on Optional Practical Training (most grads do), a crucial bridge to remaining by any channel.
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James S. Murphy @jamessmurphy.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Weird that this airline went out of business.
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James S. Murphy @jamessmurphy.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Headlines: Where Thinking Goes to Die
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Nate Schenkkan @nateschenkkan.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
More than any Chronicle of Higher Education profile of a professor who doesn't like academia, I think this interview is the one I'd recommend to understand where higher education is at in the United States www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...
insidehighered.com
Architect of Ohio Higher Ed Overhaul on Shared Governance: Garbage
Jerry Cirino, former chair of the Senate Workforce and Higher Education Committee, successfully passed a sweeping, controversial law in his state. He’s an example of state lawmakers getting more invol...
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Robert Kelchen @robertkelchen.com · 10/09/2026
As a higher ed finance person, I keep emphasizing that more students are enrolling in high cost of educating fields like health and engineering and fewer in lower-cost fields like the humanities. This squeezes institutional budgets as cross-subsidies disappear.
insidehighered.com
Report: Humanities Majors Disappearing
Anxiety about job prospects and heavy reading loads have led to dramatic declines in humanities majors since 2012, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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W. Carson Byrd @wcbyrdphd.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Additional weak findings announced about supposed discrimination in law & medical admissions that rely on decontextualized test scores & misconstruing internal communications & other materials that seek to follow the SFFA ruling’s allowance of considering student essay responses.
insidehighered.com
Trump Admin. Says Berkeley Law, Duke Med Discriminated
The Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services announced this week that they had determined the University of California, Berkeley’s law school and Duke University’s medical school each inte...
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Jeremy Singer @jeremylsinger.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Ever since the pandemic, we've had a school attendance crisis...right? I have a new essay arguing that the "crisis" narrative is a bit overblown, and may be distracting us from longer-standing issues that predate the pandemic: edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1574 🧵
School Attendance in the United States, 1870-2024
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Jesse Rothstein @jrothst.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
The University of California is in the midst of what looks to be a year-long debate about the use of SAT scores in undergraduate admissions. I wrote a FAQ that attempts to collect the facts that are relevant to this debate, and to dispel some common misconceptions: escholarship.org/uc/item/6kx2...
escholarship.org
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