The Boston Globe reports :

At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, students have nicknames for their residence halls. The Northeast cluster is ”Chinatown,” a reference to its large Asian population. Southwest is dubbed the ”Projects,” a reference, offensive to some, to its concentration of African-American students.

This pronounced division by race and ethnicity is a function of student choice but also university policy, which designates some residence hall floors for minority students as a means of providing comfort and comradeship on an overwhelmingly white campus.

Now, in a major shift, administration officials are seeking to eliminate self-segregated living quarters, the latest and perhaps most delicate effort by UMass-Amherst to phase out separate programs for minorities.

David Horowitz talks to NRO about his book, The Professors here.

If there were ever any doubt about the troubling divide between the academic elites and the rest of us, recent events surrounding Harvard president Lawrence Summers and the Supreme Court have surely dispelled it.

Summers

I don’t have a strong view on sabbaticals–maybe they’re a great idea and universities ought to pay for them. But with tuition costs expensive and rising, plus constant demands for new tax dollars to support higher ed, is it any wonder that people who get two weeks of paid vacation each year can’t understand why professors need this perk? Here’s the lede from a story in the Detroit News on Sunday:

Michigan universities paid more than 500 professors $23.2 million to be absent from the classroom during the 2004-05 school year, even as the state’s economy nosedived and parents and students struggled to pay double-digit tuition hikes.

The article is long, well reported, and worth reading. You can bet that it ticked off some guys who are losing their jobs with GM.

I had a quick e-mail conversation with Wall Street Journal reporter John Fund this morning about the Taliban@Yale beat; here

This case has already come up in here: John Fund continues to cover the Yale Taliban story in the WSJ today. And Yale keeps digging deeper.

Isn

Aside from mere sympathy for jihadist goals, there have also been more concrete examples of the rise of terrorist influence on our nation

Another organization spreading poison on our campuses is the Palestinian Solidarity Movement, which Georgetown University recently announced it would host. (Georgetown, it should be noted, also recently received $10 million from a Saudi prince.) The PSM claims its goal is to promote divestment in Israel, but the speakers it invites frequently spew anti-Semitism and sympathy for terrorists. At its 2004 gathering at Duke University, for instance, presenters referred to Zionism as a

Proliferating reports of the presence in colleges and universities of Islamist sympathizers–reputed to have ties all to close to terrorists–raise urgent questions about the state of our homeland security on campuses.

For example, the Saudi-funded Muslim Students Association, which has chapters on over 150 campuses across the continent, propagates Islamic fundamentalism as well as blatant anti-American and anti-Israeli agendas. The MSA-sponsored talks by Imam Umar Abdul-Jalil, the head of Islamic chaplains in the New York City Department of Corrections (taped by the counterterrorist group, Investigative Project. In these speeches, Abdul-Jalil stated

I’ve just learned that something called the Roosevelt Institution is trying to establish a chapter at my alma mater, the University of Michigan. What is the Roosevelt Institution? I thought you’d never ask. According to the group’s website, it’s “a national network of student think tanks that provide the organizational infrastructure to get student ideas into the public discourse.” That’s just what we need, because I know that whenever some topic comes before Congress–the pending nuclear agreement with India, for instance–my first question often is: “What do left-wing undergrads think?” The motto for the Roosevelt Institution should be something James Thurber once said: “American college students are like American colleges–each has half-dulled faculties.”

It is frequently asserted–or assumed–that racial preferences in college admissions help the poor. Even if this were so, of course, it would be more efficient (and much less legally problematic) to give preferences based directly on poverty rather than using race as a proxy. And, in any event, it is not so.

The classic 1998 apologia for racial preferences in university admissions–The Shape of the River by William Bowen and Derek Bok–conceded that only 14 percent of black admittees to the selective schools it studied were from

Today marks the inauguration of National Review Online