Some events of note:

• Duke and Ohio Wesleyan continue academe's fine recent tradition of legislating matters of private conscience by creating policies condemning student-professor relationships.
• The media--and FIRE--are all over West Virginia University for its unconstitutional speech code. There are two small "zones" on WVU's campus where free speech is permitted. Each is about the size of a classroom, though there are 22,000 students at the school. The rest of the campus operates according to a strictly enforced speech code--outside the zone, you can't express dissent, or even pass out flyers, especially if you are conservative. As FIRE points out, such restrictions, not to mention double standards, are illegal at a public, state-supported school.
• The College Board is gearing up to revamp the SAT. The rationale behind the decision is complex and has a long history, but basically comes down to this: minority students don't do as well on the present exam as college admissions boards would like. And so, at a moment when affirmative action is under threat, considerable energy is being spent trying to work out a way to engineer higher scores--and thus higher admission rates--for minority students. The idea is that changing the SAT from an aptitude test to an achievement test (i.e., measuring not a student's capacity to learn but measuring what s/he has already learned) will make it easier to teach toward the test in high schools, and so produce higher scores for groups that have traditionally scored poorly on the SAT. The main push behind this move came last year, when Richard Atkinson, president of the University of California, proposed dropping the SAT from admissions requirements--a suggestion that was read as an attempt to circumvent Proposition 209, which forbade California's public colleges from using racial preferences as admissions criteria. For a couple different takes on this development, check out the disturbingly bland coverage in the New York Times and compare it with Stanley Kurtz's uncompromising critique of both the College Board's decision and the soft coverage it has received elsewhere. Kurtz's column builds on a stunning piece he wrote last year about the relationship between affirmative action and academic postmodernism. The situation raises some disturbing questions. Has America sold its soul--and its economic and cultural future--to an impossible ideal of diversity? Are universities now in the business of engineering model communities rather than educating? The fact that these questions cannot even be safely asked on campus today, let alone freely debated, speaks for itself.