This report comes via the Camera blog, Snapshots.

Algemeiner and JNS: CAMERA Launches New Student Website

The Algemeiner and JNS report:

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) has launched a new website geared towards helping pro-Israel students “win the fight” on campus.CAMERAonCampus.org, along with its student-oriented blog, In Focus, was recently launched by CAMERA’s campus department.“This project grew out of repeated requests by students for a site that would provide them very specific information they need, with campus speakers, films, and books,” Aviva Slomich, CAMERA’s campus director, said in a statement.

Read the complete article here.

Click here for CAMERAonCampus.org and the website’s blog In Focus.

In The American Conservative, Wheaton College Professor Alan Jacobs shares his lack of enthusiasm for this development.

When I think about turning all this into a MOOC, my first thought is: How easy that would be. Just write out a lecture and deliver it? Piece of cake — especially in comparison to the hard work of trying to learn a book and its contexts well enough to be ready when people ask those questions you didn’t expect, offer thoughts you hadn’t thought. And those questions and thoughts can change the course not just of a single class session but of the whole semester, as different ways of connecting various works come into play in response to what students want to know.

And my second thought about teaching a MOOC is: How shockingly boring that would be. To stand up there and recite what you’ve prepared beforehand in complete ignorance of and indifferent to the needs, thoughts, and questions of the people in the room before you, and the hundreds or thousands of other people who are watching and listening on their computers — not my idea of a good time.

Of course, many people lecture in just that way. As Nathan Heller comments in the essay I linked to above,

Lecturing can seem a rote endeavor even at its best — so much so that one wonders why the system has survived so long. Actors, musicians, and even standup comedians record their best performances for broadcast and posterity. Why shouldn’t college teachers do the same? Vladimir Nabokov, a man as uncomfortable with extemporaneity as he was enamored of the public record, once suggested that his lessons at Cornell be recorded and played each term, freeing him for other activities. The basis of a reliable education, it would seem, is quality control, not circumstance; it certainly is not a new thought that effective teaching transcends time and place. Correspondence courses cropped up in the nineteenth century. Educational radio appeared in the twenties and the thirties. The U.K.’s Open University, which used television to transmit lessons to students, enrolled its first students in 1971.

And if you think of lecturing as Nabokov did, why not make a MOOC? But for me it would be a savage diminishment of what I love about teaching. I’d rather find a new line of work.

Using the internet to put-together a prank involving thousands of crickets, some Kentucky high school students are getting a major time-out. Eric Owens of The Daily Caller has a report:

Seven seniors at East Carter High School in the rural northeast corner of Kentucky were prohibited from participating in commencement ceremonies because they released thousands of crickets inside the school last Thursday.

School district officials are not happy with the practical joke, reports local NBC-affiliate WSAZ, not least because of the costly consequences.

“Expenses will continue to rise as cleanup efforts are still underway,” the district said in a statement. “It is the stance of the Carter County School District that these actions, while meant to be a prank of sorts, are unacceptable.”

According to WSAZ, the pranksters and their parents must also pay several thousand dollars to cover extermination expenses.

Meanwhile, some parents and fellow seniors aren’t happy with the decision to prevent the students from attending graduation ceremonies.

“We’ve been to school with them since we were in diapers,” senior Alissa Lawson told WSAZ. “It’s not fair to us to not have them there with us.”

At least one local politician has also weighed in on the prank and its aftermath, according to the NBC station.

“Graduation is one of those lifetime milestones,” opined Robin Webb, a Kentucky state senator. “I think it’s a little overreaching.”

Webb also noted that the students have had no disciplinary problems in their pasts.

As Yahoo! blogger Sarah B. Weir notes, graduation pranks are a very humdrum springtime ritual across the country. Graffiti appears. Trees get covered in toilet paper.

In fact, the crickets prank has already been pulled at least once this year. At Brush High School in Lyndhurst, Ohio, students liberated crickets as well as a few mice in the cafeteria. The result was pretty hectic, reports Cleveland Fox-affiliate WJW.

The crickets prank also happened in 2010, reports WUSA, the CBS affiliate in Washington, DC. A student at Thomas Stone High School in Maryland broke into the school through a window he had left open earlier and let loose approximately 150 crickets on the floor.

That student ordered the crickets via the internet. It is not clear how the students at East Carter High obtained their cloud of insects.

Sarah Hofmann of The Daily Caller reports on the faculty member who is selling his lab’s discoveries to a Chinese firm.

A New York University professor and a lab engineer have been released on bail on Monday after being charged for selling the results of a federally funded study to a Chinese company.

A federal prosecutor called the two men, along with a suspected other conspirator, ”foxes in the hen house,” The Associated Press reported Monday.

The associate professor of radiology, Yudong Zhu, received a multimillion-dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health for his MRI research in 2010.

He reportedly then arranged for Chinese company United Imaging Healthcare to pay for the tuition and rent for the lab engineer, Xing Yang, and a postdoctoral fellow Ye Li.

An internal investigation was launched in the beginning of 2013 that uncovered security camera footage of Yang taking pictures of the machines, as well as emails describing ”MRI equipment prototypes, experiments and project updates,” sent between United Imaging and Zhu and Yang.

Zhu has been in the United States for the past 20 years and has degrees from Vanderbilt and Stanford, and has two children. He faces up to 20 years in prison for falsifying federal grant documents. His cohorts face up to five years for commercial bribery.

Vivian Giang of Business Insider reports.

EXPERT: 85% Of College Students Are Wasting Their Time And Money

We talked to the one of the most vocal college skeptics in a growing national debate about the value of a degree.

Penelope Trunk, founder of Brazen Careerist and widely syndicated guru, estimates that 85% of college students are wasting their time and money on getting a degree.

Please take this estimate with a grain of salt, as most experts will still tell most students to go to college. Trunk’s reasoning is certainly provocative, however, and it may be coming into the mainstream as more students are finally deciding to pass on college.

Trunk says you should skip college unless you’re really great at school or got accepted into a top ten school. Instead “you should just go to work.”

In her recent article published on LinkedIn, Trunk advises young people to re-think college and focus on internships, saying that anyone can teach themselves the skills needed to be successful. She gives the example of an MIT program that gave iPads to illiterate kids in Ethiopia who then were able to teach themselves how to use it, program it and read it in English without a teacher or curriculum.

With college costing more than ever, getting a degree may actually limit your career choices.

“How do you make those loan payments? There are like five career paths for you if you take out a $100,000 loan,” Trunk says, while “if you don’t take out any loans, then the whole world is opened to you.”

And then there’s the question of time.

“We’re not debating if you should be taking out loans … we know that’s a bad idea … we’re asking, ‘Is it worth your time?’” Trunk says.

We feature items from The College Fix regularly. Its editor, Nathan Harden, was recently interviewed by LifeSiteNews.com’s Ashley Herzog on the subject, starting with Yale University.

[Nathan Harden] exposed how Yale women are constantly degraded on campus. They are valued for their looks, bodies, and sexual prowess – not their minds. They are often required to watch hardcore porn in class and encouraged to participate in “porn star lookalike” contests during “Sex Week,” the biggest event of the year. Yale has made headlines for a string of incidents involving fraternities, in which young men marched around campus chanting, “No means yes, yes means anal” and carried signs declaring, “We love Yale sluts.” This hostile, threatening environment eventually brought Yale under federal investigation for gender discrimination.

The interview specifically looks at campus-based porn.

A few weeks ago, The College Fix broke a story about a Pasadena College class “devoted entirely to porn. Students are actually assigned to watch porn as part of the class homework.”

The most revealing quote was from a female student, who admitted to being uncomfortable with porn before being groomed to accept it as normal: “My view of pornography before taking this class was more the traditional view that it was not meant for me, as a woman… After, or in the midst of taking this class, I’ve become much more accepting of it and understanding of it.”

This woman probably felt that porn was “not meant for her” for a good reason. As The College Fix notes, the scenes shown in class included women being called “b—-,” “whore,” and worse.

Is it any surprise that cases of sexual misconduct on campuses have reached an all-time high?

“We have seen an increase in the number of high-profile cases of sexual assault and harassment on college campuses,” Nathan told me during our interview. “Unfortunately, many on the academic left who bemoan the hostile sexual environment on our campuses are the same people who have done the most to create that hostile environment. They have embraced moral relativism. They have told students that their sex lives should be considered free of moral consequence, so long as everything is ‘consensual.’”

But in an environment like this, the boundaries of consent begin to break down. Students – who face enormous peer pressure to participate in this free-for-all – have trouble saying “no” when they want to. Other students simply don’t respect a “no.”

Needless to say, students are also indoctrinated to accept abortion as “no big deal.”….

“Most universities today are run by leftist ideologues and free-love social revolutionaries left over from the sixties,” Nathan told me. “The hyper-sexual culture has led to a me-first brand of sexuality, where the feelings, the well-being, and even the consent of others is disregarded in an all-out pursuit of getting ‘what I want, when I want it.’”

This is bad news for women, and it’s got to stop.

Obama and Elizabeth Warren Feed the College Beast

College students may see their debt rise sharply overnight, as the interest rate for Stafford Loans is set to double to 6.8 percent on July 1^st. Fortunately, students have some friends in high places: The Obama administration, House Republicans, and various senators have each proposed plans that would forestall the rate jump. (Inside Higher Ed has a more detailed account of these policies.)

The proposals put forward by Obama, House Republicans, and Senators Jack Reed (D-RI) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) would tie student loans to the market rate (either the 10-year or the 91-day Treasury rate), though each with its own variation. The boldest plan, from new Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), would reduce student loan rates to .75 percent (the rate at which banks borrow from the Federal Reserve) for one year.

These proposals would offer students some relief, but none of them address the core problem that rising college tuition rates are closely linked to the increased availability of government loans. Stafford loans have been around for just over forty years, and over the past thirty, college tuition and fees surged 1,120 percent—four times faster than the consumer price index, more than medical or food prices. And this isn’t all due to a rising cost of teaching: Colleges have used their newfound wealth to bloat their administrative ranks and spend lavishly on construction projects.

These new student loan proposals, particularly Warren’s, will only feed the higher education beast.

(h/t Instapundit)

Amanda Achtman of Intercollegiate Review reports.

Commencement speaker exhorts students to advocate more public spending

What makes a university great? Is it being part of a state-wide network of public universities? Is it an astounding enrollment of 181,000 students? Is it being able to boast a 5.5 billion dollar budget? How about being an institution with 33,000 employees? Is it a place with 36,000 graduates state-wide? Could it be about being the top university for receiving merit-based grants?

If you were at the commencement ceremony at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this past weekend then you probably found the speeches about the university’s greatness about as enthralling as a recitation of the state budget numbers.

At the ceremony, Mark Bradley, a member of the University’s Board of Regents, who was appointed in 2003 with a term that expires in 2017, delivered an address to the graduates. He spent the first full minute and a half flattering the chancellor who had spoken just before him. Bradley proceeded to enumerate the aforementioned statistical information.

Then, in his five minute speech, he used the word “system” 5 times, “public” 7 times, “state” 4 times, and “federal” 2 times. Here is an excerpt:

There is today, a great debate about the future of higher education and I urge each of you to engage in that debate. When you understand the issues, I am confident that you will understand the need to advocate for greater investment of state and federal funds because without increased investment of state and federal funds, the cruel reality is that, this great public university will not be affordable to all members of our public. We will not be able to retain the wonderful faculty that has enabled you to receive such a high quality education and we will no longer be the leader in research dollars.

How thoughtful of them.

The Brown Spectator reports.

Loser: Brown Environmentalists

In late April, passersby on the Main Green were robbed of a view of a pleasant New England spring afternoon. Obstructing the sight was an enormous black blob, allegedly containing one ton of carbon dioxide.

The unavoidable black sphere was a group of activists’ stunt to raise awareness about carbon dioxide emissions. We at The Spectator can’t help but wonder about the merits of this bout of attention-seeking. Brown has already been saturated with events to raise awareness about environmentalism. If there are students still not on the green bandwagon, it is because they live under rocks, or even disagree with the environmentalists.

In light of the stunt’s likely small impact on “awareness,” it is probable that the stunt cost more energy than it may be expected to reduce. After all, assembling, moving, and maintaining the blob used energy. We’re willing to wager not all of the energy used came from green sources. Not to mention that the stunt is also just an eyesore.

Jennifer Kabbany of the College Fix reports.

Professors: IRS Scandal Could Lead To Impeachment

If it can be proven President Barack Obama was involved in the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups, that’s an impeachable offense, two professors said in interviews with The College Fix.

“If there was a clear line of responsibility or authority that could be shown between the IRS and their actions targeting conservative groups and the president – he wouldn’t make it through the end of the day,” said Scott Waller, assistant professor of political science at Biola University.

Grove City College media law and ethics Professor Daniel Brown agreed, saying if President Obama knew about and did nothing to stop the IRS targeting of conservative nonprofit efforts, which took place as early as 2010 and through 2012, that’s grounds for impeachment.

Brown cited one of the articles of impeachment leveled against Richard Nixon to prove his point, noting it related to the former president using the IRS in a discriminatory manner:

Using the powers of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in disregard of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens, impairing the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing agencies of the executive branch and the purposed of these agencies.

PLAY-DOH is a American childhood staple that has been entertaining kids and making home messes for years. Timothy Dionisopoulos of Campus Reform files this report about the use of this fun modeling compound in a Florida university workshop.

Staff at a public school in Florida apparently led a sex workshop last month in which students were instructed on how to sculpt replica genitals out of Play-doh.

The workshop, which was non-academic, was hosted by the University of Central Florida (UCF).

The event called, “Finals? That blows,” also featured a condom hunt and a speech from a sex expert from a local adult toy store called “Fairvilla.”

The advertisements for the event, sent out on April 16, featured an animated condom with wording full of graphic innuendo. For example, the email invited students to study “LONG and HARD” and invited them to “COME to the sex program.”

Following inquiries from the Knight News, the student publication that first reported on the workshop, school administrators sought to distance themselves from the advertisement.

In a statement, UFC Spokesman Chad Binette, said the language used to promote the event reflected a “lack of judgement.”

“This event and the email promoting it clearly demonstrate a lack of judgment,” he said. “Housing and Residence Life will be reviewing its approval process for events and event promotions.

…Nikki, an employee of the local adult store, Fairvilla, told Campus Reform that the the April event at UCF represented nothing new.

“We do events for actual accredited classes like their human sexuality psychology courses and sometimes we do presentations for clubs… frequently sometimes we do presentations for any of the on-campus housing and also off-campus housing,” said Nikki, who declined to give her last name for reason of privacy. “Sometimes we co-op presentations with the on-campus Planned Parenthood groups.”

Nikki told Campus Reform events range from small groups to hundreds of students.

“We had a great turnout for that one,” she said, speaking of the Play-Doh workshop. “Planned Parenthood was also there to answer questions regarding safe sex and birth control and all that kind of information too.”

Via Jason Fertig of National Review.

Prager U: Separation of Church and State

In the age of banning nativity scenes in a public park and renaming Good Friday on a municipal calendar, some clarification is needed on ”a wall of separation between church and state.”  Thus, in the newest Prager University course, distinguished law professor John Eastman provides insight into this often misunderstood idea.

Nathan Harden of The College Fix reports.

Hamas Student Union: ‘Jews are Trash’

If you so much as publish a cartoon of Muhammad, it has been proven to ignite riots and inspire violent attacks and assassinations around the world. But when it comes to denigrating Jews, radical Islamists appear to be much more open to the principles of free speech and free expression.

For example, the Hamas Student Union in Gaza published a disturbing cartoon today, depicting a stick-figure throwing the star of David into a trash can. Judith Levy reports at Ricochet.com:

It’s a cartoon that was published today by al-Kutla al-Islamiya (the Islamic Bloc), the Hamas-affiliated student union in Gaza. The figure is constructed out of a Palestinian flag, and he (it?) is dropping a Star of David into a garbage can. The text is translated by Arutz 7 to read, “Keep the world clean.”

Note that Pal-man is not dropping an Israeli flag into a trash can. He is dropping a Star of David into a trash can, which represents Misty Rabinowitz in Shaker Heights as readily as it represents any of us here in Israel.

The Hamas student union apparently operates in high schools and universities throughout Gaza…

Oliver Darcy shares the contents of that address in Campus Reform.

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Cali.) told graduates at the University of California – Davis law school on Friday that any cuts in spending to education would actually lead to an increase in the federal deficit.

“If you want to cut education or if you want to raise interest rates on student loans, you are not reducing the deficit,” said Pelosi. “You are increasing the deficit.”

WATCH: Pelosi says cutting education spending will increase deficit (remarks start at around 59 minutes)

Pelosi justified her remarks contending “nothing brings more money to the Treasury than investing in education.”

She did not clarify or further expound upon those remarks.

Pelosi also used her speech to call for immigration reform, advance gay rights, and advocate for gun control legislation.

Thomas Sowell has some advice for you.

Undoing The Brainwashing That Students Get In College

This time of year, as college students return home for the summer, many parents may notice how many politically correct ideas they have acquired on campus. Some of those parents may wonder how they can undo some of the brainwashing that has become so common in what are supposed to be institutions of higher learning.

The strategy used by Gen. Douglas MacArthur so successfully in the Pacific during World War II can be useful in this very different kind of battle. MacArthur won his victories while minimizing his casualties — something that is also desirable in clashes of ideas within the family.

Instead of fighting the Japanese for every island stronghold as the Americans advanced toward Japan, MacArthur sent his troops into battle for only those islands that were strategically crucial. In the same spirit, parents who want to bring their brainwashed offspring back to reality need not try to combat every crazy idea they picked up from their politically correct professors. Just demolishing a few crucial beliefs, and exposing what nonsense they are, can deal a blow to the general credibility of the professorial pied pipers.

For example, if the student has been led to join the crusade for more gun control, and thinks that the reason the British have lower murder rates than Americans have is because the Brits have tighter gun control laws, just give him or her a copy of the book “Guns and Violence” by Joyce Lee Malcolm.

As the facts in that book demolish the gun control propaganda fed to students by their professors, that can create a healthy skepticism about other professorial propaganda.