Author: paige laevy

A school being placed on lockdown has a very unsettling quality, maybe because the word itself carries a weight we borrowed from the pandemic years and now apply to something much older and more terrifying. Parents in Watlington, a small town in Oxfordshire, found out on Thursday afternoon that Icknield Community College, a school that typically only appears in the local newspapers for summer festivals or sports day photos, had turned into the focal point of a police operation. Around 1:00 PM, the first messages started to circulate. Parents were informed in a succinct and well-written message that the school…

University administrators throughout England had been silently preparing for this kind of announcement, though few had anticipated it to take this specific form. The news arrived on a Friday morning. Cranfield is being absorbed by King’s College London. Despite having little in common on paper, two institutions decided that they would be stronger together. Both vice-chancellors and Whitehall observers spent the weekend attempting to read between the lines. The news is more difficult for anyone who has been to Cranfield to comprehend. It doesn’t feel like a normal university. Surrounded by hangars and runways, it is located in Bedfordshire. It…

Looking at him now, it’s easy to forget that Scottie Scheffler used to be a scrawny eighth-grader who stood just over five feet tall. Not the bulldozer cruising Augusta’s fairways. Not the world champion, chewing a sandwich in between holes while wearing a navy Nike cap. In the fall of 2014, a young man from Highland Park who was exceptionally talented at golf packed his bags for the University of Texas at Austin with little fanfare outside of the small group of people who already had a sneaking suspicion that he would become something exceptional. He had sort of filled…

It was a cool April 4 morning over the Charles River, the kind of New England spring light that makes Boston appear clean. A small group of people had gathered around a wooden cart on the Longfellow Bridge. On top of it was a chaise lounge pillow. Martin Klein, an 85-year-old man, was lying on the pillow and leaning against the wind. He resembled a gentleman being transported across a Venetian canal, but this time it was Cambridge, and the ferry was a hand-pulled engineering feat. It’s difficult to ignore how absurdity feels rigorous at MIT, of all places. The…

The moment Washington is having with American universities is almost overdue. With sporadic disclosure scandals and the occasional congressional hearing where a university president writhed under interrogation, the debate over foreign funding in higher education has been going in slow circles for years. After that, it would fade. Donations continued to come in. The branch campuses continued to open. The slow circle has now become more acute with the passage of the Defending American Research Act and the No Branch Campuses in Hostile Countries Act. Reps. join Senator Rick Scott. The legislation was drafted by Josh Gottheimer and Elise Stefanik…

On a clear afternoon, as you drive west out of Charlottesville, you’ll notice that the road tilts slightly upward, with the Blue Ridge slipping behind you and the long shoulders of Massanutten Mountain rising in the distance. Almost without warning, Harrisonburg and the bluestone walls of James Madison University appear somewhere along the route. For a school that has grown from a two-hundred-student women’s teacher college to a public research university with over twenty thousand students enrolled in just one lifetime, this arrival is strangely understated. The State Normal and Industrial School for Women at Harrisonburg was the school’s original…

Observing a child with a well-known last name truly earn his moment has a subtle satisfying quality. John Daly II, also known as Little John as the broadcasters insist on calling him, won his first college trophy as he walked off the eighteenth hole at Rolling Green Golf Club on a chilly Monday morning in Springfield, Pennsylvania. With five holes remaining, he was five over. Then he wrote a series of numbers that appeared to be a typo: 2-3-3-3-3. Six under in five holes. That’s not a steady game of golf. You recall a finish like that. The victory occurred…

The way commonplace locations wind up in the news is peculiar. Owen Goodnight Middle School is located in San Marcos, a peaceful area of central Texas where the long Texan heat pressing against the school windows, hallway chatter, and bells typically mark the days. Nobody anticipated that a batch of cookies would cause the school’s name to make national headlines. However, that is precisely what occurred earlier this month, and the issues it brought up remain unresolved. After purchasing cookies from a campus employee, four students reportedly felt ill. The kind of detail that, until you sit with it for…

In a nutshell, the answer is yes. After years of part-time study while working as a full-time teacher and raising a family, Jill Biden graduated with a doctorate in education from the University of Delaware in January 2007. The longer response is the one that frequently resurfaces in discussions, typically during inauguration cycles or whenever someone chooses to revisit a now-famous Wall Street Journal opinion piece from 2020 that recommended she drop the title. Her qualifications aren’t the main point of contention. It’s about who gets to make the final decision and what matters. Her dissertation, which is roughly 130…

The cameras are not the first thing you notice when you enter the Belfast School of Art on a soggy Tuesday morning. It’s the printer noise. They are humming in the basement in long rows, spitting out test prints that will be pinned, evaluated, destroyed, and reprinted by the end of the week. The cost of photography, as it is taught here, is something that most people don’t realize until they are in the middle of it. Monitoring Ulster’s spending on its photography program has always been interesting. To be honest, no art school actually publishes a tidy line item…