Author: paige laevy

In the fall of 2000, Leslie Nielsen was placed in a mortarboard, given chalk, and placed in a television classroom where he would hold court as the “Professor of Stoogeology” before classic Three Stooges short films were introduced by AMC, which at the time was still in the business of airing classic films rather than prestige original drama. N.Y.U.K., which stands for New York University of Knuckleheads, was the name of the programming block. It was just as absurd as it sounds, and that’s exactly why it worked. Nielsen, whose reputation as a deadpan comedian came from Airplane! With the…

The NEET UG exam is more than just a test in classrooms and coaching facilities all over India, including the medical prep schools in Delhi and Patna, the Rajasthan coaching hub towns of Kota and Sikar, and the small study spaces in small cities where students spend years preparing for a single chance at MBBS admission. It’s the exam. The only path to the approximately 100,000 MBBS seats available across government and private medical colleges in India is through the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test for undergraduate medical admissions. Nearly two million kids take it each year, signifying years of…

On May 10, 2026, at some point in the evening, Juniper Blessing carried her laundry to the first-floor laundry room of Nordheim Court, an off-campus housing complex on 25th Avenue NE in Seattle that is so close to the University of Washington campus that students consider it to be a part of their world rather than something distinct from it. She was a transgender 19-year-old sophomore who had relocated to Seattle from Santa Fe to pursue her studies in atmospheric sciences while continuing to sing. Her voice teacher described her as a gifted vocalist with a “magnificent” voice who approached…

The announcement on April 14 carried the weight of something that had been feasible for some time and was now final on the Hampshire College campus in Amherst, a place where the buildings have names that reflect the institution’s self-conscious idealism and where students pursuing self-designed degrees have walked the pathways through its nearly 700 acres since 1970. The Board of Trustees of Hampshire decided to permanently close after the conclusion of the fall semester of 2026. In 2025, the college had fallen short of its enrollment goal by about half. It was a long-standing debt. The sale of the…

On the afternoon of May 11, 2026, Michael Gordin, Dean of the College, stood up in the Princeton faculty meeting room, an institutional setting with heavy wooden chairs and the accumulated weight of decisions made there for well over a century. He made a proposal that everyone in the room understood was more than just a modification to the examination process. It was a statement about the state of trust that had developed among students, between students and faculty, and between the university and its fundamental presumptions about who it admitted and what those students would do if given an…

January has a unique flavor for New Zealand students who took the Cambridge examinations in November; anyone who has gone through the process can immediately identify the mix of excitement and fear. Although the school year is officially finished and summer has arrived, there is still pressure to wait for the results. The results of the November series are released by Cambridge International Assessment in the middle of January, and during the space of roughly twelve hours, the Cambridge Candidate Results Portal transitions from theoretical to quite practical. As soon as their grades are released, students who registered beforehand can…

A single statement was posted on X on February 22, 2026, by the account @HoopsCrave: “Kanye West has reportedly passed the California Bar Exam on his first attempt.” A fake quote, “I finished what Kim couldn’t,” was attached. It probably worked so well because it was worded in the register of something Kanye West might reasonably say: “See you in court.” The account is clearly a parody account, its name appears in the handle’s description, and nothing about it qualifies as a news source, but within hours, the post had garnered enough engagement to escape the context that should have…

Threatening emails started to arrive at educational institutions around the Kirklees area at some point on Thursday, May 7, 2026, about the time that students on Manchester Road in Huddersfield were getting ready for the first lessons of the day at Kirklees College. The college’s Executive Leadership team acted swiftly, releasing a statement before 11 o’clock that placed all of its facilities under precautionary lockdown: stay where you are, a staff member will give you more instructions, and if you haven’t arrived yet, don’t make the trip. Students waited in classrooms spread across many college buildings. West Yorkshire Police set…

The office address listed on the company’s documents is 77 Vogel Street in Dunedin, the second-largest city in New Zealand, which is difficult for most persons outside of the Southern Hemisphere to find on a map. Dunedin is renowned for its chilly climate, Victorian architecture, university, and relative isolation from the outside world. At first appearance, it doesn’t seem like the kind of area where a multinational education technology company grows and eventually draws the interest of KKR, one of the biggest private equity companies in the world, with enough momentum to warrant a majority stake acquisition in 2021. But…

The timing has an almost cinematic quality. An internal HUD memo appears on staff members’ desks on one side of Washington, telling them to remove Spanish-language pamphlets from lobby areas and use the agency’s website for translation services. Conversely, a bilingual AI tool quietly goes live in a small nonprofit office that serves Hispanic loan officers. It can perform tasks that a translator used to require an afternoon for in a matter of seconds. The two incidents took place a few days apart. It’s difficult to ignore how odd that appears. Deputy Secretary Andrew Hughes signed the blunt HUD directive.…