By Suzanna Danuta Walters. When I came out, at 16, in those fashion-challenged late 70s when tweedy jackets and pinky rings had to do hard labor in signifying lesbian identity, my (liberal) mother sent me to a shrink before she began her queer re-education and joined the cause, righteous pink triangle pinned on her ample bosom. I knew not one other gay kid, there were no support groups in my high school, and I felt so very alone until I blissfully discovered gay bars, gay bookstores, and the gay movement. Now my 19-year-old daughter (after a high-school career of being the "s" in gay-straight alliances) seems to imagine she gains street cred by claiming queer provenance and goes to a college where gender bending is just another day and creative pronouns business as usual. More...

By Arthur F. Kirk Jr. I am not going to argue that a four-year college education isn’t expensive. It is. I won’t argue that its return on investment makes it worthwhile, although it surely does. I also cannot argue that increasing the number of administrators doesn’t increase the cost of a higher education. It does. More...

By Richard Ekman. A proposal for a detailed federal database of all college students has once again surfaced, the brainchild of researchers who believe that a major purpose of colleges is to serve as data sources for their own studies, and of policy wonks who think that any nationwide effort worth doing must be owned and operated by the federal government. More...

By Paul Basken. The National Institutes of Health announced on Wednesday a new policy requiring that both sexes be represented among the subjects of preclinical biomedical research it finances involving animal and cell models. More than two decades after requiring gender balance among human beings in the trials themselves, NIH leaders said they now realize that the same step should be applied to the laboratory experiments that inform those trials. The policy reflects a widespread recognition of differences in how men and women differ in their responses to medical treatments, the NIH’s director, Francis S. Collins, and the director of the NIH’s Office of Research on Women’s Health, Janine A. Clayton, wrote in an article in Nature announcing the policy. More...