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RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
March 31 to April 6

Featured Investigation
Culture War and Peace at Stanford:
The PC Uprising 25 Years On

As a reporter for the New York Times a quarter century ago, Richard Bernstein published a pioneering book, "Dictatorship of Virtue," on the often intimidating rise of political correctness in America, especially on college campuses. A watershed moment came at Stanford University in 1988, when the Rev. Jesse Jackson led boisterous marchers across the Eden-like campus shouting, "Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture's got to go!"

Twenty-five years later, Bernstein has returned to take the temperature at Stanford -- and he found a much more a nuanced picture of campus political dynamics than typically presented. Remarkably, Western civ didn't go - though it's still being shown the door.

He reports that:

• The culture war is pretty much all over, including the shouting. The forces of liberal-left identity politics have transformed the university through vast new course offerings and departments of study focusing on race, gender, sexual identity and intersectionality.
• Still, conservatives are not silenced. Marginalized, yes. But the writings of "dead white males" are still taught with rigor and respect.
• Changes in the makeup of the student body - now only 36% white -- may explain the state of affairs as much as firebrand radical professors. Two years ago students voted 6-to-1 against reinstating a Western civilization requirement.
• While campuses are often cast as hotbeds of passionate fights over ideology, some professors told Bernstein the thrill is gone for many students. One put it this way: "There's a growing belief among students and their parents alike that a college education is direct preparation for a job, rather than an opportunity to deepen one's personality or to create engaged, thinking citizens."

Matthew Wigler, a senior majoring in political science, noted the irony that peace has come through disengagement: "The university is very loosely coupled and some of the departments are far apart from each other. Depending on what part of the school you're in, one point of view will seem ubiquitous to you. There can be very little communication between people with different points of view."

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The Trump Investigations: Top Articles

Grassley: Mueller Team Put Collusion Spin on Trump Tower Emails, Daily Caller
Papadopoulos Suggests FBI Role in Fateful Russia Chat, The Federalist
Investigate Dossier as RussianDisinformation, Intel Experts Say, Daily Caller
Strzok'sBoss Thought Affair Made Him Vulnerable to Spies, Daily Caller
Feds Probing Possible Chinese Spying at Mar-a-Lago, Miami Herald
White House Manager: 25 Faulty Clearances, New York Times

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

More 'Overly Tactile Friendliness' From Joe Biden
New York Times
JoeBiden's undeclared campaign for president is getting off to rocky start as several women say his hands-on style of politics is a tad toohandsy. Make that way too handsy,and nosey and foreheady and feely. Complainants include:

• A politician in Nevada who says in 2014 Biden "inhaled my hair" and planted a "big slow kiss on the back of my head."
• A Connecticut woman who says Biden touched her inappropriately and rubbed noses with her during a 2009political fundraiser in Greenwich.
• A 22-year-old college student who sat next to Biden at a2016event on sexual assault, where he rested his hand on her thigh — even as she squirmed in her seat to show her discomfort — and hugged her "just a little bit too long."
• And a 59-year-old woman who said Biden her made her feel uncomfortablein 2012when he ran his hand down her back while their picture was being taken.

Theseand agrowing number of otherincidentsjoin what his opponents are callingCreepy Joe moments but what a New York Times Op-Ed writer calls examples of Biden's "overly tactile friendliness."Biden is also facingrenewed questionsabout whether he used his office as Vice President to help his son Hunter make money in Ukraine. The latest allegation is that the Veepdemanded that Ukraine fire a prosecutorleading a corruption probe into the natural gasfirmBursimaHoldings. On the Burisma board: young Hunter.

Shallow State: How Congress Protects Its Own
Daily Caller
Members of Congress have many ways to protect themselves from the laws they pass for the rest of us. Take the Office of Compliance. It ran a settlement fund that routinely paid off congressional employees to stay silent about alleged sexual misconduct. So far we know of at least $1 million worth of payoffs during the last 20 years. But this is a pretty lowball figure, this article reports. Congress's own human-resources lawyer was apparently helping members break House rules to avoid a paper trail. The ploy: Get whistleblowers to leave and agree to receive paychecks for nonexistent work rather than a traceable lump sum from the settlement fund. Hush-hush affairs in more ways than one.

DEA Secretly Tracked Sales of Bill-Counting Machines
New York Times
More fallout from the Snowden stolen-secrets fiasco:The Drug Enforcement Administration secretly collected data in bulk about Americans' purchases of money-counting machines — and took steps to hide the effort from defendants and courts. It quietly shut down the program in 2013 amid the uproar over the disclosures by the National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, an inspector general report found.Drug dealers, of course, love the machines, but so do lots of law-abiding Americans. This story reports that field offices' complained at first that the program had wasted time with a high volume of low-quality leads, resulting in agents scrutinizing people "without any connection to illicit activity." But the DEA eventually refined its analysis to produce fewer but higher-quality leads. The DEA said the methods led to arrests and seizures of drugs, guns, cars, and illicit cash.

Copy-and-Paste State Government
USA Today, Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity
Society is obviously so complicated that our small bodies of elected officials and their staffs can't begin to master the vagaries of every area they govern. So they turn to experts to help them craft laws and regulations. In most cases these are unelected members of the bureaucracy - the so-called administrative state that conservatives warn about. This article ignores that angle- as well as the influence of progressive advocacy groups -focusing instead onunelected influences scorned by the left. "Each year, state lawmakersacross the U.S.introduce thousands of billsdreamed up andwritten by corporations, industry groups and think tanks," the article says. Reporters found that "at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislationwere introduced nationwide in the past eight years,and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law."

The article's major findings include:

• Bills "drafted with deceptive titles and descriptions to disguise their true intent."
• Special interests working "to create the illusion of expert endorsements,public consensusor grassroots support."
• "Bills copied from model legislation have been used tooverride the will of local votersand their elected leaders."
• And "industry groupshavehad extraordinary success pushing copycat bills that benefit themselves."

Irony: Colleges' Move to Online Ed Is Keeping Costs Exorbitant
Huffington Post
What to do about the rising cost of college and crushing student debt? One obvious answer is online learning. Nearly every prestigious university now offers online degrees, which should be much cheaper -- except they're not. Nearly every school charges online students the same astronomical prices they levy for the on-campus experience. Why? Because the colleges don't actually run online programs themselves; they're outsourced to for-profit companies. And everybody gets a cut: Universities are using them as cash cows while corporate middlemen hoover up profits. Also getting well are big tech companies, in the form of massive sums spent on Facebook and Google ads.

'Predatory' Scientific Publisher Hit With $50 Million Judgment
New York Times
Predatory publishers pepper academics with pleas to submit papers or speak at conferences. When they receive papers, the journals often accept and publish them immediately, with a perfunctory review or none at all. In return, the journals demand fees they had not previously disclosed that can be as high as several thousand dollars. Now the Federal Trade Commission has stepped in, announcing that it has won a $50 million court judgment for deceptive business practices against Omics International of Hyderabad, India, which publishes hundreds of journals in such areas as medicine, chemistry and engineering and also organizes conferences.

The Hidden Air Pollution in Our Homes
New Yorker
The fresh outdoors may start making a comeback in the wake of a new study analyzing the dangers of the air inside our homes.Homechem - House Observations of Microbial and Environmental Chemistry - was the world's first large-scale collaborative investigation into the chemistry of indoor air. Thoroughly dissecting the data accumulated will take a couple of years, at least, and, even when the findings are published, no one will be able to state their public-health implications with certainty. But the experiment's early results are just now emerging, and they seem to show that the combined emissions of humans and their daily activities—cooking, cleaning, metabolizing—are more interesting, and potentially more lethal, than anyone had imagined. This article discusses thosefindings while providing a brief history of the home environment. What it doesn't explain is how we have been able to extend lifespans so much during the last century if all the home's modern conveniences are killing us.

How a Family YouTube Channel Unraveled a Medical Nightmare
Verge
Susan Schofield's YouTube channel featured nearly 200 videos, broadcasting to nearly 30,000 subscribers the lives of her two children, who she claims are heavily medicated because of schizophrenia. Her preteen son Bodhi is often seen in the videos in a near-catatonic state, drooling and slurring his words. This hasn't gone overlooked in the heated and skeptical world of YouTube commentary.  Many believe the boy and his older sister, Jani, are victims of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a disorder where parents or caretakers feign illness and disease in their children.