The Education Optimists blog takes on ten myths about affirmative action in college admissions:

“As many as 15 percent of freshmen at America’s top schools are white students who failed to meet their university’s minimum standards for admission, according to Peter Schmidt, deputy editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education. These kids are ‘people with a long-standing relationship with the university,’ or in other words, the children of faculty, wealthy alumni and politicians. According to Schmidt, these unqualified but privileged kids are nearly twice as common on top campuses as Black and Latino students who had benefited from affirmative action.”

New census data show the devastating effect of the current recession on young adults:

“‘Their really high levels of underemployment and unemployment will haunt young people for at least another decade,’ Sum said. Richard Freeman, an economist at Harvard University, added, ‘These people will be scarred, and they will be called the ‘lost generation’ – in that their careers would not be the same way if we had avoided this economic disaster.'”

Campus police at UC Irvine held a mock protest drill last week, complete with a SWAT team deployment:

“I am on campus today and I am currently witnessing a protest simulation complete with UC Irvine SWAT teams, police, fake protesters, and the fire department. It looks like a really strange farce. They are ‘protesting’ outside of Gateway in a closed off area around the library. The protesters are simulating what ‘protesters’ act like, confronting officers, yelling, and running around the building with picket signs and megaphones. There are also photographers and camera men ‘capturing’ the event . . . . There were a lot of SWAT on campus and I thought they had a real emergency going on. It seems it has been going on for over an hour. The protesters even have fake ‘speeches’ and chants.”

Cuts to public higher ed are causing disproportionate pain to community colleges:

“‘Budget cuts might mean larger classes, fewer full-time faculty, shorter hours in the library, or it might be less frequent cutting of the grass,’ he says. ‘But community colleges are pretty bare bones. The vast majority of money they receive goes to academics,’ not to prettifying the grounds, sports teams, or other extracurriculars.”

Short answer? No.

For starters, Twitter has denied that they’ve blocked “Troy Davis” (or #TroyDavis, or any other variant) from trending. Different topics relating to the story have been trending locally and nationally all day — as I type this, two Davis-related topics are trending in the US, while “Who Is Troy Davis” is trending in NYC and Atlanta, among other places.

So what’s the story? Why isn’t “Troy Davis” trending — or why isn’t it trending more broadly and consistently?

Because Twitter’s trending topics don’t measure Twitter users’ interest in a topic directly. They’re not intended to. I wrote about this in excruciating detail last December, when similar questions were being asked about the failure of the #Wikileaks tag to trend.

You can go read that whole post if you like. But the upshot was this:

Twitter wants trending topics to be novel, and widely tweeted, and tweeted by disparate users. They want their trending topics to be trendy.

They don’t censor terms like “Troy Davis” or “Wikileaks.” They don’t have any policy preventing them from trending. But at the same time, they’re not interested in having any topic like these — an ongoing discussion of a major social or political issue, going through peaks and lulls and times of broader and narrower resonance — make the list.

Twitter’s trending topics aren’t intended to measure what people are interested in. They aren’t intended to measure what people are passionate about. They aren’t intended to measure what people are committed to. They aren’t even intended to measure what people are fascinated by.

They’re intended to measure “Ooh! Shiny!”

As university budgets are squeezed, admissions officials are recruiting students who don’t need financial aid:

“More than half of the admissions officers at public research universities, and more than a third at four-year colleges said that they had been working harder in the past year to recruit students who need no financial aid and can pay full price, according to the survey of 462 admissions directors and enrollment managers conducted in August and early September. Similarly, 22 percent of the admissions officials at four-year institutions said the financial downturn had led them to pay more attention in their decision to applicants’ ability to pay.”

A Canadian student has filed a human rights complaint over a campus blackface incident:

“Anthony Morgan filmed the students at a Hautes Études Commerciales (HEC) school sporting event earlier this month, as they were dressed in Jamaican colours with their skin painted black. They were also chanting in mock Jamaican accents about smoking marijuana.”

Mother Jones reports on the “gutsiest” student newspapers of 2011:

“In April, La Salle University in Philadelphia demanded that an embarrassing story about a business profwho’d hired exotic dancers for a class not run above the fold in the Collegian. The paper’s solution? It left the top of its front page blank and ran the story below the fold, gaining national attention. Well played, friends, well played.”

 Maurice Sendak talks about why he doesn’t think of himself as a children’s book author: 

“I don’t know what that means. How do you write for children? I really have never figured that out. So I decided to just ignore it. I knew that my books would only be published as children’s books. And I once objected fiercely to that. I wanted Outside Over There to be realized as a complex work of art. Well, it wasn’t. And I had to live with that. And yet, perhaps, in some ways, it’s my favorite book of everything I’ve ever done. But it’s a weird book. It’s a weird book. It’s a weird world.”

A British observer warns her country against following America’s higher education model:

“Unfortunately, with our tripling of tuition fees and the shifting of the burden from state to the individual, it is the US trajectory that the UK seems to be following – one that evidence shows is unwise. As massive tuition-fee increases and poor state support in the US take their toll, graduation rates have fallen well behind those of most other industrialised nations.”

Students at a Cairo university have ended a weeklong sit-in after administrators met most of their demands:

“The conflict is also part of a larger wave of campus activism sweeping Egypt. At state universities, students and faculty are demanding the resignation of presidents and deans appointed during the Mubarak era, and the holding of elections to select their replacements. They are also demanding more openness and an end to security interference in campus affairs. The national Egyptian Student Union was reconstituted after a conference at the American University in Cairo in August. Its activities had been suspended 32 years ago by then-president Anwar Sadat.”