HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Missouri adopts performance-based funding for higher education.

This performance-based portion of the funding will be determined by metrics such as degree completion, budget practices, and job-placement rates.

Missouri joins a growing list of states that are either developing or using formulas that tie their support to these key performance indicators. Thirty-five states have attempted performance-based funding. Missouri’s higher education board believes that the formula would help schools demonstrate their stewardship of state funds at a time when public trust in higher education is quickly diminishing.

Academic skepticism has been such a pain point for colleges and universities that it emerged as a dominant theme at the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ annual meeting. Lynn Pasquerella, president of the AAC&U, tried to blame the trend on “political jockeying” and a lack of “rational inquiry” on the matter. However, she also admitted that academia needs to demonstrate how it is “teaching students 21st-century skills … within the context of the workforce, not apart from it.”

They have their work cut out for them.

Indeed they do.

JULIETTE OCHIENG: Libyan Slave Markets And Jumping Into The Fire.

JEFF DUNETZ: IF PRESIDENT TRUMP IS MENTALLY UNSTABLE, LET’S HOPE IT’S CONTAGIOUS.

ANOTHER OPEN THREAD: Commune and converse.

SABO STRIKES AGAIN: ‘We All Knew’ street art welcomes Hollywood elites to Golden Globes.

Remember, they’re not making a big deal about sexual assault in Hollywood because they found out about it. They’re making a big deal because you found out about it.

I MENTIONED THIS A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, but it’s worth pointing out again that the Neck Gaiter is the single most underrated piece of cold-weather gear. Much better than a scarf.

TINNITUS NEWS: Science has a solution for that constant ringing in your ear. “The condition doesn’t have a cure yet, but those suffering from it might not have to endure all the phantom ringing, clicking and hissing for life, thanks to a device developed by researchers from the University of Michigan. Their creation treats tinnitus by using precisely timed sounds and weak electrical pulses designed to persuade damaged nerves in the region of the brainstem called dorsal cochlear nucleus into working correctly again.”

ME IN TOMORROW’S WALL STREET JOURNAL: Why Do Federal Judges Need Clerks Anyway?

Getting rid of law clerks would eliminate the harassment problem and get judges doing their own work. Justice Louis Brandeis, who served from 1916-39, is said to have observed that the high court’s members “are almost the only people in Washington who do their own work.”

That’s not true anymore. The Supreme Court decided 160 cases in 1945, when each justice had a single clerk. Nowadays it decides about half as many cases with four clerks per justice. Law clerks were unknown for roughly the first century of the American judiciary, and the courts seemed to do fine. As my law students often comment, the older opinions are shorter and more intelligible than the newer ones.

So I propose eliminating law clerks for the lower federal courts. If the workload is too burdensome, we can always add more federal judges, as some are already suggesting. The federal courts already have excellent librarians to help with research, and staff attorneys to deal with frivolous petitions.

The Supreme Court has the additional burden of wading through thousands of certiorari petitions and deciding which cases to hear. That’s probably too much for justices to do on their own, but I’d limit the justices to one clerk each, as in 1945. That would ensure that justices do their own work again—and encourage those who aren’t up to the task to take retirement instead of grimly hanging on while their clerks do all the writing.

As an added advantage, for those concerned with inequality in America, this would break up a chummy system in which elites in academia trade favors with elites in the judiciary for the benefit of select elite graduates.

I hope Congress will pay attention.

KANGAROO COURTS GONNA KANGAROO: Oberlin College’s 100% sexual assault conviction rate prompts lawsuit, due process concerns.

Weird how Oberlin’s enrollment is declining.

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KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: The Democrats’ ‘Russian Descent:’ Tactics in the Trump probe are starting to look a lot like McCarthyism.

Democrats have spent weeks making the case that the Russia-Trump probes need to continue, piling on demands for more witnesses and documents. So desperate is the left to keep this Trump cudgel to hand that Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats have moved toward neo- McCarthyism.

If that sounds hyperbolic, consider an email recently disclosed by the Young Turks Network, a progressive YouTube news channel. It’s dated Dec. 19, 2017, and its author is April Doss, senior counsel for the committee’s Democrats, including Vice Chairman Mark Warner.

Ms. Doss was writing to Robert Barnes, an attorney for Charles C. Johnson, the controversial and unpleasant alt-right blogger. Mr. Johnson’s interactions with Julian Assange inspired some in the media to speculate last year that Mr. Johnson had served as a back channel between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. There’s still no proof, but in July the Intelligence Committee sent a letter requesting Mr. Johnson submit to them any documents, emails, texts or the like related to “any communications with Russian persons” in a variety of 2016 circumstances, including those related to “the 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign.”

Mr. Barnes seems to have wanted clarification from Ms. Doss about the definition of “Russian persons.” And this would make sense, since it’s a loose term. Russians in Russia? Russians in America? Russians with business in the country? Russians who lobby the U.S. and might be affected by the election—though not in contact with campaigns?

Ms. Doss’s response was more sweeping than any of these: “The provision we discussed narrowing was clarifying that the phrase ‘Russian persons’ in [the committee letter] may be read to refer to persons that Mr. Johnson knows or has reason to believe are of Russian nationality or descent” (emphasis added).

Well, to be fair, it was the Democrats who imprisoned people in concentration camps simply for being of Japanese descent, so at least they’re consistent.

WORKING FOR THE CLAMPDOWN: Regime-friendly NY Times makes big money selling Iran tours.

THIS WILL END WELL: New ‘Feminist Business School’ to Fight ‘Masculine’ Capitalism.. “Understanding feminist theory before starting a business is crucial, since it will give you a ‘huge leg-up on established entrepreneurs’ and help you ‘avoid the frustrations and pitfalls of outdated masculine business models,’ according to the program’s website.”

OOPS: Wikileaks Publishes Michael Wolff’s Entire Sold Out Trump Book As A PDF.

BECAUSE YOU CAN’T SPELL ‘THE BUTTERFIELD EFFECT’ WITHOUT ‘BUT:’ “Marin County has long resisted growth in the name of environmentalism. But high housing costs and segregation persist,” notes an L.A. Times headline, blissfully unaware of the irony.

(Classical reference in headline.)

WHY IS OBESITY GETTING WORSE? “It’s so serious now that close to 40 percent of Americans are obese. The average woman in the United States today weighs about 168 pounds, or roughly the same as an average man in 1960.”

This stupid article, however, jumps directly from telling us that obesity is a worldwide problem, to telling us that it’s directly related to a unique “sickness in American society.” And yet it’s written by a professor of endocrinology, who presumably is supposed to be able to think logically.

THEIR BUDGETS ARE HUGE, THEIR TRACK RECORD DREADFUL: Another ‘Oops’ from the Intelligence Community.

MEA CULPAS ARE A BITCH, JUST ASK STEPHEN K. BANNON: When President Donald Trump said of his former White House strategist that he “lost his mind” when he lost his job at the Chief Executive’s right side, it marked one of the most definitive such repudiations in American political history. Today Bannon seeks a way back into Trump’s good graces with multiple apologies. Curious that he gave his statement exclusively to, of all publications, Axios.

WHICH IS A REASON TO AVOID THEM IF YOU DON’T HAVE THE FLU: Emergency rooms overcrowded with flu patients.

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JOURNALISM:

Well, you know what they say:

ELITES CAN’T BELIEVE TRUMP ACTUALLY WILL DEFEND AMERICA: Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is amused by the reactions up and down the Northeast Corridor to President Donald Trump’s decision to terminate U.S. aid to Pakistan.

“It has so thoroughly shocked the elites that we actually are going to protect America, and defend America, and that we’re actually going to render judgment,” Gingrich told radio host John Catsimatidis in an interviewed aired on 970 AM. “That is such a shocking moment for a lot of our elites that they don’t know how to deal with it.” LifeZette political reporter Kathryn Blackhurst pulls together multiple comments on the same theme by Gingrich, CIA Director Mike Pompeo and British Prime Minister Teresa May.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: As Flow Of Foreign Students Wanes, U.S. Universities Feel The Sting. “The shift comes just as some states also are experiencing a drop in domestic students, partly the result of a decline in birthrates two decades ago. This year, the number of domestic undergraduate students dropped 224,000, or 1 percent, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.”

YOU WON’T BELIEVE HOW MICHAEL WOLFF EXPLAINS HIS WHITE HOUSE ACCESS: Asked by NBC Meet The Press Host Chuck Todd about how he gained entrance to the President and other White House officials, the “Fire and Fury” author offered a rambling account full of generalizations. LifeZette’s Kathryn Blackhurst has the ugly details.