We recently covered the Facebook saga of University of Wyoming student Meghan Lanker-Simons, who she allegedly posted on an anonymous social media page threat to herself in the guise of an outraged conservative.

It seems that Lanker-Simons has failed to read the liberal memo regarding firearms, however. Katherine Timpf of Campus Reform has these details on another court case involving the agitated activist.

Meg Lanker-Simons, an award winning liberal student activist and talk show host at the University of Wyoming (UW), walked into a radio station in 2005 and threatened her former boss with a Glock 44 .40 caliber handgun, according to court documents.

According to the 2006 affidavit on the firing, she walked into the office of her former employer and pointed the gun at the man who decided to fire her, who reported he was in “fear for his life.”

Immediately after, Albany County Sheriff’s Office deputies detained Lanker-Simons at gunpoint while she was attempting to flee the scene, according to the Laramie Boomerang.

Lanker-Simons “admitted to having (a) gun in (her) purse and pulling it out and waving it around (the) victim,” according to the affidavit.

She pled guilty and received six- years of probation. At the time, Lanker-Simons went by the name Meghan Michelena, according to the Laramie Boomerang.

Meghan Michelena or Lanker-Simons later violated that probation when she was “unsuccessfully discharged” from a treatment center, according to court documents.

Lanker-Simons lawyer appeared in Albany County Circuit Court to enter for her a “not guilty” on charges of interfering with a peace officer last month.

In early April of 2013, police accused Lanker-Simons of posting a rape threat aimed at herself on a “crush” Facebook page. The posting immediately ignited outrage from the college community.

“I want to hate f**k Meg Lanker-Simons so hard. That chick that runs her liberal mouth all the time and doesn’t care who knows it,” it read.  “I think its hot and it makes me angry. One night with me and shes gonna be a good Republican bitch,” the post reads, according to a screenshot.

Before the post was removed, Lanker-Simons commented on it and on her own blog, calling it “disgusting, misogynistic, and apparently something the admins of this page think is a perfectly acceptable sentiment.”

The University of Wyoming Police Department later issued a citation to Lanker-Simons for “interference” for “false statements she made to the UW Police Department,” according to a UW statement referred to by Laramie Boomerang Online.

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We recently posted a wish-list of 15 conservative speakers for college commencement events.

And they are likely to remain only on wish lists, too. Paul Bedard of Washington Secrets analyzes the data of the actual number of conservatives engaged for graduation ceremonies:

When President Obama gave his commencement address at Ohio State University last week and admonished Americans to stop listening to the voices of cynicism and criticism, the rest of the nation’s top colleges must have been listening because only 17 of them have invited conservatives to speak, according to a new report.

The Young America’s Foundation annual review of commencement speakers at U.S. News & World Report’s list of 99 top colleges revealed that liberals like Obama, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and PBS’ Gwen Ifill dominate, as in years past.

Conservatives are speaking at typically center-right schools such as Pepperdine University, Texas A&M University and Brigham Young University. New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, for example, is speaking at Notre Dame University.

The conservative group compared the commencement speech schedule of Obama to former President Bush and found that the newly re-elected president will have delivered 14 of them in his first four years compared to Bush’s 12 over eight years. They found that Obama, a former professor, has an affinity for colleges, spending one of every nine days of his presidency on campus.

YAF has been pushing for a more diverse pool of commencement speakers. “As tuition and student loan debt grow at historic rates, what are students getting for their money?” asked YAF President Ron Robinson. “An education from leftist professors that — combined with the Obama administration’s policies — has left 53 percent of recent grads unemployed or underemployed. These commencement speakers are just the icing on higher education’s indoctrination cake.”

YAF said this year’s commencement speaker schedule includes 17 conservatives, 62 liberals and the rest either still vacant or filled with a speaker with an unknown political bent like actress Julie Andrews, who is speaking at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and former Orioles great Cal Ripken, who will speak at the University of Maryland’s commencement this weekend.

It could have been worse, though. In YAF’s 2012 analysis, there were only nine conservative commencement speakers at the top 99 schools.

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It turns out that the Housing Bubble and the Higher Education Bubble have the same root cause: failure to scrutinize income.

In The American, the online magazine of the American Enterprise Institute, Jackson Toby analyzes how this failure will impact the next generation.

The portfolio of federally guaranteed student loans passed the $1 trillion mark in early 2012, and it continues to grow. The portfolio consists not only of loans for students from low-income families currently in college but also of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of loans taken out by students who graduated from college decades ago or quit before graduating without fully repaying their loans.

Until quite recently, about a third of college graduates didn’t have any loan indebtedness when they graduated. Some were lucky enough to have had parents or other relatives who financed their higher educations; others went to low-cost community colleges for their first two years before transferring to senior colleges, worked at low-paying jobs, and saved for college expenses. But the proportion of graduating seniors with student-loan debt has been increasing as the cost of college keeps rising. The average four-year college graduate who took out a loan owed $26,600 in 2011, and this does not count college dropouts who incur burdensome debts before giving up. The average unpaid student loan was $23,650 for 2008 graduates and $18,650 for 2004 graduates.

One effect of sizeable student loans on graduates is to make it necessary to find a good job quickly. If graduates fail to find good jobs, they are trapped in a prolonged adolescent limbo, burdening their parents economically and delaying the responsibilities of marriage and children. Former students will eventually default on a considerable portion of these loans — a reasonable estimate is 40 percent — or die before paying them off. This means that student debt is likely to be a permanent drain on taxpayers, as defaults add to the ballooning federal debt.

Defaulters suffer too, as their credit standings will be ruined for years. Even some graduates of professional schools discover that they cannot find jobs in the professions they borrowed large amounts of money to train for — and cannot repay their loans. Nine graduates of New York Law School accused their alma mater of misleading them about their postgraduate employment prospects and sued.

Causes of the Student Loan Crisis

Student loans are risky because of two aspects of a trillion-dollar misunderstanding:

1.    The failure of many students...

Sarah Hofmann of The Daily Caller reports.

Colgate professor sends insanely condescending email to senior class president

After Colgate University the senior class council president began telling tales of his drunken exploits during his speech at a senior class champagne brunch, one of the school’s professors made it very clear she wasn’t laughing.

Education professor Barabara Regenspan immediately walked out of the event and reportedly sent the following caustic email to the student:

Dear Matt: I was so disgusted by your speech today that I had to walk out on an event I was, before your words, thoroughly enjoying. Do you think that members of campus safety were entertained by the antics of you and your drinking buddies that caused them to respond to a call in the middle of the night?

Do you think most of the faculty sitting in front of you who have worked to develop the intellect and compassion of your fellow class members were entertained to hear that your prized memories of Colgate involve excessive drinking and causing working people to take care of a spoiled brat and his friends in the middle of the night?

Do you think that an international student and/or a student of color would be helped in his medical school interview by reports of such in-group bonding jokes at an interview? Does it not occur to you that the very faculty being honored today are opposed to the rich white boys drinking club and its network that is one (unfortunate) aspect of the Colgate experience, and forms a relatively small part (I have to believe based on my own wonderful dealings with one city’s association) of its otherwise inspiring alumni network?

Here’s the best part of the story.

Reviews of the professor on Rate My Professors include the following: “She is absolutely out of her mind,” “Pretty much nuts but VERY enthusiastic,” “absolutely incomphrehensible,” and “You will be frustrated by her insane ramblings.”

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A Potemkin Village is an impressive facade designed to hide an adverse condition.

Similarly, today’s campuses could be considered Potemkin Institutions.   In the American Conservative,  Alan Jacobs reviews a book on the current state of higher education that is written by Jeffrey Selingo, the editor-at-large of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Jeffrey Selingo, who has written a book about American colleges and universities, says: “One of the fears, and one of my fears, is that we might become a country where the next generation is less educated than the generation that preceded it.”

A major part of the problem is that colleges and universities have invested more strenuously in amenities than in education, with the assumption that students absorbed in the delights of their dining halls and climbing walls won’t notice that their teachers are largely underpaid adjuncts who have to jump from course to course and college to college to try to get something close to minimum-wage levels of pay. (Consider this: “About 70 percent of the instructional faculty at all colleges is off the tenure track, whether as part-timers or full-timers, a proportion that has crept higher over the past decade.”)

You want to think some about amenities? Then read Freddie DeBoer’s account of his visit to the France A Cordova Recreational Sports Center at Purdue University.

The Cordova Recreational Sports Center is five stories and about 338,000 square feet— not a misprint— of Gleaming Fitness Palace. I don’t say “gleaming” loosely. Like most new construction at American universities, the GFP is a beautiful melding of glass and steel, designed, no doubt, by some pricey architect.

It really is lovely to look at. It looks like… money.

But why is the investing in such amenities problematic? Because colleges borrowed heavily to create them at a very bad time to go deeply into debt, and in the naïve belief that their amenities would be uniquely wonderful. But if everyone is doing it, or has already done it, then the amenities cancel each other out, leaving schools with the old problem: how do we distinguish what we have to offer from what everyone else has to offer?

….. So if you want the state-of-the-art rec center, that’s cool, but just remember that the price you’ll pay for that is to have most of your classes taught by graduate students and contingent faculty, the first of whom won’t have the experience and the second of whom won’t have the...

The book was written by former Secretary of Education, Bill Bennett.

Here’s what David DesRosiers of The Washington Times had to say.

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Is College Worth It?’

William J. Bennett and David Wilezol’s “Is College Worth It?” asks and authoritatively answers one of life’s biggest questions.

The orthodox answer to the question, the authors...

Government regulations cannot create good health.

Knox College student Alex Uzarowicz takes a look at one governor’s choices to examine why personal responsibility is the key to a healthy life style:

Governor Chris Christie embodies this type of individual responsibility. He’s leading a responsible path.

In a recent post at College Insurrection, we profiled Swarthmore’s descent into madness over divestment.

What will the student activists demanding divestment say when they’re hit with a massive tuition increase?

Kevin Kiley of Inside Higher Ed reports.

How to Weigh the Future

Would you be willing to pay about $13,000 more a year in...

The extent of the Internal Revenue Service’s harassment of conservative groups just being uncovered, as more conservative groups come forward with stories of their experiences with this government agency.

In his Red State diary, Mike Krempasky reports on the special attention the Leadership Institute in Arlington received. Since being established in 1979,...

It’s college graduation season and you’ll be shocked to learn that few colleges have invited conservatives to be commencement speakers.

In light of this predict...

College Insurrection has been following Fisher v. University of Texas, a case before the Supreme Court that would end government-imposed affirmative action at American universities.

Kristin Tate of Emerson College argues on that affirmative action policies are essentially government-sponsored racism in The College Conservative:

Affirmative action is a form of racism. These policies, intended...

Cooper Union has provided free education to college students for years but it’s not immune to the dismal economy and starting this fall, they will charge tuition for the first time.

That news didn’t sit well with some people who stupidly cling to the idea that everything should be free.

Dantel Hood of...

We recently took a look at a disagreement over diversity at a small liberal arts college in Maine, which brought the magnitude campus groupthink into the public eye.

Charles C. Johnson and Ginni Thomas of The Daily Caller interview National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood on the details and the...

Conservative activist James O’Keefe was at Northwestern University recently, urging Chicago-area fans of Andrew Breitbart to continue the late activist’s legacy.

The Daily Northwestern Managing Editor Patrick Svitek files this report:

“I can’t do it alone,” O’Keefe told about 40 people in a Technological Institute auditorium. “They have come at me with everything....

The Department of Education (DOE) has hit the University of Texas – Arlington with an $82,500 fine for allegedly misreporting crime statistics.

Scott Greer of Campus Reform files this report on the details of the case:

According the DOE, the school misclassified and underreported certain crimes that were committed on its campus that...