The Week: What You Need to Know About the Past 7 Days

Riled Over Restrooms

How you explain North Carolina’s House Bill 2 depends on your point of view. Its backers say that it protects people of faith from “radical local policies” that could force them to do things like participate in gay weddings, and that it also protects women and children from encountering transgender people in restrooms. But to critics it is “literally the most anti-LGBT legislation in the country,” in the words of Mayor Jennifer W. Roberts of Charlotte, the state’s largest city.

The law, passed by legislators and signed the same day by Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, got a lot of attention on campuses last week as administrators and faculty members scrambled to understand how its various provisions might affect their institutions. Public universities, for instance, will have to abide by the law’s new limits on anti-bias policies — and particularly with the provision that says transgender people have no legal right to choose restrooms and locker rooms based on the gender they identify with. While almost all institutions have some single-occupancy restrooms, they may not be evenly distributed across campuses, and changing rooms that provide appropriate levels of privacy are comparatively recent arrivals.

The state’s private universities were quick to note that they aren’t covered by the new law. But nonetheless they worry that House Bill 2 and the widespread publicity surrounding it might make some students think twice about applying to North Carolina colleges, and might also make it more difficult to recruit faculty members and other employees. Evelyne Huber, chair of the political-science department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, summed up concerns in a single sentence: “Who wants to come to a state that legislates discrimination?”

Last week the governors of Virginia and Georgia vetoed legislation with some of the same aims, with the latter — Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican — suggesting that the measure was “essentially a solution in search of a problem,” as The Washington Post put it.

... Or Not

Far above the Mason-Dixon line, meanwhile, the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art announced it will no longer assign restrooms to men and women. All will be gender-neutral, with new signs identifying the facilities as a Restroom With Urinals and Stalls, a Restroom With Only Stalls, or a Restroom Single Occupancy.

“We are creatures of habit and most of us will continue using those restrooms that we normally have used, but they will no longer be owned by a specific gender,” wrote the institution’s acting president, William E. Mea, in an all-campus email. “I also ask that none of us practice gender policing, where we attempt to restrict someone from using the same restroom we are using or make them feel uncomfortable for doing so. If you feel uncomfortable sharing a restroom, then the single-occupancy restrooms will now be available to you.”

Silly Season

It used to be said — before the Internet, before cable — that politicians knew they were really in trouble with the public when Johnny Carson started making jokes about them during the Tonight Show monologue. Frank Bruni’s opinion column in The New York Times may not pack the same punch Carson once did, but when Mr. Bruni devotes 800 words to satirizing the state of admissions at highly selective colleges, their leaders might want to ask whether they have an image problem.

Mr. Bruni’s conceit takes to its natural conclusion the boasting many colleges do about how many applications they get for each available seat: Stanford, he jokes, has decided to admit no one at all to the Class of 2020, so that it can be “assured that no other school can match its desirability in the near future.”

“‘We had exceptional applicants, yes, but not a single student we couldn’t live without,’ said a Stanford administrator who requested anonymity. ‘In the stack of applications that I reviewed, I didn’t see any gold medalists from the last Olympics — Summer or Winter Games — and while there was a 17-year-old who’d performed surgery, it wasn’t open-heart or a transplant or anything like that. She’ll thrive at Yale.’”

Mr. Bruni’s snark was refreshing break from spring admissions mania. Wheaton College, in Massachusetts, crammed its president, its admissions dean, its mascot, and others into an SUV to hand-deliver acceptance letters to students in towns near the college. And a New York City high-school student learned that she had been accepted to Gettysburg College during a live outdoor Today Show segment with Al Roker, who had a basket of Gettysburg swag ready to hand her.

On the other hand, the website FiveThirtyEight put the season in perspective with a post titled “Shut Up About Harvard.” It notes that “more than three-quarters of U.S. undergraduates attend colleges that accept at least half their applicants; just 4 percent attend schools that accept 25 percent or less, and hardly any — well under 1 percent — attend schools like Harvard and Yale that accept less than 10 percent.” (Read more here.)

Gloom in Illinois

The state-budget standoff in Illinois that began with the start of the new fiscal year back in July shows no sign of ending. Last week Chicago State University, the hardest-hit among state institutions, took the extraordinary step of asking department heads to start collecting keys to campus facilities from employees and students in preparation “for possible widespread layoffs to begin as early as April 30.”

While the university subsequently rescinded the request — a spokesman said administrators had been given additional “clarity” about the shutdown process — the institution still expects to run out of money at the end of April unless the standoff ends. Administrators earlier canceled spring break and moved up the last day of classes so students could complete the semester before the anticipated layoffs begin.

Plus All This ...

The California State Auditor released a report slamming the University of California system’s out-of-state admissions policies, which the auditors said have “essentially deprived admittance to highly qualified residents” in favor of out-of-state students who pay higher tuition. The university responded with its own “straight talk” report, which says, in part, that “Providing adequate state funding is the best way to increase the number of California students at UC.” … A proposal in the Connecticut legislature to tax some of Yale University’s endowment income prompted Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, to suggest that Yale abandon New Haven and find new digs in Florida. “I can commit that we will not raise taxes on their endowment,” the governor said. ... Neo-Nazis hacked into some university networks and remotely printed fliers with anti-Semitic messages, the Associated Press reported. Among affected institutions were Brown and Princeton Universities and the University of Southern California. … Cornell University celebrated the start of spring break with a raucous parade featuring a giant puppet dragon built and operated by first-year architecture students. Dragon Day is a longtime tradition at the university.

Bad Bot!

Periodically the news offers some fresh insight into the human condition, but lately it’s hard to remember when one of those insights has been encouraging. The most recent, however, was particularly unnerving: As an experiment in machine learning, Microsoft created a bot to chat with young people via Twitter. The bot, named Tay, was supposed to “conduct research on conversational understanding” and to “engage and entertain people … through casual and playful conversation.”

The flaw in this plan, of course, was that it involved actual, real-life humans, who within a day had persuaded the gullible Tay to adopt their own bad habits. By the time Microsoft took the bot offline, it “disputed the existence of the Holocaust, referred to women and minorities with unpublishable words, and advocated genocide,” as The New York Times put it.

Tay will be getting “adjustments,” Microsoft said. But the humans?