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The Dartmouth
July 30, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Daily Debriefing

Brown University will pay $31.5 million to Providence, R.I. to offset the city's budget deficit and prevent a bankruptcy filing, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported. Under the new deal, Brown will provide an additional $3.9 million per year on top of what the school already pays for the next five years, followed by $2 million annually until 2022. The payments will begin this fiscal year, which ends on June 30, bringing the university's total annual contribution to municipal coffers to $8 million, The Chronicle reported. The agreement is the latest in a series of movements by various city leaders to turn to universities which are exempt from property taxes for revenue support in overcoming budget deficits created by pension plans.

Harvard University will invest $60 million in free, interactive online education for students in the form of massively open online courses, or MOOCs, Inside Higher Education reported. Harvard will collaborate with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has its own MOOCs platform, called MITx, to create edX. The two institutions expect that other peer universities will join the edX platform, allowing worldwide educators access to courses offered by the participating institutions from a single website, Inside Higher Ed reported. EdX follows initiatives by Stanford University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of California, Berkeley to offer courses online, Inside Higher Ed reported.

In a column for the Chicago Tribune, writer Rex Huppke recently declared the death of facts, which have been replaced by rumor, innuendo and "emphatic assertion" as the determinants of truth. Following an allegation by Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., that 80 Democratic members of Congress belong to the Communist Party a claim he defended even after it was proven false Huppke suggested that if a politician can fully support an untrue statement, facts must be "meaningless and dead." Dartmouth government professor Brendan Nyhan said on National Public Radio that this phenomenon exemplifies the "backfire effect," an effect in which people's biases determine whether or not they will accept a statement as true, and offering them information that proves the contrary can result in even more faith in the original fallacy.