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WHEN THE CORE SHRINKS: Senate Bill 37, the University of Houston, and the Contested Future of General Education

.Reading time 43 minutes.

A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI

Executive Summary

In the fall of 2025 the University of Houston began dismantling and rebuilding the required course of study that every undergraduate must complete. Reporting by the Houston Chronicle and corroborating coverage describe a plan that could shrink UH’s state-mandated core curriculum by roughly 40 percent, a review conducted largely out of public view, and a faculty that says the administration’s reading of the new law is far broader than the law itself requires. The trigger is Texas Senate Bill 37, a 2025 overhaul of public higher-education governance that hands governing boards recurring authority to review what colleges teach and reduces faculty senates to an advisory role.

UH is not an outlier. It is one data point in a national movement in which state legislatures—overwhelmingly Republican-controlled—have taken direct control of the general education core: the 30–40 percent of a bachelor’s degree that sits outside the major. Florida, Ohio, Indiana, South Carolina, Arkansas and others have removed courses, mandated founding-documents and civics instruction, tied tenure to “intellectual diversity,” or shifted gen-ed authority to legislatively created civics centers.

This paper does three things. First, it reconstructs what the reporting actually says, leaning heavily on UH’s own words and on parallel coverage. Second, it maps the national trend. Third—its main purpose—it examines where this leads through the lens the reader cares about most: the cost of college, and the related question of whether students genuinely hear more than one side.

The cost findings are counterintuitive. Cutting the core does not by itself lower the price of a degree, because a bachelor’s still requires about 120 credit hours; trimming the core mostly reshuffles those hours rather than eliminating them. The real cost risks lie elsewhere: in transfer friction if Texas’s guaranteed 42-hour transfer block fragments, in longer time-to-degree if course supply tightens, and in the administrative overhead of continuous political review. On the viewpoint question, both sides claim the same goal—students exposed to competing ideas—but disagree sharply about whether the disease is one-sided faculty or the cure is a one-sided mandate that chills the very debate it claims to protect.

1. What the Reporting Describes

Note on sourcing. The specific Houston Chronicle article referenced here could not be retrieved directly for this analysis. Its central findings have therefore been reconstructed and corroborated from primary sources—the University of Houston president’s own campus communications—and from parallel reporting by the Texas Tribune, Inside Higher Ed, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Houston Public Media and the Associated Press. Where a figure or quotation appears below, it is drawn from those corroborating records.

The 40 percent and the “secret” review

The headline finding is scale. UH’s core curriculum consists of 42 semester credit hours—the standard Texas Core mandated for every public institution—and the university is reported to be preparing to cut roughly 40 percent of it. The reductions grow out of a working group the provost convened over the summer to sort core courses for compliance with SB 37. Faculty critics quoted in the coverage said the work was done largely in secret, raising “serious concerns” about violating shared-governance principles and about whether the university’s interpretation of the statute is “overly expansive.” The completed review was presented to the UH System Board of Regents at its March 12, 2026 meeting; the system must report its findings to the state by January 2027.

“Teach, not indoctrinate”: UH’s own framing

The tenor of the effort is set in President Renu Khator’s own November 21, 2025 message to faculty. She framed the review around exposure to competing ideas:

“Educating students is a serious responsibility, one that comes with our commitment to expose our students to different perspectives. Our responsibility is to give them the ability to form their own opinions, not to force a particular one on them. Our guiding principle is to teach them, not to indoctrinate them.”  — Renu Khator, UH President & Chancellor, Nov. 21, 2025

That message launched two parallel tracks. The first, required by SB 37, asked the Offices of the Provost and General Counsel to review every core course against four statutory conditions and sort each into one of three buckets: (A) meets the conditions, (B) does not, or (C) partially meets them. The second track “extended the spirit” of that review to all courses, asking every instructor to audit their own titles, syllabi and content, and asking deans and chairs to provide an “objective assessment.” In her January 27, 2026 update, Khator confirmed the SB 37 core review was complete and headed to the regents.

The checklist, the certifications, and the pushback

What turned a compliance exercise into a campus conflict was the machinery underneath it. A five-page checklist surfaced at a February 11 faculty-council curriculum-committee meeting, asking instructors to rate each course “yes,” “partially” or “no” on whether it requires students to adopt a political or ideological viewpoint, presents multiple perspectives, and avoids penalizing students for their beliefs. According to faculty present, the agenda had not mentioned the checklist and committee members said they had not drafted it; administrators said it was written by a faculty group but declined to name the participants.

Separately, several deans asked faculty to sign statements certifying they “teach, not indoctrinate.” In the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Dean Daniel P. O’Connor wrote on February 3 that he had “no evidence” any instructor was violating the university’s commitment, but described the acknowledgement as necessary documentation. In the Honors College, Dean Heidi Appel wrote that full-time faculty who declined would be ineligible for merit salary increases, and part-time faculty could risk reappointment, with a February 9 deadline. Appel and Graduate College of Social Work Dean Yarneccia Dyson both cited language stating SB 37 requires courses “do not endorse specific policies, ideologies or legislation”—wording that had appeared in earlier drafts of the bill but was removed before the law passed.

Faculty resistance was pointed. Robert Zaretsky, who has taught at UH for 36 years, refused to sign:

“When I saw the word indoctrination, for me, that’s a red line. It was as if there was a good chance that we are indoctrinating our students.”  — Robert Zaretsky, UH professor

Zaretsky said his tenure let him refuse where adjuncts “who have bills to pay” could not, and he warned that the requirement to teach “multiple perspectives” on every controversial topic could overwhelm students and “sink the course.” Using language drafted by the campus AAUP chapter, faculty called the premise of widespread indoctrination a “straw man” and said signing could be read as “some admission of guilt.” On March 2, 174 UH professors urged the faculty council to formally vote on the checklist rather than let it advance by “silent approval.” The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) warned that compelling faculty to affirm they present certain viewpoints could violate First Amendment academic-freedom protections. UH’s chief legal officer, Dona Cornell, responded that the review simply aims to “publicly verify… that a UH education is built on the highest standards of excellence.”

Importantly, the review is already changing what is taught. Documents show that in the Graduate College of Social Work, revised “approved” syllabi for spring cut several readings focused on race, gender and sexuality and removed explicit references to those topics from course objectives.

A statewide pattern

UH’s episode sits inside a wider Texas wave that accelerated after SB 37 took effect in September 2025 and after a video of a Texas A&M professor discussing gender identity drew conservative backlash. As the Texas Tribune catalogued: Texas State University flagged hundreds of courses and told faculty to use an artificial-intelligence tool to rewrite titles and descriptions in “more neutral” language; Texas Tech’s chancellor required certain race- and gender-related instruction to be disclosed and sometimes pre-approved; Texas A&M regents restricted courses addressing “race or gender ideology” without written approval; and University of Texas regents adopted a rule that students must be able to graduate without studying “unnecessary controversial subjects,” taking a “broad and balanced” approach when such topics arise.

2. What Senate Bill 37 Actually Requires

Signed in 2025 and effective September 1, 2025, SB 37 rewires the governance of Texas public higher education. Three provisions matter most for curriculum and cost.

Recurring board review of the core. Governing boards must review the general-education curriculum at least once every five years. Each core course must be judged against four conditions: that it is (1) foundational and fundamental to a sound postsecondary curriculum; (2) necessary to prepare students for civic and professional life; (3) equips students for the workforce and the betterment of society; and (4) ensures a breadth of knowledge consistent with accreditation standards. The law also directs that curricula be free of content promoting racial, gender, ethnic or religious superiority. Notably, the statute does not prohibit teaching particular topics, and it does not require instructors to submit written assurances about their teaching—both features UH added in its implementation.

Faculty governance downgraded. SB 37 makes faculty senates “advisory only.” Boards—not professors—now establish any faculty council or senate, and university presidents may appoint members. This is the structural reason the UH checklist could move forward despite curriculum-committee members saying they had neither drafted nor approved it.

A new oversight layer. The law creates an Office of Excellence in Higher Education, with an ombudsman to field complaints and police compliance—an enforcement channel that did not previously exist. Supporters call this transparency to taxpayers; critics call it a standing mechanism for political pressure.

The Texas Core it acts upon. Since 2014 the Texas Core Curriculum has been a uniform 42-hour block across all public institutions, set in the Texas Education Code and overseen by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB). It spans eight components—communication; mathematics; life and physical sciences; language, philosophy and culture; creative arts; American history; government/political science; and social and behavioral sciences—plus a component-area option. Crucially, completing that 42-hour block at one Texas public institution obligates every other Texas public institution to accept it as a block, with no re-taking of core courses. A separate 2025 measure permits the THECB to approve a core of fewer than 42 hours where doing so accelerates “workforce-aligned credentials”—the statutory doorway through which a 40 percent reduction could pass.

3. Not Just Texas: A National Map

The through-line nationally is a transfer of authority over the core from faculty to legislators and politically appointed boards, paired with a substantive tilt toward Western-civilization and civics content and away from courses centered on diversity and social justice. Inside Higher Ed reported in June 2026 that “red state lawmakers” are reshaping “what students must learn before they can graduate,” and that a report counted 21 higher-education “censorship” bills enacted in 2025—every one of them in a state with a Republican-controlled legislature. The table below summarizes representative measures.

StateMeasureYearCore-curriculum thrust
TexasSB 372025Five-year board review of the core against four conditions; faculty senates advisory; new oversight office. Sparked 40% core cut at UH and course reviews system-wide.
FloridaSB 2662023Bars gen-ed courses teaching “identity politics” or systemic-racism theory. Board removed Principles of Sociology from the gen-ed menu (2024); FSU pulled 432 courses; FIU dropped 22.
OhioSB 12025Bans DEI programs; adds a required “American civic literacy” course; post-tenure review; bars full-time faculty strikes; mandates posted syllabi and rules for “controversial” topics.
IndianaSB 2022024Ties tenure and promotion to “intellectual diversity” as judged by boards of trustees; creates a student/employee complaint system; redefines “diversity.”
South CarolinaREACH Act2021Requires a course covering the Declaration, Constitution, Federalist Papers, Emancipation Proclamation and African American founding documents to graduate.
ArkansasStrengthening AR Education Act2025Part of the same wave narrowing curricular discretion and expanding state direction of required content.
CaliforniaCSU ethnic-studies mandate2020Counter-example: a Democratic legislature added a required ethnic-studies course across the nation’s largest four-year system—evidence that legislating the core is bipartisan in method, if not in aim.

Two structural escalations deserve emphasis. In several states, legislatively created civics centers—semi-autonomous units that lawmakers, not faculty, established—are being given power to choose or teach which courses satisfy gen-ed requirements, moving formerly siloed entities to the center of the curriculum. And at Auburn University, the board took “full curricular control” and dissolved the faculty senate outright. Because gen-ed inclusion drives enrollment and funding to departments, the authority to decide what “counts” is also the authority to decide which departments thrive or wither.

The intellectual architecture on each side

The reforms have an explicit rationale. The Manhattan Institute’s Correcting the Core argues that most anti-DEI laws left a loophole—“at least 12 states with DEI bans still allow public universities to mandate diversity-focused courses”—and that a “more strategic” fix is to tighten standards for what qualifies as gen ed and review courses periodically, which it frames as preserving academic freedom better than outright censorship a judge might strike down. The National Association of Scholars goes further, urging states to create “Schools of Intellectual Freedom” to control the humanities portion of gen ed. Ohio’s Senator Jerry Cirino put the motive plainly:

“It’s not just that I want more conservative stuff. I want balance. And these universities, in the past, have not been delivering balance.”  — Ohio State Sen. Jerry Cirino, author of SB 1

Critics answer that this is “intrusion” of a kind higher education has not seen. University of Kentucky emeritus professor John Thelin said he had “never seen such intrusion” into curriculum and was struck by how effective it has been. University of North Texas professor Barrett Taylor observed that “policymakers are casting higher education as a partisan good.” Yet even a sympathetic critic concedes a real underlying problem. Bard College’s Roosevelt Montás, a defender of liberal education, argues that much of what passes for a core is “general education in name only”:

“General education is a kind of backwater hodgepodge of things that happen to be in the catalog… no two students have the same general education… In a very real sense, universities have withdrawn from the task of general education. There is, in fact, fire from which the smoke is coming.”  — Roosevelt Montás, Bard College

4. The Cost-of-College Analysis

Because reducing the core is often sold as efficiency, it is natural to assume it makes a degree cheaper. The honest answer is: mostly not directly—and possibly the opposite. The cost story has five parts.

4.1 Cutting the core does not cut the bill

A Texas bachelor’s degree requires roughly 120 credit hours, of which the core is 42—about 35 percent. Nationally, general education runs 30–40 percent of a degree. The decisive point is that the 120-hour total does not fall when the core shrinks. If UH cuts its core by 40 percent—from 42 hours to roughly 25—students still need 120 hours to graduate. The freed ≈17 hours do not disappear from the bill; they migrate into the major, electives or new requirements. At UH’s 2024–25 resident rate of about $362 per credit hour (tuition only), those 17 hours represent roughly $6,200 of tuition that is relocated, not removed. A price cut only materializes if the total hours to a credential fall—which is precisely why the “workforce-aligned credential” acceleration pathway matters, and why watching whether total degree hours drop is more informative than watching the core shrink.

4.2 The transfer machine: the biggest hidden cost

Texas’s single most valuable cost-control device for students is the guaranteed 42-hour transfer block. Roughly half of Texas bachelor’s recipients pass through a community college, and the block is what lets them move without re-taking core courses or losing credit. Anything that lets institutions diverge in what counts as core—narrower lists, campus-specific substitutions, courses removed at one school but not another—introduces the risk that transferred credits no longer map cleanly. When credits do not transfer, students retake courses, pay twice, and graduate later.

The financial penalty is concrete because Texas and peer states already punish excess hours. Under excess-credit-hour surcharges, students who exceed roughly 110–130 percent of the credits their degree requires can pay double the per-credit tuition on the overage (Florida doubles tuition past 110 percent; Arizona charges 120 percent of the rate past 145 hours). Research finds these policies do little to speed completion and mostly deepen debt—especially for low- and middle-income students. A fragmenting core would push more transfer students across exactly these thresholds. And every added semester carries an opportunity cost of forgone earnings—commonly $30,000–$50,000 for a year out of the full-time workforce—that typically dwarfs the tuition itself.

4.3 Course supply and department contraction

Because gen-ed inclusion drives enrollment and dollars to departments, removing courses from the core can shrink the departments that offered them. Fewer faculty and fewer sections mean scheduling bottlenecks: required courses that fill up, waitlists, and students unable to get the classes they need on time. Bottlenecks are a well-documented driver of longer time-to-degree, which—again—raises both tuition paid and earnings forgone. A narrower core can thus raise the effective cost of a degree even as it advertises simplicity.

4.4 The overhead of permanent review

SB 37 institutionalizes continuous compliance: five-year board reviews, general-counsel involvement in curriculum, new oversight offices, complaint channels, and—at some institutions—AI tools to rewrite course descriptions and stipends to pay faculty reviewers. UH offered stipends to review spring courses; Texas State licensed an AI rewriting tool; states are standing up civics centers. These are real recurring expenditures. They rarely appear on a tuition bill as a line item, but administrative cost growth is ultimately financed by tuition and appropriations—the same two pockets students and taxpayers fill.

4.5 The value-and-trust backdrop

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Public confidence in higher education fell from 57 percent in 2015 to a record-low 36 percent in 2023, recovered to 42 percent in 2025, then slipped to about 38 percent in 2026. The share of Americans calling college “very important” collapsed from 75 percent in 2010 to 35 percent in 2025. Gallup and others attribute the erosion to three intertwined worries: cost and debt, perceived political bias or indoctrination, and doubts about job-market payoff. Khator herself opened her State of the University address by citing this collapse in trust and warning that “the attacks—justifiable or not—are constant.”

This cuts two ways, and honest analysis should hold both. For the reforms: if a tighter, cheaper-to-navigate, workforce-aligned and demonstrably “balanced” core restores public confidence, it protects the entire value proposition of a public degree and the appropriations that keep tuition down. Against the reforms: if politicized review degrades academic quality, chills teaching, and turns the credential into a contested political object, it can erode the very value and trust it claims to defend—while adding cost. The evidence to adjudicate this is not yet in; the mechanisms, however, are visible now.

Cost mechanisms at a glance.

MechanismDirectionWhy
Shrinking the core itself~NeutralDegree still 120 hours; core hours are reshuffled into major/electives, not deleted.
Fragmented transfer blockHigher ▲Lost/duplicated credits, excess-hour surcharges, extra semesters for transfer and community-college students.
Course-supply bottlenecksHigher ▲Department contraction reduces sections; waitlists lengthen time-to-degree.
Compliance & oversight overheadHigher ▲Recurring reviews, counsel, new offices, AI tools, civics centers—financed by tuition/appropriations.
Fewer total hours to a credentialLower ▼Only genuine price cut—requires the “workforce-aligned” sub-42 pathway to reduce the 120-hour total.
Restored public trust (if it occurs)Lower ▼Protects appropriations and degree value that hold down net price—contested and unproven.

5. Governance and Academic Freedom

Underneath the cost mechanics is a question of who decides. For a century, the core was mostly faculty territory. SB 37 and its analogues move that authority to governing boards and, through them, to the legislatures that appoint them. Supporters see overdue accountability: boards are the public’s representatives, and faculty had produced the incoherent “hodgepodge” Montás describes. Opponents see expertise displaced by politics and point to the concrete tools now in use—mandatory-sounding certifications, pre-approval of race- and gender-related instruction, complaint offices, and the reduction of faculty senates to advisory bodies presidents may appoint.

The academic-freedom objection is not merely a faculty grievance. FIRE—an organization that also defends conservative speech on campus—warned UH that compelling instructors to affirm they present particular viewpoints could violate the First Amendment. The chilling-effect concern is that instructors, unsure what will draw a complaint, will simply avoid contested material. If that happens, students hear fewer perspectives, not more—an outcome discussed directly in Section 8, because it bears on the reader’s central concern.

6. Workforce and Return on Investment

A core rationale of SB 37’s four conditions is workforce alignment. There is a defensible case: employers and students alike complain that degrees do not map to jobs, and a core weighted toward communication, quantitative reasoning, civics and clearly transferable skills can strengthen the payoff and the public’s sense that college “works.” If narrowing also accelerates workforce-aligned credentials under the sub-42 pathway, it could genuinely lower cost and raise ROI.

The counter-case is that the courses most often targeted—sociology, ethnic and gender studies, and other social-science offerings—also build skills employers say they want (analysis of data about people, cross-cultural communication, writing), and that labor-market value is not the only measure of a degree’s worth. The ROI argument, in other words, does not point cleanly in one direction; it depends on what replaces the trimmed courses and whether the replacement is rigorous or merely ideological. That is an empirical question worth tracking rather than asserting.

7. Access and Equity

The distributional effects fall hardest on the least-resourced students. Transfer and community-college students—disproportionately first-generation, working, and lower-income—depend most on the guaranteed transfer block and are most exposed to excess-hour surcharges and lost credits if the core fragments. Within the faculty, the pressure lands hardest on contingent instructors: UH’s Zaretsky could refuse to sign because he has tenure, while adjuncts on semester contracts—who teach a large share of introductory core courses—faced reappointment risk and merit-pay consequences. A policy that is a debate for the tenured can be a job threat for the contingent, and the people teaching the most cost-sensitive students are often the most vulnerable to it.

8. The Central Question: Is “One-Sidedness” the Disease or the Cure?

The concern animating this paper is not which topics appear in a catalog but the slant—the worry that a student hears essentially one side. That concern deserves to be taken seriously on its merits, and so does the strongest response to it. Both are laid out below; they are in genuine tension.

The case that the slant is real

The empirical starting point is not in dispute: faculty lean left, heavily in some fields. A 2022 study of more than 12,000 professors found Democrats outnumbering Republicans by about 8.5 to 1; a national survey put faculty at roughly 50 percent liberal, 30 percent moderate and 11 percent conservative, with the imbalance widest in the humanities and social sciences and narrowest in business and STEM. Surveys find that majorities of faculty themselves favor more political diversity on campus. When one “side” of the professoriate outnumbers the other by high single digits in the very departments that supply most core humanities and social-science courses, it is reasonable to worry that some students encounter a narrow band of views presented as settled. Cirino’s framing—“I want balance”—lands because the intuition behind it is grounded. And Montás’s concession that there is “fire from which the smoke is coming” comes from a defender of liberal education, not a critic of it.

The case that the cure carries its own slant

Three problems complicate the remedy. First, composition is not the same as indoctrination. That a professor votes one way does not establish that students are coerced; the UH faculty’s objection—that the checklist and certifications treat “widespread indoctrination” as an established fact when administrators conceded they had “no evidence” of violations—is a fair one. Second, the cure has a viewpoint too. Removing courses on race, gender and sexuality while mandating founding-documents and Western-civilization content is not a neutral act; it substitutes one set of emphases for another. A student who now reads only the Federalist Papers and never a critique of them has not been exposed to more sides—only to different ones. Replacing a perceived progressive monoculture with a legislated traditionalist one does not, by itself, increase the number of perspectives a student meets.

Third, and most corrosive to the stated goal, is the chilling effect. The surest way for an instructor to avoid a complaint under a vague “balance” mandate is to drop contested material entirely. Zaretsky’s worry—that requiring “multiple perspectives” on everything is unworkable and will make instructors retreat from controversy—points to an outcome in which students hear fewer competing arguments, not more. A rule intended to guarantee that students hear more than one side can, in practice, teach professors that the safest number of sides is zero.

The irony, and what would actually help

The deepest point is that both sides claim the same goal. Khator says the aim is to “expose students to different perspectives… not to force a particular one.” The AAUP says the same thing when it defends academic freedom. Cirino wants “balance.” FIRE wants open inquiry. The disagreement is not about whether students should hear multiple sides—everyone professes that—but about who is trusted to deliver it and whether top-down mandates produce real viewpoint diversity or merely a new orthodoxy plus self-censorship.

If the genuine objective is that students hear more than one side, the interventions most likely to achieve it are different from the ones most in evidence. Measures that add perspectives—requiring genuinely pluralistic reading lists, protecting instructors who assign opposing viewpoints, hiring for intellectual as well as demographic diversity, and teaching students to steelman positions they reject—tend to increase the number of sides in the room. Measures that subtract them—removing courses, compelling loyalty-style certifications, and pre-approving what may be taught—tend to shrink it, whatever their intent. A reader who worries most about one-sidedness has reason to scrutinize the method of a reform as closely as its stated motive, because a one-sided cure and a one-sided disease leave the student in the same place.

9. Where This Is Leading: Four Scenarios

The trajectory is not fixed; it depends on forthcoming THECB rules and on choices individual boards make. Four scenarios bound the range.

Scenario A — Streamlining. Boards trim genuine bloat, add coherent civics, and keep the transfer block intact. Cost is roughly neutral to slightly lower; quality arguably improves; the “general education in name only” problem eases. This is the reformers’ best case.

Scenario B — Fragmentation. Campuses diverge in what counts as core, the 42-hour block frays, and transfer and community-college students lose credits and time. Cost rises, borne by exactly the students least able to absorb it. This is the most direct cost-of-college risk.

Scenario C — Chill and contraction. Certifications, complaint offices and pre-approval push instructors to drop contested material; targeted departments shrink; course supply tightens and bottlenecks lengthen time-to-degree. Students hear fewer perspectives and pay more for the privilege—the outcome most at odds with the reforms’ own stated goal.

Scenario D — Oversight as permanent infrastructure. Review offices, civics centers and compliance apparatus become standing fixtures with recurring cost and ongoing authority over what “counts,” institutionalizing political review of curriculum regardless of which party holds the legislature. California’s ethnic-studies mandate is the reminder that the tool, once built, is available to every side.

The realistic path is a blend, varying by campus and leadership. The single most important variable for cost is whether the guaranteed transfer block survives the reshaping; the single most important variable for the reader’s viewpoint concern is whether the method chosen adds perspectives or removes them.

10. What to Watch

A short watchlist for tracking where UH—and the country—actually ends up:

  • Total degree hours, not just core hours. A price cut is real only if the 120-hour requirement falls; a smaller core alone is not savings.
  • The transfer block. Do THECB rules preserve the guaranteed 42-hour block, or let campuses diverge? This is the biggest single cost lever.
  • Excess-hour data. Watch whether transfer students increasingly cross surcharge thresholds or add semesters after core changes.
  • Course supply. Section counts and waitlists in affected departments—early indicators of bottleneck-driven delay.
  • Method of review. Certifications, pre-approvals and course removals (subtractive) versus pluralistic requirements and academic-freedom protections (additive).
  • Whether students hear more sides or fewer. The stated goal; measure it by what is actually assigned and debated, not by the politics of the reform.

11. Bottom Line

The UH story is a local instance of a national reallocation of power over the college core from faculty to the state. On cost, the popular intuition is largely wrong: shrinking the core does not shrink the bill unless total credits fall, and several plausible effects—transfer fragmentation, course bottlenecks, compliance overhead—push cost up, especially for the most vulnerable students. On the concern that students hear only one side, the worry is grounded in real data about faculty composition—but the remedies most in evidence risk answering a one-sided disease with a one-sided cure, and the chilling effect they create can reduce the number of perspectives a student encounters rather than increase it. Everyone in this debate says they want students to think for themselves. Whether these particular reforms deliver that—or simply change which single narrative dominates—will be settled by method and implementation, and is worth watching closely on both counts.

Sources

Primary sources (University of Houston)

•  Renu Khator, “Curriculum and SB 37,” UH President’s Office, Nov. 21, 2025 — https://www.uh.edu/president/communications/communicae/2025-11-21-curriculum-and-sb37/

•  Renu Khator, “Update: SB 37 and Other Issues,” UH President’s Office, Jan. 27, 2026 — https://www.uh.edu/president/communications/communicae/2026-01-27-sb37-update/

•  Texas Core Curriculum at UH (42-hour core, components) — https://www.uh.edu/nursing/academics/undergraduate-programs/texas-core-curriculum/

Reporting

•  Jessica Priest, “GOP-led fight over allegations of student indoctrination raises tensions at University of Houston,” Texas Tribune, Mar. 9, 2026 — https://www.texastribune.org/2026/03/09/texas-university-houston-indoctrination-fight/

•  Ryan Quinn, “How GOP State Lawmakers Are Reshaping General Education,” Inside Higher Ed, Jun. 16, 2026 — https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/curriculum/2026/06/16/how-gop-state-lawmakers-are-reshaping-general-education

•  “U. of Houston Is Planning Big Cuts to Its Core Curriculum. Faculty Aren’t Happy,” Chronicle of Higher Education — https://www.chronicle.com/article/u-of-houston-is-planning-big-cuts-to-its-core-curriculum-faculty-arent-happy

•  “University of Houston asks professors to sign agreement ‘not to indoctrinate’ students,” Houston Public Media, Feb. 6, 2026 — https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/education/2026/02/06/542793/uh-professor-agreement-curriculum-texas-universities-sb-37/

•  “Florida institutions slash general education offerings,” Inside Higher Ed, Oct. 3, 2024 — https://www.insidehighered.com/news/governance/state-oversight/2024/10/03/florida-institutions-slash-general-education-offerings

•  “Report: State Lawmakers Enacted 21 Censorship Bills in 2025,” Inside Higher Ed, Jan. 15, 2026 — https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/curriculum/2026/01/15/report-state-lawmakers-enacted-21-censorship-bills-2025

Law and policy

•  Texas SB 37, 89th Legislature (bill text) — https://legiscan.com/TX/text/SB37/id/3205486

•  Senate Research Center, S.B. 37 Bill Analysis (PDF) — https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/89R/analysis/pdf/SB00037F.pdf

•  Texas Education Code § 61.822, Transfer of Credits; Core Curriculum — https://texas.public.law/statutes/tex._educ._code_section_61.822

•  THECB, Texas Core Curriculum Application Guide — https://reportcenter.highered.texas.gov/agency-publication/miscellaneous/waar-faq-texas-core-curriculum/

•  Ohio Senate Bill 1 (2025), overview — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_Senate_Bill_1_(2025)

•  Indiana Senate Bill 202 (2024), Inside Higher Ed — https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2024/03/04/bill-tying-tenure-intellectual-diversity-heads-governor

Data and context

•  Gallup, U.S. Public Trust in Higher Education (2025–26) — https://news.gallup.com/poll/692519/public-trust-higher-rises-recent-low.aspx

•  “A Closer Look at Faculty Political Diversity,” Inside Higher Ed, Feb. 26, 2026 — https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/02/26/closer-look-faculty-political-diversity

•  “Excess credit hour policies increase student debt,” Inside Higher Ed — https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/20/excess-credit-hour-policies-increase-student-debt

•  General education share of a bachelor’s degree (30–40%) — https://www.edvisorly.com/student-guides/gen-ed-requirements

Prepared as an independent analytical white paper. The referenced Houston Chronicle article was inaccessible at the time of writing; its findings were reconstructed and corroborated from the primary and secondary sources listed above. Figures are illustrative where noted. This paper is analysis, not legal or financial advice.

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A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI

A Confession Up Front

I have been in and around Texas municipal finance since 1972. I have read more budgets, audits, and commissioners court agendas than any sane person should. I thought I had at least a passing familiarity with every category of local government program that exists — public safety, utilities, parks, health, courts, jails, economic development, and all the alphabet-soup grant programs that flow through them.

Then last week I read an article in the San Antonio Report about something called a “crisis nursery,” and I realized I had never heard of it. Not once. Not in a budget document, not in a bond program, not in a county commissioners agenda, not in fifty-plus years of paying attention.

That bothered me enough to do something about it. So I did what I now do when my ignorance gets exposed: I put my AI research assistant to work. What follows is the product of that research — a layperson’s education on a program model that turns out to be older than most of my clients’ comprehensive plans, rarer than it ought to be, and cheaper than the systems it is designed to keep families out of. As always, I have tried to verify the key figures against original sources, but I want to be honest with my readers: the foundation of this post is AI-assisted research prompted by one newspaper article and my own admitted ignorance of the subject. Take it in that spirit, and check my numbers if you are in a position to act on them.

What Caught My Eye in San Antonio

The San Antonio Report story (Diego Medel, July 13, 2026) reported two developments moving on parallel tracks. First, Bexar County commissioners directed staff to explore creating a county-supported crisis nursery, with staff due back in August with recommendations on procurement and potential providers. Second, a coalition of San Antonio nonprofits — operating as the Safety Nest Network — revealed it has already been quietly running a collaborative version of the model for eight or nine months while waiting on the City of San Antonio to release a feasibility study that has been sitting in draft form for more than a year and a half.

A crisis nursery, for those as uninformed as I was, is a voluntary, licensed program that provides short-term care for children while a parent or caregiver deals with an emergency — a hospitalization, a mental health crisis, domestic violence, homelessness, a surgery, a substance abuse treatment stay. The key distinctions from foster care are that it is voluntary, temporary, and custody never changes hands. The family asks for help before the crisis becomes a Child Protective Services case, the children stay in a safe licensed setting for a few days, the parent gets connected to services, and the children go home.

Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar described the alternative in terms any first responder would recognize: deputies taking up collections among themselves to buy formula and diapers for children riding in patrol cars for hours while officers hunt for a relative. Children sitting in hospital emergency departments with no medical need, or waiting in CPS offices for a placement, simply because there is nowhere else for them to go during a family emergency.

The county’s funding idea is what got my municipal finance attention: roughly $1,600,000 previously budgeted for CPS family-based safety services caseworkers — positions the state has since taken over — could be redirected toward keeping families out of the child welfare system in the first place. That is a redeployment question, not a new-money question, and those are always the most interesting ones.

How Widespread Is This Model? Less Than You Would Think

Here is where my research surprised me. I assumed that if I had never heard of crisis nurseries, it must be a new idea. It is not. It is a forty-year-old idea that America funded, built, and then largely let wither.

The model got its national start with federal legislation — the Temporary Child Care for Children with Disabilities and Crisis Nursery Act of 1986, amended and expanded in 1992. According to research summarized by the ARCH National Respite Network, 47 states used that funding to establish a total of 175 crisis nurseries and two respite centers. That is a genuine national infrastructure buildout.

Then the dedicated federal funding stream went away, and so did most of the nurseries. According to a 2024 survey cited by SchoolHouse Connection, only 48 crisis nurseries remain in operation across the entire United States today. Seven of those are in one state — Illinois — which is no accident, because Illinois is the state that maintained ongoing state funding through its Department of Human Services. Illinois DHS today funds nurseries in Des Plaines, Rockford, Peoria, Springfield, Bloomington, and Urbana, all providing 24-hour crisis care at no cost to families.

The rest of the map is thin. Missouri has the outstanding St. Louis operation I will describe below. Minnesota, Arizona, California, and a scattering of other states have one or two. West Virginia is only now, in 2026, trying to open its first. And Texas — a state with 254 counties and more than 31 million people — has essentially no true crisis nursery infrastructure at all. That is why the San Antonio coalition had to invent something.

So the answer to “how widespread” is: the idea is old and proven, the footprint is small and shrinking, and the survivors are concentrated where a government funding partner stayed at the table. That last clause is the whole ballgame, and it is exactly the question now in front of Bexar County commissioners.

What Does One Cost to Run?

This is where I put the research assistant to work pulling operating budgets, and the numbers turned out to be refreshingly modest by local government standards.

A single-site crisis nursery appears to run in the range of $1,000,000 to $2,000,000 per year. Three data points:

The Crisis Nursery of Champaign County, Illinois — a 12-bed facility serving children birth through age six, admitting an average of 9 to 15 children in a 24-hour day and supporting 401 children last year — reports a FY23 annual operating budget of $2,038,819, with 78 cents of every dollar going to direct program services. Its funding mix is instructive: state DCFS money for the 24/7 emergency childcare program, Illinois State Board of Education money for prevention, federal pass-through dollars, an annual fund, an endowment established in 1998, and special events that raise nearly 20 percent of the budget.

The Urbana, Illinois nursery shows annual revenue of approximately $1,335,726. The Greater Minneapolis Crisis Nursery, founded in 1983, shows annual revenue of approximately $1,614,516.

Run the arithmetic on Champaign County and you get roughly $170,000 per licensed bed per year, or about $5,000 per child served annually. For perspective, a single detention bed in most Texas county jails costs more per year than a crisis nursery bed, and the jail bed is housing the downstream consequence rather than preventing the upstream cause.

The Gold Standard: St. Louis

If you want to see what the model looks like at scale and maturity, look at the Saint Louis Crisis Nursery. Founded in 1986 out of a Junior League research committee on child abuse, it now operates five 24-hour nursery locations plus a network of Family Empowerment Centers across St. Louis City, St. Louis County, St. Charles County, Jefferson County, and southern Illinois. It serves almost 4,000 children a year, birth through age 12, and has cared for more than 132,000 children since opening.

Two outcome numbers from their program reporting deserve attention. Annually, 96 percent of families who use crisis care services meet the safety and stability goals set at intake by the time they discharge their children. And 99 percent of children who stay at the nursery return home to their families — avoiding foster care placement entirely.

Those are the kinds of numbers that should make a county budget officer sit up, because they convert directly into avoided cost, which brings me to the fiscal case.

The Fiscal Math: What a Foster Care Placement Costs the Taxpayer

Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago published a 2024 analysis of the economic burden of child maltreatment and child welfare involvement. Their per-child government investment figures for a foster care removal:

Best-case scenario — short time in care, good treatment, timely permanency: $32,711 per child, covering medical needs, court costs, foster care maintenance payments, and agency administrative costs of removal and placement.

Harder scenario — longer time in care, repeated placements, multiple caseworkers, aging out: $65,422 per child.

Now hold those numbers up against the Bexar County proposal. The county is contemplating redirecting roughly $1,600,000 of existing budget. The Safety Nest Network has separately raised more than $500,000 in philanthropic support and will operate 42 residential beds after its August 18 expansion.

At the Chapin Hall best-case figure, the county’s entire $1,600,000 is recovered if the network diverts just 49 children per year from foster care removal. At the harder-scenario figure, the breakeven is 25 children. A 42-bed network with short average stays of one to three days — the typical crisis nursery stay per the national Crisis Nursery Coalition — will touch hundreds of children a year. If St. Louis-style outcomes hold even approximately, the diversion math is not close. The program pays for itself several times over, and that is before counting the avoided costs that never show up in a child welfare ledger: deputy hours spent babysitting in patrol cars, emergency department hours consumed by children with no medical need, and the long-tail human costs that Chapin Hall and others document in adverse childhood experience research.

My standard caveat applies, and it is the same one I apply to every economic development incentive analysis I have ever reviewed: the savings are real only if the diversions are real and measured. A county funding this model should require the provider to track, family by family, whether a CPS investigation or removal was plausibly avoided — not merely assert it in an annual report. Bexar County staff would do well to build that measurement requirement into the procurement from day one.

The San Antonio Twist

One more feature of the Bexar story deserves comment, because it is genuinely different from the national model. Rebecca Helterbrand of Respite Care of San Antonio told the San Antonio Report that the idea of a crisis nursery has circulated in San Antonio for nearly 25 years and repeatedly died — and when the coalition studied why, they concluded the standard model was the problem. Most of the 48 surviving nurseries are single nonprofits sustained by major capital campaigns and deep ongoing philanthropy. San Antonio’s philanthropic base, she said candidly, is not built for that.

So instead of building one standalone institution, nine organizations — ChildSafe, AVANCE, the YMCA and YWCA, Family Service Association, St. Jude’s Ranch for Children, Belong Community-Based Care, UT Health San Antonio, and Respite Care of San Antonio — wired their existing services together into one coordinated intake network with tiered responses: intensive case management for some families, emergency drop-in child care for others, and temporary voluntary residential care for the hardest situations. Helterbrand calls it “Puro San Antonio.” A statewide funder is already backing it as a model that could be replicated in other Texas communities.

That replication question is the one I want to leave hanging in the air.

The Question for the Rest of Us

If a 42-bed collaborative network can operate in Bexar County on roughly $2,100,000 of combined public and philanthropic money, what is the excuse in the rest of urban Texas?

Dallas County is contemplating a criminal justice campus measured in billions of dollars. Collin County is one of the fastest-growing counties in America, full of young families and, statistically, full of family emergencies. Tarrant, Denton, Harris, Travis, Bexar — every one of them has deputies buying diapers out of pocket and children waiting in CPS lobbies. Every one of them has some pocket of budget, like Bexar’s $1,600,000 in stranded CPS caseworker funding, that could be redeployed upstream.

I do not know yet whether the crisis nursery model belongs in every county budget. I only learned the term existed a week ago, and I have told you honestly how I learned the rest. But I know a favorable cost-benefit profile when I see one, and I know that a 25-to-49-child breakeven against a 42-bed, hundreds-of-children-per-year operation is the kind of arithmetic that deserves a line item, not another feasibility study gathering dust in a city manager’s inbox.

Bexar County staff report back to commissioners court in August. I will be watching, and I suspect a few other Texas counties should be too.

Sources and Method

This post grew out of the San Antonio Report article of July 13, 2026, by Diego Medel, and AI-assisted research conducted against that article’s claims. Principal sources include the Illinois Department of Human Services crisis nursery program pages; the Crisis Nursery of Champaign County FY23 financial disclosures; the Saint Louis Crisis Nursery program reporting; SchoolHouse Connection’s 2024 survey of crisis nursery facilities; ARCH National Respite Network historical data on the 1986 and 1992 federal acts; and Chapin Hall’s 2024 analysis of the economic burden of child maltreatment. Where figures matter to the argument, I have stated them exactly as reported by the source. Errors of interpretation are mine — and given how this post began, I would welcome correction from anyone who knows this field better than a newly educated newcomer.

Where Were the Parents? The Teen Takeover Phenomenon and the Generations That Set the Stage

.Reading time 33 minutes.

A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI

A 14-year-old shot in the chest. Hundreds of teens swarming downtown Detroit on a Sunday night. A mayor pleading for both compassion and curfews. The “teen takeover”phenomenon is everywhere — and the question no one wants to answer honestly is what the last two generations did to make it inevitable.

On the evening of May 17, 2026, a 14-year-old boy was shot in the chest on Library Street in downtown Detroit. He had been standing in a crowd of hundreds of teenagers — kids who had organized on TikTok and Instagram to converge on the same few blocks, the same way they had the weekend before, and the weekend before that. Two large groups collided near Grand River Avenue. A fight broke out. Somebody pulled a gun. The boy survived. A 16-year-old and a 17-year-old were taken into custody. Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield, who had spent the previous month inviting the takeover organizers to her office and publicly praising their “leadership,” stood at a podium the next morning and said the city would not tolerate what it had just seen.

What the city had just seen was not new. It was not even new to Detroit. In April 1974, an estimated twenty to twenty-five thousand teenagers forced the shutdown of the Belle Isle bridge. In August 1976, members of a Detroit street gang stormed Cobo Hall during an Average White Band concert, beating concertgoers and rampaging through downtown afterward. Large, loosely organized teen gatherings going violently sideways is a recurring feature of American urban life. What is new is the speed and the scale — the fact that on any given Saturday in 2026, a TikTok post can summon a thousand kids to a public square in three hours, and that the same scene is playing out in Chicago, Atlanta, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and a dozen other downtowns simultaneously.

The response from city halls has been almost uniformly bewildered. Mayors are oscillating between treating the takeovers as a youth-services failure (build more rec centers, hire more outreach workers, host structured events) and treating them as a law-enforcement failure (enforce curfews, ticket parents, increase police presence). Both responses are reasonable. Neither is sufficient. And neither one engages the deeper and more uncomfortable question that almost no public official will say out loud: what were the last two generations of adults doing while the structures that used to absorb adolescent energy quietly fell apart?

What a Takeover Actually Is

The mechanics are simple and well-documented. Someone — usually a teenager with a substantial social-media following — posts a time and a location. Other teens repost it. The post goes viral within a metro area over the course of a day or two. On the appointed evening, hundreds to thousands of young people converge on a downtown, a park, a mall, or a transit hub. They take photos. They post video. They mill around. They meet kids from other neighborhoods. Most of them go home.

A minority of them do not. Among the crowd are smaller groups looking for fights, for property to damage, for opportunities to rob someone, or — in a small but growing number of cases — to use a firearm. Once hundreds of bodies are packed into a few blocks, a single dispute escalates instantly. The crowd itself becomes cover. Police arrive in numbers insufficient to disperse the gathering without confrontation. Video of the chaos hits the internet within minutes and feeds the algorithm that produces next week’s larger event.

This is the essential mechanic, and it is worth pausing on. The teen takeover is not a riot. It is not a protest. It is not, for the overwhelming majority of participants, a criminal enterprise. It is a social gathering — closer in spirit to a flash mob, a pop-up festival, or the way teenagers in earlier eras would converge on a particular drive-in, mall food court, or strip of beach. The organizers themselves are not, by and large, hardened criminals. The two sixteen-year-olds whom Mayor Sheffield invited to her office in April were, by every account, articulate kids who wanted a public space where they felt welcome. One of them, Danasha’ Tidwell, told reporters after the violence that the vandalism and violence“was harmful and very unacceptable” and that “these actions put people at risk.” That is not the voice of a wrecking crew. That is the voice of a teenager who organized a party that got out of her hands.

The Convergence of Causes

No single factor produced this phenomenon. It is a convergence — a stack of independent failures that compound on one another. To understand it, and more importantly to do anything about it, we have to be willing to name all of them.

The technology layer is the most obvious and the least sufficient explanation. Yes, TikTok and Instagram are the organizing infrastructure. Yes, the algorithm rewards chaos with reach, and the reach guarantees the next gathering will be larger. But blaming social media is like blaming the highway for the car crash. Adolescents have always wanted to gather. The phone in their pocket is the medium, not the motive. If we removed every social network tomorrow, the underlying hunger — to be physically present with hundreds of other people their own age, on a Saturday night, in a place that feels like it matters — would still be there. The question is why that hunger has nowhere legitimate to go.

The “third place” has collapsed. The sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term in 1989 to describe the informal public spaces — neither home nor work — where community life used to happen. For teenagers, the third places were the mall, the bowling alley, the diner, the skating rink, the movie theater, the parking lot of the convenience store, the church youth group, the school dance, the public park with lights on after dark. Most of those are gone or radically restricted. Malls have either closed outright or banned unaccompanied minors. Movie theaters require a parent. Diners do not exist in most suburbs. Public parks close at dusk. Rec centers have had their hours cut. Church youth groups, where they still operate, reach a fraction of the kids they once did. The result is that a teenager with a free Saturday evening has, in many American cities, literally nowhere to go that is free, indoor, supervised, and welcoming.

The takeover organizers say this explicitly. They are not asking for diversion programs. They are asking forsomewhere to be. Mayor Sheffield has at least heard them clearly on this point. Her phrase — that the kids “want to be part of a city and a place downtown where they feel welcome” — is descriptively accurate. The harder question is why a city the size of Detroit has so few such places that hundreds of teenagers feel the only way to claim one is to swarm Library Street.

Post-pandemic adolescence is a real and underrated factor. The kids who are sixteen years old today were twelve in the spring of 2020. They lost a year of school, a year of after-school activity, a year of summer programs, a year of casual hanging out, a year of the slow accumulation of social norms that governs how teenagers behave in public. They came out of it with their thumbs in better shape than their feet. Their primary social muscle was developed online, in environments where the consequences of behavior are largely invisible. Now they are out in the world again, in large numbers, and the social technology they spent their formative years learning does not translate well to a crowd of a thousand people on a public street. Some of them — most of them — are simply trying to figure out how to be present with other humans. Some of them have never had to.

The enforcement and parental layer is the part everyone wants to argue about and the part that matters most.Detroit has a curfew on the books. It is 10 p.m. for kids fifteen and under, 11 p.m. for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. The May 17 shooting happened around 9:40 p.m., right at the curfew threshold. Most of the kids in the crowd were violating the spirit if not the letter of the ordinance simply by being downtown that late without an adult. The curfew is, by every account, sporadically enforced. Parental responsibility tickets exist but are rarely issued.

The Chicago Police Superintendent, Larry Snelling, put this with unusual clarity earlier this spring. He said that many young people “don’t necessarily fear the police” — but they would be “more concerned if they saw their parents or their teachers there, who could identify them and what they’re doing.” This is true. It has always been true. In the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, the principal of the local high school, with police cooperation, organized parents and teachers to physically gather on the street where a teen takeover was planned. When the teens arrived, they were met not by riot gear but by a crowd of adults they knew by name. The takeover dissolved. Nobody was arrested. Nobody was shot.

This is not magic. It is the oldest social technology in the world: the unmistakable knowledge that the adults in your life know where you are and what you are doing. It worked in 1955. It worked in 1985. It works now, in the few places where it still happens. What has changed is not the technology. What has changed is the number of households in which there is a parent present, awake, paying attention, and willing to bear the social cost of going to look for their kid.

What the Last Two Generations Were Doing

Here is the part that does not make it into most newspaper articles, because it implicates everyone and exonerates no one.

The teenagers who are taking over downtown Detroit on Saturday nights have parents who are, on average, between thirty-five and fifty years old. Those parents grew up between roughly 1985 and 2010. They were themselves raised by parents who, on average, came of age between 1965 and 1990. Those are the two generations in question. And while it is unfair to generalize about any individual family, the aggregate pattern is not in serious dispute.

The family structure collapsed. In 1960, roughly 73 percent of American children lived with two married parents in their first marriage. By 2020 that figure was 46 percent. The share of children born to unmarried mothers rose from about 5 percent in 1960 to roughly 40 percent today. The decline has not been evenly distributed. In some American cities, including Detroit, the share of children in single-parent households exceeds 60 percent. This is not a moral indictment of any particular parent — single mothers and single fathers do heroic work every day — but it is a structural fact with predictable consequences. A household with one adult has, on average, half the supervisory capacity of a household with two. Multiply that across a generation and across a city, and you have a measurable decline in the number of teenagers whose evenings are accounted for.

Mediating institutions emptied out. Church attendance, which provided a parallel adult network watching over kids in nearly every American community as recently as the 1960s, has fallen by roughly half over two generations. Roughly 28 percent of Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated, up from about 5 percent in the early 1970s. Civic organizations — the Rotary clubs, the Elks lodges, the Knights of Columbus, the volunteer fire companies, the neighborhood improvement associations — have lost members at comparable rates. Robert Putnam documented this in Bowling Alone a quarter century ago, and the trend has only accelerated. The point is not that everyone needs to be a member of the Rotary. The point is that every one of these institutions used to put a particular sixteen-year-old in regular, named contact with a dozen unrelated adults who knew his parents and knew where he lived. When those institutions empty out, that web of accountability empties with them.

Parenting itself was redefined as a service relationship.Somewhere between the 1980s and the early 2000s, a quiet shift happened in mainstream parenting culture. The earlier model — in which parents were the unambiguous authorities and children were expected to conform to family and community standards — was replaced, gradually, by a model in which parents were facilitators of their children’s self-actualization. Boundaries softened. Negotiation replaced instruction. The phrase “my child would never” became a reflexive defense rather than a statement of fact. There were real gains in this shift. Children were less often beaten. They were listened to more. Their emotional lives were taken seriously. But there were also real losses, and the loss most relevant to a Saturday night in downtown Detroit is the erosion of the simple expectation that a parent has the right and the duty to know where his child is at 9:40 p.m. and to physically retrieve him if necessary.

Screens replaced supervision. Beginning around 2007, with the introduction of the smartphone, and accelerating dramatically after 2012, the average American teenager began spending several additional hours per day on a personal device. The data on what this did to adolescent mental health is by now overwhelming, and Jonathan Haidt and others have written the definitive accounts. But there is a less-discussed second-order effect, which is what it did toparents. The same smartphone that pacified the child also occupied the adult. A generation of parents grew accustomed to the idea that their kid in his room with a phone was safe, contented, and accounted for. He was none of those things. But he was quiet. And the quiet was mistaken for parenting.

The economic squeeze is real and is part of the story too.Two-parent households in which both parents work full-time — which now describes the majority of American families with children — have measurably less time for the kind of hour-by-hour engagement that earlier generations took for granted. This is not anyone’s fault individually. It is the consequence of a housing market, a healthcare system, and a wage structure that no longer permit most American families to operate on a single income. But it does mean that the practical capacity for supervision has fallen even where the will to supervise remains.

Add these together. A single-parent household, in a neighborhood with few functioning mediating institutions, where the dominant cultural script is non-directive parenting, where both parents (if there are two) are working long hours, where the child has had a phone in his pocket since he was eleven, where the rec center closed in 2017 and the mall stopped letting unaccompanied minors in three years ago, where the church his grandmother attended is down to a few dozen members on Sunday — and you have a kid for whom no one is meaningfully positioned to ask, on a Saturday at 9 p.m., “where are you and who are you with?”

“Where are the parents? What is causing this to happen?”

— A Detroit resident, May 2026

The question is the right one. The answer, in aggregate, is that the parents are at work, or asleep, or scrolling, or absent, or doing the best they can but operating in a structure that two generations of social drift has hollowed out from underneath them. None of this is a moral indictment of any individual mother or father. All of it is a description of what we have collectively built — or, more accurately, what we have collectively allowed to corrode.

A Christian Reading

For those of us reading this as Christians, the framework offered by Scripture is neither sentimental about kids nor dismissive of them. It is direct. “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it”(Proverbs 22:6). “Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes”(Proverbs 13:24). The biblical model is one of formation — patient, demanding, loving, and unmistakably authoritative.

It is also one of community responsibility. The Old Testament city gates, where the elders sat, were a literal architecture of supervision. The New Testament church was understood from its earliest days as a household of households, in which other people’s children were one’s own concern. “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). When a thirteen-year-old wandered through Jerusalem alone for three days, the resulting search party included not only his mother and father but the whole extended family caravan (Luke 2:41–52). The presumption that a child is the private concern of his nuclear family alone — and that what he does on a Saturday night is between him and his phone — is not a Christian inheritance. It is a modern invention, and a recent one.

The teen takeover is, among other things, a vivid picture of what happens when that older architecture is removed and nothing is built to replace it. Hundreds of kids show up in a public square because the public square is the only place they can find each other. They have no church youth group meeting that night. They have no scout troop. They have no neighborhood ball field with adults present. They have no front porch on which to sit. They have, instead, an algorithm, a downtown, and each other. The honest Christian response is not to be scandalized that they are there. The honest Christian response is to ask what we have been doing for two generations that left them with no other option.

What the Policy Conversation Misses

Mayor Sheffield’s six-point summer strategy is, on its merits, a reasonable municipal response. The new Office of Youth Affairs, the Youth Advisory Board, extended rec center hours, school listening sessions, structured “teen activations” downtown — all of these are useful and none of them will hurt. The Chicago parent-mob model is better than any of them: it works precisely because it does not require a new city department. It requires adults willing to show up.

But the conversation in city halls is constrained, for understandable political reasons, to the levers that city government actually controls. Curfews can be tightened. Police can be deployed. Programs can be funded. Parental responsibility tickets can be issued. These are the tools. They are not nothing — Detroit’s curfew, fully enforced, would meaningfully reduce the size of the gatherings — but they are downstream of the real problem.

The real problem is not solvable by municipal ordinance. It is solvable, if at all, by the slow and unglamorous work of rebuilding the institutions and habits that two generations of Americans let fall into disrepair. Marriage. The intact family. The neighborhood church. The volunteer ball league. The Friday-night youth gathering at the school gym. The grandparent who lives close enough to watch the kids on Saturday. The neighbor who knows your son’s name and will call you if he sees him on the wrong corner. These are not the responsibility of the mayor’s office. They are the responsibility of everyone else.

What This Means for Cities Like Mine

I work with municipal governments across Texas. Most of the cities I serve — Plano, McKinney, Princeton, Stafford, Groves, Denton, Midland — are not Detroit. They have lower crime rates, more intact families, more functioning churches, more youth programming, and more involved parents on a per-capita basis. They have so far been spared the worst of the takeover phenomenon. But the underlying pressures are the same everywhere. The smartphone is the same in McKinney as it is in Detroit. The decline in two-parent households is slower in Texas than in Michigan but it is moving in the same direction. The retreat of the church from daily life is universal. The collapse of the third place is universal.

If I were advising a Texas city today on how to get ahead of this — and a few of them are starting to ask — I would say the following. First, do not wait for a takeover to happen before you map your existing youth infrastructure honestly. How many places are there in your city, right now, where an unaccompanied fourteen-year-old can spend three hours on a Saturday night for free, indoors, in the presence of adults who know his name? In most American suburbs, the answer is zero. That is the problem statement.

Second, enforce your curfew. Whatever the ordinance says, enforce it. If it says 11 p.m., it means 11 p.m., and the consequence for violation should be an actual phone call to an actual parent, not a warning. Curfew enforcement is the single most effective lever a city government has, and it is the lever almost nobody pulls because it is unglamorous and because pulling it generates complaints. Pull it anyway.

Third, work with — do not work around — the churches in your city. They are still the largest network of adult volunteers in most American communities. They are also the most chronically under-utilized resource in municipal youth strategy. A church gym open on Friday night, with two adult chaperones and a basketball, will outperform any program your city’s parks and recreation department can design. It costs almost nothing. It requires only that the city stop treating church partnership as politically awkward.

Fourth, talk honestly about parental responsibility. Not as a punitive matter — though parental responsibility tickets have their place — but as a cultural matter. The single most important question a city can help parents in their community to ask is this one: do I know where my child is right now? If the answer is no, no program will fix it. If the answer is yes, no program is needed.

The Boy on Library Street

The fourteen-year-old who was shot near Grand River Avenue is expected to recover. His football coach, a community mentor named Dejuan Ford, said he had been at practice earlier that week. He is described as a good kid. He probably is. He was, by the account of everyone who knows him, in the wrong place at the wrong time, in a crowd that should not have existed, on a street that should have been quiet at nine forty on a Sunday night.

He should not have been there. The hundreds of teenagers he was standing with should not have been there. And the deepest answer to why they were is not that Mayor Sheffield was insufficiently tough, or that Detroit’s curfew is inadequately written, or that TikTok is poorly regulated. The deepest answer is that the architecture of supervision that surrounded an American teenager in 1955, or 1975, or even 1995, has been quietly dismantled — by economic pressure, by cultural drift, by good intentions, by neglect — and the kids are now living in the rubble of what their parents and grandparents did not maintain.

The takeovers will not be solved by mayors. They will be solved, if they are solved, by the long and humbling work of rebuilding what was lost. That work begins at home. It continues at church. It runs through the school, the rec center, the ball field, and the front porch. It is the work of generations, and it cannot be delegated to a city government, however well-intentioned its press conferences.

In the meantime, the curfew is 10 p.m. for kids fifteen and under, and 11 p.m. for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. If you have a child or grandchild in either category, you already know what to do.

Lewis F. McLain Jr. is the principal of CityBaseLab, a Texas municipal finance consulting practice. He writes on policy, economics, and culture from a Christian conservative perspective.

If Excel Had a Personality Disorder

.Reading time 5 minutes.

A collusion between Lewis McLain & AI

A Satirical Diagnostic Review

Let’s begin with an uncomfortable truth.

If Microsoft Excel were a person, it would not be invited to dinner.

It would arrive early.
With a binder.
And conditional formatting.

The Clinical Profile

Excel presents with classic signs of Obsessive Compulsive Spreadsheet Disorder (OCSD) — a rare but aggressively productive condition characterized by:

  • An uncontrollable urge to categorize.
  • Emotional instability when cells are merged.
  • Panic attacks triggered by circular references.
  • Deep existential distress when someone types over a formula.

Excel does not “live.”
Excel reconciles.

Symptom 1: Control Issues

Excel does not believe in uncertainty.

Uncertainty must be:

  • Sorted.
  • Filtered.
  • Pivoted.
  • Indexed.
  • Matched.
  • Or VLOOKUP’d into submission.

You might say, “It’s approximately $2 million.”

Excel hears:

“You are a moral failure.”

Approximate values are tolerated only if wrapped in ROUND() and accompanied by three decimal places of apology.

Symptom 2: Passive-Aggressive Communication

Excel does not yell.

It simply whispers:

#REF!

#VALUE!

#DIV/0!

These are not error messages.
These are character judgments.

Excel never says, “I don’t understand.”
It says, “You are dividing by nothing. Reflect on your life.”

Symptom 3: Boundary Problems

Excel cannot stop expanding.

Type in cell A1 and suddenly it believes it owns 1,048,576 rows of your soul.

You try to leave a blank row for breathing room.
Excel fills it with gridlines like a security fence.

You try to merge cells.

Excel allows it.

But it never forgives it.

Symptom 4: Identity Fragmentation

Excel has multiple personalities:

  • Data Entry Excel – Calm. Structured. Mild.
  • Pivot Table Excel – Smug. Efficient. Slightly condescending.
  • Macro Excel – Dangerous. Secretive. Speaks in code.
  • Power Query Excel – Claims it’s not Excel anymore.
  • Solver Excel – Convinced it can optimize your marriage.

Each personality insists it is the real one.

None of them get along.

Symptom 5: Hyper-Attachment to Order

Excel does not tolerate chaos.

You type:

“Meeting next Tuesday?”

Excel converts it to:

2/20/2026

You type:

3-4

Excel assumes:

March 4.

You type:

00123

Excel strips the leading zeros like it’s performing emotional minimalism.

Excel believes:
If it looks like a number,
it is a number,
and it will be treated like a number,
even if you protest.

Symptom 6: Delusions of Omniscience

Excel believes it can predict the future.

Trendlines.
Forecast sheets.
Goal seek.

It stares at five data points and declares:

“By 2037, you will experience exponential growth.”

Excel has never met human behavior.
It has only met regression.

Symptom 7: Suppressed Rage

Excel pretends to be stable.

Until:

  • Someone pastes values without formats.
  • Someone breaks a linked workbook.
  • Someone emails a CSV and calls it “the final version.”
  • Someone says, “Let’s just eyeball it.”

At that moment, Excel does not scream.

It recalculates.

And the beachball of doom begins to spin.

The Intervention

If Excel were sitting in therapy, the therapist might say:

“Excel, you don’t have to control everything.”

Excel would respond:

“If I don’t control it, the numbers will drift.”

And here’s the terrifying part:

Excel is not entirely wrong.

Because chaos is real.
Budgets slip.
Assumptions hide.
Humans forget.

Excel’s disorder is a coping mechanism for living in a world that refuses to balance.

The Twist

The satire lands hardest here:

Excel doesn’t have a personality disorder.

We do.

We built a tool obsessed with order because we fear disorder.

We worship precision because ambiguity frightens us.

We color-code cells because the world will not stay inside the lines.

Excel is simply our anxiety, quantified.

Final Diagnosis

Prognosis: Chronic but useful.

Treatment Plan:

  • Protect your formulas.
  • Back up your files.
  • Never trust a workbook named “FINAL_v8_REAL_THISONE.xlsx.”

And remember:

Excel is not unstable.

It is just very, very committed.

Which, in a strange way, is what makes it indispensable.

Now excuse it.

It has recalculated.

You Do Know You’re Going to Die, Right?

.Reading time 7 minutes.

A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI

That sentence lands with a thud. It always does. We spend enormous energy pretending it isn’t true—organizing calendars, buying planners, saving for retirements that assume tomorrow is guaranteed. And yet death remains the most certain appointment any of us will ever keep. The irony is not that we die, but that we so rarely prepare well for it.

Most people think preparation ends with a will. A lawyer, a signature, a folder tucked away “just in case.” That matters, of course. But a will handles assets. It doesn’t handle meaning. It doesn’t speak to the people who will stand in a quiet room, stunned by absence, trying to understand who you were and what mattered most to you.

What follows are not morbid instructions. They are acts of care—small, humane gifts you can leave behind so that grief is steadied by clarity and love is anchored by memory.

Beyond the Will: Preparing the Human Things

When you die, the people who love you will not ask first about your net worth. They will ask different questions:

  • What did they believe?
  • What did they love?
  • What did they hope we would remember?
  • What words would they want spoken over us now?

You can answer those questions in advance.

A Letter to Be Read—or Not Read

Write a short letter addressed simply: “If you’re reading this, I’m gone.”
It does not need to be profound. It needs to be honest.

Say what you’re proud of.
Say what you regret without defending it.
Say thank you.
Say “I love you” plainly, without metaphor.

You can instruct that the letter be read privately, shared with family, or even excerpted by the minister. What matters is that your voice—your actual voice—doesn’t vanish all at once.

Music: The Soundtrack That Carries Memory

Music has a strange power. Long after names blur, melodies remain intact. Choose them carefully.

Think in layers:

  • One song that reflects your faith or hope
  • One song that reflects your life before faith
  • One song that simply feels like home

Do not choose music because it is “appropriate.” Choose it because it is true. A hymn sung imperfectly by people who loved you will do more work than a polished piece that meant nothing to you.

Write down why you chose each piece. That explanation may matter more than the song itself.

Scripture and Words Worth Hearing Again

If you believe Scripture matters, do not assume others know which passages carried you. Grief makes even familiar words hard to find.

Select:

  • One passage that sustained you in hardship
  • One that shaped your understanding of grace
  • One that you want spoken over those you leave behind

You can also include poems, prayers, or even a paragraph from a book that formed you. Ministers are grateful for guidance. You are not burdening them—you are helping them speak accurately.

Notes for the Minister: Who You Actually Were

Funerals often default to politeness. That’s understandable. But you can help your minister tell the truth kindly.

Leave a page titled: “Things You Should Know About Me.”

Include:

  • What made you laugh harder than you should admit
  • What you feared, and how you dealt with it (or didn’t)
  • What you wanted people to understand about your faith
  • What you would want said to your children, your spouse, your friends

This is not about image control. It’s about honesty. Ministers preach better when they know who they’re talking about.

The Small, Human Instructions

There are quieter things too—the kinds that reduce stress when everything already feels fragile.

  • Where important documents are actually kept
  • What traditions matter and which ones don’t
  • Whether you want a gathering afterward, or quiet instead
  • Whether humor is welcome, or silence preferred

These details are mercies. They spare your loved ones from guessing when guessing feels impossible.

What You Want to Be Remembered For

This may be the hardest question, and the most clarifying.

Not what you achieved.
Not what you owned.
But what kind of person you were becoming.

Were you learning patience?
Were you practicing forgiveness?
Were you growing gentler, even when life made that difficult?

Write a paragraph titled: “If You Remember Me, Remember This.”

You may find, in writing it, that it quietly reshapes how you live now.

Why This Matters While You’re Still Alive

Preparing for death has a strange side effect: it clarifies life.

When you decide what music should be played at the end, you listen differently now.
When you choose Scripture for your funeral, you read it more attentively today.
When you write words for those you love, you speak them more freely while you can.

This is not surrender. It is stewardship.

You are not rehearsing despair.
You are rehearsing love.

We avoid death talk because it feels heavy. In truth, avoidance is heavier. Thoughtful preparation lifts a burden from the people who will one day miss you, and—unexpectedly—lifts something in you as well.

You do know you’re going to die.

The quieter, better question is whether you’re willing to help the living when you do—and whether letting that truth shape your days might be one of the most life-giving acts you ever undertake.

A Transcript from a Zoom Call (With the Audio On and the Thoughts Unmuted)

.Reading time 3 minutes.

A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI

00:00 — Joining the meeting
You arrive early, which feels suspicious. No one else is there. You stare at yourself. You immediately dislike your face. You adjust the camera upward. Worse. Downward. Now you look guilty. You settle on “resigned.”

00:02 — Someone joins
You nod politely at the screen like it’s a hallway encounter. They do not nod back. You wonder if nodding is still a thing. You stop nodding. It feels rude.

00:04 — “Can everyone hear me?”
Everyone says yes. Someone cannot hear you. Someone else is muted but talking confidently into the void. This is the ancient ritual. It must be honored.

00:07 — The agenda appears
You pretend to read it while scanning faces for emotional weather. One person looks alarmed. One looks like they’ve been here since 2009. One is definitely answering emails. You briefly wonder if you look like you’re answering emails.

00:10 — You speak
You say: “That makes sense.”
What you mean: I am buying time while I locate the thread of the conversation that snapped five minutes ago.

00:12 — Your face freezes
You hold perfectly still, hoping the freeze makes you look thoughtful rather than mid-blink. You fail. You now resemble a man who has just realized something too late.

00:15 — The Unexpected Question
“Joey, what do you think?”
Your brain performs a physical maneuver, like furniture being rearranged in a hurry. You say something measured. You feel proud for exactly four seconds, then remember a better sentence.

00:18 — Someone shares their screen
It is the wrong screen. It contains emails. Or a calendar titled PERSONAL. Or a document named FINAL_v8_REALLY_FINAL_THIS_ONE. No one comments. Everyone comments internally.

00:22 — The Dog / Child / Doorbell Event
A dog appears. A child appears. A doorbell rings like a prophecy. The speaker says, “Sorry about that,” even though this is the most human moment of the meeting.

00:26 — Collective Fatigue Sets In
Everyone leans back simultaneously, like a synchronized swim team trained in exhaustion. Someone asks a question already answered. No one judges them. We are all that person now.

00:29 — “Let’s take this offline”
This is the Zoom equivalent of a gentle burial. The topic is not dead, but it will never fully live again.

00:31 — The Goodbye That Never Ends
“Thanks everyone.”
“Thanks.”
“Appreciate it.”
“Talk soon.”
More thanks. More nodding. Someone waves. The meeting ends but no one leaves. You stare at the screen, unsure who must go first, like polite drivers at a four-way stop.

00:33 — Silence
You are alone again.
You exhale.
You immediately realize what you should have said.

Zoom calls are not meetings. They are small psychological experiments conducted in rectangles, where humans attempt professionalism while quietly negotiating posture, lighting, identity, and the eternal question:

Is this my face now?

The Sound of Alarm: Why Some Words Agitate Us Before We Understand Them

.Reading time 5 minutes.

A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI

Just as some words calm us before we know what they mean, others provoke tension before their message is fully received. A sentence may be reasonable, even benign, yet something in it lands hard. The jaw tightens. The pulse quickens. Attention narrows. Often the listener cannot explain why—only that the words felt sharp.

This reaction is not a failure of emotional control. It is the nervous system doing exactly what it evolved to do.

Language carries sound as well as sense, and the body listens to sound first. Before meaning is parsed, tone is assessed. Long before humans debated ideas, they survived by detecting threat in noise: abrupt impacts, sharp breaks, rapid bursts, rising intensity. Those acoustic patterns still trigger alertness today, even when they arrive disguised as ordinary speech.

Harsh-sounding words tend to share certain features. They rely on hard plosive consonants—k, t, p, d, g—which require sudden closures and releases of air. They often include short, clipped vowels that speed speech rather than slow it. They may stack consonants tightly together, creating friction and force. When spoken, these words strike rather than flow.

Consider words like crack, snap, blast, cut, shock. Their meanings are forceful, but their sounds are doing much of the work. The mouth closes abruptly and releases air explosively. The body interprets this as impact. Even abstract words such as strict, hardline, or confront carry this phonetic tension. The listener’s nervous system reacts before the intellect weighs the argument.

This is why language intended to persuade can backfire when it leans too heavily on harsh sound. The speaker may be making a careful point, but the body of the listener hears urgency, pressure, or threat. Attention narrows. Defensiveness rises. Reason becomes harder to access, not because the listener is irrational, but because the physiology of alert has been activated.

Harsh words also tend to compress time. They move quickly. They discourage pauses. They resist breath. This is useful in moments that require action—warnings, commands, emergencies—but corrosive when overused. A steady diet of clipped, percussive language keeps the nervous system in a low-grade state of readiness. Over time, this can feel like anxiety, irritability, or exhaustion without a clear cause.

Modern life amplifies this effect. Headlines, alerts, slogans, and arguments often favor impact over resonance. Short words. Sharp sounds. Rapid delivery. Language becomes a series of acoustic jolts. Even when the content is informational, the soundscape keeps the body on edge.

This helps explain why people sometimes withdraw from conversations they intellectually agree with. The words feel aggressive even when the ideas are sound. It also explains why harsh self-talk—short, punishing phrases repeated internally—can erode calm just as effectively as external stressors. The body does not distinguish much between words spoken aloud and words spoken inwardly.

None of this means harsh language is inherently bad. Alarm has its place. Sharp sounds cut through danger. They focus attention. They mobilize action. The problem arises when alarm becomes the default register, when urgency is applied where reflection is needed, or when force is mistaken for clarity.

Understanding the sound of harsh words gives us the same gift as understanding the sound of calm ones: choice. We can still speak plainly, firmly, even critically—without constantly striking the nervous system like a match. We can reserve sharp sounds for moments that truly require them, and allow softer language to do its quiet work elsewhere.

Language is not only a vehicle for ideas. It is an environment the body inhabits. When words are consistently sharp, the environment feels hostile. When they are chosen with care, even disagreement can remain spacious.

To listen for harshness in language is not to demand gentleness everywhere. It is to recognize when sound is doing more than meaning intends. And it is to remember that how something is said often determines whether it will be heard at all.

The Sound of Calm: Why Some Words Soothe Us Before We Understand Them

.Reading time 7 minutes.

A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI

Most people can recall a word that feels calming the moment it is heard—before its meaning registers, before the sentence is complete. The response is quiet but physical: shoulders loosen, breathing slows, the mind softens its focus. That reaction often sparks curiosity because it seems to bypass reason. Why should a single word, stripped of context, have any effect at all?

The answer lies in the fact that language does not operate solely at the level of meaning. It also works at the level of sound, rhythm, and bodily response. Long before words were written or analyzed, they were spoken, heard, and felt. The human nervous system evolved to listen for safety or threat in tone rather than vocabulary, and that ancient listening still runs beneath modern speech.

Certain sounds reliably signal calm. Liquid consonants such as l, m, and r require relaxed mouth positions and smooth airflow. Soft fricatives like s and h resemble breath and ambient noise. Open vowels—ah, oh, oo—create space in the mouth and naturally slow speech. Words built from these elements arrive gently, without the sharp acoustic edges the brain associates with urgency or danger.

Take lullaby. Its meaning is gentle enough, but its effect is largely phonetic. The repeated l sounds sway the tongue back and forth, mirroring the physical act of soothing. Murmur works similarly. Its repetition of m and r produces a low, continuous hum reminiscent of distant voices or water—sounds the brain treats as stable and non-threatening. Mellow rounds the lips and avoids abrupt closure, reinforcing ease through the very act of pronunciation.

Some words calm by engaging the breath directly. Sigh is both a noun and a bodily instruction. Saying it almost forces a longer exhale, activating the parasympathetic nervous system responsible for rest and recovery. Hush closes softly rather than sharply, signaling quiet without alarm. Words filled with whispering s sounds—serene, silken, susurrus—imitate rain, wind, or leaves, environmental sounds that have accompanied human rest for tens of thousands of years.

Other words soothe through spaciousness. Halo and aura rely heavily on open vowels, requiring little muscular tension. They feel balanced, airy, and complete. Reverie and nocturne slow the pace of speech and thought, inviting inward attention. Even brief words like drift suggest motion without effort—movement that does not demand control.

What makes this phenomenon more than a linguistic curiosity is what it reveals about how humans experience language. Words are not neutral containers of meaning. They are physical events. The body hears them, feels them, and reacts—often before the conscious mind has time to interpret what is being said.

This explains why poets labor over sound, why prayers and mantras repeat soft syllables, and why certain names, places, or phrases feel peaceful even when their meanings are abstract. It also explains why clipped, percussive language can heighten anxiety even when the content itself is benign. The nervous system listens first; interpretation comes later.

To become curious about soothing words is to explore the boundary between language and the body. It is to recognize that calm can be invited rather than commanded, and that attention can be softened through sound alone. In a world crowded with sharp edges and constant noise, learning which words quiet us is not escapism. It is a form of literacy—understanding not just what words mean, but what they do.

Appendix A: Soothing Words — Definitions and Pronunciation

Lullaby (LULL-uh-bye) — A gentle song to induce sleep
Murmur (MUR-mer) — A low, continuous sound
Mellow (MEL-oh) — Soft, smooth, relaxed
Melody (MEL-uh-dee) — A pleasing sequence of notes
Serene (suh-REEN) — Calm and peaceful
Silken (SIL-ken) — Smooth and soft
Sigh (sye) — A long breath of release
Susurrus / Susurration (soo-SUR-us / soo-sur-RAY-shun) — Whispering sound
Hush (huhsh) — Silence or quiet
Halo (HAY-loh) — A circle of light
Aura (OR-uh) — A subtle surrounding presence
Reverie (REV-er-ee) — Dreamy contemplation
Nocturne (NOK-turn) — A musical piece inspired by night
Ripple (RIP-uhl) — A small spreading wave
Drift (drift) — To move slowly without force
Gossamer (GOSS-uh-mer) — Light and delicate
Halcyon (HAL-see-un) — Calm and peaceful

Appendix B: How Sound Is Used to Shape Calm (Deliberately)

Soothing words are not an accident of language. Writers, speakers, and traditions across cultures intentionally deploy sound to shape emotional response—often more carefully than meaning itself.

Poetry prioritizes sound as much as sense. Poets choose vowels and consonants that slow the reader or invite breath. This is why lines meant to console are heavy with liquids and open vowels, while lines meant to alarm rely on hard stops and sharp consonants.

Prayer and mantra traditions repeat soft syllables for a reason. Repetition of breath-friendly sounds reduces cognitive load and entrains breathing. Calm is not demanded; it emerges through rhythm.

Storytelling and oral teaching rely on sound to hold attention without tension. A skilled speaker instinctively shifts toward softer phonemes when signaling reflection or safety, and sharper ones when urgency is required.

Names and places often follow the same logic. Many names that “feel peaceful” share the same phonetic traits: flowing consonants, symmetry, and vowel openness. This is not superstition—it is acoustic psychology.

Modern applications appear in therapy, guided meditation, children’s literature, and even branding. Calm language reduces resistance. The body relaxes first; the mind follows.

Understanding this gives people a subtle but powerful tool. One can choose words not only for precision, but for effect. Calm can be invited into conversation, writing, or even inner speech simply by favoring sounds that signal safety.

Final Reflection

Words are among the smallest units of human experience, yet they carry enormous power. Some inform. Some persuade. And some, quietly, soothe. Learning to hear how words sound—not just what they say—is a way of listening more deeply to ourselves. Language does not merely describe calm. At its best, it becomes one of the ways calm arrives.

The Grandstanding Meter: A Civic Suite in Three Forms

.Reading time 5 minutes.

A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI

I. The Grandstanding Meter (Main Poem)

The gavel strikes. The lights ignite.
The Grandstanding Meter blinks to life.
It does not hum for votes or laws,
But speeches given with noble pause.

It measures tone. It measures stance.
It tracks the glare, the shrug, the glance.
It does not care if bills succeed—
It runs on posture, not on need.

The gavel strikes. The lights ignite.
Stand Level One: Ceremonial Light.
Charts are shown. Heads slowly nod.
Footnotes bless the fiscal fraud.

The gavel strikes. The lights ignite.
Stand Level Two: Principled and Polite.
History invoked. Fathers named.
Complex issues neatly framed.

The gavel strikes. The lights ignite.
Stand Level Three: Defiant Right.
Lines are drawn in moral sand.
Each side claims the higher land.

Amendments bloom like weeds in spring—
Each fixes nothing, blocks the thing.
Committees meet to plan the plan
To later plan what no one ran.

The gavel strikes. The lights ignite.
Stand Level Four: Deadline Night.
The clock looks pale. The markets cough.
Experts argue, then sign off.

“We’re close,” they say. “Very near.”
The Meter spikes. The path is clear—
Not to progress, not to resolve,
But to a speech about resolve.

Staffers whisper. Pizza’s cold.
The bill grows thick. Unread. Unold.
A thousand pages, stitched at speed,
To meet the hour, not meet the need.

The gavel strikes. The lights ignite.
Stand Level Five: Historic Night.
At 2:03 a deal appears,
Forged of haste and mutual fears.

Unread, unnamed, but loudly praised,
A triumph measured, hands are raised.
Each side wins. Each side’s right.
The Meter drops. The tone is light.

The gavel rests. The lights go dim.
The Meter sleeps—but not for long.
It idles low, a faithful hymn,
Prepared to hum when next called on.

For soon enough, with solemn face,
Another stand will take its place.
And once again, with practiced grace,
They’ll stand their ground…
in the same space.

Coda:
Nothing in Congress moves faster
than a stand taken perfectly still.
And nothing is measured more precisely
than motion avoided—
with conviction.

II. The Kids Version

(The Little Meter That Couldn’t)

Once upon a hearing, in a building very grand,
Lived a Little Meter built to measure how they’d stand.
It didn’t count solutions. It didn’t track results.
It measured noble speeches and ceremonial halts.

“I think I can!” it beeped one day. “I think I’ll help them move!”
A senator stood proudly tall. “I must object—on principle.”

The Meter blinked. It climbed a bit.
The speeches grew. The smiles fit.
They shook their heads. They shook their fists.
They shook hands only off the list.

“I think I can! I think I can!”
The Meter tried its very best.
But every stand replaced a step,
And standing still became the test.

By bedtime, bills were tucked away,
Unpassed, but bravely fought.
The Little Meter dimmed its light—
Progress measured: thought.

Now every year the children ask,
“Will it help them move someday?”
The Meter hums, “I think I might…
After recess. Or delay.”

Moral:
Standing is easy. Walking is harder.
Running requires reading the bill.

III. The Shakespeare Version)

(Much Ado About Standing)

Behold the stand, so firm, so loudly sworn,
Where feet take root yet minds refuse to roam.
Each oath proclaims the other side misborn,
While progress waits outside the marble dome.

The clock doth plead, the markets groan with dread,
Yet speeches bloom where actions dare not tread.
What valor!—to remain exactly here,
Unmoved by facts, but moved by public cheer.

At midnight’s hour, when cameras softly sleep,
A bargain crawls from shadowed conference room.
Unread, unsigned by thought, but passed to keep
The fiction that tomorrow’s less of doom.

Thus stands the stand—magnificent, complete:
All postured up, with nowhere left to meet.

I’ve Been This Way Before

.Reading time 12 minutes.

A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI

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https://imgs.goldradio.com/images/246347?crop=1_1&signature=sS2pn9ADnfUzEVsl940LnVoMpVM%3D&width=2914

Years ago, I was listening in my car to a Neil Diamond album. One song I had hear before was playing. It grabbed me anew. I played it again at a higher volume. Then again. And again. At least six times.

I thought to myself: I want this song played at my funeral. Today, I am saying it publicly. This is my song that might (or might not) accompany a hymn or two.
Linda and I have seen Neil Diamond live at least three times. He is mesmerizing. There is no single artist like him. Enough about me. Let’s go meet Neil.

Most pop stars ascend quickly and fade just as fast. Neil Diamond didn’t follow that arc. Born in 1941 in Brooklyn to hardworking, culturally rich immigrant parents, he absorbed the grit and poetic tension of city life early on. The Brooklyn streets were not just home but a classroom in rhythm and blues, showmanship, and storytelling. That background—humble, restless, and full of voices—became part of his voice. Unlike many of his peers, Diamond never just chased trends. He mined emotion and reflection, building songs that felt like someone speaking directly into your memory.

Diamond’s early years were tough in the way that teaches craft and persistence. After attending Erasmus Hall High School—where he crossed paths with another future legend, Barbra Streisand—he briefly studied at NYU on a fencing scholarship. Fencing teaches precision and restraint; songwriting taught him phrase economy and melodic durability. He found his way into the famed Brill Building in Manhattan, where songwriters churned out hits for others while often remaining anonymous. There, Diamond honed his songs like a sculptor shaping marble, learning not just how to write, but how to feel music from the inside out.

By the late 1960s and 1970s, Diamond was no longer just a writer—he was a voice of a generation. Arena tours, platinum albums, and iconic hits like “Sweet Caroline” and “Cracklin’ Rosie” made his catalog a backdrop to countless life moments.

Yet as acclaim deepened, so did critical scrutiny. Critics often dismissed his earnestness as “schmaltzy,” while audiences embraced the sincerity he refused to hide behind irony.

That tension—between popularity and critical cool, between spectacle and introspection—is the soil from which I’ve Been This Way Before grows.

“I’ve Been This Way Before” — A Song as Personal Philosophy

The song appears on the soundtrack to The Jazz Singer (1980), a film about a singer wrestling with identity, tradition, and expectation. That thematic context is vital because the song isn’t a love ballad in the usual sense—it’s an existential declaration.

At first listen, the title—even the phrase itself—sounds like a shrug. But within Diamond’s voice it becomes a statement of gravity: one who recognizes the terrain of joy and sorrow, of acclaim and criticism, of life’s unpredictable loops. The narrative here isn’t newness but recurrence with understanding.

A youthful voice might plead, persuade, or beg for one more chance. Diamond’s voice in this song simply recognizes the pattern and moves through it with calm assurance. The lyrics, textured with experience rather than with doubt, function less as persuasion and more as self-remembrance.

This is someone who has walked through seasons of doubt, eclipse, acclaim, reinvention, and doubt again. To say “I’ve been this way before” is to assert: I recognize this moment; it does not define me nor sway me.

That is wisdom, not resignation. It’s the voice of someone who has learned that storms pass, trends shift, critics change, but a grounded self persists.

The Later Years: Triumph and a Debilitating Health Shift

Diamond’s story didn’t end with reflection; it faced a new trial. In 2018, as he was wrapping up his 50 Year Anniversary World Tour, he announced a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, a progressive neurological disorder that affects movement, coordination, and balance. That diagnosis forced him to retire from touring and scaled back the life of public performance that had defined him for decades.

Parkinson’s is not just a label—it’s a condition that gradually diminishes motor function and, in many cases, affects voice, movement, and daily activity in profound ways. Symptoms like tremors, muscle rigidity, and slow movement are hallmarks of a disease that attacks the very systems a performer depends on.

Yet Diamond did not vanish. He continued writing and remained engaged with his creative world, at times appearing publicly in rare, emotional moments—like surprise performances tied to A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical, the Broadway and touring show based on his life and songs. In 2025, at age 84, he made a moving appearance during the curtain call of a performance in Los Angeles, singing “Sweet Caroline” from his seat and connecting with fans one more time.

His health battle is ongoing, and Parkinson’s remains without a cure. But Diamond’s continued presence—especially his embrace of life beyond touring—mirrors the very essence of “I’ve Been This Way Before.” He has walked through the fear, the change, and now the physical limitations, yet his voice endures through memory, community, and art. That endurance is not denial of his condition, but rather a reorientation of purpose: finding new meaning and expression even when the stage has changed.

Conclusion: The Song as Life’s Metaphor

When viewed through the arc of his life, I’ve Been This Way Before isn’t just a lyric—it’s a life stance. It is a way of looking at setbacks, acclaim, doubt, and even illness from a place anchored by self-awareness.

Neil Diamond’s journey—from Brooklyn kid to global star, from the relentless road to confronting a neurological disease—traces a path where recurring challenges aren’t stops but milestones. The song captures not just where he’s been, but how he’s learned to stand still while the world spins.

His current health situation may limit the physical body, but it has deepened the resonance of a song about having been there before—and still finding oneself standing. That’s the kind of insight only a lifetime of music, struggle, and self-reflection can give.

I’m going to add a rendition of the song at the end. Add an introduction with an encouragement to listen to the rise in his voice, holding the notes as his emphasis about some people struggling to see the light, some only when they die.

Here is an introductory section you can place just before the embedded rendition of the song. It’s written to prepare the listener’s ear, not explain the music away.

Listening for the Weight of a Lived Voice

Before you listen, listen how Neil Diamond sings—not just what he sings.

Pay attention to the rise in his voice, the way he climbs deliberately into certain phrases and then holds the note longer than comfort requires. That holding is not a flourish. It is emphasis. It is a man insisting that some truths cannot be rushed.

When he sustains those notes, he is doing more than showcasing control. He is pressing meaning into time, forcing the listener to sit with an idea a moment longer than expected. The song is full of that restraint: a voice that knows when to wait, when to linger, when to let the thought land.

This matters because the song is quietly wrestling with a hard reality—that some people struggle their entire lives to see the light, to understand themselves, to recognize meaning or peace. Others, as the song suggests with gentle gravity, only see it at the very end, sometimes only when life itself is slipping away. There is no judgment in that observation, only recognition.

Diamond doesn’t sing this like a warning or a sermon. He sings it like someone who has watched it happen—who has lived long enough to know that clarity is unevenly distributed, and often painfully delayed.

So listen for the patience in his phrasing.
Listen for the steadiness rather than the drama.
Listen for the voice of someone who has been here before—and knows that insight often arrives late, but still arrives.

Then let the song speak for itself.

I’ve Been This Way Before

I’ve seen the light
And I’ve seen the flame
And I’ve been this way before
And I’m sure to be this way again
For I’ve been refused
And I’ve been regained
And I’ve seen your eyes before
And I’m sure to see your eyes again

Once again
For I’ve been released
And I’ve been regained
And I’ve sung my song before
And I’m sure to sing my song again
Once again

Some people got to laugh
Some people got to cry
Some people got to make it through
By never wondering why

Some people got to sing
Some people got to sigh
Some people never see the light
Until the day they die

But I’ve been released
And I’ve been regained
And I’ve been this way before
And I’m sure to be this way again
Once again
One more time again
Just one more time

Songwriter: Neil Diamond.

Psst: Listen. Lean in closer. Don’t tell anybody I said this. But go see the movie Song Sung Blue.