The most famous beastly sculpture in the college town of Athens, Ga., is — improbably — not a bulldog. It is an 11-foot-tall welded steel horse, an abstract labyrinth of undulations and crescents, created at the University of Georgia by a visiting Chicago sculptor, Abbott Pattison, in 1954. When a crane first heaved Pattison’s mammoth steed from the basement of the university’s Fine Arts Building that spring, it was unlike anything the campus had seen before, with a cage-like midsection of pointed ribs, flat, Cubist planes, and a wavy, squared-off mane and tail. It was recognizably a horse, but it was no classical equestrian sculpture. And the artwork had many on campus seething. Last spring, when the sculpture — briefly titled “Steel Horse” and then “Pegasus” by the artist, but popularly known as Iron Horse — was extricated from a concrete pad in a cornfield outside Athens for conservation, it was missing 32 pieces and bore decades-deep scars of etching and graffiti, and a bullet wound in its neck. Its hooves had rusted the color of Georgia clay. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Statues on college campuses have long been lightning rods for the issues and debates coursing through society. But exactly why the Iron Horse was attacked by students may always be a mystery.“There’s all this mystery and misinformation around it,” said Donald Cope, a designer and metal fabricator who spent six months restoring the sculpture to its original condition with a conservator, Amy Jones Abbe, both based in Athens. “It has this lore, it has an aura.” Cope painstakingly repaired corrosion and reproduced missing parts (all but one, for which he could not find photographic support), mimicking the artist’s rugged welds. Before then, the Iron Horse had not been seen in its complete form since the day it was unveiled 70 years ago. Scholars today are hard-pressed to distinguish a significant large-scale, modern steel public sculpture in the South that predates it. “If I were teaching at the University of Georgia and I was wanting to split my classes into modern and traditional art, I could use this piece as the perfect pivot point,” said David Raskin, a professor of contemporary art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where Pattison taught in the 1940s and ’50s. For a brief few hours after it was first installed at the University of Georgia campus, the sculpture stood unbruised on a lawn between men’s dormitories. But curious crowds began to gather, and by nightfall hundreds of students had descended on the horse, marking it with graffiti (“What the hell is this thing?”), shoveling manure under its tail, and, among other indignities, tying two balloons between its hind legs. Old tires were set ablaze beneath it and the fire department was called to subdue the flames, and the mob. “Essentially, I see a reaction to modernism, which was an issue they didn’t understand, which a lot of Americans didn’t understand,” said William U. Eiland, who was the director of the Georgia Museum of Art from 1992 to 2023 and pushed for the sculpture’s conservation for years. “They were reacting to change.” It was a “heady time” on campus, added Eiland, who wrote a biography of Lamar Dodd, the influential head of the art department during that period. It was the era of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, the Brown v. Board of Education decision that would desegregate schools, and campus dress codes and curfews for women. Did the Iron Horse represent something disruptive or unknown? Did its Cubist lines somewhat resemble the horse in Picasso’s famed protest piece, “Guernica,” as some have suggested? Maybe. But several of those involved in the incident said later in a University of Georgia alumni newsletter that they were motivated more by a tiff between Pattison and the university community, reflected in the campus newspaper, The Red & Black. Prank or Grudge? Pattison came to the university as an artist in residence in 1953 on a grant from the General Education Board, which was devoted to the cause of improving education throughout the United States and supported by John D. Rockefeller Sr. The artist, who died in 1999, saw wide success with more than two dozen works on public display in the Chicago area and pieces in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He was initially well-received in Athens, with a newspaper reporting that an exhibition of his work at the new academic Georgia Museum of Art was extended due to popularity. Students observed him on the campus lawn hand-chiseling his first commission — an abstract rendition of a mother and child from an 8-foot-tall block of Georgia marble, which was installed next to the Fine Arts Building that fall. But a student journalist, Bill Shipp, writing in the Red & Black, called the four-sided totem of polished curves and rough planes “ridiculously complex.” A cartoon of the sculpture ran alongside his story, with the caption, “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s….” Then one night, after Pattison returned for the spring semester in 1954, the modern marble was met with a can of green paint.Pattison penned a letter to the editor, stating: “The green paint on my marble sculpture doesn’t hurt me as much as it does the University upon which is cast the shadow of the presence of spite, ignorance, and intolerance.” Two months later, the Iron Horse landed on the lawn. But for Don McMillian, who was a veterinary student at the university at the time, and procured the manure in his Studebaker Commander convertible, it was just an end-of-the-year prank. “It wasn’t a big, deep, dark problem with the art or anything like that,” said McMillian, now 91 and a retired veterinarian living in Jonesboro, Ga. “It was just a bunch of crazy boys having fun.” (This was, he noted, the era of the panty raid craze on campuses across the country.) Pattison himself was offended. “I was rather shocked, to say the least, to see the painting on it, and to see the manure and the litter all around the place, and things hanging off of it,” the artist said in a 1981 documentary by William VanDerKloot about the sculpture that aired on PBS. “It was a rather devastating experience to me.” The morning after the attack, university officials carted the sculpture out of sight, hiding it behind an off-campus barn where it languished for five years until a horticulture professor, L.C. Curtis, got permission to take it to his farm in Greene County, 20 miles south of Athens. He positioned it right alongside Georgia State Route 15 for passing motorists to see.And there the Iron Horse has sat for decades, where it has morphed from a pariah into a kind of icon, a destination for selfies, a landmark for visiting football fans, a symbol for the community — featured on town murals, in brochures, on student bucket lists. McMillian, the veterinarian, visited a few years ago for the first time since 1954 to have his picture taken, he said. For years, the university and the Curtis family disputed the fate of the Iron Horse and where it belonged. But for now its future seems set in the cornfield. The Curtis farm was sold to the university in 2013 and renamed the Iron Horse Plant Sciences Farm, but the family maintained ownership of the sculpture and the 400 square feet surrounding it. Last January, the family gifted the sculpture to the university, on the condition that it be restored by the school and returned to the farm, said Alice Hugel, granddaughter of L.C. Curtis, who died in 1980. Her mother, Patty Curtis, was newly married to L.C. Curtis’s son, Jack, when the family acquired the sculpture.The university would not disclose the amount of the restoration, except to say in a statement that private funds were allocated. Eric Atkinson, the school’s dean of students, said, “This restoration is an important step in ensuring the Iron Horse remains a part of the U.G.A. experience.” In late November, the Iron Horse was set back out to pasture in the cornfield, now in a shiny new coat of black paint, sitting atop a Georgia granite plinth. But many believe it should be returned to the main campus, where the artist intended and where it might be better protected. One advocate has been the artist’s son, Harry Pattison, a working artist living in Bellingham, Wash., who was 2 years old when his father completed the Iron Horse. He said he had several conversations with his father about the fate of the sculpture before his death. “Abbott wanted it back where it originally belonged,” Pattison said. “He thought, someday the university will want it back.”Out in the field, over decades, the sculpture was subjected to the elements — and campus high jinks. It was spray-painted at least twice by opposing football fans (and spray-painted back to black by a secret Greek society, the Order of the Greek Horsemen, that considers the horse its symbol). Underwear has been fashioned into a hat stretched over its forelock. Climbing atop the horse became the custom, which over time caused welds to give. Carved initials once speckled its hide. “It’s sort of the price of celebrity for the horse,” said Alice Hugel, who, with her mother, argued that it should remain at the farm, where it would continue to be accessible. Raskin, the art history professor, noted, “There is something really wonderful that this horse on campus, even if it was controversial, somehow managed to at least focus people’s attention on modern art — or on art at all.” Now, its conservators Cope and Abbe hope the sculpture can enter a third phase of life where it is admired as a museum-worthy work rather than something like a roadside attraction.“I just hope going forward people have a different kind of appreciation for it, even if it came from a place of affection,” said Abbe, who previously worked as a conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On a recent windy afternoon, the Iron Horse stood peacefully on its hilltop, seemingly untouched since its re-installation nearly two months ago. Olen Anderson, a senior at the university and a member of the Order of Greek Horsemen, said the organization and its alumni supported the restoration and had offered to donate funds for the work if needed. “We feel very sentimental toward it,” he said. Still, part of the group’s ritual each year is climbing atop the horse for the cover of The Fraternity Way magazine. What about the conservators’ wish that it be admired from the ground instead? “I think we’d honor that. Because above all, we want it to last.”

An error in the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s projection of the number of first-year students starting college last fall caused the organization to report incorrectly that freshman enrollment last year had dropped when in fact it had increased, its director said in a statement this week. By mistakenly mislabeling a number of first-year college students as high school students taking college or university courses, the center said it underestimated the true number of incoming college students. That led it to erroneously project the largest drop in freshman enrollment since 2020 in a report it published in October. The acknowledgment on Monday amounted to a reversal of the report’s top-line findings. Those conclusions fed into anxieties in higher education about long-term challenges, including a coming “demographic cliff” caused by a drop in births during the Great Recession and more general doubt about the value of a college degree. The report was based on preliminary enrollment data that the research center gathered from slightly more than half of all U.S. colleges and universities. After catching its error, the center said it expected to show that enrollment had risen in a report next Thursday, which includes data from nearly all institutions of higher education. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT It said that the error had affected previous reports as well, but that “the effect was magnified” last year because of an unusually large number of dual-enrolled high school students. That may have obscured the fact that the number was inflated even more by the center’s overcount. “The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center acknowledges the importance and significance of its role in providing accurate and reliable research to the higher education community,” the center’s executive director, Doug Shapiro, said in a statement. “We deeply regret this error and are conducting a thorough review to understand the root cause and implement measures to prevent such occurrences in the future.” The faulty numbers were reported by a wide range of news media and trade publications, including The New York Times. The National Student Clearinghouse, founded in 1993, is a nonprofit that provides services to thousands of U.S. institutions of higher learning, including by maintaining student records and enrollment, degree and student loan data. While it walked back its conclusions about freshman and dual-enrolled students on Monday, the center said its other findings — including that total undergraduate enrollment had increased — remained sound. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The report last fall also raised alarms that a comparatively tumultuous year for college students applying for federal financial aid might have led to a significant number of students postponing or abandoning college. Concerns about how the problematic rollout of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid early last year would affect college enrollment left many schools and higher education groups nervously anticipating the center’s October findings. In a statement on Monday, the Education Department’s under secretary, James Kvaal, said officials were “encouraged and relieved” by the revised assessment. “The increase is consistent with what we are seeing on the financial aid side: More than 5 percent more students are receiving federal aid this year,” the statement said. “Thank you to the high schools, college counselors, colleges and universities, and community organizations for pulling together to help students and families through a tough year.” When the report was published in October, the department did not directly dispute its conclusions, but provided a list of other factors that could have explained the apparent decline. Those included a longer-term downward trend in undergraduate enrollment as documented by the National Center for Education Statistics, a strong labor market drawing high school students directly into the work force and falling rates of college attainment among men. The revised numbers expected next week instead suggest a modest recovery in the number of students starting college after a steep drop-off during the pandemic, according to the research center’s statement.

The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it would enter a new battlefield in the culture wars, agreeing to decide whether the Constitution guarantees parents of students in public schools the right to have their children excused from classroom discussion of storybooks featuring L.G.B.T.Q. characters and themes. Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland’s largest school system, adopted the new curriculum in 2022. It included, its lawyers told the justices, “a handful of storybooks featuring lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer characters for use in the language-arts curriculum, alongside the many books already in the curriculum that feature heterosexual characters in traditional gender roles.” Among the storybooks were “Pride Puppy,” an alphabet primer about a family whose puppy gets lost at a Pride parade; “My Rainbow,” about a mother who creates a colorful wig for her transgender daughter; and “Love, Violet,” a story about a girl who develops a crush on her female classmate. (Some of the books have since been dropped from the curriculum.) In a run of recent cases, the Supreme Court has expanded the role of religion in public life, sometimes at the expense of other values, like gay rights and access to contraception. In the past few years, the court has ruled in favor of a web designer who said she did not want to create sites for same-sex marriages, a high school football coach who said he had a constitutional right to pray at the 50-yard line after his team’s games and a Catholic social services agency in Philadelphia that said it could defy city rules and refuse to work with same-sex couples who had applied to take in foster children. The school system in the new case, based in Washington’s liberal suburbs, at first gave parents notice when the storybooks were to be discussed, along with the opportunity to have their children excused from those sessions. The school system soon changed that policy. “The growing number of opt-out requests,” its lawyers wrote, “gave rise to three related concerns: high student absenteeism, the infeasibility of administering opt-outs across classrooms and schools, and the risk of exposing students who believe the storybooks represent them and their families to social stigma and isolation.”Several parents sued to challenge the new policy, saying it violated their religious rights. Lower courts refused to block the program while the suit moved forward. Writing for the majority of a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, Judge G. Steven Agee said, “There’s no evidence at present that the board’s decision not to permit opt-outs compels the parents or their children to change their religious beliefs or conduct, either at school or elsewhere.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Judge Agee, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, added, “Should the parents in this case or other plaintiffs in other challenges to the storybooks’ use come forward with proof that a teacher or school administrator is using the storybooks in a manner that directly or indirectly coerces children into changing their religious views or practices, then the analysis would shift in light of that record.” In dissent, Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr., who was appointed by President Donald J. Trump, said the parents, of several faiths, had made a modest request. “They do not claim the use of the books is itself unconstitutional,” he wrote. “And they do not seek to ban them. Instead, they only want to opt their children out of the instruction involving such texts.” A lawyer for the parents, Eric Baxter of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, welcomed the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case. “Cramming down controversial gender ideology on 3-year-olds without their parents’ permission is an affront to our nation’s traditions, parental rights and basic human decency,” he said in a statement. The school board, in its Supreme Court brief in the case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, No. 24-297, wrote that the parents “seek to unsettle a decades-old consensus that parents who choose to send their children to public school are not deprived of their right to freely exercise their religion simply because their children are exposed to curricular materials the parents find offensive.”

At least 18 of the 80 school districts in the county announced that schools would be closed and urged parents to take precautions as at least four wildfires burned.Follow continuing coverage of the wildfires in Southern California. The wildfires burning in Southern California have prompted officials to close schools across Los Angeles County on Wednesday. At least 18 of the 80 school districts in the county issued statements announcing that schools would close for the day. Many urged parents to take precautions as the fires continue to rage and strong winds affect the area. “Due to the volatility of the ongoing high wind event, power outages affecting several schools, and the nearby Eaton fire, all A.U.S.D. schools will be closed,” the Azusa Unified School District said in one typical announcement, adding that community safety was its “top priority.” Here is a list of some of the school districts that have announced closures: Alhambra Unified School District said it would close all schools on Wednesday to “ensure the safety of our students, staff, and families.” Arcadia Unified School District said it would close all schools on Wednesday and encouraged residents to “take precautions at your own home.” Azusa Unified School District said it would close all schools. Burbank Unified School District said it would close all schools on Wednesday. It said it expected them to reopen on Thursday. Duarte Unified School District said it would close all schools on Wednesday. El Monte City School District said all its schools would be closed on Wednesday due to “strong winds and the uncertainty of power” service, but expected to reopen them on Thursday. Glendale Unified School District said it would close all of its schools on Wednesday. La Cañada Unified School District said it would close all schools on Wednesday but expected to reopen on Thursday. Las Virgenes Unified School District said that its schools would close on Wednesday “out of an abundance of caution,” but expected to reopen them on Thursday. Los Angeles Unified School District announced closures at some schools. Monrovia Unified School District said schools would be closed on Wednesday due to “high winds.” Mountain View School District said it would close its schools due to the “high winds impacting our region.” Pasadena Unified School District said its schools would close on Wednesday. San Marino School District announced that all four of its schools would close on Wednesday after power outages. Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District said its schools would close on Wednesday. South Pasadena Unified School District announced that its schools would close on Wednesday. Temple City Unified School District said it would close its schools, citing “downed trees, power outages, downed power lines and damage to several of our campuses,” caused by strong winds. Valle Lindo School District said it would close its schools on Wednesday.

The Texas Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday in a battle over whether Southern Methodist University can separate from the United Methodist Church. The university, founded in Dallas by Methodists in the early 20th century, has been trying to extricate itself since 2019 amid turmoil in the denomination over gay clergy and gay marriage. At stake is the question of who ultimately controls the university: its own board, or the church that founded it more than a century ago and wrote its ownership into the school bylaws. The case will determine whether one of the flagship institutions of Methodism will remain connected to the church, the country’s second-largest Protestant denomination. In Austin on Wednesday morning, the justices sounded wary of allowing the school to sever the relationship. The court’s new chief justice, Jimmy Blacklock, concluded the hearing by saying the court should be “very, very hesitant to undermine what seems to be over 100 years of settled expectations.” He called the school’s case “clever lawyering.” “I have difficulty imagining, just in equity, that it would be proper for the courts to vindicate that kind of a maneuver,” he said. In 2019, the private university abruptly changed its articles of incorporation and named its own board as its “ultimate authority.” That displaced a regional governing body of the church that oversees congregations in Texas and seven other states. The university’s articles of incorporation previously stated that the school would be “forever owned, maintained and controlled” by the conference. In response, the conference sued Southern Methodist, arguing that the university did not have the authority to declare independence without the church’s approval. A Texas district judge ruled in favor of the university in 2021, but an appeals court reversed the decision. A lawyer for the university, Allyson N. Ho, argued on Wednesday that the case was an “extraordinarily clear case” under Texas corporate law; the school had simply acted to bring its bylaws into compliance with state law around nonprofit structures. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT But publicly, the university has suggested that the separation was a response to conflicts in the United Methodist Church over issues related to sexuality.The university’s president, R. Gerald Turner, said in 2019 that the school needed a formal separation from the church because of turmoil over its stance on gay rights — which the university argued impeded its ability to attract students from all denominations. At the time, the denomination approved a plan strengthening bans on same-sex marriages and gay and lesbian clergy. That plan put the church out of step with the university’s nondiscrimination statement, which includes “sexual orientation and gender identity and expression.” Dr. Turner told The Dallas Morning News that year that the school wanted to sever formal ties before the church splintered. In the years since then, the dynamics in the church have changed. In 2024, the church overturned its longstanding ban on “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” serving as clergy members, and it officially allowed same-sex marriage. By that time, more than a quarter of the denomination’s churches had already departed over their disagreements with those moves. Some of those churches have remained independent, and others have joined the new Global Methodist Church, a rival denomination that says it will not ordain or marry gay people. One justice, Debra Lehrmann, suggested from the bench on Wednesday that since the dispute over sexuality between the university and the church conference had been resolved, the litigation might not need to proceed. A lawyer for the conference, Sawnie McEntire, replied that the school had “shut the door” on the church, regardless. “We disagree very much with their attempt to mask their justification in some kind of doctrinal dispute,” Mr. McEntire said. A spokeswoman for the university, Megan Jacob, said the school does not comment on pending litigation. Southern Methodist University was founded in the early 20th century by Southern Methodists who wanted to establish a flagship institution west of the Mississippi River. Today, the university and the church’s conference have relatively few practical entanglements. But the relationship is important to the church, and its dissolution risks “diminishing the distinct Methodist character that has shaped the university’s identity,” the Rev. Dr. Derrek Belase, chairman of the South Central Jurisdiction Mission Council, said in a statement.In a brief filed on behalf of the church, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty argued that if the court were to allow the university to unilaterally separate itself from the church, it would violate the legal principle of church autonomy, overriding church-written bylaws and essentially letting the government interfere in ecclesiastical affairs. Many prominent American universities were founded with distinctly religious missions, but later shed their formal ties and Christian identities.Vanderbilt University, another school founded by Southern Methodists, declared itself independent of the church before Southern Methodist University was founded, and that severance was eventually supported by the Tennessee Supreme Court. Church leaders enshrined the church’s connection to Southern Methodist in the school’s bylaws in response to the Tennessee decision. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In the century that followed its founding, Southern Methodist grew in the direction its founders imagined. It now has 12,000 students and an endowment of more than $2 billion. Dr. Turner, who became president in 1995, landed George W. Bush’s presidential library for the campus in 2008. The school joined the Atlantic Coast Conference last year, and its football team made the playoffs. The board announced last week that Jay Hartzell, currently president of the much larger University of Texas at Austin, will be Southern Methodist’s next president.

As he prepares for his final year as governor of New Jersey, Philip D. Murphy on Tuesday proposed banning cellphones in schools and disclosed plans to blunt any additional limits on abortion access by the Trump administration. Mr. Murphy also said he would work to address last year’s alarming 14 percent increase in roadway fatalities by overhauling the state’s 10 most dangerous intersections. Mr. Murphy, a Democrat, began his seventh State of the State address in Trenton by acknowledging what he called “the elephant that is not in the room”: President-elect Donald J. Trump. “I know there is some uncertainty and even concern about what this administration will bring,” the governor said, drawing the first round of applause from the standing-room-only crowd. Mr. Murphy, who plans to attend Mr. Trump’s inauguration next week, said he “would never back away from partnering with the Trump administration” when doing so aligned with New Jersey’s priorities. But he vowed to fight Mr. Trump “if and when” those values are tested. To that end, he said that New Jersey would stockpile a supply of mifepristone, one of two drugs used in medication abortions, in the event that Mr. Trump moved to limit its availability. Aides to Mr. Murphy said New Jersey’s Department of Health had already begun gathering a six-month “strategic reserve” of medications, including mifepristone, which will be stored with abortion providers. New Jersey law permits abortion throughout a pregnancy. But the governor also said that he would pursue legislation to end out-of-pocket costs for the procedure, reiterating a proposal he made last year. As he outlined his priorities for his final year in office, Mr. Murphy said he would push for legislation to provide full pay to state workers on parental leave, make full-day kindergarten mandatory in the small number of towns that do not already offer it and permit 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in school board elections. But perhaps the loudest and most sustained applause came when Mr. Murphy said he would direct school districts to adopt policies that ban cellphones in the state’s elementary, middle and high schools. “Our children are inundated with screens,” Mr. Murphy said, adding that cellphone use had fueled a rise in cyberbullying and contributed to a mental health crisis among children. “We will help establish phone-free schools,” he vowed. New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, said Monday that she planned to limit cellphone use in schools. New York and New Jersey join a growing number of states, including Virginia, Ohio and Minnesota, that have moved to limit the use of the devices in schools. Los Angeles Unified became the largest school district in the United States to ban cellphones last year. Mr. Murphy is prohibited by law from running for more than two consecutive terms, and November’s race to replace him is already in full swing. Six prominent Democrats and four Republicans are competing for their party’s nomination to run for governor in the June primaries. The list of contenders includes the mayors of the state’s two largest cities, two members of Congress and a former Republican Assembly member who came within three percentage points of beating Mr. Murphy in 2021. Indeed, the governor’s speech had a perfunctory air, and members of the audience at times appeared distracted; some repeatedly exited and re-entered the State Assembly chamber throughout the address. The Republican leader of the State Senate, Anthony M. Bucco, called Mr. Murphy’s address a retread of costly, feel-good policy proposals. “This state has become more and more and more unaffordable,” Mr. Bucco said. “The days of spending outside of our means are coming to an end,” he added. Still, the hourlong speech offered a window into major challenges facing New Jersey, including last year’s 14 percent increase in roadway fatalities. Traffic fatalities nationwide have been declining. But last year in New Jersey, there were 691 traffic deaths, up from 606 the year before. Pedestrian fatalities soared by 32 percent. The increase coincided with a drastic eight-month reduction in traffic enforcement by State Police troopers, who in July 2023 began writing far fewer tickets for speeding, drunken driving, cellphone use and other violations. The reduced enforcement began a week after the state’s attorney general, Matthew J. Platkin, released a report critical of the performance of the State Police, New Jersey’s largest policing agency. In August 2023, the first full month of the slowdown, troopers wrote 81 percent fewer tickets statewide, and crashes on the state’s two main highways immediately began to increase, according to records obtained by The New York Times through public records requests. Mr. Platkin has appointed Preet Bharara, a prominent former federal prosecutor in Manhattan, to lead a criminal investigation of the slowdown.Mr. Murphy is the only official in New Jersey with the power to replace the State Police superintendent, Col. Patrick Callahan, who led the department during the slowdown. On Monday, when asked about the relationship between traffic fatalities and the reduced levels of enforcement, Mr. Murphy said, “If we’re not enforcing the laws on the books, that’s unacceptable.” But he also worked to shift accountability for the slowdown away from himself and instead place full responsibility on Mr. Platkin and Colonel Callahan. “It’s on their backs to get this into the right place,” Mr. Murphy said, adding that he had confidence in both men. A spokesman for Colonel Callahan did not respond to a request for comment. On Monday, Mr. Murphy signed a bill that created a commission dedicated to reducing the number of traffic fatalities in New Jersey to zero by 2040. On Tuesday, he told lawmakers that he would “work with all of you to make New Jersey’s roads safer.” He also announced plans to “overhaul” 10 of the state’s most dangerous intersections “to keep our families safe and to help prevent avoidable tragedies.”

Hundreds of public schoolteachers are among the Southern Californians who lost their homes to raging wildfires in the last week. Some are scrambling to find places to live, even as they hope to return soon to their classrooms to restore some normality for their students — and for themselves. In the Pasadena Unified School District, which includes the communities where the Eaton fire has killed at least 16 people and destroyed thousands of structures, about 300 employees lost their homes, said Jonathan Gardner, president of United Teachers of Pasadena, the district’s union. The district has about 1,500 teachers and staff members, according to federal statistics. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, which includes an area where the Palisades fire leveled whole neighborhoods, the teacher’s union has counted nearly 150 teachers and staff members whose homes were lost, and hundreds more who’ve been displaced. Cecily Myart-Cruz, president of that district’s union, United Teachers Los Angeles, said that she expected that figure to rise. Many students have also lost their homes, a mass displacement that will affect the rest of the school year and beyond, and could lead to declines in enrollment, Mr. Gardner predicted. “There’s not going to be anything resembling normal for the rest of the semester,” he said. The Pasadena school district is closed this week, but nearly all schools in the Los Angeles school district reopened on Monday. Students and teachers at two elementary schools that were destroyed by the Palisades fire will resume classes later this week at space set aside for them in two nearby schools. In the Los Angeles district, more than 300 employees live in areas under mandatory evacuation orders, a district spokesperson said. Teachers who were displaced by the fires have been given the week off. Rebecca Mitsuse, 57, a middle school science and English teacher whose home in Altadena was destroyed in the Eaton fire, said she was using the time to search for housing for herself, her husband and their 16-year-old son. She hopes to be back in the classroom next week. “Life has to keep moving forward,” she said. Still, she is grappling with loss on many levels — including keepsakes that she cannot replace. Among those are books she used in lessons, notebooks where she had recorded plans and resources, a note from a student she received during her challenging first year of teaching 20 years ago. “We’re so glad you’re our teacher, and I know it’s hard, but please stay,” she recalled the note saying. LoriAnne Denne, 66, a middle school English teacher and college and career adviser, also lost her home in Altadena. She described herself as fortunate because she and her husband can stay with her brother, who lives nearby. Even so, she was finding the process of submitting insurance claims and applying for help overwhelming. “Everything should be done yesterday, by people who can’t even cope and have no home,” Ms. Denne said. Many teachers in Los Angeles-area districts already struggled to afford to live near their schools, so the cost of temporary housing was a major concern. Mr. Gardner said that roughly half of Pasadena school employees lived inside the district, and their shorter commutes allowed many of them to coach sports teams and advise after-school clubs. Those staff members had been heavily affected by Eaton fire damage, he said. “For those that aren’t able to find a place nearby, those schools will lose some of that color, that joy” created by teacher-led extracurricular activities, Mr. Gardner said. Scott Mandel, 68, has taught in the Los Angeles district for 40 years. As one of eight regional chairs of the union, he has spent the last few days calling roughly 15 teachers in his area who lost their homes to check in and share information. Some, he said, were crying when they picked up the phone. The closest comparison to the fires, he said, was the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which killed about 60 people and caused $35 billion in damage. While a few teachers lost homes in that quake, he said, it was “nowhere near the scale that we have now.” Ms. Mitsuse, whose school has reopened, said she was looking forward to the sense of routine that returning to work would provide. In the meantime, she knew her students could go to her partner teacher, who teaches math and history, with questions or concerns. He lives in Pasadena, and although fire had come within a few blocks of his home, she said, it escaped damage.

A divided House on Tuesday approved legislation that aims to bar transgender women and girls from participating in school athletic programs designated for female students, as Republicans sought to wring political opportunity from a social issue that helped them win the 2024 elections. The bill, approved almost entirely along party lines on a vote of 218 to 206, would prohibit federal funding from going to K-12 schools that include transgender students on women’s sports teams. It faces a steep challenge in the Senate, where seven Democrats would have to join Republicans to move it past a filibuster and to a final vote. Just two Democrats joined all Republicans in voting in favor in the House, while another Democrat voted “present,” declining to register a position. Republicans on Tuesday presented the legislation, which they also pushed through during the last Congress, as a popular and pragmatic way to level the playing field for female athletes, and as a move to protect women’s spaces and women’s rights. “The overwhelming majority believe men don’t belong in women’s sports,” said Representative Greg Steube, the Florida Republican who sponsored the measure. “This bill will deliver upon the mandate the American people gave Congress.” But Democrats, who dubbed the bill the “Child Predator Empowerment Act,” said it was a dangerous invasion of privacy for young girls that would put them at greater risk. They also pointed to the bill as the latest example of an unhealthy fixation among Republicans with trying to restrict the rights of transgender individuals, when they could be spending their time passing legislation to create jobs or reduce the prices of groceries. Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, said bluntly that the bill was an example of Republicans’ “creepy obsession with your kids’ private parts” and that it would fuel more hate against a small and vulnerable population of transgender children that already faces higher rates of bullying and mental health issues. “Every kid should be able to play sports,” Mr. McGovern added. “This is a mean, cruel, bullying tactic.” Representative Lori Trahan, Democrat of Massachusetts and the only former Division I female college athlete currently serving in Congress, said there were legitimate concerns about transgender athletes competing in women’s sports at the highest levels. But she criticized Republican lawmakers for injecting themselves into the issue. “Why in the world would we let insincere, attention-seeking politicians here in Washington — many of whom know little to nothing about competitive sports — take over?” Ms. Trahan said. “It doesn’t make any sense.” Democrats also said that while there could be instances of transgender athletes competing in elite sports that were concerning, the measure would lump those with harmless situations in which elementary school children simply want to be included in activities with their friends. The decision by Republicans to bring up a bill cracking down on transgender rights in the second week of Congress indicated that they believe the issue continues to be politically potent for them. During the 2024 presidential election season, the Trump campaign spent more than $37 million on television ads dealing with transgender issues, nearly 20 percent of its overall ad budget, according to data provided by AdImpact, an organization that tracks political ad placement and spending. Last year, House Republicans brought up 87 bills curtailing transgender rights, according to Trans Legislation Tracker, an independent research organization tracking such bills.And as they have started the unpleasant process of conducting a post-election autopsy, studying their own deficits, Democrats have been split on how much their stance defending transgender rights cost them with swing voters. On Tuesday, Democrats notably spent more time raising alarms about how the bill would trample the privacy of girls, who they said would be subject to invasive questioning about their bodies, than on defending the rights of transgender athletes. “This doesn’t protect a girl’s rights, it eliminates them,” said Representative Katherine M. Clark, Democrat of Massachusetts. “It puts a target on the back of every girl, every young woman who chooses to play sports. The genital inspection of little girls is the wrong answer.” What followed was a heated disagreement about how such legislation would be enforced. Representative Tim Walberg, Republican of Michigan, said there would be no need for invasive questions or any physical exam; enforcement would mean simply reviewing a student’s birth certificate to see what gender he or she was assigned at birth. Democrats said that some birth certificates list babies who are born intersex, meaning their biological or physiological traits are not clearly male or female, and argued they would not be a reliable way to enforce the ban on transgender athletes from women’s sports. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, said that “when there is no enforcement mechanism, you open the door to every enforcement mechanism.” Democrats also noted how small a population was at stake. There are about 510,000 athletes competing at the N.C.A.A. level, Representative Suzanne Bonamici, Democrat of Oregon, noted, and just 10 are transgender. But Republicans said the legislation would strengthen Title IX protections and railed against Democrats for what they characterized as extreme positions on transgender issues, citing stories from their own districts about girls losing out on opportunities that went instead to transgender students. Mr. Steube blasted the “radical left who seek to dismantle the core foundation of our society” by recognizing more than two genders. “In worship to their trans idols, radical leftists want to kill Title IX.” Mr. Walberg added that Democrats were missing the reality that “the American people, parents, grandparents, teachers, don’t stand with them” on this issue. The two Democrats who voted with Republicans in favor of the measure were Representatives Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez of Texas. Representative Don Davis, Democrat of North Carolina, voted “present.” Mr. Cuellar opposed the same bill last year, while both Mr. Gonzalez and Mr. Davis did not vote on it. President Biden had sought to expand protections for transgender students and make other changes to the rules governing sex discrimination in schools. But last week, a federal judge in Kentucky struck down that effort. It is still early days in the new Congress, and President-elect Donald J. Trump has not yet been sworn into office. But railing against transgender rights is already becoming a theme for the Republican-led House. Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, began a campaign against the first openly transgender member of Congress, Representative Sarah McBride of Delaware, before she was even sworn in. During member orientation, Ms. Mace introduced a measure to bar transgender women from using women’s restrooms and changing rooms in the Capitol complex. Ms. McBride so far has steered clear of weighing in on issues that have to do with her identity. She did not take the bait on the bathroom ban, saying simply that she would adhere to the new rules. And on Tuesday, Ms. McBride opposed the bill, but she notably did not speak out against it on the floor as many of her Democratic colleagues did. A correction was made on Jan. 14, 2025: An earlier version of this article misstated Representative Lori Trahan’s status as a former college athlete. She is the only former Division I female college athlete serving in Congress, not the only former Division I college athlete there.

Michigan prohibited segregation in public education decades before the Supreme Court did the same for the nation in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Yet nearly 20 years after Brown, the public schools in Detroit remained almost totally segregated. The story of how that happened, the failed effort to change it, and the implications for public education and civil rights today is the subject of Michelle Adams’s splendid new book, “The Containment.” The Detroit schools were segregated not because a law required it, but because the city, like virtually everywhere in the United States, operated on a neighborhood school model. And since Detroit’s neighborhoods were highly segregated — 99 percent white in some areas and 95 percent Black in others in 1970 — its schools were, too. Why? Because, Adams writes, of a longstanding policy of containment: a system of government and private actions that kept the city’s Black citizens confined to a handful of neighborhoods in Detroit and out of the suburbs altogether. The tools of the containment included racially restrictive covenants in housing deeds (no sales to Black people allowed), redlining (mortgages for Black home buyers only in certain areas), as well as segregated public housing and segregated real estate salesperson associations. “The Containment” follows the lawsuit, filed in 1970 by the N.A.A.C.P., to integrate Detroit’s schools. In this objective, the civil rights group eventually found an unlikely but revealing ally: the Citizens Committee for Better Education, which represented the already shrinking white population of the northern part of the city, an area bordered, as all Eminem fans know, by the road known as Eight Mile. The C.C.B.E. originally entered the case as an opponent of the N.A.A.C.P. In time, however, the C.C.B.E. became a partner of sorts, because its members — mostly working-class white families — began arguing to the federal judge Stephen J. Roth that it was unfair to place the burden of integration exclusively on the whites of Detroit, who could not afford to move north of Eight Mile, while shielding their wealthier white neighbors in the suburbs. Roth, a conservative Democrat and former state attorney general, ultimately saw the logic of the argument. In this way, Adams’s book explores class as well as race, with a richness and sophistication that recall J. Anthony Lukas’s 1985 masterpiece, “Common Ground,” which told the story of the struggle over the desegregation of Boston’s public schools at around the same time. In June 1972, Judge Roth ordered a broad integration plan, which included such prosperous suburbs as Grosse Pointe and Bloomfield Hills in the same “metropolitan” school district as Detroit. That is, he established a system of “busing” — a word that was every bit as politically incendiary at that time as “trans” is today. The suburbs recoiled in horror, and politicians joined in. On May 16, 1972, George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor, had ridden an antibusing platform to a smashing victory in the Michigan Democratic presidential primary. (He had been shot and paralyzed in Maryland the previous day.) Richard Nixon, running for re-election, had demanded “an immediate halt to all new busing orders by federal courts,” and his campaign responded to Roth’s ruling with a TV ad declaring: “President Nixon believes busing is wrong. And he intends to do something about it.” Meanwhile, the state of Michigan appealed Roth’s order to the Supreme Court in a case called Milliken v. Bradley. The issue before the court was profound. In Brown, the court held that segregating students by race was unconstitutional, but how did this ruling apply to schools located in neighborhoods that happened to be racially segregated — in other words, when racial separation was not a binding policy of the school district (de jure segregation) but the reality of the community (de facto segregation)? By 1974, Nixon had placed four new justices on the court, and they formed the core of the 5-to-4 majority that voted that July to overturn Roth’s desegregation plan on the grounds that the Constitution compelled states to remedy only de jure, not de facto, segregation. (Roth himself died of a heart attack at 66, just before the Supreme Court’s decision was announced.) In an apt summary, Adams writes that Chief Justice Warren Burger’s majority opinion was “grounded in white innocence. … There was no acknowledgment of how Blacks were locked in specific Detroit neighborhoods and mostly Black schools, and then into an ever-expanding urban core that was hermetically sealed off from the suburbs.” Though a subsequent, much more modest plan by Roth’s successor, another federal judge, attempted to address segregation within Detroit, it affected just 10 percent of the students in the city’s school system and left many schools untouched. (Adams observes that in this period, there was actually more successful court-ordered integration in the public schools of the South, because municipalities there tended to include the suburbs, while in the North suburban towns were often legally separate from the cities they abutted.) In all, as Adams puts it, “Milliken was where the promise of Brown ended.” If anything, Adams, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, understates the continuing effect of Milliken and its prohibition on metropolitan desegregation orders. She writes about white flight to the suburbs and their public schools, but little about white flight to private and parochial schools. (Adams notes that she is a Black Detroiter whose parents sent her to a mostly white private school in the suburbs.) The white population of Detroit’s public schools currently hovers at about 2 percent. Adams recognizes that there is a long history in the Black community, including in Detroit, of hostility to integration, or, to put it another way, of belief in Black self-sufficiency. The theory goes that Black excellence in all matters, including in education, does not require the presence of whites. (Justice Clarence Thomas is now a leading advocate for this view.) But Adams is firm in her belief, like that of Justice Thurgood Marshall and many others, that students thrive most in diverse settings. As she writes, the research shows that “students in racially and socioeconomically integrated schools and classrooms have stronger academic outcomes and higher test scores, are more likely to enroll in college, have higher earnings and health outcomes as adults, and are less likely to become incarcerated.” In the half-century since Milliken, the Supreme Court, as well as the evolving structure of the American economy, has made those kinds of public schools only harder to find. “The Containment” explains why.

Public schools in Montclair, N.J., were closed on Monday after a teacher at an elementary school threatened its principal on social media, the police said. Several hours later, the school district announced that the potential threat had been “neutralized.” The teacher, Amir Doctry, was arrested in Philadelphia on Monday morning and charged with making terroristic threats, a spokesman for the Montclair Police Department, Lt. Terence Turner, said. Mr. Doctry, a teacher at Northeast Elementary School, was put on administrative leave last week when he started showing signs of “erratic behavior,” Lieutenant Turner said. Mr. Doctry was in a “manic state” when he was apprehended and taken to a Philadelphia hospital for a psychological evaluation, Lieutenant Turner added. The Montclair Police Department said it was increasing patrols around all schools out of an abundance of caution. The department added that there was “no further danger” to Montclair, a township in Essex County, N.J., that is about 20 miles from New York City by car. Mr. Doctry is listed as a “long-term teacher” on the school district’s website, but he was not listed as a staff member in the Northeast Elementary School’s directory as of Monday afternoon. A LinkedIn profile for a user with his name says that he owns a business geared toward creating virtual-reality lessons for students and that he previously taught sixth-graders in Montclair and students in Newark. Not long after the school district announced the school closure on Monday, parents began to speculate that it was connected to a YouTube video featuring Mr. Doctry. Lieutenant Turner confirmed the connection in an interview. In the video, Mr. Doctry can be seen holding up a letterman jacket and saying that he believed he would be promoted to school superintendent and planned to get the title “superintendent” stitched onto the jacket once that happened. “That is how confident I am that I am going to be the new superintendent of Montclair Public Schools,” he said. He later added: “We need change. That is the whole point,” before making a series of remarks about artificial intelligence. The video’s lengthy caption contained a string of profane, political and racist assertions. It read, in part: “Joe must die school shooting Montclair school shooting kills Dr. Joe Racsim Racist Joe is dead. He dies tonight.” The school’s principal is listed as Dr. Joseph Putrino. Lieutenant Turner confirmed that Dr. Putrino, who did not respond to a request for comment, was the target of the threat. Damen Cooper, the interim superintendent of Montclair Public Schools, had said in an email to parents early Monday that the district became aware of the potential threat late Sunday night and had decided to close schools to be safe. “I understand that this last-minute closure may cause inconvenience, but the safety of our students, staff, and entire school community is our highest priority,” the email said. Several hours later, Mr. Cooper advised the community that the potential threat had been “neutralized,” thanks to a collaboration with the Police Department. Matthew Frankel, who has two children in Montclair public schools, one of whom was tutored by Mr. Doctry during the pandemic, said the news had been a “shock to the system.” “There was transparency within our community, and I think in a moment of crisis, that’s what we want as parents,” he said. “In terms of how we feel about this teacher, and even speculating on his mental state, I think the most important thing that we can do is to let the authorities do their job.”