(Daily Signal)—The fruits of another woke revolution are here—and even California academics are fed up.
In May 2020, weeks into the nation’s shutdown and days before George Floyd’s death, the University of California regents voted that applicants to the prestigious public higher education system would no longer need to submit SAT or ACT test scores.
“I believe the test is a racist test,” said Jonathan “Jay” Sures, one of the regents. “There’s no two ways about it.”
The initial vote, which was cast during the tenure of former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano as UC president, suspended the test score requirement through 2024. A lawsuit settled in 2021 required the University of California system, which serves over 230,000 undergraduate students, to not consider standardized tests for admissions through 2025.
But now, over 900 members of the University of California faculty have had enough, according to the UC Student Success site, which hosts an explosive new letter.
Hundreds of professors, including dozens of STEM department chairs, ask in the letter that the UC system start requiring STEM major applicants to submit either math SAT or ACT scores.
Why?
Because the status quo is so broken that UC faculty are now teaching middle school—or even elementary—math skills to students old enough to vote.
At the University of California, San Diego, the number of students who had math skills below high school levels increased thirtyfold from 2020 to 2025, according to a 2025 report from a working group at the university. One out of 12 students didn’t even have math skills at a middle school level.
Yet looking at high school transcripts didn’t reveal how behind these students were. Forty-two percent of those students who were in the 2024 class and unable to do middle school math had taken precalculus or calculus in high school. Another 44% had taken a statistics class.
Without any SAT or ACT scores to provide context, admissions officers had no way of realizing how many students were taking classes but not bothering to learn anything.
As a result, UC San Diego is now teaching remedial math classes. Nor is it the only UC facing such challenges. “[F]or three consecutive years, 20%-30% of UC Berkeley first-semester calculus students who participated in mathematical diagnostic testing displayed severe preparation deficits,” states the letter.
Furthermore, these students’ poor grasp of math has implications for better-educated students. “[T]he widening spread between underprepared and well-prepared students creates polarized courses, weakening the foundation available to many students and making it harder to teach at the level required for advanced STEM work,” states the letter.
“UC is increasingly unable to provide its students with the education needed to become leaders in California’s scientific, technological, and economic future.”
But hey, even if California’s economy careens because there’s no workforce, at least the UC system is diverse, right?
Well, actually, it’s not so simple.
Sure, people blithely slap the racist label on standardized tests, as Jonathan “Jay” Sures did in 2020. But the reality is significantly more complicated.
“The SAT was originally designed to identify students who might not have had high [high school grade point averages] or attended elite or well-resourced high schools but who showed academic promise,” wrote members of a University of California task force in a January 2020 report.
“The SAT and ACT appear to play that role for many students at the UC today.”
Effectively, students who weren’t necessarily getting super-high GPAs at their high schools but were scoring well on standardized tests were still able to get into the UC system thanks to those test scores. Among the 2018 class, the task force identified about 22,000 who were admitted due to their SAT scores.
“Of these students for whom the SAT score was decisive in guaranteeing them admission to UC, 4,931 were low-income and 5,704 were first-generation college [students],” the report states, adding that “5,609 were underrepresented minorities (URMs), comprised of 4,442 Latino students, 999 African American students, and 168 Native American students.”
“This is a substantial proportion of these disadvantaged groups of students who would not have been guaranteed admission had they not had high SAT scores,” the report concludes.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that finding, the task force recommended against suspending the standardized testing requirement.
But of course, in 2020, the year when performative gestures trumped reality from sea to shining sea, the University of California poohbahs decided the critical thing was to seem woke, not to defend the misunderstood impacts of using standardized tests.
Consider the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which ultimately took a different path. MIT suspended testing requirements for two years, citing the COVID-19 pandemic, but then reinstated the test requirement—and the results weren’t exactly what leftists would have predicted.
“Once we brought the test requirement back, we admitted the most diverse class that we ever had in our history,” Stu Schmill, dean of admissions, told The New York Times in 2024. “Having test scores was helpful.”
In that class, the Times reported, “15 percent of students are Black, 16 percent are Hispanic, 38 percent are white, and 40 percent are Asian American” and “[a]bout 20 percent receive Pell Grants, the federal program for lower-income students.”
Since then, MIT’s incoming classes have become less racially diverse—but that’s not because of the standardized tests. It’s because the institute overhauled its admissions approach after the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that ruled race-based admissions were illegal.
Interestingly, economic diversity is increasing—in the class of 2029, 27% of students at MIT were eligible for Pell Grants, a sharp increase.
Ultimately, too, while white liberals are prone to angst over standardized tests, that’s not the viewpoint of minorities themselves. Only about a fifth of black and Hispanic respondents believe that test scores shouldn’t be a factor in college admissions, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey. In contrast, 81% of Hispanics and 79% of black respondents believed standardized test scores should be a major or minor factor in college admissions.
Will UC bring back the standardized tests? This letter comes at a time when more and more colleges have reinstated testing requirements. Nor is that the only sign that higher education gurus are waking up to the fact that they have veered too far from prioritizing—or even caring about at all—academic excellence. Harvard faculty voted earlier this month to start limiting As to about 20% of students in any given class—which will be a major change for the college. Currently, about 63% of undergraduate grades are As, according to the student newspaper, The Crimson.
It’s not quite 2019 all over again yet. But when even professors at public California universities are calling for a return to (partial) sanity, it shows just how extreme the overreach of 2020 was.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.