Since the Supreme Court’s sharply divided and startlingly wrongheaded decision two years ago in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, those concerned about religious liberty on campus have known that the fallout was on its way. At Vanderbilt University, it has arrived — and it’s as bad as anticipated.

In Martinez, the Court determined that public institutions like the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law could require all student groups — even those based on shared belief, such as religious and political organizations — to admit members and even leaders without regard to their beliefs. Groups like the Christian Legal Society (CLS), whose constitution required students to have traditional Christian beliefs (such as in Christ’s bodily resurrection) and morals (no sexual activity outside heterosexual marriage), could be required to remove those provisions from their constitutions and admit “all comers,” or else face “derecognition” and the corresponding loss of access to meeting space and other benefits that all other groups enjoyed. To lack recognition is basically not to exist at all on today’s college campus.

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‘Race to the Top” federal handouts, increasing Pell Grants, and executive-branch decrees won’t lower college tuition or improve the quality of university degrees, despite President Obama’s bluster in his State of the Union address. If only it were that simple.

The truth is that over the next decade, many universities may bankrupt themselves by clinging to an educational approach that confuses lecturing with learning and protects highly paid, tenured faculties and administrators from a tsunami of technological change that soon will deliver transformational learning at a fraction of today’s costs.

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For Rick Santorum, Missouri’s primary is likely his last opportunity to regain momentum.

Newt Gingrich isn’t on the ballot, thanks to his campaign’s decision not to file. (Missouri’s caucuses, held beginning in mid-March, will determine the state’s delegates, so the primary is a non-binding “beauty contest.”) That leaves Tuesday’s primary as a showdown between Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, and Santorum.

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Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta recently delivered the Obama administration’s clearest warning yet on Iran’s nuclear program. In a 60 Minutes interview he said: “If they proceed and we get intelligence that they’re proceeding with developing a nuclear weapon, then we will take whatever steps are necessary to stop it. . . . There are no options that are off the table.” As welcome as this clear warning may seem, it rests on legal grounds that are ultimately untenable — and potentially catastrophic.

The Iraq war roundly discredited the notion that inferential intelligence assessments are a valid basis for preemptive military action against a WMD threat. Tehran has helped remediate the problem by uniting the West, lending some degree of legitimacy-by-consensus to possible strikes. But that does not remove the obstacle that generally accepted principles of international law nowadays pose for any effective regime of counter-proliferation.

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Missouri’s “beauty contest” primary on Tuesday could be Rick Santorum’s big chance. If he defeats Mitt Romney in that event, as at least one poll shows he is poised to do, the punditocracy and public alike might finally recognize the considerable upside he would offer Republicans as their presidential nominee.

Rick Santorum can win the Republican nomination. Rick Santorum can indeed beat Barack Obama in the fall. And Rick Santorum can and would govern at least as conservatively as Ronald Reagan did.

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