“I have some free unsolicited advice for Harvard University”



Carol Swain:

  1. Stop listening to the apologists for plagiarism.
  2. Fire Claudine Gay posthaste. She can be relieved of duties until the terms are negotiated.
  3. Stop listening to the racist mob of whites and blacks who cry racism while being among the worst offenders.
  4. Hire the best man or woman who can steer the university back towards sanity. Appeasing the Marxist identity politics mob should not be a consideration. The person for the job might be a middle to older age white Jewish man who believes in classical liberalism.
  5. Have a sit down conversation with the people who have been harmed by the plagiarism of Gay and the system that protects her.
  6. Recognize that Harvard’s systematic racism and classism have far reaching effects.
  7. Apologize to alumni, students, parents, and donors who have been harmed and embarrassed.

More.




Notes on Large Language Models and Woke content






USCIS Updates Policy Guidance for International Students



U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)

For example, the guidance clarifies that F and M students must have a foreign residence that they do not intend to abandon, but that such students may be the beneficiary of a permanent labor certification application or immigrant visa petition and may still be able to demonstrate their intention to depart after a temporary period of stay.

In addition, the guidance specifies how F students seeking an extension of optional practical training (OPT) based on their degree in a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) field may be employed by startup companies, as long as the employer adheres to the training plan requirements, remains in good standing with E-Verify, and provides compensation commensurate to that provided to similarly situated U.S. workers, among other requirements.

The nonimmigrant academic student (F-1) classification allows a noncitizen to enter the United States as a full-time student at a college, university, seminary, conservatory, academic high school, elementary school, or other academic institution, or in a language training program. The nonimmigrant vocational student (M-1) classification includes students in established vocational or other recognized nonacademic programs, other than language training programs.




On the privacy of push notifications



Phoenix R&D

In December 2023, Reuters, TechCrunch, 404 Media, and others reported on the surveillance of Apple and Google users through push notifications. We were involved in the original investigation by netzpolitik.org. These findings have been confused in various places with an older privacy issue. In this blog post, we want to examine the problem and address potential misconceptions.

What is all this about?

Push notifications are a mechanism through which applications can send and display notifications to users of smartphones. Such notifications can include receiving a new email or a message from a messaging app. The user interface of push notifications is well known to any smartphone user – the infrastructure that drives them in the background is, however, a complex mechanism and not without privacy issues.

Push notifications are delivered via Apple Push Notification service (APNs) on Apple devices, or via Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM)or Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) on Android devices. To use these push notifications, applications must register a push token with the respective platform. The tokens are an identifier that references the installation of an application on a specific device. They are used as an identifier to route messaging from the internet to a device.

Push notifications come with two distinct privacy problems:




Self-Teaching, Spaced Repetition, & Why Books Don’t Work



Dwarkesh Patel:

A few weeks ago, I sat beside Andy Matuschak to record how he reads a textbook.

Even though my own job is to learn things, I was shocked with how much more intense, painstaking, and effective his learning process was.

So I asked if we could record a conversation about how he learns and a bunch of other topics:

  • How he identifies and interrogates his confusion (much harder than it seems, and requires an extremely effortful and slow pace)
  • Why memorization is essential to understanding and decision-making
  • How come some people (like Tyler Cowen) can integrate so much information without an explicit note taking or spaced repetition system.
  • How LLMs and video games will change education



Congress Widens Investigation into Harvard to Include Plagiarism Allegations Against President Claudine Gay



Emma H. Haidar and Cam E. Kettles:

“If a university is willing to look the other way and not hold faculty accountable for engaging in academically dishonest behavior, it cheapens its mission and the value of its education,” Foxx wrote in the letter.

University spokesperson Jonathan L. Swain declined to comment on the investigation.

The committee initially opened a probe into antisemitism at Harvard on Dec. 7 following Gay’s testimony before the committee two days earlier. In an interview with The Crimson the same day, Gay said the University would “comply with whatever information is called for.”

Foxx requested Harvard produce “all documents and communications” related to the plagiarism allegations or related to the review by members of the Corporation.

The committee also warned that Harvard could lose federal funding if it is found to not have taken the claims of widespread plagiarism against Gay seriously.




Commentary on Wisconsin’s K-12 System



Mackenzie Krumme

In her 2023 State of Education Address, the head of the Department of Public Instruction said schools are undergoing significant change. We speak with Superintendent Jill Underly on issues facing Wisconsin’s schools in the past year and look ahead to 2024.

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




Civics: WILL Files Lawsuit Against Discriminatory “DEI” State Bar Practices



WILL:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed a lawsuit against the State Bar of Wisconsin for promoting discriminatory DEI practices including its “Diversity Clerkship Program,” which offers premier internship opportunities based primarily on race.

WILL’s client must pay mandatory and annual State Bar dues, which not only fund this internship program, but also other programs and communications that discriminate against him and thousands of other Wisconsin attorneys.

The Quotes: WILL Associate Counsel, Skylar Croy, stated, “When the government discriminates based on race, it sows more division in our country and violates the Constitution in the process. WILL is standing up against discrimination and holding the State Bar accountable to the rights of its due-paying members.”




A bitter pill for public health



Christopher Snowdon:

In March 2021, a study was published in BMJ Open claiming that the UK sugar tax had led to a 10 per cent reduction in the amount of sugar consumed in soft drinks. Although one of its authors admitted that a decline of this magnitude “might sound modest”, it was presented as a win for public health. The preposterous pressure group Action on Sugar called for the tax to be “extended to other categories” and the 10 per cent figure soon found its way into the National Food Strategy and several World Health Organisation reports.

Last week the study was retracted, along with an editorial titled “UK sugar tax hits the sweet spot” that had been published in the British Medical Journalclaiming that the tax was “working exactly as intended”.

It turns out that tax has not been not working exactly as intended. In a new version of the study, the authors estimate that the decline in sugar consumption from soft drinks was just 2.7 per cent, barely a quarter of the original figure, and that in contrast to the original study, which claimed that there had been no change in soft drink sales, the volume of soft drinks rose by 2.6 per cent.




Hemp Gummies Are Sending Hundreds of Kids to HospitalsH



Liz Essley Whyte:

Jessica Harris’s 15-year-old daughter was walking to her school bus in London, Ky., last month when a classmate offered her a piece of red candy.

The square-shaped sweet seemed harmless at the time to Harris’s daughter. But it turned out it contained a form of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the intoxicating ingredient in cannabis plants, and it sent her to the hospital.

An explosion of products containing THC and similar chemicals—some of them in kid-enticing forms such as candy or gummy bears—is sending children to emergency rooms across the country and has federal and state regulators grappling with how to contain it. Many of these products face little to no restrictions, because their creators obtain their intoxicating compounds not from marijuana but from hemp, which Congress legalized in 2018.

Calls to poison-control centers concerning these newly popular hemp-derived cannabinoids boomed over the past several years, from four in January 2021 to hundreds every month of 2022 and 2023 for which there is data, according to America’s Poison Centers. More than half of those calls concerned children. Reports of adverse events from these products to the Food and Drug Administration have also increased.




Notes on School Choice:



Tommy Thompson:

The school choice and charter movement spreading across the country had its beginning more than three decades ago in Wisconsin.

Opponents of choice and charter schools asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to end these successful programs. Fortunately, the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday unanimously denied the request to directly take the case. But the threat to end these education reforms isn’t over, because the lawsuit could still be filed in circuit court.

In 1990 as governor, I had the privilege to design and sign into law the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. It was the first program to empower parents by having public funding follow the student. By the decade’s end, I signed additional measures creating charter schools and allowing parents to enroll their children in public schools outside of districts where they lived.




Quebec’s ‘Language Police’ Take Aim at Sneaky English Slang



Vipal Monga:

Dequoy’s cri de coeur resonated across Quebec, where language remains a hot button. Although French is the official language of Quebec’s government, education, courts and commerce, provincial authorities are alarmed by what they see as the waning of French in workplaces and homes.

A particular concern is the creep of “Franglais,” the mixing of French with English slang. In an ad campaign launched earlier this year, on TV and social media, authorities warned of the pernicious spread of lingo such as “cool” and “chill”—even “email.”

A provincial ad parodying Franglais also threw in the English words “sick,” “insane” and “sketch.”

Longtime Montreal residents readily cop to committing Franglais. Kristian Gravenor, a 60-year-old journalist, peppers his French with bilingual flourishes such as “field trip,” to indicate an outing.

“People find it spicy and delightful,” said Gravenor, who takes a Darwinian attitude toward the matter. “It’s survival of the best words, as far as I’m concerned.”




About iMessage Contact Key Verification



Apple

iMessage Contact Key Verification provides additional security by helping to detect sophisticated threats against iMessage servers and allowing you to verify that you’re only messaging the people you intend to.




“I was one of ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after January 6. I think the court’s decision is shameful”



Peter Meijer

In a time when elite schools appear uniquely removed from reality, amid a political moment defined by elite failure, the irony is profound. Trump campaigns on “saving America” from elites seeking to thwart the will of the people. Those elites, in turn, respond by confirming Trump’s worst allegations.

Third, the consequences:

What is extraordinary today will be precedent tomorrow; past exceptions become today’s rule. Bending the law and loosening interpretations to force Trump’s accountability for January 6 into the legal realm will be far more damaging in the long term than whatever Trump’s opponents think they might prevent.

Broadening the Fourteenth Amendment understanding of insurrection from the horrendous bloodshed of a civil war or equivalent catastrophe will open the floodgates to tit-for-tat challenges. If Trump’s rhetorical culpability for January 6 qualifies, similar lawsuits against Democratic politicians who encouraged BLM rioters will swiftly follow. Was Kamala Harris giving “aid or comfort” when she fundraised bail money for rioters? You can imagine where this could go.

Political chaos is guaranteed if the Colorado ruling stands. That the Supreme Court will undoubtedly vote to overturn is cold comfort now that a state Supreme Court has sanctioned such corrosive folly. 

You will be hard-pressed to find someone less disposed toward Trump than me. 

I was one of ten House Republicans who voted to impeach him following January 6. I stand by that vote, despite the fact that it cost me reelection in Michigan after Democrats boosted my Trump-endorsed primary challenger. (Really.)




Civics: Lawfare, the Ivy League, UVA law vs Denver






Fresh Allegations of Plagiarism Unearthed in Official Academic Complaint Against Claudine Gay



Aaron Sibarium:

Harvard University on Tuesday received a complaint outlining over 40 allegations of plagiarism against its embattled president, Claudine Gay. The document paints a picture of a pattern of misconduct more extensive than has been previously reported and puts the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing body—which said it initiated an “independent review” of Gay’s scholarship and issued a statement of support for her leadership—back in the spotlight.

The new allegations, which were submitted to Harvard’s research integrity officer, Stacey Springs, include the examples reported by the Washington Free Beacon and other outlets, as well as dozens of additional cases in which Gay quoted or paraphrased authors without proper attribution, according to a copy of the complaint reviewed by the Free Beacon. They range from missing quotation marks around a few phrases or sentences to entire paragraphs lifted verbatim.

The full list of examples spans seven of Gay’s publications—two more than previously reported—which comprise almost half of her scholarly output. Though the Harvard Corporation said earlier this month that it initiated an independent review Gay’s work in October and found “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct,” that probe focused on just three papers.




Data Poisoning



T.J. Thomson and Daniel Angus

Imagine this. You need an image of a balloon for a work presentation and turn to a text-to-image generator, like Midjourney or DALL-E, to create a suitable image.

You enter the prompt: “red balloon against a blue sky” but the generator returns an image of an egg instead. You try again but this time, the generator shows an image of a watermelon.

What’s going on?

The generator you’re using may have been “poisoned”.

What is ‘data poisoning’?

Text-to-image generators work by being trained on large datasets that include millions or billions of images. Some generators, like those offered by Adobe or Getty, are only trained with images the generator’s maker owns or has a licence to use. 

But other generators have been trained by indiscriminately scraping online images, many of which may be under copyright. This has led to a slew of copyright infringement cases where artists have accused big tech companies of stealing and profiting from their work.




Notes on credentialism and bureaucracy



Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau

The Department of Safety and Professional Services (DSPS) is statutorily responsible for ensuring the safe and competent practice of credentialed professionals in Wisconsin. In August 2023, DSPS administered more than 200 types of credentials for individuals who work in healthcare professions, business professions, and the trades.

DSPS is funded primarily by program revenue, including from the fees individuals pay when applying for initial credentials and renewing their credentials. In fiscal year (FY) 2022-23, DSPS spent $11.2 million on credentialing activities.

Commentary.




UW La Crosse drops mandatory ‘inclusivity statement’ after YAF legal threat



College Fix:

The University of Wisconsin – La Crosse will not require the Young Americans for Freedom chapter to include an “inclusivity statement” in order to be recognized on campus.

The school announced the policy change Friday morning after being threatened with a lawsuit by YAF, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, and the Mountain States Legal Foundation.

“[The] referenced statement is not a condition for YAF’s recognition as a student organization, effective immediately,” Quinn Williams, the counsel for the UW system, stated on Friday. The UW-La Crosse Student Association required the statement’s use.

“This is a massive victory for free speech and our constitutionally protected rights, and we look forward to promoting YAF across the campus next semester,” campus YAF Chairman Ryan Kitzan told the national organization’s New Guard publication.




“From pre-K lessons on ‘ethnic noses’ to lectures on Israel as an apartheid state, students are learning that Jews are the enemy”



Francesca Block:

Earlier, she had made her philosophy for educating kids clear: “Our work of decolonizing education begins in preschool. It is very much already a political practice.”

Ever since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, pro-Palestinian protests have swept U.S. colleges, leading to charges of Jew-hatred and a disastrous congressional hearing where three college presidents failed to offer a clear moral condemnation of rising antisemitism.

But the ideology fueling these demonstrations isn’t limited to the college campus. It now begins in public high schools and even elementary schools as early as pre-K, according to more than 30 public school teachers, administrators, and parents across four states who spoke to The Free Press.

American youths aren’t just encountering the views on TikTok; they’re learning them from teachers and, in some cases, from the mandatory public school curriculum itself. Take California, where a 10th grade history course, approved by the Santa Ana Unified School District, includes readings that call Israel an “extremist illegal Jewish settler population” and accuses the country of “ethnic cleansing.” Or the Jefferson Union High School District near San Francisco, which teaches about the “Palestinian dispossession of lands/identity/culture through Zionist settler colonialism.”




The era of big taxes is upon us



Tom Fairless

Rich countries are raising more money from taxpayers than they have in decades to finance a burst of state spending as surging interest ratesmake borrowing less attractive. 

Tax revenues have risen to record levels as a share of economic output in a number of major economies, including France, Japan and South Korea, according to data published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the club of mainly rich countries. 

The increases are worth hundreds of billions of dollars in additional revenue for governments that are navigating an array of new spending needs, from military priorities to industrial policy.

They underline a trend toward big government, amplified by the Covid-19 pandemic and fueled by national-security concerns in a world of geopolitical divisions, the need to care for aging populations and the fight against climate change.




Sydney man dubbed the ‘Annihilator’ wins spreadsheet world championship



Daisy Dumas:

There was a moment in the semi-final of the Microsoft Excel world championship when Andrew “the Annihilator” Ngai thought he had been eliminated.

With the clock ticking and the Las Vegas audience on the edge of their seats, the two-time spreadsheet world champion started “furiously checking” his answers. Had he made a rounding error? Were his decimal places off?

Stressed and doubting himself, Ngai decided it wasn’t his night. Michael “the Jarman Army” Jarman from the UK or Peter Sharl – no nickname – from the US looked set to win. But Ngai had no reason to worry.

“For some unknown reason there was a mismatch between the scoresheet and the live stream,” he tells Guardian Australia from the US. “No one really knows why but it got out of sync.”

The glitch was fixed, the scoreboard corrected and the 36-year-old from Sydney stormed to victory on Saturday night, becoming the triple world champion in data processing.




The Biggest Root Cause of Crime Is Fatherlessness



Jason Riley:

That advice, more popularly known as the “success sequence,” is often credited to research done by Brookings Institution scholars Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins, though others have made similar observations. In his recent book, “Agency,” Ian Rowe of the American Enterprise Institute writes that the message “has attracted many admirers because of the simplicity of the three steps that young people, even if born into disadvantaged circumstances or raised by a young single parent, can themselves control and take in their lives.”

The effort nevertheless faced significant backlash from detractors who accused then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg of stigmatizing teen pregnancy and pushing a “moralistic, conservative agenda to revitalize marriage,” Mr. Rowe writes. Mr. Bloomberg’s successor, Bill de Blasio, ultimately abandoned the effort. Public moralizing has since fallen further out of favor and been replaced by a kind of self-congratulatory nonjudgmentalism. In today’s New York, you’re likely to see ads for free syringes and directions to “safe” injections sites for junkies, even as drug overdoses have reached record levels.

We could use more of that moralizing from public officials, whether the issue is solo parenting, substance abuse or crime. The success sequence works to keep people not only off the dole but also out of trouble with the law. High-school graduates and children raised by both parents are much less likely to end up in jail. “Virtually every major social pathology,” political scientist Stephen Baskerville writes, “has been linked to fatherless children: violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, truancy, unwed pregnancy, suicide, and psychological disorders—all correlating more strongly with fatherlessness than with any other single factor, surpassing even race and poverty.”




What Is Happening at the Columbia School of Social Work?



Pamela Paul:

During orientation at the Columbia School of Social Work at Columbia University, the country’s oldest graduate program for aspiring social workers, students are given a glossarywith “100+ common terms you may see or hear used in class, during discussions and at your field placements.”

Among the A’s: “agent and target of oppression” (“members of the dominant social groups privileged by birth or acquisition, who consciously or unconsciously abuse power against the members or targets of oppressed groups”) and “Ashkenormativity” (“a system of oppression that favors white Jewish folx, based on the assumption that all Jewish folx are Ashkenazi, or from Western Europe”).

The C’s define “capitalism” as “a system of economic oppression based on class, private property, competition and individual profit. See also: carceral system, class, inequality, racism.” “Colonization” is “a system of oppression based on invasion and control that results in institutionalized inequality between the colonizer and the colonized. See also: Eurocentric, genocide, Indigeneity, oppression.”

These aren’t the definitions you’d find in Webster’s dictionary, and until recently they would not have been much help in getting a master’s in social work at an Ivy League university. They reflect a shift not just at Columbia but in the field of social work, in which the social justice framework that has pervaded much of academia has affected the approach of top schools and the practice of social work itself.




Preserving US History






A five-point plan to save Harvard from itself



Steven Pinker:

The fury was white-hot. Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context. Gay was excoriated not only by conservative politicians but by liberal alumni, donors, and faculty, by pundits across the spectrum, even by a White House spokesperson and by the second gentleman of the United States. Petitions demanding her resignation have circulated in Congress, X, and factions of the Harvard community, and at the time of this writing, a prediction market is posting 1.2:1 odds that she will be ousted by the end of the year.

I don’t believe that firing Gay is the appropriate response to the fiasco. It wasn’t just Gay who fumbled the genocide question but two other elite university presidents — Sally Kornbluth of MIT (my former employer) and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned following her testimony — which suggests that the problem with Gay’s performance betrays a deeper problem in American universities.

Congressional inquiries are often televised ambushes, and as Gay walked into the line of fire she had been rendered defenseless by decades of rot in campus policies. In the exchange that went viral, Republican Representative Elise Stefanik of New York asked Gay whether “calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment.”




Harvard’s embattled president quietly built “diversity” ideology into every facet of campus life.



Christopher Rufo:

Harvard president Claudine Gay has been embroiled in controversy for minimizing Hamas terrorism and plagiarizing material in her academic work on race. Both scandals have discredited her presidency, but neither should come as a surprise. Throughout Gay’s career at Harvard—as professor, dean, and president—racialist ideology has driven her scholarship, administrative priorities, and rise through the institution.

Over the course of her career, Gay quietly built a “diversity” empire that influenced every facet of university life. Between 2018 and the summer of 2023, as the dean of the largest faculty on campus, Gay oversaw the university’s racially discriminatory admissions program, which the Supreme Court found unconstitutional. Even after the court issued its ruling earlier this year, Gay said that it was a “hard day” and defended the university’s policies, which were deemed discriminatory against Asian and white applicants. Gay promised to comply with the letter of the law, while remaining “steadfast” in her commitment to producing “diversity”—a not-so-subtle message that Harvard would find a way, as the University of California has done, to evade the law in practice.

While affirmative action has been a longstanding practice at Harvard, other programs led by Gay were new. Following the death of George Floyd in 2020, Gay commissioned a Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage, which released a series of recommendationsthe following year for engaging in the “historical reckoning with racial injustice.” The recommendations included a mandate to change “spaces whose visual culture is dominated by homogenous portraiture of white men.” In particular, the report maintained, administrators should “refresh” the walls of Annenberg Hall, which “prominently display a series of 23 portraits, none of [which] depict women, and all but three of [which] depict white men.” Who were these white men and why were they honored in the first place? The report does not say—their race and sex alone provided sufficient justification for their banishment.

In 2022, Gay implemented an initiative at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for “denaming” any “space, program, or other entity” deemed racist by the faculty and administration. According to the report, commissioned by then-president Lawrence Bacow, these decisions would be “based on the perception that a namesake’s actions or beliefs were ‘abhorrent’ in the context of current values.” In other words, Harvard would use the standards of present-day social-justice activism to pass judgment on men who lived hundreds of years prior—at best, an ahistorical and deeply ambiguous method. As part of this project, Gay sent an email to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences community soliciting “requests for denaming,” promising to address the situation “through the lens of reckoning.” Since then, the university has grappled with denaming multiple buildings, including Winthrop House, named after John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his great grandson, also John Winthrop, a Harvard professor and president.




Elon Musk plans new university, invests $100M



Maggie Kelly:

The IRS approved Musk’s funding application in March

Elon Musk plans to launch a STEM-focused primary and secondary school and a new university in Austin and has allocated $100 million to the effort.

The tech billionaire and owner of X filed an application with the Internal Revenue Service to establish an elementary and high school dedicated to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and, ultimately, a university in the Texas capital, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

The IRS application, obtained by Bloomberg, was filed in October 2022 and approved in March.

The application states that Musk’s new “[f]oundation…is in the process of creating an independent primary and secondary school,” and “The School intends ultimately to expand its operations to create a university dedicated to education at the highest levels.”




Illinois School Climate



Shawn Fleetwood:

On Thursday, Parents Defending Education reported that students attending the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA) orchestrated a protest and walkout on Dec. 8 demanding harsh punishments for individuals who have “bias incident reports” filed against them. According to the academy’s website, anyone from IMSA students to alumni and visitors can file on-the-record or anonymous reports alleging incidents of “bias” committed by other IMSA community members. The reports are then investigated by school staff such as the chief human resources/equity officer and/or the director of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

IMSA students who participated in the Dec. 8 demonstration, however, are demanding the high school take its leftist policies even further. Included in their list of demands are requests for the school to publicize a list of “possible consequences for students following a bias incident report,” including “detentions, removal from leadership positions, suspensions, expulsions, and notification to parents.” 

But the students who chanted “Silence is complacence!” and “Why are our pronouns not used?” during the Dec. 8 demonstration didn’t stop there. They also want the university to notify any “potential future colleges” that offending students may consider transferring to or attending in the future, after they are presumably expelled for their supposed transgressions. In essence, the demonstrators want to destroy possible offenders’ future educational and career prospects based on potentially-anonymous reporting of “incidents” like not using a person’s preferred pronouns.




Diving into the disastrous response to the Covid pandemic



John Tierney:

Today I’m joined by the author of a terrific new book on this subject, Joe Nocera, a journalist whose work I’ve admired for decades in magazines and books. Joe is a longtime op-ed columnist for The New York Times. He’s now a columnist for The Free Press, and he’s the co-author of the new book, The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind. Joe and his co-author, Bethany McLean, are both veteran financial journalists and the co-authors of a previous bestseller, a history of the 2008 financial crisis titled All the Devils Are Here.

Now they’ve applied their impressive reporting skills to provide an insider’s view of how things went so wrong during the pandemic. Many of these mistakes will be familiar to readers of City Journal. We’ve been criticizing the lockdowns and school closures and mask mandates for three years now. These mistakes are not so familiar to people who’ve been getting their news from left-leaning media, and that’s one reason I think this book is so valuable. Joe, you and Bethany can hardly be accused of being conservatives. You both write for liberal publications, or you have written for them, and you share some of the perspective.

Mandates and the taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public Health Department.




Colleges Have a New Scheme to Get Around the End of Affirmative Action



Rent Mukherjee

At a November event for College Board, Art Coleman, EducationCounsel’s co-founder and managing partner, explained that if the mission of a college or university is to advance diversity and equity, then applicants whose identities align with this mission should be given preference. Under Coleman’s understanding of merit, presumably, a black student who writes his application essay about overcoming “systemic racism” might be considered more intelligent and prepared for higher education than, say, a Korean-American student who gets a perfect score on the SAT.

Even organizations outside of higher education have subscribed to EducationCounsel’s redefinition of merit. In its response to the Court’s decision, the New York State Bar Association referenced the firm’s July guidance letter six times and advised law schools in the Empire State to “consider reevaluating the criteria for assessing merit, including standardized test scores.” It warned law firms that “overreliance on a student’s GPA might not be appropriate or determinative of a student’s career outcome and is often at the expense of evaluating a prospect’s qualities and abilities more holistically.”

EducationCounsel has been trying to redefine the concept of merit for some time. In 2019, College Board published a playbook for “advancing higher education diversity goals” that was co-authored by Coleman. It explains that “adhering to principles of holistic review that consider multiple measures of preparedness and merit (i.e., a student’s academic, nonacademic, and contextual backgrounds) is critical to making the kinds of nuanced and individualized judgements called for to achieve robust student diversity.” It instructs colleges and universities to create “admissions materials that allow students to represent academic preparedness in multiple ways, in addition to or in lieu of test scores.”




A tenured professor at Bakersfield College says district leaders are firing him for expressing conservative views. College administrators dispute that and cite a long list of charges.



Sara Weissman:

A tenured history professor at Bakersfield College in California who founded a controversial, conservative-leaning faculty group received notice earlier this month that the Kern Community College District Board had voted to fire him. The professor, Matthew Garrett, says administrators are penalizing him for exercising his free speech. College leaders say the decision has nothing to do with his conservative views and have charged him with a litany of offenses.

The Kern Community College District Board of Trustees voted to end Garrett’s employment in a closed session at a board meeting on April 13, according to a notice provided to Garrett the following day. At the meeting, the board listened to public remarks from Garrett and other faculty members before discussing the matter and ultimately deferred making a public announcement on its decision. The termination notice, however, was leaked to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech advocacy organization. It gives Garrett the option to appeal the decision within 30 days, which he has done.

Garrett has been a polarizing figure on campus as co-founder of the Renegade Institute for Liberty, which describes itself as a faculty coalition “dedicated to the free speech, open inquiry, critical thinking to advance American ideals within the broader Western tradition of meritocracy, individual agency, civic virtue, liberty of conscience and free markets.” Members of the group say it’s intended to foster diversity of thought and good-faith debate. Critics say some members have contributed to a hostile campus environment by making inflammatory posts on the group’s social media page and stalling diversity initiatives by repeatedly questioning and criticizing them in committee meetings.

Commentary.




Oklahoma eliminates DIE $pending



Campus Reform:

Oklahoma colleges will be required to review their DEI programs to “eliminate and dismiss non-critical personnel” per a new executive order from Governor Kevin Sitt.

Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt announced the mandate Wednesday, citing a need to spend more money on preparing young Oklahomans for the workforce, and less on “six-figure salaries to DEI staff.”

“We want to make sure we don’t lie to the next generation. You’re gonna have to work hard, life is not always fair,” said Stitt. “With my executive order we’re gonna take politics out of education and let’s just go help kids.”




Higher Education’s Slide From ‘Veritas’ to ‘My Truth’



Gerard Baker:

“Great job, Madam President. You absolutely knocked it out of the park. Really exposed those fascist Republicans for the patriarchal white supremacists they are. Thank God we don’t have any of them on the faculty.

“There’s just one small thing. We know this is going to seem petty and annoying after all the magnificent things you said, but some people seem to think you might want to have another go at that moment when you couldn’t say whether calling on campus for the eradication of Jewish people might represent a form of harassment against Jews on campus. We’ve done some brainstorming and we’ve come up with something we think you should say to help you keep your job.”

The damage limitation didn’t work for Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned on Saturday. It shouldn’t work either for Claudine Gay of Harvard or Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.




Federal lawsuit filed claiming UW-Eau Claire employee was demoted from DEI position because she is white



Rich Kremer:

The affinity model that had been in use at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire was premised on the idea that for a student to be well served, they needed to be assigned a coordinator of the same ethnic background and that a white person could not adequately support a student of color,” the lawsuit claims.

Hoffman’s suit claims comments and concerns from some faculty about the “optics” of a white woman replacing former DEI leaders who were Asian and Black created a hostile work environment that led to Hoffman being told she had to move into her current role. It also alleges she was stripped from a teaching role and faced retaliation after filing a complaint with the university.

Hoffman referred a WPR request for comment to her attorneys with Fox and Fox S. C. in Monona. They were unavailable for comment Friday. A spokesperson for UW-Eau Claire told WPR Schmidt and O’Halloran were unavailable as well and said the university would not comment on pending litigation. A spokesperson for the Universities of Wisconsin administration office did not respond to a request for comment.




UW-Madison to cover full cost of college for Native students from Wisconsin tribes



Kelly Meyerhofer

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is pledging to cover the full cost of a college degree for students from Wisconsin Indian tribes under a new program announced Monday.

Dubbed the Wisconsin Tribal Educational Promise, the program launches next fall. Incoming students are eligible, as well as current students who meet the program criteria. Unlike the university’s other tuition promise program, this one isn’t based on financial need. All enrolled members of Wisconsin tribes qualify.

Here’s what to know:




The possibility of spending “too much” on education is itself mostly missing from debates



Byrne Hobart:

Normally, if there’s a question about paying for something that’s phrased in the passive voice, it’s eliding the true question, which is more accurately phrased as “How should you pay for my..?” But education is a special case: it’s extremely expensive, with direct costs totaling $702bn in 2020-21 (as in, that figure does not include the opportunity cost of students’ time, teachers’ talents, and the fixed assets schools occupy). It’s also a case with positive externalities, both from practical work—a country without any civil engineers can’t build or mantain bridges&dmash;and more abstract ones. And, critically for the who-pays-how question, the people attending college do not personally have the resources to drop five figures per annum on a degree, but, because of their age, will be benefiting from that education over a longer period than someone who works for a while to save up enough to pay for college in cash.

So higher education must be paid for through some combination of students’ earnings, parents’ savings, school subsidies, government subsidies, loans, and special deals with employers. Unfortunately, all of these lead to problems one way or another. For example, if we’re requiring everyone to fund their own education upfront, either directly through they’re own earnings or indirectly through their parents’, then we’re setting up a system with an education shortage among people who didn’t choose the right parents, or among people whose post-graduation incomes will be higher than their pre-graduation incomes.[1]Conversely, if everyone’s education were free, then there wouldn’t be a good way to determine a) which specific programs ought to have different prices because of the supply and demand for that kind of credential, b) whether particular people might be better-served by spending their time in different ways, or c) when we’re allocating too much of society’s resources to education, in the aggregate.

The possibility of spending “too much” on education is itself mostly missing from debates over how, and how much, to fund it. But it ought to be a genuine concern. Not just because college graduates have higher incomes, and student loan borrowers’ spending patterns do not indicate much financial distress on average, but because it’s possible for overall education spending to be too high (even aside from the question of whether higher education spending is redistribution towards the highest earners). There are a few failure modes here: obviously it’s a problem if people are literally starving or freezing because they’re too busy studying. But there are more subtle issues:




Censorship and “content moderation” at openai



Erin Woo Stephanie Palazzolo:

Under Willner, a former Meta Platforms content moderation executive, the trust and safety team sometimes ran into conflicts with other executives at OpenAI. Developers working on apps built on OpenAI’s technology had complained, for instance, that the team’s vetting procedures took too long. That caused executives to overrule Willner on how the app review process worked.

The shift to the new team follows a debate over how much of OpenAI’s content moderation can be handled via automation. It’s part of a broader discussion about whether OpenAI should keep its staff small and nimble or scale up as usage of its products takes off.

The debate about how to handle content moderation echoes similar conversations at Facebook and other social media platforms in recent years. Facebook, for example, was reluctantto hire large numbers of content moderators for much of its history, before it reversed course in 2017.

The looming U.S. presidential elections pose a test for OpenAI and other artificial intelligence firms. A Wired report from last week found that Microsoft’s AI chatbot Copilot, which uses OpenAI’s GPT-4, consistently responds to questions about elections with conspiracy theories and incorrect information.




How about some real diversity instead of the DEI sham that demonstrably does not help Black students?



Mike Nichols:

I don’t want to get in the way of the decent idea finally and begrudgingly approved by the Board of Regents as part of the DEI deal — approximately doubling the number of conservatives on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus faculty and adding one more.

But I do hope whoever writes up the job posting is honest.

Wanted: A really smart person to join the faculty at the OG of progressivism: UW-Madison. We don’t care about the color of your skin (just this once!) but unusual thickness is an absolute must. Epidermis should be approximately as thick as, say, a good border wall. Candidates with lesser thickness should have willingness to wear Kevlar.

I think it might be helpful to also explicitly require a good sense of humor, but that need is going be pretty apparent once the posting gets out and progressives accuse the university of both discriminating against illegal immigrants and making light of gun violence.

There’s nothing wrong with adding one more conservative — if they can find the right one. But the truth is that adding one more is peanuts.

“While happy to see the university is recognizing this as a deficiency,” one of the few admittedly conservative professors at the university, UW-Madison Political Science Professor Ryan Owens, says, “this effort needs to be much more significant and institutionalized.”

No doubt.

——-

David Blaska:

Higher education across the nation, already over-priced and over-sold, is in disrepute. Add trigger warnings, cancel culture, and general all around pecksniffery and you have a system that is Out Of Touch. Stir in the “Depends on the Context” of campus anti-semitism and you have a crisis of confidence — one that legislative Republicans are addressing and Democrats are pooh poohing.

Harvard, Penn, and MIT may be entitled to their contextual equivocations, being privately endowed universities. The Universities of Wisconsin are taxpayer-supported. We are paying for this university system! But accountability violates the essence of progressivism: rule by expert. They decide, the rest of us shut up and fork over.

What is undeniable (if you want to play that game) is that the race and sex commissars discourage sifting and winnowing through a regimen of shaming, intimidation, denial of tenure, refusal to hire. Submit your DEI statement along with your doctoral thesis.

Bigotry of low expectations

Black educator and NY Times columnist John McWhorterremarks that this week’s congressional hearings “point up how low expectations are for black students on many college campuses — expectations low enough to qualify as a kind of racism.”

The Universities of Wisconsin expelled a 42-ton boulder deposited on the Madison campus 12,000 years ago by the last glacier. Someone, almost as long ago, referred to it with a racist term. The Abraham Lincoln statue is rumored to be next on the flatbed truck. Or beheaded, like the statue in front of the state Capitol of the slavery abolitionist who died fighting the Confederacy. Republicans didn’t do that; ISIS-inspired progressives did.

Professor McWhorter’s Bottom Line: “If you can’t bear walking past a rock someone called a dirty name 100 years ago, how are you going to deal with life?”

——-

The documentary covers the relationship between identity studies, student activists, and the DEI administration of a college in Olympia, Washington




The magnificent medieval map that made cartography into a science



Meredith Small:

DURING a stay in Venice a few years ago, I spent time in the Correr Museum, soaking up the city’s history. Located in Saint Mark’s Square, the museum displays imposing statues, paintings of sea battles and ancient weapons. But as I passed through the last room of exhibits, another artefact hanging alone in an alcove caught my eye. It was a map of the world – a “mappa mundi” in Latin – but it was unlike any I had encountered before.

Framed in gold and 2.4 metres in diameter, the world pictured here was a combination of rolling blue seas with cresting waves and off-white landmasses, all covered with handwritten notes. It was one of the most beautiful, and beautifully complex, things that I had ever seen.

Created by a monk called Fra Mauro 550 years ago, the map had been largely overlooked for centuries, a lamentable state of affairs considering it displays a level of accuracy absent in earlier maps. Turn it upside down – Mauro placed south at the top – and it is recognisable as a map of Africa and Eurasia.

Following my visit to Venice, I decided to find out more about this map, a project that culminated in my book Here Begins the Dark Sea. I spent more than a year delving into the literature on world maps, poring over Fra Mauro’s creation and trying to understand what he intended it to say. It turns out that it was part of the inflection point from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance because it was the…




Notes on Teacher Gender



Ursina Schaede and Ville Mankki

We evaluate equity-efficiency trade-offs from admissions quotas by examining effects on output once beneficiaries start producing in the relevant industry. In particular, we document the impact of abolishing a 40% quota for male primary school teachers on their pupils’ long-run outcomes. The quota had advantaged academically lower-scoring male university applicants, and its removal cut the share of men among new teachers by half. We combine this reform with the timing of union-mandated teacher retirements to isolate quasi-random variation in the local share of male quota teachers. Using comprehensive register data, we find that pupils exposed to a higher share of male quota teachers during primary school transition more smoothly to post-compulsory education and have higher educational attainment and labor force attachment at age 25. Pupils of both genders benefit similarly from exposure to male quota teachers. Evidence suggests that the quota improved the allocation of talent by mending imperfections in the unconstrained selection process.




Va. Supreme Court reinstates case of teacher fired over student’s pronouns



Anna Bryson:

The Virginia Supreme Court ruled Thursday that it would reinstate a lawsuit alleging the West Point School Board unlawfully fired a teacher for violating West Point schools’ anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policies.

Peter Vlaming, who taught French at West Point High School before he was fired in December 2018, has said he could not in good conscience use a transgender student’s preferred pronouns because he said it would have violated his religious beliefs. He said his Christian faith prevented him from using male pronouns for a student he saw as female.

People are also reading…

Vlaming agreed to use the student’s new, male name. But he tried to avoid using any pronouns — he or him, and she or her — when referring to the student. The student said that made him feel uncomfortable and singled out.

School administrators sided with the student, telling Vlaming he could not treat the transgender pupil differently than he treats others.




Why Go to College if the World Is About to End?



James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley:

The Jehovah’s Witnesses have long preached that going to college is a waste of time because the world as we know it is going to end soon. “No doubt, school counselors sincerely believe that it is in your best interests to pursue higher education,” advised the faith’s official publication a few years ago. “Yet, their confidence lies in a social and financial system that has no lasting future.”

It would be interesting to know how soon Americans actually think the world is going to end. A growing number of secular progressives have begun echoing the apocalyptic rhetoric of religious sects. Their views aren’t driven solely by fear of imminent environmental doomsday. They believe the whole “system” is broken and don’t want to bring children into a world plagued by structural racism, sexism and irreversible oppression. It is one reason campus protests are so common, with some spilling over into violence. According to this worldview, there’s no time for considered political persuasion.

But the Jehovah’s Witnesses have a point. If one thinks the world will run out of time to save itself from climate catastrophe in 2030, as the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared in 2018, then there isn’t much point in going to college or planning for the future.




High-school grade inflation and test-optional policies spell trouble for America’s colleges.



Daniel Buck:

A columnist covering K-12 education, I come to you, dear reader, with a warning: There’s a coming wave of college-freshman failure that will stress the institutions and systems of our universities. Grade schools haven’t and likely won’t recover from pandemic-era learning losses, and so, ready or not, a poorly educated generation is soon to flood your campuses.

We’ve all read the statistics. Students lost out on months’ worth of education, obliterating two decades’ worth of academic improvements. What’s more, we’re experiencing something of a “long Covid” in education. According to the testing company NWEA, students aren’t just not catching up. Rather, due to chronic absenteeism, behavior challenges, staffing shortages, and a general ennui in K-12 schooling, they are actually backsliding.

Ready or not, a poorly educated generation is soon to flood American campuses.This alone would pose a substantial problem for higher ed, but the obfuscation of admissions standards at colleges and universities only compounds the difficulty.




Northwestern Added nearly 400 new admin roles since 2013 while enrollment remained stagnant



Micaiah Bilger:

Northwestern University employs more than one administrator for every two undergraduates, including several new DEI staff in its sports program, a College Fixanalysis found.

In the past decade, the private Illinois school has created nearly 400 new administrative and support staff positions while also adopting a policy to hire more “diverse” staff.

Meanwhile, its student enrollment numbers remained relatively stagnant.

During the 2021-22 school year, the most recent data available, the university employed 4,258 full-time administrators and support staff, according to information the university filed with the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.




Northwestern Added nearly 400 new admin roles since 2013 while enrollment remained stagnant



Micaiah Bilger:

Northwestern University employs more than one administrator for every two undergraduates, including several new DEI staff in its sports program, a College Fixanalysis found.

In the past decade, the private Illinois school has created nearly 400 new administrative and support staff positions while also adopting a policy to hire more “diverse” staff.

Meanwhile, its student enrollment numbers remained relatively stagnant.

During the 2021-22 school year, the most recent data available, the university employed 4,258 full-time administrators and support staff, according to information the university filed with the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.




K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: “after an audit revealed that state employees were spending substantially more time working from home than in their offices”



Harm Venhuizen:

However, a majority of the agencies surveyed said that remote work had increased their efficiency. Most state agencies allow employees to work remotely up to five days a week, and employees at several agency headquarters seldom used their ID cards to access the buildings, according to the audit published Friday by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau.

“The audit shows massive waste on expensive unnecessary physical structures,” Republican Sen. Eric Wimberger, who co-chairs the Legislature’s audit committee, said in a statement.

Key card data reviewed by auditors also suggested that some state employees may be working in person less often than stipulated by their remote work agreements.




Johnson’s Board of Education has proposed shifting back toward neighborhood schools – away from the system where kids compete for selective programs



Claudia Aohara

The schools are not just the best in Chicago – but rank among the top high schools in the entire country. 

Walter Payton College Prep is ranked 10th best school in the US. Northside College Prep is 37th. Jones College Prep ranks 60th. 

Now, a resolution is up for a vote by the school board on Thursday.

Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez has prepared a resolution for ‘a transition away from privatization and admissions/enrollment policies and approaches that further stratification and inequity in CPS and drive student enrollment away from neighborhood schools.’

It would lay out a five-year ‘transformation’ to effectively get rid of selective schools in Chicago – which have been heralded as the gems of the city’s education system.




GCHQ reveals its Christmas challenge for children



Haha Khalil:

What do secret codes and kids have to do with Christmas?

GCHQ, the UK’s largest intelligence agency, has sent out its annual Christmas card, complete with a set of puzzles aimed at Britain’s youngest minds.

This year’s challenge is the “toughest” one yet, the organization said in a statement Thursday, with 11- to 18-year-olds facing a series of seven “complex puzzles” masterminded by the agency’s puzzlers to uncover the final festive message.

“Puzzles have been at the heart of GCHQ from the start. These skills represent our historic roots in cryptography and encryption and continue to be important to our modern-day mission to keep the country safe,” GCHQ director Anne Keast-Butler said in the statement.




The DINKs video isn’t shaping culture—it’s a cultural response to the rising opportunity cost of having children in free and prosperous societies.



Alex Nowrastesh:

room at Fox News. He had just been on air, and I was about to go on to talk about my area of expertise, the latest immigration controversy. (Yes, this is a very DC story.) I asked him what he was working on and he said, “The fertility crisis.” I was broadly aware of concepts like the demographic transition, falling total fertility rates, and how even immigrants from high-fertility societies rapidly decrease their fertility after arrival. Well-worn books by Bryan Caplan, Jonathan List, and Julian Simon about how children and a higher population are great and why falling birth rates are bad have been with me for years, but this was the first I’d heard of a crisis. 

Knowing that I worked on immigration policy, my acquaintance said that immigrants assimilate too rapidly to America’s low-fertility culture and we have to find a way to slow assimilation to boost the birthrate. I disagreed vehemently because I support cultural assimilation (which is going well, by the way), but also because he had misdiagnosed the mechanism. “They’re not assimilating to America’s low-fertility culture,” I said. “They’re assimilating to high opportunity cost in the United States, which is the reason why they’re here in the first place.” He asked what I’d do to increase fertility if that were the only outcome I cared about. After clarifying that I don’t support this policy, I said that I’d massively increase marginal tax rates on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity cost of having children. Then the producer came out and hustled me on set.

That conversation has stuck with me because people who worry about low fertility focus on vague cultural explanations and don’t look at the simple one staring them in the face: microeconomics. Opportunity cost is what you must give up to buy what you want in terms of other goods or services, but the concept applies to every action you take. If I go to the movie theater on a Friday at 7pm, I give up the opportunity to spend that time watching a Netflix movie at home. The cost of going to the movie theater is watching the Netflix movie at home, or any other activity that’s second on my list of desires. The more options I have, the potentially higher the opportunity cost I face.




The Ivy League Mask Falls



Wall Street Journal:

The great benefit of last week’s performance by three elite-school presidents before Congress is that it tore the mask off the intellectual and political corruption of much of the American academy. The world was appalled by the equivocation of the academic leaders when asked if advocating genocide against Jews violated their codes of conduct. But the episode merely revealed the value system that has become endemic at too many prestigious schools.

The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania hid behind concerns about free speech. But as everyone paying attention knows, these schools don’t protect speech they disagree with. They punish it.

Harvard President Claudine Gay has presided over the ouster of professors for speech that violated progressive orthodoxy. As Elise Stefanik wrote on these pages on Friday, Harvard’s Title IX training says using the wrong pronouns qualifies as abuse. Harvard was 248th out of 248, and Penn was 247th, in the annual college ranking by the free-speech Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.




Decline has consequences: One of them is more decline.



Paul Mirengoff:

Yesterday, Ted Leonsis, owner of the Washington Wizards (NBA) and the Washington Capitals (NHL), announced that he has reached a non-binding agreement under which both teams would move to Alexandria, Virginia. Gov. Glenn Youngkin appeared with Leonsis to tout the relocation, for which the Commonwealth will make a major financial commitment. 

The original owner of the two teams, Abe Pollin, moved them from Maryland to D.C.’s Chinatown neighborhood in 1997. The move transformed a deteriorating, crime-ridden part of town. New restaurants and bars flourished. The area became what Barry Svrluga of the Washington Post calls “a neighborhood that used to pulse with life even when the Caps and Wizards weren’t home.” (Emphasis added) 

But the key words in the Svrluga quotation are the ones I emphasized — “used to.” The neighborhood surrounding the area has undergone a sharp declinein recent years. There’s an open-air drug market nearby. Homelessness is evident.  Crime has spiked (as is the case throughout D.C.).

This decline isn’t the only reason why Leonsis approached Virginia about taking his teams there. But it likely played a significant role. As Svrluga puts it, the equation is more complex than, “‘The District’s going downhill, so the teams had to leave’, but damned if it doesn’t feel that way.”

It feels that way for good reason.

Left-liberals writing about Leonsis’ planned move blame the pandemic for the decline of the Chinatown area. During the pandemic, a great many workers who live outside of D.C. but whose jobs are in the city, started working remotely. After the pandemic, the federal government was extremely lenient in permitting its employees to continue working from home. As a result, there are many fewer people in the city when the workday ends.

But people won’t come at night to an area riddled by homelessness, open drug use, and crime. Just yesterday night, I passed on a big high school basketball game between two great D.C. rivals — a matchup I’ve attended for years except during the pandemic — because it was played in a sketchy neighborhood.

——-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




The Literacy View:



Podcast:

Steve Dykstra’s Interpretation of Mark Seidenberg’s Slide Deck-Season 3




Does Immigration Threaten Western Civilization? A conversation with Amy Wax



Richard Hanania

I’m generally unimpressed with most academic and liberal anti-wokes. They usually concede so much to their opponents that their critiques end up not only intellectually shallow but probably ineffective. Political movements have a spirit and an aesthetic of “always in a defensive crouch” inspires nobody. It’s certainly inadequate to meet the challenges posed by a fanatical faith. 

You know who doesn’t have that problem? Amy Wax. She really doesn’t have that problem. For that reason, I was excited to have her on the CSPI podcast this week. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation is below. You can read that, listen to the audio, or watch on YouTube.

The important thing is not whether I always agree with Amy. It’s that when she is right, she presents necessary truths that others would rather hide from, and when she goes astray, she’s still taking a brave position and contributing something to the discourse. As I tell her during our conversation, I never bothered asking whether she’s thought about trying to be a bit less provocative, because I don’t think it’s an option for her. Some people just have a compulsion to tell the truth. 

Our conversation begins with the effort to fire her from Penn. This leads to a discussion about what to do about the universities.




Children born or raised during lockdown are developing language skills at a slower rate



Eva Murillo Sanz, Eva Murillo Sanz, Marta Casla Soler and Miguel Lázaro:

Social interactions in the first months of life are fundamental for babies to learn how to communicate and develop their language skills. Physical contact, touch, smiling and our first face-to-face “conversations” are the pillars on which we build our understanding of the social world.

The limits placed on social interaction during the COVID-19 pandemic profoundly affected these early interactions. We interacted less and with fewer people and had to go without some basic aspects of communication, such as physical touch or sharing objects.

For children born during the pandemic, it is easy to conclude that their first interactions were so different that it impacted their development.

Our team conducted research into the development of language in Spanish children born during or just before the pandemic. We found that they developed more slowly than children born before.




Governance and DIE staffing and $pending



related:




“Active Listening”



404 Media

CMG says “the ROI is already impressive” and is actively soliciting potential customers, though. On LinkedIn, Chris Marxmiller, a senior sales consultant at CMG, invites people in his bio to “Ask me about our NEW product – ACTIVE LISTENING.” Marxmiller did not respond to a request for comment which asked for more information on the Active Listening product.

CMG lists a number of other companies as its partners and publishers. These include Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. None of those companies responded to a request for comment on whether they were aware of this capability or whether it was in active use.




WILL Challenges DIE Mandates at University of Wisconsin Campus



WILL:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) and the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF) are preparing a legal challenge against the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse for denying a conservative group, Young America’s Foundation (YAF), a student organization designation.

In violation of the First Amendment, UW-La Crosse is denying the group’s designation because the student organization rightfully refuses to sign onto a “DEI” inclusivity statement that opposes YAF’s values. 

The Quotes: Dan Lennington, WILL Deputy Counsel stated, “We are now seeing the fruits of UW’s radical DEI agenda: students forced to adopt UW-approved beliefs before receiving benefits. This is a blatant violation of the First Amendment. Make no mistake, WILL is ready to challenge discriminatory DEI policies everywhere and anywhere. The school must correct this action, or we are prepared to take further legal action.”




Notes on Campus free speech



Rick Hess:

Missing over the past week has been an appreciation that the historic purpose of campus free speech is not to provide banner-waving protesters with a bucolic backdrop, but to facilitate the unfettered pursuit of truth and understanding in teaching, learning, and research. It’s to enable scholars to challenge received wisdom, students to ask uncomfortable questions, and the academy to serve as a place of exploration rather than ossified groupthink.




A bit lost in the controversy over antisemitic speech on campus is the failure of university administrators to enforce existing rules that are content-neutral.



David Bernstein:

I have already written about my own university’s failure to enforce Virginia’s law banning masked demonstrations. That failure continues, despite a letter from the state attorney general reminding universities of their obligation to enforce the law, and despite an incident in which a student waving a pro-Israel Israel flag was attacked by masked demonstrators. My understanding is that other universities in Virginia are also refusing to enforce the law. I have an email from one university police department official explaining that the law was intended to be enforced only if another crime has been committed.  This is nonsense. The law is meant to prevent intimidation by hateful mobs, and to help police identify suspects if laws are broken. I understand that one would not want to suddenly enforce the law and arrest masked students on felony charges, but I don’t see any problem with enforcing the law after providing due warnings.

Meanwhile, at Cornell anti-Israel groups have been disrupting indoor spaces with extremely loud chantingof “from the river to the sea” and so forth. When students and their parents complained to the school, the response they received from the dean’s office is that the university would not intervene unless the protests were “too” disruptive. When pressed, 20-30 minutes of disruption was deemed not “too” disruptive. But it gets worse. According to the Cornell Sun, a university official admitted that the administration has been cooperating with the disruptions, including the students’ “occupying” a campus building as he made the statement!




FDA Approves World’s First Crispr Gene-Editing Drug for Sickle-Cell Disease



Joseph Walker:

The gene-editing revolution is jumping from the lab to the marketplace.

The U.S. has approved the world’s first medicine employing Crispr technology, a Nobel Prize-winning discovery that promised a powerful new tool for modifying genes to treat disease and improve crop production.

The new treatment, called Casgevy and developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics, was cleared Friday for treatment of people with the painful sickle-cell disease.

The landmark decision by the Food and Drug Administration heralds a powerful new kind of medicine, one that turns off or replaces genes to tackle conditions that have long confounded doctors and researchers.

Several companies are developing Crispr-based therapies for diseases including heart disease, cancer and rare genetic disorders. Next-generation gene-editing techniques promise to make it easier to administer the therapies with fewer side effects.




Statement on Harvard’s Claudine Gay from Philip Dybvig, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics



Christopher Brunet:

Dr. Dybvig told Karlstack:

‘‘I realize I have been too pure. I assumed that a lot of people shared my dream (expressed for example by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King) of ending oppression. However, the dream of most people (especially but not exclusively the oppressed) seems to be becoming the oppressor. This is why there is a strong correlation between abusers of children and people who were abused as children.

Claudine Gay has power now and she is the oppressor of any group not favored by her and other people in power. This is a common pattern in governments heading for totalitarianism. First, say you represent the oppressed. Then you get power and oppress non-favored groups. This leaves you in a morally indefensible position that could not survive given free speech, so you do what you can to destroy anyone (“counterrevolutionaries”) who disagrees with your narrative.’’




History (revisionist…?), Governance and Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results



David Blaska:

Here in Madison, the proponents of one-size-fits-all government monopoly schooling are rewriting history to cover their misdeeds. The occasion was the recent passing of barely remembered Daniel Nerad, superintendent of Madison public schools between 2008 and 2012.  

Capital Times publisher Paul Fanlund marvels that the same problems that beset Nerad a dozen years ago plague the city’s public schools today — those being a yawning racial achievement gap and disparate disciplinary problems. Indeed, the numbers have not budged. Only 8% of the district’s black students can read and write at grade, compared to 64% of white students. 

Back in 2011, nationally renowned education reformer Kaleem Caire offered Madison an escape hatch — a charter school called Madison Prep that would hold longer school days on an almost year-round calendar and suffer no race-shaming excuses. But the school board sent him packing.

Today, former school board president Ed Hughes, incredibly, blames Scott Walker’s Act 10 for supposedly tying the district’s hands because, Fanlund quotes Hughes to say:

“The district could not as a practical matter alter the collective bargaining agreement with the teachers union.” 

We’re still paying for MTI’s self interest

—-

2011: On the 5-2 Madison School Board No (Cole, Hughes, Moss, Passman, Silveira) Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School Vote (Howard, Mathiak voted Yes)

——

Meanwhile, decades go by….

——

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




Censorship: Attempt to Vanish My Article About Attempt to Vanish My Article About Attempt to Vanish Other Articles



Eugene Volokh

I wrote about Hyman v. Daoud, a case that sought the takedown of various online items—including mainstream media articles—in November 2020. I then wrote in 2021 about an attempt to get Google to deindex my article (among others), aimed at causing it to disappear from search results. And four days ago Google got the following takedown request from someone, seeking to deindex my 2020 and 2021 articles, plus various other media articles:




Higher education’s ideological rot has been exposed for Americans to see—but the elites who adhere to such thinking retain control of these institutions



Christopher Rufo

The struggle for Harvard’s presidency is ostensibly about anti-Semitism, freedom of speech, and a rapidly unfolding plagiarism scandal. A group of challengers—most notably, New York representative Elise Stefanik, hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, and journalists Christopher Brunet, Aaron Sibarium, and myself—has contested the leadership of Claudine Gay, arguing that she epitomizes the moral and intellectual rot within the institution.

Despite the firestorm, the Harvard Corporation has stubbornly defended Gay. And it appears that, for now, the outsider offensive has failed to remove her from power.

Why? To answer that question, one might consult the twentieth-century Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, who outlined the distinction between the “war of maneuver,” in which a political actor can quickly topple a centralized, weakly structured regime, and the “war of position,” in which a political actor must wage a protracted fight against an entrenched bureaucracy that protects itself via a dispersed yet hegemonic ideology.

At Harvard, the war of maneuver has failed, but there is a silver lining: the institution’s ruling ideology has been exposed to the public. The university has sacrificed its academic integrity to retain a president who minimized genocidal rhetoric against Jews, oversaw a racially discriminatory admissions system, ensnared herself in multiple personnel scandals, and lifted sections of at least four academic papers—all because she is the living embodiment and administrative enforcer of DEI ideology.




Target state of digitalisation in early childhood education and care, pre-primary, primary and lower secondary education



Berisha, Anna-Kaisa; Francke, Laura; Hakalisto, Liisi; Helminen, Juho; Huttunen, Tero; Kotomäki, Kaisa; Leppänen, Päivi; Orenius, Riikka; Pöyry-Lassila, Päivi; Saari, Heidi

A description of the target state of digital transformation in early childhood education and care, pre-primary, primary and lower secondary education is completed in autumn 2023. The description is drawn up as part of the ‘Framework for Digitalisation in Early Childhood Education and Care, Comprehensive School Education and Liberal Adult Education’ project, which develops the guidance, direction and effectiveness of digitalisation and the anticipation capacity of the Ministry’s administrative branch.

The description makes concrete the objectives set out in Finland’s Digital Compass, Policies for the digitalisation of education and training until 2027, and other significant documents defining how digitalisation should be carried out in the sector from the perspective of early childhood education and care and pre-primary, primary and lower secondary education. Digitalisation is examined through seven areas: preconditions for digitalisation development, digital competence, support for developing digital infrastructure, services and interoperability, data management and quality, data protection and information security, digitalisation-related legislation and legal interpretation, and digitalisation research.




Harvard punishes students for plagiarism, but not President Gay



hxstem

This is, of course, a far clearer case of plagiarism than what Harvard’s website defines as the standard for academic dishonesty. Moreover, Dr. Gay flipped the entire conclusion of the source material, changing the word “decrease” to the word “increase.” In total, Dr. Gay has plagiarized in at least five out of her eleven total publications. Veritas, right?

What are the standard punishments for plagiarism dealt out to undergraduates? Of the 99 students found guilty of academic dishonesty (which constitutes many offenses, plagiarism being the most severe) by the University’s Ad Board in the 2021-22 school year,27 were required to withdraw from the college and 56 were put on probation. The punishments for older students at other Harvard schools are usually a lot more severe. Harvard Law’s website notes, “In a case of academic dishonesty, the Board will begin its deliberations over sanction with a presumption of a one-semester suspension” (emphasis added). Of course, if a student plagiarized in five papers as Dr. Gay did, the punishment would likely be more severe.

We would love to know why, in an email to the Harvard family, the members of the Harvard Corporation deliberately minimized the importance of the president’s misconduct.




Wisconsin is only one of three states that doesn’t require schools to go out for bid on construction projects



Corrinne Hess:

School districts in Wisconsin would have to comply with competitive bidding requirements for construction projects costing more than $150,000 under a new legislative proposal.

Wisconsin is one of only three states that allows a project of any size to be awarded on a no-bid basis, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Municipalities, meanwhile, have to seek a competitive bid for any project over $25,000. The same proposed legislation would increase that threshold for municipalities to $50,000.  

During a public hearing Thursday before the Assembly Committee on Local Government, Chris Kulow, government relations director for the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, testified against the bill. He argued that requiring a competitive bidding process would take away local control.

Kulow said most school boards are already using competitive bidding. He said having to choose the lowest bidder could mean having to sacrifice the best quality.




Civics: Substack faces another deplatforming campaign, triggered by a clarion-call from America’s flagship of suck, Atlantic Magazine



Matt Taibbi:

Substack is under attack again. The crusade is led by a site contributor, Jonathan Katz, whose style might be characterized as embittered-conventional, i.e. toting the same opinions as every mainstream editorialist, only angrier about it. There’s been more of this genre on offer here as staff positions for talking-point-spouters dry up in legacy shops, but hey, it’s a free country. If you want braying about fascism, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, the lab leak theory, and other #Resistance horrors you’d hear about if you just left MSNBC on in a corner — or feel deprived of headlines like “What Ron DeSantis and a Norwegian mass murderer have in common” — Substack’s got you covered. It’s not my idea of what alternative media’s for, but fortunately, nobody asked me. Why should I care what other people read?

Katz does. Though this site is a true content free-for-all, where you can find everything from serialized graphic novels to Portuguese “dark storytelling” to bagel bites recipes, a microcosm of the old Internet where the randomness of being able to hop from Bigfoot to Buddhism is a key part of the free vibe, Katz believes he’s detected a malicious pattern. He aims to put a stop to it, by deplatforming Substack contributors he doesn’t like. A group letter is being organized, demanding action, following Katz’s stern argument in the Atlantic, “Substack Has a Nazi Problem.”

As an aside: a big reason people read Substack is because of the terribleness of magazines like The Atlantic, which is edited by a guy, Jeffrey Goldberg, who won a pile of awards for blowing the WMD story in spectacular fashion for years on end, making him a walking, talking symbol of the failing-upward dynamic in corporate media. If that magazine wants people to read Substack less, it might consider not filling its pages with exposés about the Alfa Server fantasies or plaintive defenses of the Steele dossier or other transparent propaganda, instead of demanding deplatforming here.




Civics: Heartland/Rasmussen Poll: One-in-Five Mail-In Voters Admit to Committing at Least One Kind of Voter Fraud During 2020 Election



Justin Haskins, Christopher Talgo, Donald Kendal, Jack McPherrin, James Taylor, Jim Lakely:

A new poll by The Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports found one-in-five voters who cast mail-in ballots during the 2020 presidential election admit to participating in at least one kind of voter fraud.

When asked, “During the 2020 election, did you fill out a ballot, in part or in full, on behalf of a friend or family member, such as a spouse or child?”, 21% of respondents who said they voted by mail answered “yes.” (Filling out a ballot for someone else is illegal in all states, although many states allow people to assist others with voting.)

Additionally, 17% of mail-in voters said they voted “in a state where you were no longer a permanent resident.” Seventeen percent of mail-in voters also admitted to signing a “ballot or ballot envelope on behalf of a friend or family member.” (Both voting in a state where you are no longer a permanent resident and forging a signature on a ballot or ballot envelope are fraudulent activities that invalidate votes, when caught by election officials.)

According to election data, more than 43 percent of 2020 voters cast ballots by mail, the highest percentage in U.S. history.




The Copia Institute Tells The Copyright Office Again That Copyright Law Has No Business Obstructing AI Training



Cathy Gellis:

A little over a month ago we told the Copyright Office in a comment that there was no role for copyright law to play when it comes to training AI systems. In fact, on the whole there’s little for copyright law to do to address the externalities of AI at all. No matter how one might feel about some of AI’s more dubious applications, copyright law is no remedy. Instead, as we reminded in this follow-up reply comment, trying to use copyright to obstruct development of the technology instead creates its own harms, especially when applied to the training aspect.

One of those harms, as we reiterated here, is that it impinges on the First Amendment right to read that human intelligence needs to have protected, and that right must inherently include the right to use technological tools to do that “reading,” or consumption in general of copyrighted works. After all, we need record players to play records – it would do no one any good if their right to listen to one stopped short of being able to use the tool needed to do it. We also pointed out that this First Amendment right does not diminish even if people consume a lot of media (we don’t, for instance, punish voracious readers for reading more than others) or at speed (copyright law does not give anyone the right to forbid listening to an LP at 45 rpm, or watching a movie on fast forward). So if we were to let copyright law stand in the way of using software to quickly read a lot of material to it would represent a deviation from how copyright law has up to now operated, and one that would undermine the rights to consume works that we’ve so far been able to enjoy.




Six Students Convicted in Trial Linked to Beheading of French Teacher



Nick Kostov:

Six teenagers were convicted of helping the man who beheaded French schoolteacher Samuel Paty three years ago after he showed caricatures of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad in class as part of a lesson on free speech.

The attacker, an 18-year-old Russian national of Chechen origin identified by authorities as Abdoullakh Anzorov, was shot dead by police minutes after the attack.

Following a two-week trial behind closed doors, five boys on Friday were convicted on charges of criminal conspiracy for monitoring the high school’s surroundings and assisting Anzorov in identifying Paty. Another defendant, a girl who was 13 years old at the time, was convicted of slander.

The sentences ranged from a 14-month suspended jail term to six months’ incarceration.

Eight adults will also face trial over Paty’s death in a separate court next year. Two of them have been charged with complicity in terrorist murder, while six others face charges of terrorist conspiracy.




Civics: When the New York Times Lost Its Way



James Bennet:

“For now, to assert that the Times plays by the same rules it always has is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole. It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe. The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.”




Schools staff up as student enrollment drops



Jill Barshay:

School finance expert predicts teacher layoffs ahead in 2024

The stats on school staffing might seem like a violation of the laws of supply and demand.

In the past decade, the population of elementary, middle and high school students in Massachusetts dropped by 42,000 while the number of school employees grew by 18,000. In Connecticut, public school enrollment fell 7 percent while staffing rose 8 percent. Even in states with growing populations, school staff has been increasing far faster than students. Texas, for example, educates 367,000 more students, a 7 percent increase over the past decade, but the number of employees has surged by more than 107,000, a 16 percent jump. Staffing is up 20 percent in Washington state but the number of students has risen by less than 3 percent. 

“When kids go to school right now there are more adults in the building of all types than there were in 2013 and more than when I was a kid,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, where she has been tracking the divergence between students and staff at the nation’s public schools. 

What’s behind the apparent imbalance? Follow the money.




Retired teacher claims Madison school threw away $12K in materials



Scott Girard:

A retired Madison teacher claims district officials threw away more than $10,000 worth of classroom items she had purchased over her 35-year career and intended to share with her successor.

Kathy Viner, who retired from teaching 4-year-old kindergarten at Franklin Elementary School after the 2022-23 school year, filed a notice of claim against the Madison Metropolitan School District in October seeking $11,922 to replace the items she bought with her own money throughout her career.

Viner said she left the items, many of which were organized in boxes at the school, for the classroom’s new teacher to use, with that new teacher expecting to have the items at the ready this fall.

According to the claim, however, many of those materials were removed over the summer.

In an interview, Viner told the Cap Times said she no longer wants to substitute teach given the disrespect she felt over the incident.




After being bullied, a Philly student was threatened with deportation by his principal. Here’s what happened next.



Kristen Graham:

Then, “the principal said if he did not behave, the principal would call ICE and deport all of his family,” said Hernández.

Eventually, Hernández, with the help of advocates, sued the Philadelphia School District. This month, the school system entered into a settlement with Hernández, agreeing to more training for staff, a mandatedsocial-emotional curriculum for students district-wide, and an outside review of the district’s harassment and discrimination policies.

Hernández hopes that her fight keeps any other families from going through what hers has endured. But she still worries for her son — the effects of the bullying, and the principal’s threat, still linger.




America Gets a Harvard Education



Wall Street Journal:

The Harvard Corporation lined up behind university president Claudine Gay on Tuesday after calls to fire her for her handling of antisemitism on campus and evidence of plagiarism in her academic work. The decision confirms the school’s pattern of putting identity politics above liberal values and its selective support for free speech on campus.

One of the “serious societal issues” is managing the outbreak of antisemitism on campus since the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre of Israelis, an issue on which Ms. Gay has failed. In the days after the terrorist attack, Harvard’s administration was silent, even as Palestinian student groups released statements blaming Israel for the attack.

“The University’s initial statement should have been an immediate, direct and unequivocal condemnation,” the fellows write, but no consequences will be meted out. “President Gay has apologized for how she handled her congressional testimony” in which she said that calls for the genocide of Jews might violate the school’s speech code depending on the “context.”




Bill Ackman’s Ruthless Quest to Oust College Presidents



Cara Lombardo:

Once it became official, the Harvard graduate turned his attention to the other two university presidents who struggled to condemn calling for the genocide of Jews when testifying before Congress last week.

He wrote a letter to his alma mater’s governing board Sunday, reiterating his calls to remove Claudine Gay as president and fired off a tweet warning the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s boards that if they didn’t take action, he could send them a missive next. Harvard decided against removing Gay, it said Tuesday.

Within days of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Ackman became one of the most vociferous wealthy donors criticizing their alma maters’ handling of antisemitism, using tactics he honed as a shareholder activist—an investing strategy he no longer practices.

He has remade himself as a social crusader and landed a starring role in a roiling debate over free speech and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives on college campuses through a torrent of tweets and open letters to Harvard that have become increasingly hostile.

“When I started out, this was all about antisemitism,” he told The Wall Street Journal on Monday evening. “The much bigger issue is this ideology on campuses…that has led to free speech being squelched.”




Administrative cost bloat



John Seery

The president now has nine vice presidents (up from four in 1990). The Dean of Students Office has gone from six persons in 1990 to sixty-five persons in 2016 (not counting administrative assistants). Academic Computing has gone from six persons in 1990 to thirty-six persons in 2016. The Office of Admissions has jumped from six to fifteen (again, none of these figures includes administrative assistants). The Office of Development (which formerly included Alumni Affairs) counted sixteen persons; now those renamed offices tally forty-seven persons all told. A few years ago Pomona created a new position, Chief Communications Officer; there are twenty-two persons (not counting administrative assistants) working for the CCO (yes, we have twenty-three persons working for Pomona’s PR!). There are all sorts of offices that have popped up in 2016 that never existed back in 1990 (all the following numbers denote administrators and directors and don’t include the administrative assistants for the office): Archives (2 persons); Asian American Resource Center (3); Career Development (11); Draper Center for Community Partnerships (6); Graduate Fellowships (1); Institutional Research (2); International Initiatives (1); Ombuds (1); Outdoor Education Center (2); Pacific Basin Institute (2); Quantitative Skills Center (1); Queer Resources Center (3); Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity (6); Sustainability Office (2); Writing Center (2).




Kenosha Unified School District Board votes to close 6 schools, amid declining enrollment, growing budget deficit



WGTD and Deneen Smith:

Kenosha Unified School District will close six schools next year as part of a plan to close a $15 million deficit.

After meeting for five hours, a divided Kenosha School Board approved a district consolidation and downsizing plan on Tuesday, largely following th recommendations of district administratiion

The main points of contention dealt with the future of Lincoln Middle School and the alternative education program at Reuther Central High School, according to WPR partner 91.1 WGTD.

The board narrowly voted to close Lincoln but decided to keep the Reuther program intact, but reduce the staff by 10 people.

Five elementary schools — Stocker, Vernon, McKinley, Jefferson and Edward Bain School of Language and Art-Creative Arts — will close. Students who attend the aging Washington Middle School will be moved to the Edward Bain School of Language and Art, a newer building designed for grade school students that’ll now be turned into a middle school.




Elkhorn Area School District considering changing book policy after parent challenges more than 400 titles



Corrinne Hess:

Before the Nov. 30 request, Tadlock said only two books had been challenged during his 11 years with the district. Those books — “Everybody Sees the Ants” by A.S. King and “Burn Baby Burn” by Meg Medina — were moved from the middle school to the high school after being reviewed by administrators.

Elkhorn Schools’ student test results.




The progressive coalition is splitting over Israel and identity politics.



Nate Silver:

Last week, the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT testified before Congress. In a clip widely shared by the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, the presidents backpedaled and offered a series of legalistic defenses when asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their respective bullying and harassment policies.

You might not expect Stefanik, a once-moderate Republican who became a loyal Trump supporter, to garner much sympathy from liberals. But there was initially an intensively negative reaction to the presidents from nearly everyone save the left wing. That included people who I’d normally consider to be partisan Democrats who rarely criticize their own “team” — indeed, even the White House condemned the presidents. By the weekend, Liz Magill, the president of Penn, resigned under pressure from Ackman and the board.

Part of the problem for Magill, Harvard president Claudine Gay and MIT president Sally Kornbluth is that you could criticize them from several different directions: because they didn’t sufficiently condemn anti-Semitism, because they didn’t sufficiently defend free speech, and because the hearing was a PR disaster. That can lead to some weird coalitions — such as between people who want to see additional consideration for Jewish students within university speech codes and DEI frameworks, and others who want to see those frameworks dismantled.




Donors should not decide campus policies or determine what is taught



Scott Bok:

But there are limits to what universities can do to address such matters. Physical safety concerns must come first, so at Penn we dramatically stepped up our police presence — that campus has never been more closely watched. And if you walked across campus as I did numerous times this semester, most often, you would have been struck by how normal life seemed.

Students are walking to classrooms and labs, hoping to win a place at a law or medical school or a job at Google or J.P. Morgan or Teach for America. On weekends they are going to fraternity parties and basketball games, just like I did.

There have been a handful of loud but otherwise peaceful protests where hateful things have been said, but it’s been a long way from the unrest of the 1960s, when the civil rights movement and Vietnam War inspired violent protests on a grand scale.

And yes, there have been some well-publicized acts of deplorable antisemitism.




Scientists worry that ill-informed use of artificial intelligence is driving a deluge of unreliable or useless research.



Philip Ball

The paper — one of dozens of studies on the idea — has been cited more than 900 times. But the following September, computer scientists Sanchari Dhar and Lior Shamir at Kansas State University in Manhattan took a closer look2. They trained a machine-learning algorithm on the same images, but used only blank background sections that showed no body parts at all. Yet their AI could still pick out COVID-19 cases at well above chance level.

The problem seemed to be that there were consistent differences in the backgrounds of the medical images in the data set. An AI system could pick up on those artefacts to succeed in the diagnostic task, without learning any clinically relevant features — making it medically useless.

Shamir and Dhar found several other cases in which a reportedly successful image classification by AI — from cell types to face recognition — returned similar results from blank or meaningless parts of the images. The algorithms performed better than chance at recognizing faces without faces, and cells without cells. Some of these papers have been cited hundreds of times.




Cognitive Ability and Miscalibrated Financial Expectations



Chris Dawson:

It is a puzzle why humans tend toward unrealistic optimism, as it can lead to excessively risky behavior and a failure to take precautionary action. Using data from a large nationally representative U.K. sample our claim is that optimism bias is partly a consequence of low cognition—as measured by a broad range of cognitive skills, including memory, verbal fluency, fluid reasoning and numerical reasoning. We operationalize unrealistic optimism as the difference between a person’s financial expectation and the financial realization that follows, measured annually over a decade. All else being equal, those highest on cognitive ability experience a 22% (53.2%) increase in the probability of realism (pessimism) and a 34.8% reduction in optimism compared with those lowest on cognitive ability. This suggests that the negative consequences of an excessively optimistic mindset may, in part, be a side product of the true driver, low cognitive ability.




What Is Plagiarism?



Christopher Rufo:

On Sunday, Christopher Brunet and I published an exposé revealing that Harvard president Claudine Gay had plagiarized multiple sections of her Ph.D. thesis, in violation of Harvard’s policies on academic integrity.

As the news circulated on social media, Washington Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium followed up with an additional investigation demonstrating that Gay had plagiarized sections of three additional papers. The evidence was damning: multiple verbatim passages copied without proper citation or quotation – textbook plagiarism, in other words.

Sensing vulnerability, the Harvard Corporation responded with a statement conceding that Gay had provided “inadequate citation” in numerous papers and promising that she would request “four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.” The subtext: the university admitted to serious error but would have the public believe that it did not amount to plagiarism.

This raises the obvious question: Is Harvard telling the truth? To answer this question, I reached out to Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars. The following is a lightly edited transcript of his comments: