Tyler Cowen:

Put aside the more virtuous public universities, where such matters are governed by law. What policies should private universities have toward freedom of speech for university staff? This is not such a simple question, even if you are in non-legal realms a big believer in de facto freedom of speech practices.

Just look at companies or for that matter (non-university) non-profits. How many of them allow staff to say whatever they want, without fear of firing? What if a middle manager at General Foods went around making offensive (or perceived to be offensive) remarks about other staff members? Repeatedly, and after having been told to stop. There is a good chance that person will end up fired, even if senior management is not seeking to restrict speech or opinion per se. Other people on the staff will object, and of course some of the offensive remarks might be about them. The speech offender just won’t be able to work with a lot of the company any more. Maybe that person won’t end up fired, but would any companies restrict their policies, ex ante, to promise that person won’t be fired? Or in any way penalized, set aside, restricted from working with others or from receiving supervisory promotions, and so on?

The German PISA results are nothing short of a disaster. pic.twitter.com/mqmKPCTiYP

— Christian Odendahl (@COdendahl) December 5, 2023

Nicholas Confessore:

The validation they have sought seemed to finally arrive this fall, as campuses convulsed with protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and hostile, sometimes violent, rhetoric toward Jews. It came to a head last week on Capitol Hill, as the presidents of three elite universities struggled to answer a question about whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate school rules, and Republicans asserted that outbreaks of campus antisemitism were a symptom of the radical ideas they had long warned about. On Saturday, amid the fallout, one of those presidents, M. Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned.

For Republicans, the rise of antisemitic speech and the timid responses of some academic leaders presented a long-sought opportunity to flip the political script and cast liberals or their institutions as hateful and intolerant. “What I’m describing is a grave danger inherent in assenting to the race-based ideology of the radical left,” said Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, at the hearing, adding, “Institutional antisemitism and hate are among the poison fruits of your institution’s cultures.”

Andrew Sullivan:

In the hearings, President Gay actually said, with a straight face, that “we embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.” This is the president whose university mandates all students attend a Title IX training session where they are told that “fatphobia” and “cisheterosexism” are forms of “violence,” and that “using the wrong pronouns” constitutes “abuse.” This is the same president who engineered the ouster of a law professor, Ronald Sullivan, simply because he represented a client, of whom Gay and students (rightly but irrelevantly) disapproved, Harvey Weinstein.

This is the same president who watched a brilliant and popular professor, Carole Hooven, be effectively hounded out of her position after a public shaming campaign by one of her department’s DEl enforcers, and a mob of teaching fellows, because Hooven dared to state on television that biological sex is binary. This is the president of a university where a grand total of 1.46 percent of faculty call themselves “conservative” and 82 percent call themselves “liberal” or “very liberal.” This is the president of a university which ranked 248th out of 248 colleges this year on free speech (and Penn was the 247th), according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Harvard is a place where free expression goes to die.

Al Gore:

Gore whined that social media had “disrupted the balances that used to exist that made representative democracy work much better.”

The former Vice President said that functioning democracy relied on a “shared base of knowledge that serves as a basis for reasoning together collectively” but that “social media that is dominated by algorithms” upsets this balance.

According to Gore, people are being pulled down “rabbit holes” by algorithms that are “the digital equivalent of AR-15s – they ought to be banned, they really ought to be banned!”

Gore claimed, “It’s an abuse of the public forum” and that people were being sucked into echo chambers.

Aaron Sibarium

In four papers published between 1993 and 2017, including her doctoral dissertation, Gay, a political scientist, paraphrased or quoted nearly 20 authors—including two of her colleagues in Harvard University’s department of government—without proper attribution, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis. Other examples of possible plagiarism, all from Gay’s dissertation, were publicized Sunday by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo and Karlstack’s Chris Brunet.

The Free Beacon worked with nearly a dozen scholars to analyze 29 potential cases of plagiarism. Most of them said that Gay had violated a core principle of academic integrity as well as Harvard’s own anti-plagiarism policies, which state that “it’s not enough to change a few words here and there.”

Rather, scholars are expected to cite the sources of their work, including when paraphrasing, and to use quotation marks when quoting directly from others. But in at least 10 instances, Gay lifted full sentences—even entire paragraphs—with just a word or two tweaked.

In her 1997 thesis, for example, she borrowed a full paragraph from a paper by the scholars Bradley Palmquist, then a political science professor at Harvard, and Stephen Voss, one of Gay’s classmates in her Ph.D. program at Harvard, while making only a couple alterations, including changing their “decrease” to “increase” because she was studying a different set of data.

The Gemini release has a ton of data in it. It is explosive.

Let’s take a look at the real toxicity and bias prompts.

According to the data, every site is classified as a particular bias.

Should that be used by as part of the datasets of what will define toxicity?…

— Kristen Ruby (@sparklingruby) December 11, 2023

Matt Stoller:

One of the great puzzles of American society is the position of the Ivy Leagues. They are a bastion of privilege and power, and yet the campuses are rife with left-leaning professors who one might imagine seek to redistribute wealth. According to the Harvard Crimson, 77.6% of Harvard professors define themselves as left-leaning, and just 2.9% as conservative. What explains this dynamic? Former Harvard College Dean Harry Lewis said that it gets to the basic point of the school, which is to advance radical ideas. “It’s almost by definition anti-preservationist because we place such a high value on the creation of new knowledge,” he said.

A wildly different explanation is apparent from watching Netflix’s Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal, the highly publicized fiasco in which wealthy parents used bribery to get their kids into top colleges. What I found most interesting about this episode wasn’t the actual corruption, but a different and more poignant feature of American meritocracy. Even in the midst of acts of bribery, many of the parents were beset with fear that their children might find out about the crooked machinations to win their admission to elite schools. They took desperate steps to shield the kids from facing real questions of “merit” or deservedness. And in fact, while most involved in meritocracy don’t use bribery, a tremendous amount of energy now goes into preserving similar basic fictions about the nature of elite private education and its role in the United States.

Jill Barshay:

The typical ambitious high school student takes advanced algebra, trigonometry, pre-calculus and calculus. None of that math may be necessary for the vast majority of undergraduates who don’t intend to major in science or another STEM field. 

But those same students don’t have many of the math skills that professors think they actually do need. In a survey, humanities, arts and social science professors say they really want their students to be able to analyze data, create charts and spreadsheets and reason mathematically – skills that high school math courses often skip or rush through.

“We still need the traditional algebra-to-calculus curriculum for students who are intending a STEM major,” said Gary Martin, a professor of mathematics education at Auburn University in Alabama who led the team that conducted this survey of college professors. “But that’s maybe 20 percent. The other 80 percent, what about them?” 

Martin said that the survey showed that high schools should stress “reasoning and critical thinking skills, decrease the emphasis on specific mathematical topics, and increase the focus on data analysis and statistics.”

This damning assessment of the content of high school math comes from a survey of about 300 Alabama college professors who oversee majors and undergraduate degree programs at both two-year and four-year public colleges in the humanities, arts, social sciences and some natural sciences. Majors that require calculus were excluded.

Mike Ford (UW Oshkosh)

It is unmooring to read critiques regarding the system’s hostility to freedom of speech and intellectual diversity while teaching a class specifically on freedom of speech and intellectual diversity. Earlier this semester I moderated a panel on freedom of speech and expression on campus with UWO professors, President Rothman, and a representative from FIRE. It was an awesome example of what is possible when we embrace intellectual diversity and questions of free speech on campus. Making this issue, which is core to a functioning university, a political wedge issue is a choice. This semester at UWO we made a different choice, to take the topic on honestly and enthusiastically as a learning opportunity. And it is working. I don’t want to be a pawn in a culture war, I want students to know their constitutional rights, to experience true intellectual diversity, and to be comfortable discussing uncomfortable topics.

I was also struck by the some of the comments around shared governance being supportive of the rejected deal. My least popular opinion on campus is probably my belief that shared governance needs some serious reimagining. This may be more specific to UWO, but when I see the inequities in program staffing and support across campus, I cannot help but ask whether our governance processes enable such inequities. Do our longstanding processes contribute to a culture where the administrative and academic sides of our institution are adversarial? A bigger question is whether faculty and staff have confidence in the shared governance process. In my observations over the past ten years I see plenty of red flags, i.e., something being supported by shared governance processes does not equate to something being supported by those the shared governance process is intended to represent. That creates an impossible situation that is not fair or constructive for those participating in the process, or those impacted by the process. Worse, the disconnect breeds mistrust at all levels of the institution.

To my original question, where do we go from here? I favor embracing reform. At UWO, this would mean our layoffs and academic reform processes include budgeting reform, shared governance reforms including a new faculty constitution, and the taking of deliberate steps to unify the administrative and academic sides of the university. In other words, we need to rebuild our culture at all levels of the institution. That work is harder than restructuring or cutting costs, but it is also the work that will make all the other reforms successful. Without budgetary and cultural reform, we are at risk of repeating the mistakes that got us to this untenable point.

Jason Willick @ Bezos Washington Post

The episode has the makings of a turning point in the culture wars over higher education. But whether it’s constructive or destructive depends on what lessons are drawn. To that end, here are three:

First, justified concern about American campus radicalism cannot obscure the fact that the presidents were objectively right on the free-speech merits. Universities that claim to be forums for free inquiry should not promise Congress that they will punish students or faculty for constitutionally protected speech. Private universities are not bound legally by the First Amendment, but most have committed themselves to abiding by its spirit and meaning (even though they often don’t; more on that below).

Like racist, sexist, homophobic or anti-Muslim speech, antisemitic speech is generally constitutionally protected. To legally constitute harassment, speech must be so pervasive that it interferes with someone’s ability to access education — think of a mob that follows someone around campus or blocks a building. An isolated outburst, social media post or protest chant doesn’t meet that threshold.

Even speech endorsing violence in the abstract is protected. This might seem surprising, but it’s well-established law. Speech crosses into incitement only if it is both intended to cause violence and likely to cause violence in the imminent future. As the Supreme Court affirmed in 1969’s Brandenburg v. Ohio, advocating “the moral propriety or even moral necessity for a resort to force and violence is not the same as preparing a group for violent action and steeling it to such action.”

Commentary.

FIRE:

FIRE statement on Gov. Hochul’s letter to New York State colleges and universities

Yesterday, New York State Gov. Kathy Hochul sent a letter warning the presidents of colleges and universities in New York that failing to discipline students for “calling for the genocide of any group of people” would violate both state and federal law. The governor promised “aggressive enforcement action” against any institution failing to prohibit and punish such speech.

Gov. Hochul’s warning cannot be squared with the First Amendment.

Colleges and universities can and should punish “calls for genocide” when such speech falls into one of the narrowly defined categories of unprotected speech, including true threats, incitement, and discriminatory harassment. But broad, vague bans on “calls for genocide,” absent more, would result in the censorship of protected expression.

After three university presidents were universally panned for their testimony about anti-Semitism on campus, SNL decided that @EliseStefanik was the one who embarrassed herself.
pic.twitter.com/wSympwPfEj

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 10, 2023

Someone smarter than me should apply this overly long, precious and vaguely condescending @washingtonpost “deep read” style to like an Ivy League-educated East Coast or D.C. PMC couple. Now THAT would be enlightening. https://t.co/EbZEtISxdK

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) December 10, 2023

Oxford Literary Festival

Ali Smith Interviewed by Richard Ovenden

“Every day the universities wake up and break the law.”

That's how I began my recent seminar for Stanford's Classical Liberalism Initiative.https://t.co/qbmI0uV5wD

— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) December 6, 2023

and this is our investigation into @harvard which STRONGLY suggests claudine gay helped engineer the downfall of a genius black professor named roland fryer because his research kept blowing up wokeness.

this is the (baller) opening. you can watch the full doc here:… pic.twitter.com/FsL4N2os5K

— Rob Montz (@Robmontz) December 8, 2023

commentary

Victor Davis Hanson

After the George Floyd riots in 2020, reparatory admissions — the effort to admit diverse students beyond their numbers in the general population — increased.

Elite universities like Stanford and Yale boasted that their so-called “white” incoming student numbers had plunged to between 20 and 40 percent, despite whites making up 68-70% of the general population.

The abolition of the SAT requirement, and often the comparative ranking of high school grade point averages, have ended the ancient and time-proven idea of meritocracy. Brilliant high school transcripts and test scores no longer warrant admissions to so-called elite schools.

One result was that the number of Jews has nosedived from 20-30% of Ivy League student bodies during the 1970s and 1980s to 10-15%.

Joseph De Avila and Melissa Korn:

In one particularly tense exchange, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), challenged Harvard’s Gay on where she draws the line between protected speech and incitement to violence, and whether she would take disciplinary action against individuals who participated in rallies where there were calls for an intifada, or a violent Palestinian uprising. Gay said the school does give a wide berth to protected speech, but acts when rhetoric crosses into conduct that violates the school’s policies on harassment, bullying or intimidation. Stefanik called for Gay’s resignation.

College campuses have been riled by protests since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, with hundreds or even thousands of students, faculty and staff at schools around the country joining pro-Palestinian rallies. Jewish leaders say chants such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “Globalize the intifada” are incitements to violence against Israelis and Jews more broadly.

Students and alumni groups say anti-Jewish antagonism has increased amid the rising tensions, prompting calls for schools to do more to protect Jewish students from bigotry. The universities represented at the hearing Tuesday are all private institutions, but Congress has some oversight role because the schools receive significant federal funding for research and student financial aid.

After the Plague:

The After the Plague project investigates these questions by exploring health in later medieval England. It is centred on studying about 1000 medieval skeletons from the cemetery of the Hospital of St. John, Cambridge and from other medieval sites in Cambridge. The people we study date to between 1000 and 1500 CE.

​

The most significant health event of this period was the Black Death, the bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis) epidemic of 1348-9 which killed between a third and a half of Europe’s population. We investigate the short and long term biological and social consequences of this catastrophe on the medieval people of Cambridge.

Gabriel T. Rubin and Rosie Ettenheim:

More than three million borrowers have had $132 billion of their federal student loans flagged for cancellation, despite a Supreme Court ruling in June that blocked relief for millions more student-loan holders.

The high court ruled that the Biden administration couldn’t cancel hundreds of billions of dollars for tens millions of student-loan holders, reasoning that the authority for such a broad-based policy doesn’t exist under the law. While that closed one path, Biden tapped a variety of different tools that no previous president had ever used to this extent.

The administration announced its latest round of cancelations on Dec. 6, forgiving about $5 billion in loans for roughly 80,000 borrowers. Since taking office in 2021, the Biden administration has arranged to cancel loans equal to around 30% of the total projected cost of its blocked mass cancellation plan. Here’s how:

David Blaska:

There is some irony in the presidents of Harvard and Penn defending campus free speech when that speech calls for the destruction of Israel and, by implication, the extermination of Jews. Given that conservative speakers espousing traditional values have been run off our supposedly most enlightened campuses.

The school presidents did such a poor job when subpoenaed before the Republican House of Reps this week that their jobs are in jeopardy, especially at Penn.

What did you expect? The “Universities” of Wisconsin hired $32 million worth of hate-speech monitors with the power to hire and, by denying tenure, fire. To penalize students and ban their clubs. Result? A 42-ton glacial boulder is accused or racism and escorted off campus (via a flatbed truck).

More:

UW Board of Regents rejects system deal struck with Republicans on DEI, UW-Madison engineering building

Kelly Meyerhofer:

In an unexpected move Saturday, the board overseeing state public universities narrowly rejected a deal University of Wisconsin System leaders brokered with the state’s top Republican over campus diversity efforts.

The UW Board of Regents voted 9-8 to strike down an agreement “reimagining” campus diversity efforts, which many saw as selling out students of color in exchange for $800 million in employee pay raises and building projects.

UPDATE: “In a shocking turn of events, the board rejected the proposal 9 to 8, leaving over $800 million on the table and the future of the system’s DEI offices in limbo. The board also voted not to table the vote for further discussion, effectively killing the deal.”… https://t.co/K08LBbRTFy

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) December 10, 2023

Elite US universities are trend setters in academia and far beyond. Which presents a golden opportunity to lead the way in ending a period of madness in US social, cultural, and educational history. It simply has to declare: 1) Our DEI complex has been abolished. 2) Henceforth,…

— Timur Kuran (@timurkuran) December 10, 2023

Claudine Gay:

This moment offers a profound opportunity for institutional change that should not and cannot be squandered. The national conversation around racial equity continues to gain momentum and the unprecedented scale of mobilization and demand for justice gives me hope. In raw, candid conversations and virtual gatherings convened across the FAS in the aftermath of George Floyd’s brutal murder, members of our community spoke forcefully and with searing clarity about the institution we aspire to be and the lengths we still must travel to be the Harvard of our ideals. It is up to us to ensure that the pain expressed, problems identified, and solutions suggested set us on a path for long-term change. I write today to share my personal commitment to this transformational project and the first steps the FAS will take to advance this important agenda in the coming year.

Amplify teaching and research on racial and ethnic inequality

——-

This seems to be a good example of responding to antisemitism with more DEI instead of more freedom and fairness:

Bill Ackman:

The Curious Case of Claudine Gay. This is a detailed critique of President Gay’s academic and administrative history prior to her becoming President of Harvard.

Kind of odd that UW doubles down on its commitment to its ideology at the same time that it’s falling apart at more prominent schools.

After researching the bios of Evers' appointees to the Board of Regents, it's not only not surprising that they were willing to kill $800m in funding, an engineering building & pay raises for 34K state workers – it was predictable. They're a grab bag of wealthy trial attorneys,…

— Wisconsin Right Now (@wisconsin_now) December 10, 2023

Thaleigha Rampersad:

Elite universities are attempting damage control amid backlash over their presidents’ testimony to Congress on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on campus.

The presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology testified that it “depends on the context” whether calls for the genocide of the Jewish people would violate university rules.

Penn attempted to clarify President Liz Magill’s testimony the following day, releasing a video statement from Magill in which she said, “I was not focused on—but I should’ve been—the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetrate.”

Bishop Robert Barron:

Last week, the presidents of three Ivy League universities—Harvard, MIT, and Penn—appeared before Congress to address the issue of anti-Semitism on their campuses, in the wake of the conflict between Hamas and the state of Israel. In their formal statements as well as in the conversation with the congressional committee members, they acknowledged the tension between free speech and the legitimate regulation of certain types of provocative rhetoric. But as the dialogue unfolded, Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York, became increasingly impatient with what she took to be the presidents’ diffidence regarding extreme forms of anti-Semitic speech at their universities. She finally pressed each one of them: “Would calling for the genocide of Jews constitute a violation of the code of conduct at your school, yes or no?” Astonishingly, each of them balked, insisting that it depended upon the context.

All three women have justifiably faced massive blowback and calls for their resignations, due to the baffling lack of moral clarity in their statements. I should like to explore, however briefly, what has made this kind of moral opaqueness and muddle-headedness possible. First, in the minds of far too many people today, the category of the intrinsically evil act has disappeared. In classical moral philosophy, an intrinsically evil act is one that is, by its very nature, so disordered that it could never be justified or permitted. Good examples of this include slavery, rape, the direct killing of the innocent, and acts of terrorism. Nothing in the circumstances surrounding such acts or in the intentionality of the one performing them could ever turn them into something morally praiseworthy. When we lose a sensitivity to the intrinsically evil, we fall, automatically, into a moral relativism, whereby even the most egregiously wicked act can be justified or explained away. To give just one obvious example, abortion, which involves the direct killing of the innocent, is justified by millions today on account of its purportedly positive effects.

When we lose a sensitivity to the intrinsically evil, we fall, automatically, into a moral relativism . . . 

gexall:

If ever there was a judgment where the clue is in the name it is Harber v Commissioners for His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (INCOME TAX – penalties for failure to notify liability to CGT – appellant relied on case law which could not be found on any legal website – whether cases generated by artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT) [2023] UKFTT 1007. This is a case that exemplifies the danger of relying on “Artificial Intelligence” to make legal submissions. In this case the appellant cited cases that do not exist

Julie Jargon:

Teresa Lubovich says nearly every student coming to her private tutoring center to learn personal organization skills is a boy.

Starting at $500 a month, her services don’t come cheap, but she says parents are willing to pay to jump-start their middle-school-age boys, many of whom show up unmotivated and disorganized.

Elise Stefanie:

What constitutes bullying and harassment at Harvard? A mandatory Title IX training last year warned all undergraduate students that “cisheterosexism,” “fatphobia” and “using the wrong pronouns” qualified as “abuse” and perpetuated “violence” on campus.

But when I asked Harvard President Claudine Gay at a congressional hearing whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated the university’s rules on bullying and harassment, she answered: “It depends on the context.” Pressed further, she said it would qualify “when it crosses into conduct.” I received similar answers from the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania.

This lack of moral clarity is shocking. If only it were surprising. In the months since Oct. 7, the mainstreaming of anti-Jewish hate has been on full display at the poisoned Ivy League and other so-called elite schools, as has the gutless lack of response from university leaders. When 34 Harvard student groups signed a statement that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” Ms. Gay and other Harvard leaders were silent for days.

Since then, we have heard reports of Jewish students being spat on, verbally accosted and, in a widely circulated video, physically assaulted. We’ve seen students march chanting “There is only one solution: Intifada revolution,” a call for violence against Israel. They follow that with a chant of “Globalize the Intifada,” implying that the hatred of Israel is a hatred of Jews everywhere, including on campus.

An astonishing and terrifying glimpse of “post-truth” at the heart of democracies https://t.co/xM9DyAQ7cR

— Rory Stewart (@RoryStewartUK) December 9, 2023

I asked Grok if the US government spies on Americans without a warrant. This was Grok’s answer:

Well, it seems like the US government has been caught with its hand in the cookie jar! According to some sources, there have been instances of warrantless surveillance of American…

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) December 9, 2023

apple

Privacy manifest files outline the privacy practices of the third-party code in an app, in a single standard format. When you prepare to distribute your app, Xcode will combine the privacy manifests across all the third-party SDKs used by your app into a single, easy-to-use report. With one comprehensive report that summarizes all the third-party SDKs found in an app, it will be even easier for you to create more accurate Privacy Nutrition Labels.

Ashish Arora, Sharon Belenzon, Larisa C. Cioaca, Lia Sheer & Hansen Zhang.

We study the relationships between corporate R&D and three components of public science: knowledge, human capital, and invention. We identify the relationships through firm-specific exposure to changes in federal agency R\&D budgets that are driven by the political composition of congressional appropriations subcommittees. Our results indicate that R&D by established firms, which account for more than three-quarters of business R&D, is affected by scientific knowledge produced by universities only when the latter is embodied in inventions or PhD scientists. Human capital trained by universities fosters innovation in firms. However, inventions from universities and public research institutes substitute for corporate inventions and reduce the demand for internal research by corporations, perhaps reflecting downstream competition from startups that commercialize university inventions. Moreover, abstract knowledge advances per se elicit little or no response. Our findings question the belief that public science represents a non-rival public good that feeds into corporate R&D through knowledge spillovers

Commentary.

Tyler Cowen:

McTaggart wore his eccentricities with pride. He rode a tricycle. He walked “with a curious shuffle, back to the wall, as if expecting a sudden kick from behind,” a fact that may or may not be explained by his having been bullied at boarding school. He saluted every cat he met. His dissertation for a fellowship at Trinity, later published as Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic; had elicited from that older Apostle, Henry Sidgwick, the remark; “I can see that this is nonsense, but what I want to know is whether it is the right kind of nonsense.” Apparently, it was.

Ava Menkes:

Kayla Romanovs-Malovrh, on the brink of a sharp decision, met with her academic advisor a week before the deadline in hopes of transferring to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s engineering program.

Romanovs-Malovrh first applied to the program in 2021. But she did not get off the waitlist due to the high volume of applicants during her admission year.

In the meantime, Romanovs-Malovrh who grew up in Wausau, chose to live in Menomonie, a city of less than 20,000 located hours away from Madison, to study mechanical engineering at UW-Stout. 

“If you don’t get into Madison, where can you really go in the state of Wisconsin?” she told The Daily Cardinal. “Then you have to find other routes, less-known schools that don’t put as much funding into their engineering program. So you might not get as good of an education.”

Patrick Mcilheran:

Huge taxpayer savings are at risk, but beyond that is the question of who controls government, voters or organizers

The unions’ lawsuit to overturn Act 10, Wisconsin’s 2011 labor reform, isn’t primarily about money.

Money is involved. When the Legislature and then-Gov. Scott Walker took away most of the control that public employee unions exerted over state and local governments, they said it was to arrest overspending by reducing employee benefit costs.

We applaud Speaker Vos’s efforts to reduce & eventually eliminate discrimination through DEI from the UW campuses. Today’s deal is a victory in a state with divided government. 🧵 https://t.co/BW7Bij6p7Q

— WILL (@WILawLiberty) December 8, 2023

Ron Hassner:

When college students who sympathize with Palestinians chant “From the river to the sea,” do they know what they’re talking about? I hired a survey firm to poll 250 students from a variety of backgrounds across the U.S. Most said they supported the chant, some enthusiastically so (32.8%) and others to a lesser extent (53.2%). 

But only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea. Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic. Less than a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafat was (12 of them, or more than 10%, thought he was the first prime minister of Israel). Asked in what decade Israelis and Palestinians had signed the Oslo Accords, more than a quarter of the chant’s supporters claimed that no such peace agreements had ever been signed. There’s no shame in being ignorant, unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions.

Would learning basic political facts about the conflict moderate students’ opinions? A Latino engineering student from a southern university reported “definitely” supporting “from the river to the sea” because “Palestinians and Israelis should live in two separate countries, side by side.” Shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel, he downgraded his enthusiasm for the mantra to “probably not.” Of the 80 students who saw the map, 75% similarly changed their view.

Fino Menezes:

One of the traditions of the Japanese education system is that students do o-soji(cleaning). However, it’s been in print more than once that Japanese schools have no janitors because students do all the cleaning. That’s simply not true.

Japanese schools have non-teaching staff called yomushuji , or shuji for short. They have many responsibilities, including serving as crossing guards when school lets out, but their main job is cleaning and maintenance. That’s a good thing, too, when you take a moment to think about. Schools definitely need adults to mop things up after the children finish cleaning.

Jonathan Haidt:

University presidents: If you’re not going to punish students for calling for the elimination of Israel and Israelis, it’s OK with me, but ONLY if you also immediately dismantle the speech policing apparatus and norms you created in 2015-2016. Please read The Coddling of the American Mind. @glukianoff and I laid out exactly where the oppressor/victim frame came from (ch. 3), how it spread out of a few departments to gain power over administrators and campus culture (chapters 4 and 5), and how it drove the creation of the bureaucratic structures and processes that now have us all teaching and learning on eggshells (ch. 10). In chapter 13 we offer advice to leaders on how to to return universities to their academic mission and regain public trust.

Bev Weintraub:

Some of America’s biggest names in education tackled some of the thorniest issues facing the country’s schools on the op-ed pages of The 74 this year, expressing their concerns about continuing COVID-driven deficits among students and the future of education overall. There were some grim predictions, but also reasons for hope. Here are some of the most read, most incisive and most controversial essays we published in 2023.

From rethinking the American high school to the fiscal cliff, tutoring and special ed, what our most incisive opinion contributors had to say

Matt hen:

A simulation of a wave inside a stadium- a rectangle and two semicircles. Although it is a very simple shape, the wave function cannot be exactly solved and becomes chaotic. The simulation is actually computed on a rectangular grid of pixels as a cellular automaton- note the checkerboard patterns and pixelated edges.

Rikki Schlott:

“If a billionaire has committed $50 million or $100 million a year and now they’re backing out, colleges need to figure out how to fill that gap,” Command Education founder Christopher Rim told The Post.

“The only way to do that is by recruiting lower amount donors.”

Since Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, many elite colleges have been accused of failing to tackle antisemitic demonstrations on campus and refusing to straightforwardly condemn the mass murder.

Katy Grimes:

When Gov. Jerry Brown was elected in 2011, the state budget was $98 billion. The state’s population was a little over 38 million. Brown doubled the budget to $199.3 billion – with no measurable increase in population. Gov. Newsom inherited Brown’s $199.3 billion budget, and has grown it to $330 billion in 5 years – while losing population. Where is all of that new spending going?

Tyler Cowen

Here is three and a half minutes of their testimony before Congress.  Worth a watch, if you haven’t already.  I have viewed some other segments as well, none of them impressive.  I can’t bring myself to sit through the whole thing.

I don’t doubt that I would find their actual views on world affairs highly objectionable, but that is not why I am here today.  Here are a few other points:

1. Their entire testimony is ruled by their lawyers, by their fear that their universities might be sued, and their need to placate internal interest groups.  That is a major problem, in addition to their unwillingness to condemn various forms of rhetoric for violating their codes of conduct.  As Katherine Boyle stated: “This is Rule by HR Department and it gets dark very fast.”

How do you think that affects the quality of their otherdecisions?  The perceptions and incentives of their subordinates?

2. They are all in a defensive crouch. None of them are good on TV. None of them are good in front of Congress. They have ended up disgracing their universities, in front of massive audiences (the largest they ever will have?), simply for the end goal of maintaining a kind of (illusory?) maximum defensibility for their positions within their universities. At that they are too skilled.

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