Katy’s Hoyer:

Similarly, when East Germans joined the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990, they expected to live in the democracy they had pushed for – a system where they, the people, wouldn’t be ignored, looked down upon and viewed with suspicion by a political class that considered itself morally superior to them. For some, this hope was disappointed. They feel that the main political parties take no interest in their concerns, and that this fact doesn’t change no matter which of them they vote for. 

Many West Germans feel like this, too, as indeed do many people in other parliamentary democracies around the world. A survey in Britain last year showed that six out of ten people here felt politically homeless, and the same proportion of Americans said in a poll in 2016 that neither of the political parties represented their views.

What makes East Germans different isn’t a special aversion to the political offering – they share that with millions of people in the West – but an unwillingness to accept the shortcomings of parliamentary democracy. Their ‘dictatorship experience’ hasn’t blinded them to democracy but rather sharpened their sensitivity for its failings. In 1989, they had enacted democracy – the rule of the people – in a way other than voting: through street protest, grassroots-level organisations and by complaining loudly to their bosses, local politicians, police officers and state officials. But many now feel that the change they had helped bring about didn’t seem to gift them more agency. In a way, some say, there was more of a feeling of participation then than there is now in a democracy with formal voting. The AfD is very good at exploiting this feeling, using slogans like ‘The East rises up’, ‘Complete the Peaceful Revolution,’ or ‘We are the people’ (which was used by protesters in 1989).

Bill Osmulski:

The latest plagiarism scandal at Harvard University has implicated one current and two former diversity officials at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

LaVar Charleston is UW-Madison’s current Deputy Vice Chancellor for Diversity & Inclusion, Vice Provost and Chief Diversity Officer. He is married to Sherri Ann Charleston, who is Harvard’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer. Sherri Ann had also previously worked as a diversity official at UW-Madison before getting the job at Harvard in 2020. This week, she was accused of committing plagiarism throughout her academic career. Her husband, LaVar, allegedly helped her to commit fraud at least one of those times in a 2014 study.

Another former diversity official from UW-Madison, Jerlando Jackson was also listed as a co-author of the study in question. Jackson was UW-Madison‘s Director & Chief Research Scientist, Wisconsin’s Equity and Inclusion Laboratory. He was hired as the Dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University in 2022.

All three individuals were with UW-Madison at the time the article was published.

Abbey Machtig:

The candidates will be interviewed again Wednesday, but those discussions will not be livestreamed, recorded or open to the public. The interviews will involve teachers, district leaders, students and selected community members.

Eric Murphy:

Choudhury is one of three finalists for superintendent in Madison, along with Joe Gothard, the superintendent of Saint Paul Public Schools and a former Madison principal, and Yvonne Stokes, a former superintendent of Hamilton Southeastern Schools in Indiana. Stokes also resigned under pressure from conservative school board members who took issue with her diversity and inclusion efforts as superintendent. All three will be interviewed by various panels Feb. 6-7. 

When asked for comment on the allegations against Choudhury by Cornelius and others, school district leaders said they were happy with their final three options for superintendent. “Our board has done exhaustive work in selecting our finalists, and we remain confident with the process and the selection of our finalists,” the district said in an unsigned email to Isthmus sent by communications staffer Ellie Herman. 

The email pointed to a previous statement from school board president Nichelle Nichols: “We are extremely pleased with the pool of candidates for this position. They each reflect the diverse needs of our community and the competencies that we agreed upon in November. Our three finalists have exceeded our expectations, and we’re excited for the community to meet them….”

——-

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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?

Chris Rickert:

About three times as often, according to this analysis: mdpi.com/2076-0760/11/4…

Tim Harford:

In the case of Flight 447, the challenge was a storm that blocked the airspeed instruments with ice. The system correctly concluded it was flying on unreliable data and, as programmed, handed full control to the pilot. Alas, the young pilot was not used to flying in thin, turbulent air without the computer’s supervision and began to make mistakes. As the plane wobbled alarmingly, he climbed out of instinct and stalled the plane — something that would have been impossible if the assistive fly-by-wire had been operating normally. The other pilots became so confused and distrustful of the plane’s instruments, that they were unable to diagnose the easily remedied problem until it was too late.

This problem is sometimes termed “the paradox of automation”. An automated system can assist humans or even replace human judgment. But this means that humans may forget their skills or simply stop paying attention. When the computer needs human intervention, the humans may no longer be up to the job. Better automated systems mean these cases become rare and stranger, and humans even less likely to cope with them.

Jessie Guy-Ryan:

In fact, the government has actually won this fight before—secretly. 

Throughout 2015, U.S. politicians and law enforcement officials such as FBI director James Comey have publicly lobbied for the insertion of cryptographic “backdoors” into software and hardware to allow law enforcement agencies to bypass authentication and access a suspect’s data surreptitiously. Cybersecurity experts have unanimously condemned the idea, pointing out that such backdoors would fundamentally undermine encryption and could exploited by criminals, among other issues. While a legal mandate or public agreement would be needed to allow evidence obtained via backdoors to be admissible in court, the NSA has long attempted—and occasionally succeeded—in placing backdoors for covert activities.

One of the most important developments in cryptography was the Enigma machine, famously used to encode Nazi communications during World War II. For years, rumors have persisted that the NSA (then SSA) and their British counterparts in the Government Communications Headquarters collaborated with the Enigma’s manufacturer, Crypto AG, to place backdoors into Enigma machines provided to certain countries after World War II. Crypto AG has repeatedly denied the allegations, and in 2015 the BBC sifted through 52,000 pages of declassified NSA documents to find the truth. 

The investigation revealed that while no backdoors were placed in the machines, there was a “gentlemen’s agreement” that Crypto AG would keep American and British intelligence appraised of “the technical specifications of different machines and which countries were buying which ones,” allowing analysts to decrypt messages much more quickly. Consider it a security “doggy-door.”

Jill Tucker:

A Hayward elementary school struggling to boost low test scores and dismal student attendance is paying $250,000 for an organization called Woke Kindergarten to train teachers to confront white supremacy, disrupt racism and oppression and remove those barriers to learning.

The Woke Kindergarten sessions train teachers on concepts and curriculum that’s available to use in classrooms with any of Glassbrook Elementary’s 474 students. The sessions are funded through a federal program meant to help the country’s lowest-performing schools boost student achievement. 

But two years into the three-year contract with Woke Kindergarten, a for-profit company, student achievement at Glassbrook has fallen, prompting some teachers to question whether the money was well-spent given the needs of the students, who are predominantly low-income. Two-thirds of the students are English learners and more than 80% are Hispanic/Latino.

Grace Reilly:

Rhode Island’s North Kingstown School Department is under fire following a board member’s statement of desire to “never” inform parents if a child changes his or her so-called gender expression during school hours and activities. She expressed this belief during a Jan. 25 board meeting, during which transgender and non-binary policy was discussed. 

The board member explained, “[M]y point would be that we never notify a parent with these issues.” She then doubled down, saying, “I don’t think we should notify parents on many issues that we notify them on.”

“I don’t think parents should be notified, simply because society assumes that every child has a well-meaning family culture that is accepting of this,” she stated. “Sometimes the worst thing you can do is involve a parent in some of these issues, based on their own beliefs and their own culture. And that would cause that student to commit suicide.”

Erin Geary:

For school choice to be realized, parents must create a mass movement

When trying to find the best restaurant in an area, people tend to turn to the internet, look for a list of eateries in the area, and visit their website. The more diligent may search out Yelp for reviews. If at least seven out of 10 comments are positive, you are likely to feel good about your choice. If only three of 10 found the restaurant appealing, however, most would avoid that restaurant and it would eventually close its doors.

Now, let us apply that same logic toward Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Parents live in a neighborhood, send their kids to schools that their tax dollars pay for and discover that, overall, 30 percent of students are unable to read and 17 percent are unable to complete basic math problems. Yet, instead of being able to choose a higher performing school, their kids are stuck in failing schools because of politics and unions.

On Thursday, January 25, the Chicago Board of Education voted to renew charter schools’ contracts but for only three or four years as opposed to prior agreements that allowed for renewal up to ten years. Additionally, charter schools will be under the microscope with more vigor — especially in how they deal with English language learners and those students with disabilities. Other preconditions imposed by the renewal include teacher licensing and financial issues.

Jeff Myers

Public education in Oregon, and around the country, has become both an important and divisive topic. COVID-19 lockdowns, classroom disruptions and violence, shifts in instructional content and approaches, and ongoing declines in student achievement brought many new faces into school board meetings. Education has become highly partisan as well, turning school board races into highly-funded, hotly contested events. Why is this all happening? And why now?

If you had asked me a year ago, I would have told you the guy behind the declines in our public education system was Colt Gill, the former Director of the Oregon Department of Education (ODE). As ODE’s leader, he was the very public face of the agency. When parents, including me, got increasingly upset with the direction of Oregon’s public schools, it was Colt Gill we spoke out against. While he took all the heat, there was someone on his executive leadership team who flew under the radar until now: Scott Nine.

Michele Catanzaro:

Cliques of mathematicians at institutions in China, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere have been artificially boosting their colleagues’ citation counts by churning out low-quality papers that repeatedly reference their work, according to an unpublished analysis seen by Sciencenone. As a result, their universities—some of which do not appear to have math departments—now produce a greater number of highly cited math papers each year than schools with a strong track record in the field, such as Stanford and Princeton universities.

These so-called “citation cartels” appear to be trying to improve their universities’ rankings, according to experts in publication practices. “The stakes are high—movements in the rankings can cost or make universities tens of millions of dollars,” says Cameron Neylon, a professor of research communication at Curtin University. “It is inevitable that people will bend and break the rules to improve their standing.” In response to such practices, the publishing analytics company Clarivate has excluded the entire field of math from the most recent edition of its influential list of authors of highly cited papers, released in November 2023.

Chloe Berger:

Before the days of the punch buggies and the Toyotathon, Americans were stuck with the objectively slower, more austere transportation options of horses and sail boats. With the passage of time, minivans with bumper stickers and HyundaiSonatas eclipsed trusty ole steeds. But a funny thing happened along the way, as wealthy hobbyists turned dressage and rowing into status symbols of a life of leisure spent mastering the old ways. Could the world of work be the same?

In 2020, remote work was every bit as revolutionary as the technologies of the horse or the boat, and in an accelerated version of the transportation revolution, it’s rapidly shaping up as a commodity that the wealthy save for themselves. 

Just a few years after most knowledge workers shifted to remote work, it’s now mostly wealthy, college-educated employees who are still being allowed to work from home, according to a newly released poll from Ipsos Consumer Tracker. The survey of 1,110 adults, conducted in mid-January, further supports a conclusion that the labor market has split into separate groups, based on one’s sector, pay, and location.

The Economist:

A year ago New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, proposed to adjust a state cap on charter schools, the publicly funded but privately run schools that have become a locus of innovation and controversy in American education. Ms Hochul’s plan was not ambitious, but it would have allowed dozens of new charter schools to open in New York City, where they already attract about 15% of public-school students and where thousands of families languish on waiting lists. But the governor’s plan drew fervent protests from fellow Democrats, including state legislators aligned with teachers’ unions. After a bruising fight, the governor had to settle last autumn for a small increase.

The row reflected a discouraging change in the politics of charter schools. Once a topic of unusual bipartisan enthusiasm, the schools have become divisive, particularly among Democrats. Barack Obama campaigned on charter-school expansion in 2008, but Joe Biden declared in 2020 that he was not enamoured of them. (His administration has nonetheless maintained federal funding for charters.) Republicans are more favourably inclined overall, and Donald Trump increased support during his presidency. But Republican priorities have shifted since George W. Bush, as president, and his brother Jeb, as governor of Florida, championed charters as beacons of racial equity. These days Republicans prioritise vouchers that allow parents to use taxpayer funds to enroll children in religious schools.

Jacob Light:

In an era of rapid technological and social change, do universities adapt enough to play their important role in creating knowledge? To examine university adaptation, I extracted the information contained in the course catalogs of over 450 US universities spanning two decades (2000-2022). When there are changes in student demand, universities respond inelastically, both in terms of course quantity and content. Supply inelasticity is especially pronounced in fields experiencing declining demand and is more pronounced at public universities. Using Natural Language Processing, I further show that while the content of existing courses remains largely unchanged, newly-created courses incorporate topics related to current events and job skills. Notably, at selective institutions, new content focuses on societal issues, while at less selective institutions, new content emphasizes job-relevant skills. This study contributes uniquely to our understanding of the supply-side factors that affect how universities adapt to the rapidly evolving landscape.

Commentary.

Dave Cieslewicz:

Notice what’s missing? There’s nothing in there about a track record of actually improving, you know, education. Nothing about a record of improving test scores.

That’s concerning because MMSD’s record in that regard is not good. This morning the New York Times ran a story that allowed readers to check on how their district was performing with regard to math test scores. Here’s the chart for Madison:

We have been below the national average for at least seven years while Wisconsin as a state performs above the average. We came close in 2019 and then dipped again during COVID. Our recovery since then has been anemic, running below both the national and state average.

——-

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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?

Eugene Volokh:

The post (at Balkinization) is here; as I’ve mentioned before, I haven’t studied the issues in this case closely enough to speak to this myself, but Prof. Lederman is a leading constitutional expert, and his thoughts struck me as much worth passing along:

1. Colorado Is Not “Enforcing” or “Implementing” Section 3.

The briefs of all four of the parties in the Supreme Court (and those of many amici, as well) proceed on the assumption, articulated repeatedly in their briefs, that if Colorado were to omit Donald Trump’s name from its presidential primary ballot—something that, as I explain in this post, Colorado has not in fact done and is unlikely to do—the state would acting to “enforce” or “implement” Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Indeed, some of the parties’ arguments take this as a jumping-off point, and depend upon it.

Frank Jacobs:

Since the early 1920s, more than 330 climbers have died on Mount Everest. 200 bodies remain on the mountain, the most famous one being “Green Boots”. These maps provide some surprising insights into Everest’s morbid geography.

For almost 20 years, “Green Boots” was a creepy landmark near the summit of Mount Everest. Mountaineers ascending via the north face would invariably pass by this frozen body, huddled into a limestone alcove some 1,150 feet (350 m) below the top. To the live climbers who passed the body, the corpse, still clothed in brightly colored climbing apparel, must have seemed a grim exemplar of the saying that “every corpse on Everest was once a highly motivated individual.”

Alex Tabarrok:

Greg Clark may well be the most important social scientist of the 21st century. His use of historical data informed by evolutionary theory and genetics is a unique contribution to social science with important and challenging results.

Clark’s latest paper (with Neil Cummins) makes a simple but striking point. If the primary systematic determinant of social outcomes is genetic then we expect the father and the mother to contribute equally (each giving half their genes). If, on the other hand, the primary determinant is social then we expect widely different mother-father contributions in different societies and at different times and for different characteristics. Fathers ought to matter more in patriarchies, for example, and mothers more in matriarchies and gender-egalitarian societies. Similarly, if social factors are determinative, we would surely see a rising contribution of mothers to child outcomes as the social power of women rises (you can’t use your mother’s contacts in the legal profession to get a job, for example, if your mother was never a lawyer.) Similarly, if social factors are determinative we would expect mothers to be more important perhaps for characteristics determined early and fathers for characteristics determined late.

As Clark and Cummins write:

Thomas Lin:

Inside, the office is spare, pragmatic: just a computer, printer, chalkboard, papers and books, with few personal effects. The place where the magic happens seems not so much a physical location in space-time as a higher-dimensional world of abstractions in Viazovska’s mind.

Across the small table in her office, the world’s preeminent sphere-packing number theorist begins to recount her story in her usual matter-of-fact manner. Gradually, she breaks form and smiles, her eyes light up and lift upward, and she grows ever more animated while summoning memories from the past.

The earliest memory is of walking with her grandmother as a 3-year-old from her family’s utilitarian Khrushchyovka apartment building (named after the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev) down a wide boulevard to a monument of the geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, where her grandmother lifted her up and tossed her into the air. The late 1980s were a difficult time in the Soviet Union, said Viazovska, now 37. “It took people many, many hours to buy even basic things.” When a shop was low on goods like butter or meat, her mother felt bad about taking more for her three children and worried that others waiting in the long line would get angry at her. Her family didn’t have much, because there wasn’t much to have, but her parents made sure she and her sisters never went hungry or without heat. No stores carried nice clothes, but workers were sometimes offered a chance to win a stylish pair of shoes made in Czechoslovakia as an incentive for doing good work. The shoes might not fit, her mother explained to her, but if you won a pair, you could trade with someone who had won a pair in your size.

James Bosco:

How new laws will affect children and parenting

“Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too—all his lifelong. The mind that judges and desires and decides—made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions…Suggestions from the State!,” Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, 1932.

‍

Brave New World opens inside the Central London Hatchery where babies are not born, but rather “decanted.” We are told by the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning how hypnopedia, or the repetition of recorded phrases every night is used to condition children in their sleep. Such conditioning shapes the minds and desires of human beings in the World State. These repeated phrases determine how the child behaves for the rest of his or her life, guiding their decisions and behaviors. Naturally, all the programming comes from the state.

In Huxley’s dystopian future, there are no parents. No mothers or fathers. No brothers or sisters. There are no families and there are no marriages. No one is a son or a daughter. Whereas the population appears to be sterile, sex is trivial. There are no relationships, and despite there being five castes, everyone is considered to be equal. No matter who you are, everyone has an important role to play in service to the World State.

“Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn’t do without Epsilons. Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one,” Brave New World.

Now it appears that the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), being prodded on by a radical leftist arm of the Chicago Teachers Union, the CORE caucus, has taken Huxley’s warning as an instruction manual. In CORE’s dystopian future — which is now — your children do not belong to you; every child is a ward of the state.

James Marriott:

The website of Eton College promises that “Eton believes in equal opportunity for everyone irrespective of gender, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, belief, disability or social demographic background”. Before you dispatch your progeny to claim their free first-class education at this socialist paradise by the Thames, it is worth checking the “fees” section of the same website, which takes a rather less egalitarian line on the issue of “social and demographic background”.

The nice words were not really meant. Vacuous moral self-congratulation is simply the default mood of the modern public school. Harrow runs an equity, diversity and inclusion group. Marlborough offers lessons in “implicit bias, stereotype threat, oppression, power structures and racial profiling”.
Naturally, one supposes these earnestly progressive institutions are united in passionate support

——-

Commentary.

Please watch this Q&A with @bhorowitz and me on the travails of the universities and the future of higher ed. Our last of 3 videos on this topic. Enjoy! pic.twitter.com/HZCSLQ1xiN

— Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 (@pmarca) February 2, 2024

George Leef:

Among the many destructive ideas that “progressive” thinking has unleashed on education in America is that it’s unfair to hold students from “underrepresented groups” to the same standards as others. Schools and colleges should “help” minority students succeed by lowering expectations for them—somehow atoning for wrongs done to their ancestors in the distant past. That is how Claudine Gay wound up as president of Harvard.

The notion that academic standards should be lower for minority students has swept through our educational institutions, but there are some dissenters who argue that this doesn’t help but hurts. One of them is Professor Erec Smith of York College. He teaches rhetoric and composition and has written a book challenging the belief that minority (especially black) students are somehow harmed by teaching them to use standard English. Smith argues in his book, A Critique of Anti-Racism in Rhetoric and Composition, that standard English empowers those students by giving them another tool to accomplish their objectives.

Much as woke professors want to stamp out racism, they’re going about it the wrong way.As Smith sees things, professors in his field, eager to display their “anti-racist” zeal, have adopted the trendy idea that “whiteness” is the enemy of progress for blacks. They’re passionate and sincere, but they have allowed their emotions to trample over reason in evaluating the pros and cons of their pedagogy. Smith writes that “feelings and opinions have replaced critical thinking in attempts to decenter whiteness and challenge hegemonic forces in academia.” Much as those professors want to stamp out racism, they’re going about it the wrong way.

That way entails an exclusive focus on the racial identity of students. Black students are assumed to be victims of white, racist social forces against which they are helpless. Therefore, they must band together in group solidarity to be empowered against “whiteness.” The trouble with that, Smith shows, is that it actually disempowers them. It leads to fallacious interpretations of texts and situations (seeing racism everywhere) and an inability to communicate and persuade. Instead of enabling black students to succeed, it infantilizes them. They’re trapped in an identity of victimhood, always looking for excuses and villains.

——

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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?

Daniel Nuccio:

For example, he said while most of his students took some sort of calculus class their senior year of high school, “at least a third of them test into a class that’s lower than calculus because what happens is the schools will push people through the pipeline.”

“Even if someone hasn’t mastered algebra, they’ll get some sort of generous grade in their prerequisite math classes and then be put into calculus their senior year,” he said.

Similar trends concerning the inability of college students to do high school math have been reported nationally post-COVID, with educators lamenting how incoming freshmen no longer can be expected to know how to add fractions or subtract a positive number from a negative number.

Yi-Zen Chu, an associate professor of physics at the National Central University in Taiwan, who was educated in the U.S. and has been a harsh critic of DEI, stated in a recent email to The Fix that he believes practices such as “grade inflation and lowering the bar” contribute to the lack of preparation exhibited by American college students.

By Carrie Spector

A new report by researchers at Stanford and Harvard shows that U.S. students achieved historic gains in math and reading during the 2022-23 school year, the first full year of recovery from the pandemic.

The report, which measures the pace of academic recovery during the 2022-23 school year for school districts in 30 states, finds that students recovered about one-third of the original loss in math and one-quarter of the loss in reading. These gains significantly exceed what students would be expected to learn in a typical year, based on past trends. 

Students in one state, Alabama, returned to pre-pandemic achievement levels in math, while students in three states reached 2019 levels in reading. But students in a majority of the states in the study remain more than a third of a grade level behind pre-pandemic levels in math, and students in almost half of the states are that far behind in reading.

WILL:

Wisconsin Statute § 118.019 governs human growth and development (HGD) instruction. This is
essentially the sex education curriculum in Wisconsin. Public school districts are not required to adopt an HGD curriculum, but once they do, certain requirements are triggered.

ADVISORY COMMITTEE ROLE AND REQUIREMENTS
The advisory committee MUST be made up of parents, teachers, school administrators, pupils, health care professionals, members of the clergy, and other residents of the school district. Id.

No one category of member shall constitute more than one fifth of the membership of the committee,
except that parents may comprise more than one-fifth the membership of the committee. No more than one quarter of the members of the committee may be made up of employees of the school district or their spouses, or members of the school board or their spouses. Id.

The committee MUST review the HGD curriculum for the district. Id.

The committee MUST advise the school board on the implementation

Maureen Brakke:

Since 1856, Western Oregon University has been committed to the region, to serving the people of Oregon, and to the core values of student success. As an innovative public liberal arts institution historically serving first-generation college students from all four corners of the state, Western is announcing the implementation of a strength-based grade approach that recognizes, embraces, and focuses on student competencies and achievements.

Beginning this fall term, the institutional academic grading regulation will reflect a grade range of A through D; the letter grades of D- and F will be replaced with No Credit (NC) for undergraduate students. The grade of NC will be used in instances where the student does not meet the course learning objectives. The difference is that the grade of NC will not negatively impact student GPAs.

Aaron Sibarium:

The complaint makes 40 allegations of plagiarism that span the entirety of Charleston’s thin publication record. In her 2009 dissertation, submitted to the University of Michigan, Charleston quotes or paraphrases nearly a dozen scholars without proper attribution, the complaint alleges. And in her sole peer-reviewed journal article—coauthored with her husband, LaVar Charleston, in 2014—the couple recycle much of a 2012 study published by LaVar Charleston, the deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, framing the old material as new research.

Through that sleight of hand, Sherri Ann Charleston effectively took credit for her husband’s work. The 2014 paper, which was also coauthored with Jerlando Jackson, now the dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education, and appeared in the Journal of Negro Education, has the same methods, findings, and description of survey subjects as the 2012 study, which involved interviews with black computer science students and was first published by the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.

James Pethokoukis:

A key factor in population projections is the fertility rate, particularly how it might change over time. When University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde calculates global fertility rates, he finds them “falling much faster than anyone had realized before.” Something more like that UN Low Scenario in the above chart. As Fernández-Villaverde (I will be referring to several of his papers and essay throughout) told me in an enlightening Faster, Please! podcast: 

So I look at the fertility of the planet as a whole in 2023. According to my calculations, it’s already 2.2. That means that the planet in 2023 — I’m not talking about the United States, I’m not talking about North America, I’m not talking about the advanced economies, I’m talking about the planet — is already below replacement rate. Which means that the world population will start falling some moment around the late 2050s to early 2060s]. Of course, this depends on how people will react over the next few decades, how mortality will evolve. But what I want the listeners to understand is, for the very first time in the history of humanity — humans have been around for 200,000 years — we are below replacement rate in terms of fertility.  … My argument is the United Nations is underestimating how fast fertility is falling. Instead of 2084, I’m pushing this to 2060, let’s say. And instead of 9.7, I will say that we will peak around 9.2, 9.1, and then we are going to start falling.

Gavin Escott:

The search is underway for a new dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education after Diana Hess stepped down as the head of one of the nation’s highest-ranked education schools. 

Hess, who served as the dean of the School of Education since 2015, announced in October she would be leaving her leadership position and returning to a faculty role in summer of 2024. During her tenure, Hess oversaw new programs to support students and solidified the education school’s status as No. 3 in the nation, according to U.S. News.

——-

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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?

By Veronica H. Paulus and Akshaya Ravi

Top Harvard Medical School neuroscientist Khalid Shah allegedly falsified data and plagiarized images across 21 papers, data manipulation expert Elisabeth M. Bik said.

In an analysis shared with The Crimson, Bik alleged that Shah, the vice chair of research in the department of neurosurgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, presented images from other scientists’ research as his own original experimental data.

Though Bik alleged 44 instances of data falsification in papers spanning 2001 to 2023, she said the “most damning” concerns appeared in a 2022 paper by Shah and 32 other authors in Nature Communications, for which Shah was the corresponding author.

Shah is the latest prominent scientist to have his research face scrutiny by Bik, who has emerged as a leading figure among scientists concerned with research integrity.

She contributed to data falsification allegationsagainst four top scientists at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute — leading to the retraction of six and correction of 31 papers — and independently reviewed research misconduct allegations reported by the Stanford Daily against former Stanford president Marc T. Tessier-Lavigne, which played a part in his resignation last summer.

——

Commentary.

———

By Nidhi Subbaraman

“Most of the problems in this set of 28 could be explained by honest error,” Bik said, for example if a researcher mislabeled their images and pasted in the wrong ones. She added that looking at published data alone makes it difficult to distinguish an error from misconduct. “There are a couple of papers that stand out that suggest an intention to mislead.”

“The sheer number of examples justify some concern,” said Matthew Schrag, a neurologist and researcher at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who outside his work at the institution reviewed Bik’s assessment. Schrag said he agreed with Bik’s observations in almost all cases and believed the issues warranted an institutional review. 

Bik on Tuesday posted her observations on PubPeer, an online forum that scientists use to question details in published studies. On Wednesday, she emailed her allegations to Harvard Medical School’s Office for Academic and Research Integrity and Mass General Brigham’s Anderson, and several journals.

One anomaly in the group is a 2022 paper in the journal Nature Communications which has images similar to those in nearly a dozen other sources, including papers published earlier, according to Bik. “I’ve never seen this,” she said.

Cory Doctorow gave the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival in Berlin

We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.

It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying.

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the ‘great forces of history,’ and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It’s not just a way to say ‘things are getting worse’ (though of course, it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way. It’s an English word. We don’t have der Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).

But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let’s examine how enshittification works.

It’s a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

———

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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?

Ethan Blevins:

School segregation has risen from the grave—disguised under a different name.

An increasing number of school districts are offering “affinity classes” that cater to specific racial groups. Schools have long offered racially segregated options for electives such as African American history or mentorship programs. But the idea has begun to expand to the wider K-12 curriculum: One school district in Evanston, Illinois, has drawn the media’s eyes recently for expanding affinity course options, now offering segregated courses in the core curriculum, like math and English. Technically, anyone can join, but each class is expressly designed for—and targeted at—a particular racial group.

In reality, “affinity” is just a newfangled term for “segregation.” Schools that support such racial sorting insist these classes are opt-in, benign programs that don’t violate anti-discrimination laws or the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee. They’re wrong.

The supporters of affinity groups and classes claim that they give students a comfortable, safe and inviting environment that improves learning outcomes. One Evanston school official who backs affinity classes told The Wall Street Journal that too often “Black students are expected to conform to a white standard” and that in affinity classes, “you don’t have to shed one ounce of yourself because everything about our space is rooted in Blackness.” The notion that culture and character are pinned to skin pigment undergirds the philosophy behind affinity programs—that races are so different from one another that they should not even learn together.

Ben Hunt:

I’ve never met Claudine Gay, but I know Claudine Gay. 

We both went to grad school at Harvard in the government department (what they call political science pretty much everywhere else), me from 1986-1991 and Gay from 1992-1998. We both got a masters degree and Ph.D. there. We both had the same dissertation advisor, famed statistical methodologist and all around nice guy Gary King, yet neither of us were statistical methodologists at heart. We both used regressions and econometrics as a toolkit to help us answer questions that we wanted to explore, Gay in American politics and me in international relations, and we were perfectly proficient with the tools, but we didn’t really care about the tools. We cared about the questions. I didn’t overlap with Claudine Gay chronologically at Harvard, but I overlapped 100% with the classes and the places and the people and the life.

After graduation we both did the tenure track publish-or-perish thing, but here the close similarities stop. Gay had a significantly more successful academic career than I did. I had a good start at NYU but ended up with tenure at SMU, which is pretty much a dead end in prestige academic terms. Looking back now, I can see how impatient I was with the game of academia and how poorly I played it. Gay started at Stanford and ended up with tenure at Stanford, which is anything but a dead end. Harvard brought her back with a full professorship within two years of that. Gay was patient, and she played the game extremely well.

Interestingly, we both stopped teaching a few years after getting tenure. Me to co-found a software company, which required leaving academia completely, Gay to go into university administration as a dean, which locked her into academia for life. There but for the grace of God … I am SO lucky that I got out when I did.

Dell Cameron:

United States officials fought to conceal details of arrangements between US spy agencies and private companies tracking the whereabouts of Americans via their cell phones. Obtaining location data from US phones normally requires a warrant, but police and intelligence agencies routinely pay companies instead for the data, effectively circumventing the courts.

Fortune:

“So long as you have Congress keep extending the debt limit and doing deals because they’re afraid of the consequences of doing the right thing, that’s the political structure of the political system, eventually you’re going to have a debt spiral,” he explained, per Bloomberg. “And a debt spiral is like a death spiral.”

Currently the American national debt stands at $34.14 trillion—about $100,000 for every person in the U.S.—with the debt ceiling currently suspended until 2025 courtesy of a deal passed in the summer of 2023.

ZACH RAUSCH, THOMAS POTREBNY, AND JON HAIDT

Here at After Babel, we have systematically documented substantial increases in rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide since 2010. We first showed extensive increases in the U.S., and then across the Anglosphere (U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). We showed similar rises in the five Nordic nations(Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland). We have also examined changes in suicide rates across nations. In the five Anglosphere countries, rates of adolescent female suicide were relatively steady before 2010.1 Afterward, their rates began to rise, reaching levels higher than those of any previous generation when they were young. Today, we look at all of Europe.

There are still researchers who are skeptical that an international youth mental health crisis broke out in the early 2010s. In a previous post, Zach showed that one reason for this disagreement lies in a widely used international database—the Global Burden of Disease—which tries to estimate rates of mental illness in all countries, including countries that do not collect mental health data. He showed that the GBD systematically underestimates rates of youth mental illness in countries that have robust national mental health data. In fact, it almost entirely misses the spike in countries where a clear spike is found in their own datasets.

William Jacobson:

DEI is a religion at Cornell. People don’t give up their religion easily.

In the least surprising development in the history of least surprising developments, the Cornell University Board of Trustees at its meeting this weekend rejected the call by Alumnus and Donor Jon Lindseth for President Martha Pollack to resign, issuing this statement:

Unanimous Vote in Support of President Martha E. Pollack

Cornell University Board of Trustees

Jan. 27, 2024

Cornell was founded on the principle that ‘any person can find instruction in any study.’ Under President Martha E. Pollack’s leadership, the university has remained faithful to this principle and to the core values that unite our institution. Today, the Board of Trustees of Cornell University met and voted unanimously in support of her leadership of the university.

We believe the pursuit of knowledge is dependent on robust discourse that acknowledges differences while exploring shared values. Cornell proudly embraced diversity in its inaugural student body over 150 years ago and will continue to do so for the next 150 years.

By Jessica Marie Otis

Steam engine entrepreneur James Watt, as responsible as anybody for upgrading the world from poor to rich, left a notebook of his work. Squiggly symbols such as “5” and “2” mark the pages. Without these little glyphs, borrowed by Europeans from medieval Arabs, Watt would not have been able to determine cylinder volumes, pressure forces, and heat-transfer rates. Isaac Newton would’ve struggled to find that gravity is inversely proportional to the square of a planet’s distance from the sun. Calculations for Antoine Lavoisier’s chemistry, Abraham de Moivre’s probability tables, and the Bank of England’s bookkeeping would have been difficult or impossible.

But before Hindu-Arabic numerals could fuel the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, society had to start to think quantitatively. Jessica Marie Otis’ By the Numbers is about scribes starting to write 7 instead of VII, parish clerks counting plague deaths rather than guessing, and gamblers calculating instead of hoping and praying.

Why did some countries become wealthy after 1800? Historians argue about the relative influences of religion, climate, geography, slavery, colonialism, legal systems, and natural resources. But the key, famously shown by economist Robert Solow, who died in December, is technological innovation enabling more and more goods and services to be produced per worker and unit of capital. Innovation needs research, development, and engineering. All those require numbers and numeracy.

By Caitlin Moscatello

For $120,000 a year, Christopher Rim promises to turn any student into Ivy bait.

Christopher Rim makes himself hard to get to. First, there’s the email to register as a guest at the Aman Club, where members pay an initiation fee of $200,000 to perch themselves above the crowds on Fifth Avenue and where Rim sometimes holds his client meetings. Then there’s the check-in at the front desk to get access to the elevator, which leads to another reception area on the 14th floor. From there, a man in a suit guides me into the main room (fireplace, lots of couches, mostly empty), then through a door that blends into a wall, past a bar (one guy drinking water; it’s only noon), and up a narrow flight of stairs. It’s there that I meet Rim in a small room decorated with bottles of Macallan 18 and coffee-table books about art.

His look is quiet luxury, though everything about this meeting appears designed to scream money. On his wrist: a $55,000 Patek Philippe watch. On his back: a Loro Piana cashmere sweater. Rim tells me that sometimes he runs into his clients here and they pretend not to know him. But he can imagine what they’re thinking: What is the tutor doing at the same club where Bill Gates lunched when he was in town?

For the past nine years, Rim, 28, has been working as an “independent education consultant,” helping the one percent navigate the increasingly competitive college-admissions process — the current round of which ends in February. He started by editing college essays from his Yale dorm room for $50 an hour but now charges the parents of his company’s 190 clients — mostly private-school kids, many of them in New York — $120,000 a year to help them create a narrative he believes will appeal to college-admissions officers. That company, Command Education, currently has 41 full-time staffers, most of whom are recent graduates of top-tier colleges and universities. The pitch is crafted to appeal to the wealthy clients Rim courts: a “personalized, white glove” service, through which Command employees do everything from curating students’ extracurriculars to helping them land summer internships, craft essays, and manage their course loads with the single goal of getting them in.

Quinton Klabon:

This was interesting. I calculated Wisconsin!

least paying off student debt: Herzing, Mount Mary, Alverno, UW-Superior

most: MKE Engineering, WI Lutheran, Lawrence, UW-Platteville

I think parent help affects this. WLC produces teachers/pastors, MKE Catholics serve low-income

Alex MacGillis

The program was the first in the nation to provide public money for tuition at religious schools, and by 2000, virtually all Cleveland voucher recipients were using them at a religious private school (mostly Catholic) rather than secular ones. In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly rejected a challenge to the Cleveland vouchers; the court ruled that because the vouchers could be used for religious or nonreligious schools, they did not violate the constitutional prohibition against a state favoring religion. In the years that followed, vouchers spread to more districts around the state, taking on the name EdChoice. Initially, they were targeted at families in other districts deemed to be failing, but a decade ago, the state legislature — whose Republican majorities are buttressed by highly gerrymandered districts — made them available to lower-income students across the state.

Then came last year’s big expansion, eliminating income limits and raising the value of the vouchers. It offers major benefits even to many solidly middle-class families: A family of four at 451% of the poverty level, or $135,300 in household income, will receive $5,200 per year for a K-8 student and $7,050 per year for a high school student.

In the 2022-23 school year, before the expansion, EdChoice cost $354 million, on top of the $46 million for the Cleveland program, according to the state education department. That was already more than quadruple what EdChoice had cost a decade earlier.

——

Ohio per student K-12 per student $pending.

NAEP results.

Kayla Huynh:

The Madison Metropolitan School District has named two former education administrators and one current administrator as finalists to be the next superintendent.

Two of the finalists left their former jobs after facing criticism for their performance.

The finalists are Mohammed Choudhury, the former state superintendent of schools at the Maryland Department of Education; Joe Gothard, a Madison native who is superintendent of Saint Paul Public Schools in Minnesota; and Yvonne Stokes, the former superintendent at Hamilton Southeastern Schools in Indiana. 

The Madison School Board began interviews with candidates in closed meetings last month and selected the three candidates from nearly 60 applicants, according to district officials.

——

David Blaska:

——-

Dave Cieslewicz:

There’s some process left, with three or four sets of interviews ahead, and the board isn’t expected to make a decision until the end of February. At least on paper, Gothard is clearly the strongest candidate while Choudhury seems like a guy you’d want to stay away from. But I would give the edge to Stokes. I’m not sure this board will be able to resist the chance to hire the first Black woman superintendent.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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?

Nader Issa & Sarah Karp:

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson says he supports ending the controversial Chicago Public Schools program that puts uniformed police officers in dozens of high schools.

The mayor said in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ on Tuesday that he will give the Board of Education the green light to end its $10.3 million contract with the Chicago Police Department. CPS officials told principals in early January to prepare for the possible removal of police officers by next fall.

“The Board of Education is moving in the direction that I do support,” the mayor said in his conference room on City Hall’s fifth floor. “There is an intergovernmental agreement between Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Police Department. To end that agreement, there’s no qualms from me there.”

There have been years-long calls to remove police from public schools to stem what research has shown to be a disproportionate policing of Black students and children with disabilities that often lands kids in the criminal justice system for in-school disciplinary situations.

Sonali Basak:

Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb said the US deficit is swelling to a point that it would take a miracle to reverse the damage. 

“So long as you have Congress keep extending the debt limit and doing deals because they’re afraid of the consequences of doing the right thing, that’s the political structure of the political system, eventually you’re going to have a debt spiral,” he said Monday night at an event for Universa Investments, the hedge fund firm he advises. “And a debt spiral is like a death spiral.”

Jim Piwowarczyk

The document lists “behaviors” that “are examples of white privilege and fragility in action,” citing “physically leaving” or “emotionally withdrawing,” “focusing on intentions,” “denying” and “seeking absolution.

The screenshots were shared this month on X by the page “End Wokeness,” which has 2.2 million followers.

“EXCLUSIVE: UW Health employee sent this from their mandatory DEI training,” the site wrote. “White employees are required to check off examples of their white privilege & white fragility. Whites are also instructed to take steps like yielding positions of power to non-whites in order to atone for their natural racism.”

UW Health denies the trainings are mandatory but did not contest their authenticity in an email response to Wisconsin Right Now.

The page noted, “They are also directed to take courses to unlearn the systemic racism they were inherently born

Steven Pinker:

Harvard admissions should be more meritocratic.

By “merit” I don’t mean cosmic merit — moral deservingness, a judgment by the almighty at the gates of heaven. I mean the traits that enable a student to profit from an elite university education, including cognitive aptitude, conscientiousness, and a thirst for knowledge.

What’s the opposite of meritocracy? Historically, positions were distributed by hereditary privilege, family ties, patronage to cronies, or sale to the highest bidder.

These are not far from the system we have here. It’s conventional wisdom that Harvard accepts just a fraction of its students by academic merit alone. The rest are chosen by “holistic admissions,” the mystery-shrouded process that considers athletics, the arts, charity, activism, and travel — together with donations, legacy status, and until this year, race.

The Harvard fundraising office once fixed me up for a dinner with a wealthy alumnus, who was perhaps more candid than they might have liked. He said, “I want to donate just enough to Harvard so they’ll admit my son.” His son was admitted.

Why should Harvard select students on the basis of merit instead? Because it serves the interests of Harvard and the country.

Janet Lorin:

Ken Griffin, one of the largest donors to Harvard University, said he won’t support the school financially unless it makes significant changes and accused elite US colleges of producing “whiny snowflakes” instead of future leaders. 

“I’m not interested in supporting the institution,” Griffin said of Harvard at the MFA Network conference in Miami on Tuesday. The billionaire said the university must make clear that it will “resume its role educating young American men and women to be leaders and problem solvers.”

WILL

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has responded to a new effort to overturn Wisconsin’s congressional maps, six months before an election. The case is brought by Marc Elias, a notorious left-wing attorney who pursues political objectives through legal action. WILL has also filed a joint request with the Wisconsin Legislature calling on Justice Protasiewicz to recuse herself from any ruling that revisits Johnson v. WEC. 

The Quote: Lucas Vebber WILL Deputy Counsel, stated, “Wisconsin’s current congressional map was proposed by Governor Evers and adopted by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2022. Any attempt to revisit this ruling and once again alter Wisconsin’s Congressional districts, is both procedurally improper and legally wrong.”

Julia Carpenter:

About 59% of parents said they helped their young adult children financially in the past year, according to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center that focused on adults under age 35. (This question hadn’t been asked in prior surveys.) More young adults are also living with their parents. Among adults under age 25, 57% live with their parents, up from 53% in 1993.

Parental support is continuing later in life because younger people now take longer to reach many adult milestones—and getting there is more expensive than it has been for past generations, economists and researchers said. There is also a larger wealth gap between older Americans and younger ones, giving some parents more means and reason to help. In short, adulthood no longer means moving off the parental payroll.

“That transition has gotten later and later, for a lot of different reasons. Now it’s age 25, 30, 35, 40,” said Sarah Behr, founder of Simplify Financial Planning in San Francisco.

Kami Loukipoudis, a 39-year-old director of design, and husband Adam Stojanik, a 39-year-old high-school teacher, knew they would need parental assistance to buy in New York’s expensive home market.

Andrew S. Hanks, Shengjun Jiang, Xuechao Qian, Bo Wang & Bruce A. Weinberg

We study how human capital diversification, in the form of double majoring, affects the response of earnings to labor market shocks. Double majors experience substantial protection against earnings shocks, of 56%. This finding holds across different model specifications and data sets. Furthermore, the protection double majors experience is more pronounced when the two majors are more distantly related, highlighting the importance of diverse skill sets. Additional analyses demonstrate that double majors are more likely to work in jobs that require a diverse set of skills and knowledge and are less likely to work in occupations that are closely related to their majors.

Steve Beynon;

The Army is tossing its mandate for potential recruits to have a high school diploma or GED certificate to enlist in the service, in one of the most dramatic moves yet in the escalating recruiting crisis hitting the entire Defense Department.

On Thursday, the service announced that individuals may enlist without those previously required education certifications if they ship to basic training this fiscal year, which ends Oct. 1.

Recruits must also be at least 18 years old and otherwise qualify for a job in the active-duty Army. They also must score at least a 50 on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB, an SAT-style quiz to measure a potential recruit’s academic ability.

A 50 on the test is a relatively low score, with 31 being the minimum to qualify for service. Combat arms jobs such as infantrymen and cavalry scouts need only minimal scores to serve, while admin work such as a human resources specialist or public affairs require scores of 100 or higher.

Quinton Klabon:

9.0% of all district students attend school outside their home district. That makes it the BIGGEST school choice program.

73,280 transfers occurred. (+1,791 from 2022)

Who gained and lost the most students? Click through!

And:

This is enrollment lost since 2020 versus open enrollment applications rejected. Those kids are all public school kids. No schools closed. So, does anyone know the reasons so many were rejected for “space?”

More:

Wisconsin’s open enrollment program continues to grow. With more than 72,000 participating students, it is the largest #SchoolChoice program in the state. (1/2)

MATT TAIBBI

In the summer of 2004 Theresa Amato, campaign manager of presidential candidate Ralph Nader, took out a notebook in preparation for an important phone conference.

Her candidate, Nader, had already been subject to an extraordinary — and extraordinarily underreported — campaign of litigious harassment at the hands of the Democratic Party. John Kerry told Nader he had 2,000 lawyers at his disposal and would do “everything within the law” to win. In Arizona, Nader opponents filed a 650-page challenge to his attempt to get on the ballot, forgetting social justice concerns long enough to complain that one of Nader’s petition-circulators was a felon. They demanded ten samples of Nader’s own signature, hired a forensic examiner to call others into question, and challenged residents of a homeless shelter. The Democratic state chairman, Jim Pederson, said outright, “Our first objective is to keep [Nader] off the ballot,” because “we think it distorts the entire election.”

Now, Amato’s candidate was set to talk with Democratic National Committee chairman (and future Virginia governor) Terry McAuliffe. A high-energy, Clintonesque schmoozer in public, McAuliffe in private was curt and to the point: he didn’t mind Nader running in noncompetitive places, but had an “issue” with 19 states where “a vote for you is a vote for [George] Bush.” He shifted with impressive nonchalance to offer a bribe. 

“If you stay out of my 19 states,” he said, “I will help with resources in 31 states.” McAuliffe then made a show of pretending to ask an assistant about other ballot challenges against Nader, saying he “supported them” but wasn’t funding them, a statement ultimately contradicted in court testimony by Maine’s State Democratic Party chair. This was just one of countless instances in which Democrats hurled billable hours at anyone deemed a “threat” to votes they considered theirs.

Tracing Woodgrains:

People will turn this into a culture war issue, and in one sense, that is perfectly fair: it represents a decades-long process of institutional failure at every level. A thousand things had to go wrong to get to this point, and if people want to harp on it—let them. But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue. Virtually nobody, looking dispassionately at that questionnaire, wants to defend it. Everybody wants competent, effective air traffic controllers. Everybody, I suspect, can sympathize with the people who paid and worked through years of education to have their career path suddenly pulled away for political reasons far beyond their control.

Aaron Sibarium

It’s not just Claudine Gay. Harvard University’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, appears to have plagiarized extensively in her academic work, lifting large portions of text without quotation marks and even taking credit for a study done by another scholar—her own husband—according to a complaint filed with the university on Monday and a Washington Free Beacon analysis.

The complaint makes 40 allegations of plagiarism that span the entirety of Charleston’s thin publication record. In her 2009 dissertation, submitted to the University of Michigan, Charleston quotes or paraphrases nearly a dozen scholars without proper attribution, the complaint alleges. And in her sole peer-reviewed journal article—coauthored with her husband, LaVar Charleston, in 2014—the couple recycle much of a 2012 study published by LaVar Charleston, the deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, framing the old material as new research.

Ben Raab

Jackson School of Global Affairs fellow Robert Malley ’84, who is currently on leave from his position as the United States’ special envoy to Iran while under investigation for allegedly mishandling classified documents, will teach a course called “Contending with Israel-Palestine” this semester. 

According to the syllabus, the seminar will take “an in-depth look at important questions surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Malley told the News he had been planning to teach the course since last September.

“In the wake of Oct. 7, I questioned whether it still made sense or whether it would be best to wait,” he said. “Ultimately, I concluded, in coordination with the School, that it had become even more important to try to create an environment where students could learn more about this topic and engage with others in thoughtful, respectful conversations.”

The course, which is open to graduate and undergraduate students and capped at 18, consists of 13 weekly discussions and assigned readings. It begins with a discussion on “Competing Narratives” — which features primary source excerpts from figures such as Golda Meir and Yasser Arafat — and moves through other topics such as negotiation efforts, the American role in mediation attempts, coverage of the conflict in media, a look at Israeli and Palestinian “voices and politics” and the conflict’s debate in the United States before concluding with a class titled “Israel-Palestine Today & Tomorrow (3) – Imagining the Future.”

Frank Jacobs:

America’s most significant enlargement since the 1867 Alaska Purchase was reported by the U.S. State Department in a terse communiqué, saying it had defined “the outer limits of the U.S. continental shelf in areas beyond 200 nautical miles from the coast, known as the extended continental shelf (ECS),” which the department noted is an “extension of a country’s land territory under the sea.”

Carla Johnson:

Allegations of research fakery at a leading cancer center have turned a spotlight on scientific integrity and the amateur sleuths uncovering image manipulation in published research.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a Harvard Medical School affiliate, announced Jan. 22 it’s requesting retractions and corrections of scientific papers after a British blogger flagged problems in early January.

The blogger, 32-year-old Sholto David, of Pontypridd, Wales, is a scientist-sleuth who detects cut-and-paste image manipulation in published scientific papers.

He’s not the only hobbyist poking through pixels. Other champions of scientific integrity are keeping researchers and science journals on their toes. They use special software, oversize computer monitors and their eagle eyes to find flipped, duplicated and stretched images, along with potential plagiarism.

A look at the situation at Dana-Farber and the sleuths hunting sloppy errors and outright fabrications:

Tom Kertscher:

In the April election in Presque Isle, 100 miles north of Wausau, 76% of the town’s 649 registered voters cast ballots — the highest percentage of any town in the county.

In August, Vilas County Circuit Judge MarthaMilanowski threw out the result and ordered a do-over election after finding that two absentee ballots were cast illegally. One was by a voter in Illinois who had voted in the past in Wisconsin but hadn’t registered in Wisconsin for the spring election. The proper procedure wasn’t followed for the other: Walters had sent that voter a ballot before receiving his request by mail.

Walters said she didn’t realize the part-time Illinois resident wasn’t properly registered. She said she sent the other voter an absentee ballot because she had been in contact with him and didn’t realize she should not have sent it before receiving his official request by mail.

Milanowski also found that three absentee ballot envelopes didn’t include witness addresses, including one Walters had signed in her role as town clerk, and that the town’s Board of Canvassers didn’t follow the correct procedure for the recount, which requires reviewing absentee ballot envelopes.

Jordan Connell:

The U.S. Navy said it will allow people without a high school diploma or GED to enlist as it struggles to meet its recruitment goals.

This announcement marks the second time in a year that the service has lowered its requirements. Navy officials said those trying to enlist without a diploma will have to score a 50 or higher on the Armed Services Qualification Test.

This announcement comes as the armed forces have struggled to meet their recruitment goals. The Navy, Army and Air Force all failed to meet their recruitment goals last fiscal year. The Navy fell short of its enlistment goal by nearly 6,000.

The last time the Navy took recruits without education credentials was in 2000.

By Riley Rourke

“Striking Newton educators of the Newton Teachers Association (NTA) bargaining team put forth a modified proposal containing significant compromises. This proposal would have opened schools Monday. However, the Newton School Committee rejected even significant compromise proposals, countered only with a document that reiterated its unwillingness to fully fund schools, and left negotiations at 9:30 p.m.,” the NTA said in a statement.

Both sides are also accusing the other of putting self-interest over the students as this is the seventh day kids have not been in school.

The union is currently facing $425,000 in fines as teachers strikes are illegal in Massachusetts, but they show no sign of stopping as they continued to strike on Monday.

Harrington Shaw:

The journey through higher education ought to be one in which students face novel and exceptional cognitive challenges to master learning and critical thinking. However, while academic rigor yields capable graduates, it is not in the nature of most people—especially Gen Z students fresh out of high school—to select willingly a difficult path through their college years. The path of least resistance is the most trodden one.

Recent survey results indicating a strong preference toward online education are thus predictable. These data, from Champlain College Online, show that the perception of online education is improving, with respondents suggesting that online higher ed is a reasonable substitute for on-campus learning.

The surveyor’s vested interest in validating its own business model notwithstanding, the data make online higher education appear promising. Respondents praise the convenience of online coursework, and 84 percent of them believe employers have become more accepting of online degrees. Furthermore, 73 percent of surveyed adults said that online education is “the same or better at meeting the needs of traditional students.”

These glowing results warrant a significant degree of skepticism. Responses to overbroad questions showing more positive “perceptions” of online learning (whether among students or employers) may not be an indication of actual academic quality.

Serious institutions must weigh the convenience of online programs against their shortcomings in rigor.While the Champlain survey results paint a rosy picture from the outside looking in, one ought to examine online students’ experiences at a more granular level. After all, we have available for study a cohort of students who have experienced both in-person and online education thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic response. A study of 366 college students of all grade levels at the University of West Attica (Greece) found that students are “more time concentrated, understand better, are more engaged with learning, and communicate more effectively with the teacher during in-person classes.” Researchers concluded that “socialization is not just a feature of education but a prerequisite for successful learning.”

Daniel Trotta

Starting this year, California grade school students are required to learn cursive handwriting, after the skill had fallen out of fashion in the computer age.

Assembly Bill 446, sponsored by former elementary school teacher Sharon Quirk-Silva and signed into law in October, requires handwriting instruction for the 2.6 million Californians in grades one to six, roughly ages 6 to 12, and cursive lessons for the “appropriate” grade levels – generally considered to be third grade and above.

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Experts say learning cursive improves cognitive development, reading comprehension and fine motor skills, among other benefits. Some educators also find value in teaching children to read historic documents and family letters from generations past.

At Orangethorpe Elementary School in Fullerton, about 30 miles (50 km) southeast of Los Angeles, fourth- to sixth-grade teacher Pamela Keller said she was already teaching cursive before the law took effect Jan. 1.

Philip Mousavizadeh:

Over the last two decades, the number of managerial and professional staff that Yale employs has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body, according to University financial reports. The group’s 44.7 percent expansion since 2003 has had detrimental effects on faculty, students and tuition, according to eight faculty members. 

In 2003, when 5,307 undergraduate students studied on campus, the University employed3,500 administrators and managers. In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on student enrollment, only 600 more students were living and studying at Yale, yet the number of administrators had risen by more than 1,500 — a nearly 45 percent hike. In 2018, The Chronicle of Higher Education found that Yale had the highest manager-to-student ratio of any Ivy League university, and the fifth highest in the nation among four-year private colleges. 

According to eight members of the Yale faculty, this administration size imposes unnecessary costs, interferes with students’ lives and faculty’s teaching, spreads the burden of leadership and adds excessive regulation. By contrast, administrators noted much of this increase can be attributed to growing numbers of medical staff, and that the University has proportionally increased its faculty size.

“I had remarked to President Salovey on his inauguration that I thought the best thing he could do for Yale would be to abolish one deanship or vice presidency every year of what I hoped would be a long tenure in that position,” professor of English Leslie Brisman wrote in an email to the News. “Instead, it has seemed to me that he has created one upper level administrative position a month.”

Kayla Huynh:

The Madison Metropolitan School District has named two former education administrators and one current administrator as finalists to be the next superintendent.

Two of the finalists left their former jobs after facing criticism for their performance.

The finalists are Mohammed Choudhury, the former state superintendent of schools at the Maryland Department of Education; Joe Gothard, a Madison native who is superintendent of Saint Paul Public Schools in Minnesota; and Yvonne Stokes, the former superintendent at Hamilton Southeastern Schools in Indiana. 

The Madison School Board began interviews with candidates in closed meetings last month and selected the three candidates from nearly 60 applicants, according to district officials. 

The finalists will participate in a final round of in-person interviews next week with the board as well as over 100 nominated community members and staff who were selected through a lottery process. 

On Feb. 6, two of the interviews will be recorded and live-streamed online, including one interview with a student panel from noon to 1:30 p.m. and another with parents and caregivers from 6:30 p.m. to 8:55 p.m. 

The board expects to select MMSD’s next leader in late February, replacing former Superintendent Carlton Jenkins, who retired last summer after three years at the helm. Formerly retired educator Lisa Kvistad is serving as interim superintendent for the current school year.

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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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?

Right to Read:

Schools all over the country are changing how reading is taught and they face two big questions: 

• What curriculum will we use? 
• How will we implement it?

Decisions about what will be taught, when, and for how many minutes will determine the daily experience of students, and how much they’ll learn in school. Instructional time is limited, so building classroom schedules requires a series of choices that ultimately reflect our values.

Looking back at my old schedules, I can see how my understanding of effective reading instruction has evolved. I see similar change unfolding across the country, and this makes me feel excited but also deeply worried.

WILL:

WILL Client, Kristi Koschkee, stated, “Act 10 is pro-taxpayer and pro-freedom. This legislation provides public employees like me the freedom to not participate in unionization, or be compelled to finance or support political speech I do not agree with. It’s critical that we stand up for this law and not undo the years of positive results produced for Wisconsin.”

Our Client: WILL Client and Defendant, Kristi Koschkee, faces significant harm if Act 10 were to be somehow repealed or scaled back. Ms. Koschkee is a public-school district employee who values the benefits the Legislature provided her via Act 10.

Koschkee does not want her local union interfering with her relationship with her employer by bargaining on subjects beyond those permitted by Act 10 or entering agreements that last longer than a year. She supports requiring unions to rectify annually, does not want to have her decision to abstain from a union certification vote work in the union’s favor, and does not want to be pressured into participating in recertification elections. Ms. Koschkee also opposes allowing unions to access employee wages directly through payroll deductions.

——

Notes and links on Act 10.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

——

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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?

Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen:

“I think most Americans know that prices are not likely to fall.” pic.twitter.com/enWtrtDvGM

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) January 29, 2024

Bill Ackman:

When I voted a little more than a week ago, I clicked a link and arrived at a landing page which explained how to vote for petitioning candidates.

Now it has become a labyrinth of complexity:

You start here with descriptions and bios of Harvard’s preferred candidates:

Lolita Baldor

The U.S. Navy is starting to enlist individuals who didn’t graduate from high school or get a GED, marking the second time in about a year that the service has opened the door to lower-performing recruits as it struggles to meet enlistment goals.

The decision follows a move in December 2022 to bring in a larger number of recruits who score very low on the Armed Services Qualification Test. Both are fairly rare steps that the other military services largely avoid or limit, even though they are all finding it increasingly difficult to attract the dwindling number of young people who can meet the military’s physical, mental and moral standards.

Under the new plan, Navy recruits without an education credential will be able to join as long as they score 50 or above on the qualification test, which is out of 99. The last time the service took individuals without education credentials was in 2000.

“We get thousands of people into our recruiting stations every year that want to join the Navy but do not have an education credential. And we just turn them away,” said Vice Adm. Rick Cheeseman, the Navy’s chief of personnel, in an interview Friday with The Associated Press.

The Economist

In 1975 a young senator named Joe Biden heard of a lecture that Hannah Arendt had recently given at Faneuil Hall in Boston, on America’s need for a reckoning after the Vietnam war, now that the “big lie” about the extent of the country’s powers had been exposed by a humiliating defeat. He wrote to her saying that, as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he would be most keen to receive a copy of her paper. Such interest says something about the future president’s curiosity—and a lot about the then 68-year-old Arendt’s formidable reputation as a public intellectual.

Arendt was said to be someone you could actually see thinking. Lyndsey Stonebridge, in an absorbing new biography, conjures up the image of Arendt forming her body “into a single question-mark incarnate”. And the questions she asked were big ones: why did the great evil of the 20th century come about; how could totalitarianism have happened; how can freedom and plurality be protected?

Mike:

A reformed system must also be logical and singularly focused on funding K-12 education. The current system contains numerous illogical attributes. First, the use of 1994 as the base year for revenue limit increases assumes that district-level funding decisions made over 25 years ago should be a primary determinant of per-pupil funding levels today. Though scheduled increases to the minimal revenue limit per-pupil will no doubt make many district administrators happy, it is a Band-Aid that does not address the real problem. Further, the state funding formula has two conflicting purposes, funding education and providing tax relief. This value conflict obfuscates the true level of funding schools receive, poisons the public debate over proper school funding levels, and gives the public the perception that increases in school aids means increases in resources for students. Tax relief is an important issue, but it must be separated from education funding in any logical effective system.

Finally, an effective system must be understandable. The average Wisconsin citizen, and more than a few lawmakers and civic leaders, cannot decipher how our current funding system works. This is unacceptable. The state spends more on education than any other core service, and it is impossible for there to be true accountability, performance measurement, or even well-informed political debate regarding K-12 education funding when the formula driving resource allocation is not broadly understood.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported k-12 systems, now at least 22 to 29k per student, depending on the district numbers used.

Prepared by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity Staff

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”

• F. Scott Fitzgerald

The people who run America, or at least think they do, live in a bubble of their own construction. They’ve isolated themselves from everyday America’s realities to such a degree their views about what is and what should be happening in this country differ widely from the average American’s.

An analysis of their thinking, conducted for the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, finds that on a variety of economic, social, and political issues, there exists a wide gap between how the top 1% – the Elites – think things should be and how the rest of America looks at them.

Elite thinking, as it’s termed, is under attack – and rightly so – for being out of step with the rest of the country. Below, we highlight some of the profound attitudinal differences between elites and average Americans:

• In a time when most Americans have suffered a loss of real take-home pay, 74% of elites say they are financially better off today than in the past versus 20% of all Americans.
• Nearly six in ten say there is too much individual freedom in America – double the rate of all Americans.
• More than two-thirds (67%) favor rationing of vital energy and food sources to combat the threat of climate change.
• In stark contrast to the rest of America, 70% of the Elites trust the government to “do the right thing most of the time.”
• Two-thirds (67%) say teachers and other educational professionals should decide what children are taught rather than letting parents decide.
• Somewhere between half and two-thirds favor banning things like SUVs, gas stoves, air conditioning, and non-essential air travel to protect the environment.
• About six of ten elites have a favorable opinion of the so-called talking professions—lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, and journalists.
• President Joe Biden enjoys an 84% job approval rating from this group – roughly twice as high as the general public.

Jason Crawford:

That was the thought at the top of my mind coming out of a working group on “Accelerating Science” hosted by the Santa Fe Institute a few months ago. (The thoughts in this essay were inspired by many of the participants, but I take responsibility for any opinions expressed here. My thinking on this was also influenced by a talk given by James Phillips at a previous metascience conference. My own talk at the workshop was written up here earlier.)

What should we do instead of the PI model? Funding should go in a single block to a relatively large research organization of, say, hundreds of scientists. This is how some of the most effective, transformative labs in the world have been organized, from Bell Labs to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. It has been referred to as the “block funding” model.

Here’s why I think this model works:

TaxProf:

Only around three dozen law clerks work for the justices during each one-year term, which means these lawyers — and their unparalleled knowledge of the court — are in incredibly high demand. Jones Day, the leader in the race to recruit and hire as many clerks as possible, announced last month that it snagged 8 law clerks, all of whom worked for conservative justices during the term that began in October 2022.

But they don’t come cheap.

During the courting process, the city’s top law firms treat this elite group of lawyers to perks like an expensive dinner at the Wharf or Penn Quarter or a trip to a baseball game or spa. The recruitment is so competitive that signing bonuses for Supreme Court law clerks have reached a new high — $500,000, according to a spokeswoman for law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Such a sum far exceeds the salaries paid to the justices — the clerks’ former bosses — who are paid slightly less than $300,000 a year.

Max Kozlov:

The prestigious Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) in Boston, Massachusetts, acknowledged this week that it would seek retractions for 6 papers and corrections for an additional 31 — some co-authored by DFCI chief executive Laurie Glimcher, chief operating officer William Hahn and several other prominent cancer researchers. The news came after scientific-image sleuth Sholto David posted his concerns about more than 50 manuscripts to a blog on 2 January.

In the papers, published in a range of journals including Blood, Cell and Nature Immunology, David found images from western blots — a common test for detecting proteins in biological samples — in which bands seemed to be spliced, stretched and copied and pasted. He also found images of mice duplicated across figures where they shouldn’t have been. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature, and of other Nature-branded journals.)

It was not the first time that some of these irregularities had been noted; some were flagged years ago on PubPeer, a website where researchers comment on and critique scientific papers. The student newspaper The Harvard Crimsonreported on David’s findings on 12 January.

Gina Kolata

Aissam Dam, an 11-year-old boy, grew up in a world of profound silence. He was born deaf and had never heard anything. While living in a poor community in Morocco, he expressed himself with a sign language he invented and had no schooling.

Last year, after moving to Spain, his family took him to a hearing specialist, who made a surprising suggestion: Aissam might be eligible for a clinical trial using gene therapy.

On Oct. 4, Aissam was treated at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, becoming the first person to get gene therapy in the United States for congenital deafness. The goal was to provide him with hearing, but the researchers had no idea if the treatment would work or, if it did, how much he would hear.

The treatment was a success, introducing a child who had known nothing of sound to a new world.

Roland Li:

It was the inspiration for Emeryville-based Pixar’s hit movie “Toy Story.” 

“After 75 years of gratefully serving the San Francisco community, the store will be closing next month. The store has been struggling for a number of years, due to the perils and violence of the downtown environment, inflation, the decrease in consumer spending and the demise of retail across the world. The family is saddened it has come to this and we’ve explored all other options to try and keep the business going. The leadership of the City of San Francisco and the Downtown Association have their work cut out for them on how to revitalize what was once a vibrant and fun downtown experience,” said Ken Sterling of Sterling Venture Law, attorney for the family. “We are working through this complex situation with the landlords and creditors and at this time, I’ve advised my clients to not be interviewed by the press.”

San Francisco Business Times first reported the closure.

Elizabeth Nickson:

And just like that, Canada’s storied Liberal Party, in power for one hundred years, the country’s self-described “natural governing party,” is done. Before the ruling this week, Pierre Polievre’s Conservatives were projected to win 222 seats, according to Angus Reid’s January 21st poll, with the Liberals at 53 seats. Trudeau’s partner-in-crime, the fetching champagne socialist Jagmeet Singh,he of the mauve headwraps and Rolex watch? Twenty-five seats. With the decision, handed down by a federal judge, that Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act illegally, to end the truckers’ protest in Ottawa and at border crossings in Ontario and Alberta, Canada’s ruling elite has given up. They cannot continue the fiction any longer.

To illustrate how ridiculous Canada’s public life is, the findings by the RCMP and government were entirely driven by a government-funded Non-Governmental Organization, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, or CAHN. The group was used in a perfect illustration of the Iron Triangle of government and bureaucratic action. The government funds an anti-hate group, which immediately identifies opposition to the government, labels it as hate, feeds it to the police which proceeds to investigate.

The astroturfed outfit accused a podcaster of being a “white supremacist” and an “accelerationist.” The RCMP then provided CAHN’s “evidence” to legislators who then fed it to the subsidized media. Like a very, very good little girl, Canadian senator Paula Simons said he (the podcaster) wanted to “accelerate racial conflict to lead to the eventual creation of a White ethnostate,” during a debate in the house. None of this was found in any of the hundreds of hours of said podcast. Nevertheless, it was reported widely across the media as cold hard fact.

Related: Taxpayer Funded Dane County Madison Public Health lockdown mandates.

Brian Fung:

The National Security Agency has been buying Americans’ web browsing data from commercial data brokers without warrants, intelligence officials disclosed in documents made public by a US senator Thursday.

The purchases include information about the websites Americans visit and the apps that they use, said Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, releasing newly unclassified letters he received from the Pentagon in recent weeks confirming the sales.

The disclosures are the latest evidence that government agencies routinely buy sensitive information about Americans from commercial marketplaces that they would otherwise be required to obtain via court order.

Jacqueline Munis & Ella McCarthy:

The episode that got her in trouble happened elsewhere in Texas, at Athens High School, where her debate team was competing last February. Iglesias went into a bathroom to vape. Later that day, her coach told her she had been caught. 

“I decided to partake in something that I’m not proud of, but I did it,” Iglesias said, adding that her senior year was a stressful time and a close relative of hers was about to come out of jail. “I had had a lot of personal stuff building up outside.” 

She immediately was pulled from the debate tournament and her coach told her she could face charges because she was 18. She was sent to her district’s alternative school for 30 days, which was the minimum punishment for students caught vaping under Tyler schools’ zero-tolerance policy. 

Students found vaping also can receive a misdemeanor citation and be fined up to $100. Students found with vapes containing THC, the chemical that makes marijuana users feel high, can be arrested on felony charges. At least 90 students in Tyler have faced misdemeanor or felony charges.

Nicholas Wade:

The day is growing ever closer when Washington may have to add to its agenda with Beijing a nettlesome item it has long sought to avoid: the increasingly likely fact that China let the SARS2 virus escape from the Wuhan lab where it was concocted, setting off the Covid-19 pandemic that killed some 7 million people globally and wrought untold economic havoc.

New documents may explain why no one has been able to find the SARS2 virus (aka SARS-CoV-2) infesting a colony of bats, from which it might have jumped to people. The reason would be that the virus has never existed in the natural world. Documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know, a health advocacy group, provide a recipe for assembling SARS-type viruses from six synthetic pieces of DNA designed to be a consensus sequence—the genetically most infectious form—of viruses related to SARS1, the bat virus that caused the minor epidemic of 2002. The probative weight of the recipe is that prior independent evidence already pointed to SARS2 having just such a six-section structure.

The documents unearthed by U.S. Right to Know, and analyzed by its reporter Emily Kopp, include drafts and planning materials for the already-known DEFUSE proposal, an application to DARPA, a Pentagon research agency, for a $14 million grant to enhance SARS-like bat viruses.

The new recipe is in striking accord with a theoretical paper published in 2022 that predicted the SARS2 virus had been generated in exactly this way. Three researchers—Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne, and Antonius VanDongen—noted that the virus could be cut into six sections if treated with a pair of agents known as restriction enzymes and so had probably been synthesized and assembled in this way.

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Related: Taxpayer Funded Dane County Madison Public Health lockdown mandates.

Ken Shirriff:

Recently Craig Venter (who decoded the human genome) created a synthetic bacterium. The J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) took a bacterium’s DNA sequence as a computer file, modified it, made physical DNA from this sequence, and stuck this DNA into a cell, which then reproduced under control of the new DNA to create a new bacterium. This is a really cool result, since it shows you can create the DNA of an organism entirely from scratch. (I wouldn’t exactly call it synthetic life though, since it does require an existing cell to get going.) Although this project took 10 years to complete, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before you will be able to send a data file to some company and get the resulting cells sent back to you.

One interesting feature of this synthetic bacterium is it includes four “watermarks”, special sequences of DNA that prove this bacterium was created from the data file, and is not natural. However, they didn’t reveal how the watermarks were encoded. The DNA sequences were published (GTTCGAATATTT and so on), but how to get the meaning out of this was left a puzzle. For detailed background on the watermarks, see Singularity Hub. I broke the code (as I described earlier) and found the names of the authors, some quotations, and the following hidden web page. This seems like science fiction, but it’s true. There’s actually a new bacterium that has a web page encoded in its DNA:

By Russell Samora & Amber Thoma

Remember NBA great Donnell Harvey? Neither do we. Despite being the #1 high school recruit in 2000—something that you think would indicate future NBA stardom—he put together a meager career in the league, averaging around 5 points per game over 5 years. On the flip side is LeBron James—the #1 high school recruit just a few years later—and we all know what he’s been up to.

This disparity got us thinking, are these top 100 recruit lists any indication of making it to the NBA, let alone becoming a star?

It must be really hard to assess top talent when the pool is so large in high school. Now that we’ve entered the YouTube era, hype surrounding players can inflate in an instant. Sure, LeBron paved the way with some nationally televised games, but now millions of people are watching Zion Williamsonthrow down dunks in warm ups, or Lamelo Ball hit threes from half court in eight grade.

Andrew Joseph:

The blog post that has shaken the leadership of Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, one of the world’s preeminent cancer research centers, was written some 3,000 miles away, in a bare-walled, sparsely decorated flat, save for a stack of statistics books and a collection of Rubik’s Cubes.

It’s here that Sholto David, an unemployed scientist with a doctorate in cell and molecular biology, spends his time poring over research papers looking for images with clues that they’ve been manipulated in some way to portray misleading findings — perhaps duplicated, spliced or cropped, or partially obscured.

As he’s toiled away over the past three years, often long past midnight, he’s flagged issues on more than 2,000 papers on a site called PubPeer, where researchers can critique and discuss published studies. His comments are sometimes met by a study’s author dodging the questions raised, and sometimes result in a correction or retraction. Often though, they’re met with no response.

Balaji

Biden made unlawful demands of Texas.
Texas denied those demands.
Now Texas is making some demands of its own.
And they have 25 states behind them.

and:

“The fundamental problem is that anyone can claim asylum with zero proof, which means all of Earth can come to America.”

Esther Dyson:

People worried about AI taking their jobs are competing with a myth. Instead, people should train themselves to be better humans.

We should automate routine tasks and use the money and time saved to allow humans to do more meaningful work, especially helping parents raise healthier, more engaged children.

We should know enough to manipulate ourselves and to resist manipulation by others.

Front-line trainers are crucial to raising healthy, resilient, curious children who will grow into adults capable of loving others and overcoming challenges. There’s no formal curriculum for front-line trainers. Rather, it’s about training kids—and the parents who raise them—to do two fundamental things.

First, ensure that they develop the emotional security to think long term rather than grasp at short-term solutions through drugs, food, social media, gambling or other harmful palliatives. (Perhaps the best working definition of addiction is “doing something now for short-term relief that you know you will regret later.”)

Second, kids need to understand themselves and understand the motivations of the people, institutions and social media they interact with. That’s how to combat fake news—or the distrust of real news. It is less about traditional media literacy and more about understanding: “Why am I seeing this news? Are they trying to get me angry—or just using me to sell ads?”

Unfortunately, many children today are exposed to bad training as the result of having divorced or missing parents or experiencing abuse, hunger, exposure to addiction, mental illness, racism or bullying. These children complete less school, commit more crime and suffer from more instances of addiction, obesity and poor health than their peers with loving relatives and helpful neighbors. Affected children then often pass these vulnerabilities to those around them, including their own children when they become adults. Everyone suffers (including future taxpayers).

Expecting and new parents are the ideal place to begin such training. They are generally eager for help and guidance, which used to come from their own parents and relatives, from schools and from religious leaders. Now such guidance is scarce.

——-

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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?

William Pesek:

The past 12 months were rough on Tokyo, Beijing, Taipei, and New Delhi, which, along with the other biggest Asian financiers, hold nearly $2.9 trillion of Treasury market securities. America’s Asian bankers confronted runaway inflation, Federal Reserve tightening, a Fitch Ratings downgrade, and Moody’s Investors Service threatening to yank away Washington’s final AAA rating.

Now, as 2024 opens, add sticker shock to the mix as the U.S. national debt tops $34 trillion. The U.S. may sell $2 trillion of securities in 2024, with the tacit expectation that Japan, China, and others will dutifully hoover them up.

There are signs that Asia might not go along the way Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s staff seems to believe. That could shoulder-check global debt markets in the year ahead.

—-

In December, the Global Times warned that America’s surging national debt “may trigger another financial system crisis soon.” As such, “it is a precautionary and also prudent decision for China and other countries to trim their U.S. Treasury holdings, given the deteriorating fiscal crunch faced by the Biden administration.”

Sabrina Escobar:

“To attract Gen Zers, Chipotle is rolling out a plan that helps workers pay off student loans while saving for retirement, a debit card to help them build credit, and broader access to mental-health resources and financial education. Chipotle noted that Gen-Zers “are experiencing notable financial challenges,” from credit-card debt to “not feel[ing] confident managing their money.”

——-

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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?

Stanley K. Ridgley

If nothing else, the barbarous attacks on Israel by the terror group Hamas exposed the morally vacuous viscera of much of American higher education. By now, we have all we need to know about the “decolonization” folks due to their brutish antics in our streets and on the campuses. In the Middle East, such people are the enemies of civilization. On the campuses, they are the friends of barbarism everywhere.

How did primitivism make such a comeback in the face of logic, reason, science, progress, and humane values? Who are these people who exalt a barbaric anti-science, anti-progress, anti-civilization ethos that leads them to embrace murder, mutilation, rape, torture, and infanticide?

The answer is that they are followers of a bizarre quasi-religious mash-up of critical theory, neo-Marxist pedagogy, Fanonian chaos, and primitive racialism. They call this concoction “social justice.” On their lips, “decolonization” is recited alongside something called “indigeneity” and “indigenous knowledge” to drum up support for the inclusion of Neolithic “ways of knowing” in university curricula. Such terms provide easy labels to identify villains and victims, both in the university and, odd as it seems, in the “oppressor” state of Israel.

You find few supporters of humane Enlightenment values in the university bureaucracy.The doctrine is depraved to an inhuman extent. It is a tangible expression of the descent of a large part of humanity into an orgy of violence. “Decolonization” is civilizational regression, aided and abetted by mediocre bureaucrats and observed in silence by fearful and emasculated faculty.

Issues and insights:

There is not a single word of disparagement toward anyone, including Biden, and we defy anyone to find anything in this editorial that even comes close to Google’s “dangerous and derogatory” label.

Among the “dangerous and derogatory” material that Google prohibits is any content that challenges the accepted wisdom around COVID, or as the tech giant puts it, content that “relates to a current, major health crisis and contradicts authoritative, scientific consensus.”

——

Many taxpayer funded school districts use Google services.

Transcript of a meeting between Eric Schmidt and Julian Assange.

In q tel and Google.

Joseph Cox:

Hundreds of thousands of ordinary apps, including popular ones such as 9gag, Kik, and a series of caller ID apps, are part of a global surveillance capability that starts with ads inside each app, and ends with the apps’ users being swept up into a powerful mass monitoring tool advertised to national security agencies that can track the physical location, hobbies, and family members of people to build billions of profiles, according to a 404 Media investigation.

404 Media’s investigation, based on now deleted marketing materials and videos, technical forensic analysis, and research from privacy activists, provides one of the clearest examinations yet of how advertisements in ordinary mobile apps can ultimately lead to surveillance by spy firms and their government clients through the real time bidding data supply chain. The pipeline involves smaller, obscure advertising firms and advertising industry giants like Google. In response to queries from 404 Media, Google and PubMatic, another ad firm, have already cut-off a company linked to the surveillance firm.

“The pervasive surveillance machine that has been developed for digital advertising now directly enables government mass surveillance. Many businesses, from app publishers to advertisers to big tech, are acting completely irresponsibly. This must end,” Wolfie Christl, the principal of Cracked Labs, an Austrian research institute and co-author of a paper published last year that researched the surveillance tool, told 404 Media.

Emily Mullin:

Born deaf, the 1-year-old boy had never responded to sound or speech before. But after receiving an experimental treatment injected into one of his ears, he started turning his head when his parents called his name. Five months later, he spoke his first words.

The boy is one of six children with a type of hereditary deafness who are part of a gene therapy trial in China. Five of the children can now hear, according to results reported today in the scientific journal The Lancet. The news follows an announcement this week that yet another child born with profound deafness can hear after receiving a similar treatment developed by US drugmaker Eli Lilly.

“It’s remarkable,” says Lawrence Lustig, a hearing loss expert at Columbia University who was not involved in the trials. “We’ve never had a therapy that restores even partial hearing for someone who’s totally deaf other than a cochlear implant.”

Video: The Eye & ENT Hospital of Fudan University/The Lancet

The children were all born with a mutation in a gene that makes a protein needed for hearing called otoferlin. We hear things when sound waves in the air cause the thousands of sensory hair cells in our inner ears to vibrate and release a chemical that relays that information to the brain. Otoferlin is necessary for the release of this chemical messenger. Without it, the ear can’t communicate with the brain.

Greg Lukianoff:

ACLU National Legal Director David Cole has a review of my and Rikki Schlott’s book, “The Canceling of the American Mind,” coming out in the February 8 edition of the New York Review of Books. Overall I thought it was quite positive, but Cole made some arguments — which we actually hear quite often — that I think need addressing.

Before I do that, though, I want to stress that I both like and greatly respect David Cole. I also appreciate that the New York Review of Books found such a serious thinker on the topic of freedom of speech to review our book, as opposed to the many First Amendment skeptics these days who seem to think that simply employing a more advanced insult technology against those they disagree with is the same as refuting them (cough, cough — “The Lost Cause of Free Speech”).

I always welcome good-faith pushback — especially when it gives me an opportunity to go into more depth on why Rikki and I are so concerned about the current situation in higher education. All that said, here are some quotes from Cole’s review that I’d like to respond to:

Michael Rubinkham:

A Pennsylvania law that makes it a crime to release information about teacher disciplinary complaints is an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, a federal judge has ruled. The judge sided with a school board member who sought to publicize a misconduct allegation against his son’s school psychologist — and criticize the state’s dismissal of it — without fear of being prosecuted for the disclosure.

The unusual case involves the Educator Discipline Act, a state law that controls how the Pennsylvania Department of Education investigates and prosecutes misconduct complaints against teachers and other school staff. The law’s confidentiality provision makes it a misdemeanor to disclose the existence of a state complaint or any information about it unless and until discipline is imposed.

Prem Thakker:

Administrators at Columbia University responded to reports of students being injured by a chemical attack against an on-campus rally for Gaza by chiding students for holding protests without official authorization. Meanwhile, students told The Intercept that even as the school’s public safety department has said it is investigating the incident, school administrators themselves have yet to contact the victims — some of whom have had to seek medical care for their injuries. 

During a rally on Friday, according to attendees, two individuals sprayed a hazardous chemical that released an odious smell. Dozens of students have reported an array of symptoms, such as burning eyes, nausea, headaches, abdominal and chest pain, and vomiting.

The campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine publicized the incident on Saturday morning, identifying the substance as “skunk,” a chemical weapon used by the Israel Defense Forces against Palestinians and one that U.S. police departments have reportedly acquired in the past. SJP also alleged that the assailants have ties to the Israel Defense Forces, a claim that The Intercept could not independently confirm.

James Pethokoukis

But there’s another kind of Peak Human, a moment whose occurrence and timing are far more foreseeable. If you’re a Millennial or a younger Gen Xer, you’ll probably see the start of a long-term decline in human population due to the global collapse in fertility. That’s something that’s never happened before with Homo sapiens. While the most recent UN forecast sees a possible population peak of nearly 10.4 billion in the mid-2080s, plenty of other experts see our species’ numbers cresting at a far lower level — and much earlier:

A key factor in population projections is the fertility rate, particularly how it might change over time. When University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde calculates global fertility rates, he finds them “falling much faster than anyone had realized before.” Something more like that UN Low Scenario in the above chart. As Fernández-Villaverde (I will be referring to several of his papers and essay throughout) told me in an enlightening Faster, Please! podcast:

Choose life.

Stephen:

I have served happily as a professor at Yale for most of my adult life, but in my four-plus decades at the mast, I have never seen campuses roiled as they’re roiling today. On the one hand are gleeful activists on the right, taking victory laps over the tragic tumble from grace of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay. On the other is a campus left that has spent years crafting byzantine and vague rules on hate speech that it suddenly finds turned back on its allies. For those of us who love the academy, these are unhappy times. 

The controversy began with criticisms of some universities, Harvard included, for soft-pedaling their responses to the horrific Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and for then ignoring the overheated rhetoric of many pro-Palestinian protesters on campus. It has since spiraled into a full-bore battle in the never-ending culture wars.

There’s something sad but deeply American about the way that the current crisis stems not from the terror attacks but from a subsequent congressional hearing at which the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gave such cautious responses that it was hard to understand their positions. It was all very embarrassing; and, in its way, very McCarthyist.

Still, some good may yet come of the debacle. I have in mind not, as the left might think, a fresh rallying of the angry troops; nor, as the right might think, an eager readiness for the next battle. Rather, the controversy provides us with an opportunity to engage in a serious debate about what higher education is for.

Macmillan:

Macmillan Learning EconEd Student Excellence Award Contest. No purchase is necessary. Open only to legal residents of the fifty (50) United States and the District of Columbia who, at the time of entry, meet the eligibility requirements set forth in the full Official Rules. Must enter by 11:59pm ET on April 1, 2024. There is a limit of one entry per person. Void where prohibited. For full Official Rules, visit