Paul Mirengoff:

Princeton has offered admission to its class of 2025 to 1,498 applicants. According to numbers provided by the University, around fourteen percent of them are white American males. 

14 percent of the admitted applicants identify as international students. 68 percent of the admitted applicants from the U.S. identify as “persons of color.” 52 percent are female. 48 percent are male. 

Putting these numbers together, we see that only around 28 percent of admittees are white Americans. Less than half of that relatively small group are male. 

Whites make up much more than one-third of American students. Thus, whites are severely underrepresented in the group of American students Princeton has admitted to the class of 2025. Princeton’s class of domestic students won’t “look like America,” as the saying goes.

In its announcement, Princeton lumps Asian-American together with Blacks and other minority group members as “persons of color.” Thus, we don’t yet know what percentage of those offered admission belong to which minority group.

New Discourses:

We all know academia is in trouble. In fact, we’re not even sure it can be saved. To put it simply, the university is dying. To be sure, it’s a strange death, however, because the university is in some sense going back to its roots, returning to being theological seminaries, though in a completely new religion. That religion is the transformative religion of Dialectical Leftism, and its materialist watchword in the 21st century is “Sustainability.” In this New Discourses Podcast series, host James Lindsay takes the listener through a 2022 UNESCO book, Knowledge-driven Actions: Transforming Higher Education for Global Sustainability, that calls upon all “higher education institutions” to transform themselves so that they align, promote, and help complete the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals as a part of the 2030 Agenda.

Heather Mac Donald:

For decades, progressives have attributed black students’ low academic skills to school underfunding. Attend any graduate education program or sit in on any legislative hearing, and you will hear that stingy white taxpayers deny majority-black schools the financial resources necessary to close the academic achievement gap. Americans are to imagine cash-starved inner-city classrooms that would make a prairie schoolhouse look luxurious—teachers forced to ration textbooks, students lacking pencils and paper, harried principals drowning in administrative duties due to the lack of staff.

A recently announced initiative from the Los Angeles Unified School District, the public school system in Los Angeles County, is a good place to test the underfunding theory. February 5, 2024, will mark the start of a district-wide “Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.” (Previous LAUSD “weeks of action” have included a week in October 2023 organized around “National Coming Out Day.”) The district has distributed a teacher “toolkit” of suggestions for conducting the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action, compiled, as the toolkit notes, by the district’s “SMH,” “BSAP,” and “HRDE.”

Here is our first clue for assessing the underfunding theory: any bureaucracy that slaps acronyms on its component parts is not a bare-bones organization. The names of its innumerable departmental byways must be abbreviated, lest they take up too much space in print or in speech.

“SMH,” “BSAP,” and “HRDE” stand for the district’s School Mental Health bureaucracy, its Black Student Achievement Plan bureaucracy, and its Human Rights, Diversity and Equity bureaucracy. The HRDE bureaucracy is itself part of the Student Health and Human Services bureaucracy. Possessors of these sinecures are hidden from sight, far from the classroom. Funding such offices requires princely sums; the BSAP just received an additional $26 million in 2023, on top of its existing budget. The BSAP bankrolls counselors, climate advocates, and psychiatric social workers to work with black students in “high priority” schools. It doles out “Innovation Capacity-Building” grants of up to $100,000 to entities that promise to improve black achievement.

Dr Kevin Roberts:

Twenty years ago, when I was hiring teachers for the private K-12 school I founded, I knew better than to recruit certified teachers. That’s right—I didn’t want to hire certified teachers. Why?

Because from my previous work as a college history professor, I knew that the people least prepared to teach a subject were education majors. Requiring an embarrassingly low minimum of credit hours to be certified to teach a subject — just four courses in some states! — education majors encounter the least substance and rigor, but the maximum of racialist theory and left-wing ideology in their program.

——

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?

Abbey Machtig:

“You have to manage the expectations, the emotions, the fears of ‘is my child making the right progress’ — that is the question I think we hear families ask the most,” she said. 

Students and parents also may worry that grades won’t translate on applications to colleges, jobs or other opportunities after high school. However, students at East High will still receive a letter grade for each class at the end of the semester and maintain a GPA throughout high school, Schaefer said.

The grades translate as Advanced = A; Proficient = B; Developing = C; Emerging = D, according to the East handbook. 

Schaefer said the transition to this system will bring extra work for teachers, who have to change how they assign grades and learn a new system for entering them into the online gradebook. Schaefer recommends instructors focus on between three and eight priority standards for each course.

Yet, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results despite spending far more than most taxpayer funded k-12 systems.

Commentary.

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:

It should be noted that while childhood sexual abuse by Catholic clergy has received extensive media coverage, childhood sexual abuse by teachers and others is also a serious problem. Charol Shakeshaft, who has done extensive research on the problem of sexual abuse of students by teachers, recognizes the difficulty of collecting solid data on sexual abuse; but using available studies, she estimates that “the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than one hundred times the abuse by priests.”

According to Shakeshaft’s research, even when abuse was reported to school officials the offenders were not reported to the police. In her study of 225 cases in New York, “none of the abusers were reported to authorities and only 1 percent lost their license to teach.” A recent article in The New York Times documented abuse-including sexual abuse—of the developmentally disabled in group homes. Even when abuse was uncovered, perpetrators were allowed to continue working at other facilities.”

Ted talk.

More.

Ugh, @AP, times three. https://t.co/ZnDCwKkzKJ

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) January 3, 2024

Kevin Jon Williams:

They sold America, the greatest nation on Earth, for next to nothing because that’s what they believe it’s worth.

The Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Mr. Hunter Biden up to a million dollars a year! Wow! It seems like a lot of money.

But what were the Bidens selling? Not Hunter’s expertise in, say, energy, economics, international law, Ukrainian culture, or actually anything that he could do on his own. They were paying him because of his proximity to his father, President Joseph Robinette Biden.

The Bidens were selling the greatest country on Earth.

And this is, to me, perhaps the most troubling part of the story. The Biden crime family so undervalued my country that they sold it for chump change—not merely disloyal, but deeply dismissive and disrespectful.

What should it cost to sell America? I’d start at 50 trillion dollars—that’s 5 followed by 13 zeros. Elon Musk’s net worth is estimated to be around 200 billion dollars—that’s two followed by 11 zeros. In other words, I’d demand 250 times the net worth of the planet’s richest man. And then I’d walk away.

But not the Bidens.

Let’s assume for a moment that every accusation is true. My guess is that at least 90 percent of them are true because many major concerns about the Bidens have been confirmed from Hunter’s laptop. Moreover, we have finally been permitted to know that the laptop was really his—and not some Russian hoax, as President Biden and his leftist operatives in the foreign policy establishment and the legacy media had falsely alleged.

So strange. We finally got this nonsense out of Virginia’s history standards *in 2023* and yet all these people were struck mute about it….in fact, the Northam draft that was waved around like a bloody shirt was muddled on this point. https://t.co/jah3rX9Yuz

— Andrew Rotherham (@arotherham) January 3, 2024

Ralph Notham notes and links.

Claudine Gay’s rise to Harvard President was no doubt in part the result of affirmative action, but the more interesting dimension is how it reflects the rise of *bureaucrats* over intellectuals at top universities. Over two decades, Gay published just 10 articles & zero books.…

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) January 3, 2024

Jeff Fuhrer:

From America’s founding — and before — false narratives about post-racism and meritocracy have been at play in our national identity. By the early 19th century, there was a general expectation that white men should, and could successfully, strive for self-mastery and improvement: that a hard-working, right-living youth could become a prosperous self-made man. Implicit disapproval of the poor has an even longer history, rooted in debates over colonial poor laws. As a nation, we have absorbed and employed these narratives for generations.

In tracing the roots of these narratives, two caveats are in order. First, what the average person thought about individual achievement and opportunity at the beginning of the 19th century is difficult to say. What exists are the accounts of those who succeeded, those wealthy enough to have had political power and thus be included in the historical record. Second, this topic is much too broad to cover adequately here. Many have written about the nation’s evolving sense of itself in the wake of independence and during the years in which the republic solidified. I will borrow from their insights and heavily summarize the import of their work for this discussion of the origins of The Myth, as I call it in my book.

Rasmussen Nielsen:

When it comes to the most serious misinformation, the calls tend to come from inside the house. Technology will not change that, so let’s stop gaslighting the public and admit clearly as we head into a big election year that misinformation often comes from the top.

Parents Defending Education:

Parents Defending Education submitted a public records request seeking invoices that Armstrong School District has with companies that provide Social Emotional Learning (SEL) curricula and that promote DEI initiatives. The school district provided PDE with five invoices that totaled over $1.5 million. The largest of the invoices is dated March 27, 2023, and is from the organization Amplify Education. This invoice is for $699,176.40. This invoice includes costs for curricula from kindergarten through the fifth grade and professional development for teachers.

Another invoice from Amplify Education was dated January 30, 2023, and was for $696,917.40. This invoice also included costs for curricula from kindergarten through the fifth grade and professional development for teachers. Additional invoices with Amplify Education included a cost of $27,176.26 on July 12, 2022, and a cost of $12,740.76 on May 11, 2023.

The school district also has an invoice with CharacterStrong for $80,183.60 that is dated January 3, 2023. This invoice was for SEL curricula and professional development.

Don Lee:

Even though California has experienced lopsided out-migration for decades, the financial blow has been cushioned by the kinds of people moving into the state: The newcomers were generally better educated and earned more money than those who left.

Not now: That long-standing trend has reversed. New state-to-state migration data show that for several years, thousands more high-earning, well-educated workers have left California than have moved in.

The reversal, largely in response to the state’s high taxes and soaring cost of living, has begun to damage California’s overall economy. And, by cutting into tax revenues, has delivered punishing blows to state and local governments.

Dave Huber:

A recent report from The Federalist details how professors at Maine’s Bates College are hesitant to challenge students for fear of being reported to the school’s DEI — Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — office.

Recent Bates graduate Roy Matthews corresponded with several professors from the institution and found its DEI office is being used to intimidate instructors into compliance with its progressive ideology.

Keith Taylor, a geology professor, was subjected to a “mock hearing” led by Dean of Faculty Malcolm Hill due to challenging a student to “provide evidence that […] Bates is anti-black and based in white supremacy” after alleging just that.

According to Matthews, “activist students [at the hearing] voiced their accusations of racism and silenced other students, who wanted Taylor to finish his class because of upcoming final exams.”

Wall Street Journal

Auburn piled millions more each year into paying down the debt it borrowed for campus upgrades, including an $84 million basketball arena. It hired hundreds of administrators and professional staff. Spending on the president’s office and other administrative departments often increased far faster than that on many academic subjects.

To help pay for its transformation, the school has raised tuition and fees again and again. By one measure, students’ costs have grown faster than at almost any other major public U.S. university. Auburn’s net price, the average amount in-state freshmen pay after grants and scholarships—covering tuition, fees, room, board and other costs—topped $25,000 annually in 2021-22, according to Education Department data. That’s a 60% increase from 15 years prior, adjusted to today’s dollars.

Nationally, schools don’t consistently disclose the details of how they spend their money, making it nearly impossible to compare how they divide up dollars. To determine how one school’s priorities evolved, The Wall Street Journal chose Auburn as a case study, examining hundreds of pages of budget documents. The data help answer a question facing families across the nation: With college prices sharply higher than they were a generation ago, where does all the money go?

The Journal tallied how Auburn’s spending changed across roughly 125 of the largest budget categories between fiscal 2002 and 2016, adjusting all the numbers for inflation to today’s dollars. Comparisons after 2016 weren’t possible because of accounting changes and because Auburn stopped publishing granular spending figures.

Ann Althouse:

I’m reading “How a Proxy Fight Over Campus Politics Brought Down Harvard’s President/Amid plagiarism allegations and a backlash to campus antisemitism, Claudine Gay became an avatar for broader criticisms of academia” by Nicholas Confessore, in The New York Times.

Dr. Gay’s defenders… warn[ed] that her resignation would encourage conservative interference in universities and imperil academic freedom. (Though some experts have rated Harvard itself poorly on campus free speech during Dr. Gay’s tenure in leadership.)…

What a delicious parenthetical!

That link on “poorly” goes to the FIRE website, where you have to do a search to see where Harvard ranks. I did the search (and you can too). We’re told the “speech climate” is “abysmal.”

But of course, this article, outside of its parentheses, portrays conservative critics of academia as the threat to freedom. Note that the FIRE analysis is looking at “student free speech and open inquiry,” while the NYT article has Gay’s defenders concerned about “academic freedom,” which connotes the interests of faculty. 

Back to the NYT article:

———

Rifts dividing students, faculty and donors have widened

👀
SCOOPLET + 🧵

Danielle Allen, a highly respected Harvard poli sci prof, interviewed for the presidency in 2022.

She didn't get past an early round.

Worth asking why Gay got the job while Allen didn't come close.

I'm not saying I know. But it sure wasn't scholarship…

1/ pic.twitter.com/JtfKJsjysV

— Alice (@AliceFromQueens) January 3, 2024

Ronald Sullivan deleted this one word post written in response to former Harvard president Claudine Gay's resignation: "Karma".

As Dean of Faculty of Arts and Science, Gay refused to defend Sullivan's right to provide legal counsel to an unpopular client and played a key role… pic.twitter.com/WCPTG42I5G

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) January 3, 2024

Mara Gay — a member of the NYT editorial board and one of America's most infamous diversity hires — is perhaps best known for claiming on live TV that $500 million divided among 327 million people would give each person $1 million. https://t.co/P8uOwaQBSs

— i/o (@eyeslasho) January 3, 2024

You’d think nothing in the article could top the headline, but then you see @AP’s definition of scalping. https://t.co/BaC9cJaBjs pic.twitter.com/WORZ2IqISp

— John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) January 3, 2024

As much as I would like to blame Claudine Gay for her shenanigans, I think most of the fault lies with "us," the people who designed, supported and/or tolerated the current systems of affirmative action, diversity, equity, inclusion and all the other nonsense for the past 50… pic.twitter.com/Ud8kNxKwxA

— Thomas Sowell, The Genius of… (@AlanWolan) January 3, 2024

And:

Bill Ackman:

What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.

Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.”

Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist. More.

Christopher Rufo:

I don’t like playing the racism tabulation game, but, given that Claudine Gay’s defense has amounted to smearing her opponents as racist, let’s put it to the test, comparing Claudine Gay’s racism to that of her critics.

Evidence that Gay is racist:

–Oversaw a discriminatory admissions program ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court
–Led a discriminatory DEI bureaucracy that sought, among other things, to reduce the visual presence of “white men” on campus
–Minimized antisemitism and the call for the violent “decolonization” of Jews
–Supported policies that reduce individuals to racial categories and judge them on the basis of ancestry, rather than individual merit

Evidence that Claudine Gay’s critics are racist:

–Claudine Gay claiming, but providing no hard evidence, that some unknown person or persons sent her mean emails

Timar Kuran

Preference falsification has been central to the trajectory of DEI. People who abhor DEI principles and methods came to favor these publicly through a preference cascade. Every instance of preference falsification induced others to pretend they consider DEI just, efficient, beneficial to marginalized groups, etc. In time, a false consensus effectively displaced the search for truth as the university’s core mission, replacing it with DEI. Most professors watched in concealed horror the transfer of enormous powers from themselves to rapidly growing DEI bureaucracies.

——

Private Truths, Public Lies
The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification

Preference falsification, according to the economist Timur Kuran, is the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures. It happens frequently in everyday life, such as when we tell the host of a dinner party that we are enjoying the food when we actually find it bland. In Private Truths, Public Lies Kuran argues convincingly that the phenomenon not only is ubiquitous but has huge social and political consequences. Drawing on diverse intellectual traditions, including those rooted in economics, psychology, sociology, and political science, Kuran provides a unified theory of how preference falsification shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities.

A common effect of preference falsification is the preservation of widely disliked structures. Another is the conferment of an aura of stability on structures vulnerable to sudden collapse. When the support of a policy, tradition, or regime is largely contrived, a minor event may activate a bandwagon that generates massive yet unanticipated change.

In distorting public opinion, preference falsification also corrupts public discourse and, hence, human knowledge. So structures held in place by preference falsification may, if the condition lasts long enough, achieve increasingly genuine acceptance. The book demonstrates how human knowledge and social structures co-evolve in complex and imperfectly predictable ways, without any guarantee of social efficiency.

Private Truths, Public Lies uses its theoretical argument to illuminate an array of puzzling social phenomena. They include the unexpected fall of communism, the paucity, until recently, of open opposition to affirmative action in the United States, and the durability of the beliefs that have sustained India’s caste system.

Ryan Quinn:

A University of Florida spokeswoman wrote in an email that UF’s faculty turnover rate is still below the 10.57 percent national average. (The source she cited, CUPA-HR, said on its website that in 2022–23, overall turnover for full-time faculty was 7 percent for those on the tenure track and 11 percent for non–tenure track.) And in posts on X criticizing the New York Times story, UF president Ben Sasse—a former Republican U.S. senator—wrote, “Over the last seven years, with the exception of one year during COVID, UF has annually hired far more faculty than have left.” 

A Florida State University spokeswoman wrote in an email that “we’ve seen a slight, but not dramatic, rise in faculty departures, and perhaps not greater than expected in these post-pandemic times. However, the university’s number of new hires is well above the number of replacements for those who have departed.” She added that FSU has found “that faculty leave for multiple and complex reasons rather than a single issue. We do not have a breakdown of their reasons.” 

A UNC system spokesman wrote in an email that faculty turnover in that system—counting “voluntary separation” but not retirements and other kinds of departures—was 3.9 percent in both fiscal years 2022 and 2023. He said the system doesn’t have data on why faculty members left or where they went. 

Experts say it’s simply too soon to know how relatively recent state politics—such as Ron DeSantis’s reign as Florida’s governor and laws passed in 2023—are influencing faculty members’ decisions to leave or stay, or whether professors are leaving for universities in bluer states or quitting academe entirely. 

“Faculty members are not tagged like migrating geese,” said Brendan Cantwell, a Michigan State University professor of higher, adult and lifelong education.

Lily Hay Newman:

With the releases of iOS 16 and macOS Ventura in 2022, Apple debuted its Lockdown Mode for people at particular risk of being targeted by mercenary spyware. The feature is essentially a set of configurations for iOS and macOS that limit or block niceties like link previews in Messages and shared albums in Photos. Lockdown Mode also restricts your device’s ability to accept unsolicited communications like FaceTime calls from phone numbers and accounts you’ve never called before. And this year, in iOS 17, Apple added additional improvements, meaning more safety-focused limitations. The company has consistently emphasized that Lockdown Mode is not meant for mainstream use by most people—but in a week of testing, it’s surprisingly tolerable.

Charles Murray & Helmuth Nyborg

Two giants of the field discuss the past, present, and future of intelligence research and much, much more…

🇺🇸 https://t.co/JKUE7x9AYA

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) January 2, 2024

Ah yes, the one where GOP is blamed for decisions by Dem-dominated school board. I can’t imagine why local news is suffering when it consistently caters to one half of the political divide. 🙄 https://t.co/OYSxNjHaPO

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) January 2, 2024

Ali Almelhem, Murat Iyigun, Austin Kennedy and Jared Rubin

Using textual analysis of 173,031 works printed in England between 1500 and 1900, we test whether British culture evolved to manifest a heightened belief in progress associated with science and industry. Our analysis yields three main findings. First, there was a separation in the language of science and religion beginning in the 17th century. Second, scientific volumes became more progress-oriented during the Enlightenment. Third, industrial works—especially those at the science-political economy nexus—were more progress-oriented beginning in the 17th century. It was therefore the more pragmatic, industrial works which reflected the cultural values cited as important for Britain’s takeoff.

Commentary.

Mark Lisheron:

State Sen. Eric Wimberger, one of the co-sponsors of the bill that had a public hearing Thursday, told the Badger Institute, the legislation presents an opportunity to right a longstanding wrong and repudiate “an antiquated world view whose time has come and gone.”

The notion that tax support for education be apportioned based on skin color “is antithetical to what I and other conservatives in Wisconsin believe,” Wimberger, R-Green Bay, said.

“Eliminating race as a factor in admissions and aid programs aligns with the principles of equality and fairness,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said about the bill in an email to the Badger Institute. “Instead of focusing on race, the UW should look at the applicant’s access to resources and opportunities, for example, a rural student or veteran, to truly bring diversity and inclusion to campus.”

Emma H. Haidar and Cam E. Kettles:

Harvard President Claudine Gay will resign Tuesday afternoon, bringing an end to the shortest presidency in the University’s history, according to a person with knowledge of the decision.

University Provost Alan M. Garber ’76 will serve as Harvard’s interim president during a search for Gay’s permanent successor, the Harvard Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — announced in an email on Tuesday.

Harvard spokesperson Jonathan L. Swain declined to comment on Gay’s decision to step down.

Gay’s resignation — just six months and two days into the presidency — comes amid growing allegations of plagiarism and lasting doubts over her ability to respond to antisemitism on campus after her disastrous congressional testimony Dec. 5.

Gay weathered scandal after scandal over her brief tenure, facing national backlash for her administration’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly work.

Gay is expected to announced her decision to step down to Harvard affiliates in an email later today. The Corporation is also expected to make a statement about the decision.

Good riddance. https://t.co/3F88NeAKvW

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) January 2, 2024

Notes and links on Claudine Gay and Harvard.

More.

New Year, Same Discrimination. State of Wisconsin has 262 new job openings for "diversity internships."
Run by Gov. Tony Ever's "Bureau of Equity and Inclusion." pic.twitter.com/9T87btrsHE

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) January 2, 2024

Peachy Keenan video:

Japan Times:

The number of those that have reached Japan’s legal adult age fell by 60,000 from 2023 and accounted for 0.86% of Japan’s total population, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said Sunday.

The year 2005, when the new adults were born, had seen the country’s total fertility rate — the average number of children a woman is estimated to bear in her lifetime — fall to a record-low 1.26, later matched by that of 2022.

In Japan, the age of adulthood was lowered from 20 to 18 in April 2022 in a bid to encourage active social participation by youth.

Choose life..

Aaron Sibarium:

Harvard University president Claudine Gay was hit with six additional allegations of plagiarism on Monday in a complaint filed with the university, breathing fresh life into a scandal that has embroiled her nascent presidency and pushing the total number of allegations near 50. 

Seven of Gay’s 17 published works have already been impacted by the scandal, but the new charges, which have not been previously reported, extend into an eighth: In a 2001 article, Gay lifts nearly half a page of material verbatim from another scholar, David Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin.  

That article, “The Effect of Minority Districts and Minority Representation on Political Participation in California,” includes some of the most extreme and clear-cut cases of plagiarism yet. At one point, Gay borrows four sentences from Canon’s 1999 book, Race, Redistricting, and Representation: The Unintended Consequences of Black Majority Districts, without quotation marks and with only minor semantic tweaks. She does not cite Canon anywhere in or near the passage, though he does appear in the bibliography.

Anna Krylov:

The politicization of science – the infusion of ideology into the scientific enterprise – threatens the ability of science to serve humanity. Today, the greatest such threat comes from a set of ideological viewpoints collectively referred to as Critical Social Justice (CSJ). This contribution describes how CSJ has detrimentally affected scientific publishing by means of social engineering, censorship, and the suppression of scholarship.

Anna Krylov, a chemistry professor, has published several pieces on how left/woke ideology is undermining science. Here's her latest.

She gives examples of four main issues:

1. Policing of language.

Ever longer list of forbidden words like "healthy weight". pic.twitter.com/eJyfiapYOZ

— Whyvert (@whyvert) January 1, 2024

MB Matthews

As we survey the American landscape, we cannot help but notice that just about everything has been corrupted by the left.

The justice system has been corrupted by partisan politics to the point where Republicans and conservatives are persecuted and prosecuted at a level far higher than anyone else.  We on the right can reliably depend on being prosecuted for “misgendering,” contributing to conservative causes, being a Christian or a Jew, speaking out against the barbaric transing of children, defending ourselves with a firearm, and not being a Democrat.  We can depend upon getting arrested for protesting peacefully as the corrupt “Justice” Department singles us out for jail, bankruptcy, or keeping us off election ballots, while really destructive rioters go free.

Medical research has been corrupted by the deliberate downgrading of meritorious research that just so happens to be at odds with the latest leftist perversion du jour.  For example, there are research grants for hamster fights.

Elections have been corrupted. Mail-in ballots, demonstrated to be extremely susceptible to fraudulent inflation of Democrat votes, are ready for the next fraud. Dead people vote; people vote multiple times; non-residents vote in other states; and phony ballots are printed and signed with the same handwriting, then run through counting machines multiple times. Computer problems pop up so as to skew the vote.

Washington Examiner

Diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, in higher education was deceptively sold as a set of policies designed to promote “the fair treatment and full participation of all people,” particularly groups that “have historically been underrepresented.” But DEI offices have proved to be epicenters of division and ideological conformity, stirring hostilities and imposing an intolerant monoculture.

Fortunately, 2023 saw more than a dozen states start to take action against the DEI hydra, with six achieving concrete steps that other states should follow.

Ben Dauphinee:

The fun of owning rural property is that knowing where your land actually starts and ends is a guess usually. Sure, you have a parcel description, and maybe even an online service with “official” GIS boundaries (for us here in New Brunswick, this is GeoNB). However, since it’s in the middle of the forest, the odds of you having an actual surveyed and monumented boundary line are very low. Which also means the odds of the online boundaries being correct isn’t great either. This post is a dump of all the experiences I’ve had over the past 3 months, on my quest for accurate mapping.

CJ Szafir:

Despite having a new liberal majority, the Wisconsin Supreme Court refused this month to hear a challenge to the state’s school-choice programs. The lawsuit, supported by the Minocqua Brewing Co.’s progressive super PAC, would have deprived more than 60,000 students of funding. The episode carries a lesson for advocates of education freedom.

Families and school leaders were more engaged. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty’s brief against the lawsuit represented 22 clients, including parents and private-school leaders. Parents and students spoke out. “The new Supreme Court case will be devastating to all families . . . because it would take away opportunities from children who can’t support their education through a public school system,” Sherlean Roberts, a senior at Marquette University, told us. She attended a charter school in Milwaukee and will be the first in her family with a college degree.

Wisconsin began its experiment with school choice in 1990 with a bipartisan voucher program, enrolling 341 in secular private schools in Milwaukee. The state expanded the program to include religious schools in 1998, private schools outside Milwaukee in 2011 and 2013, and special-needs students in 2016.

David Wahlberg

Ava, Charlotte and Emma were popular baby names for girls in the Madison area this year. Henry, Jack and Theodore were among the biggest for boys.

At UnityPoint Health-Meriter, the largest birthing hospital in Madison, Emma was the top girl’s name, followed by Eleanor, Evelyn, Charlotte and Ava. SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital, Madison’s other birthing hospital, had a five-way tie for first place: Ava, Avery, Charlotte, Elizabeth and Nora.

Nate Gilbert:

Moments after what turned out to be his final Crosstown Rivalry game had concluded, Lakeside head coach Paul Bauer went out of his way to find Lake Mills standout outside linebacker Matthew Stenbroten and wished him well.

Stenbroten, a Division 1 recruit and the kind of player who gives opposing offenses fits, had suffered what looked to be a nasty lower-body injury late in the game. The pair had a brief conversation before shaking hands (Stenbroten returned from what turned out to be a high-ankle sprain in time for the playoffs).

Charles Murray:

It has to be messing with the heads of AI programmers everwhere. An AI app that has unfiltered access to all scientific knowledge is going to give answers that are sexist, racist, and classist by Progressive standards. So how do you make an AI program that is accurate about everything except a few forbidden conclusions?

Joanne Jacobs:

Cognitive ability no longer is linked strongly to years of education, concludes a Norwegian study published in published in Scientific Reports, reports Vladimir Hedrih in PsyPost. Expanding access to education could have helped talented people rise above their social class, making Norway more meritocratic, researchers speculated. But it didn’t work that way.

Researchers looked at cognitive tests of males born between 1950 to 1991 and their educational attainment by age 30. The men, who were evaluated as military draftees, were tested on “a range of mental skills and capabilities, including problem-solving, memory, reasoning, and critical thinking,” Hedrih writes.

During the period, as Norway significantly improved access to high school and college education, the correlation between cognitive ability and educational attainment declined, the study found. The hypothesis that “educational attainment increasingly aligns with individual level ability as educational opportunities are broadened” did not hold up, researchers wrote. The “potentially more plausible explanation” is that education has become “substantially less selective.” Higher education — or, at least, years of schooling — no longer is a strong signal of intelligence.

Anonymous via the Crimson:

I have served as a voting member of the Harvard College Honor Council, the body tasked with upholding the College’s community standards of academic integrity.

In my time on the Council, I heard dozens of cases. When students — my classmates, peers, and friends — appear before the council, they are distraught. For most, it is the worst day of their college careers. For some, it is the worst day of their lives. They often cry.

It is because I have seen first-hand how heart-wrenching these decisions can be, and still think them necessary, that I call on University President Claudine Gay to resign for her numerous and serious violations of academic ethics.

Let’s compare the treatment of Harvard undergraduates suspected of plagiarism with that of their president.

A plurality of the Honor Council’s investigations concern plagiarism. In the 2021-22 school year, the last year for which data is publicly available, 43 percent of cases involved plagiarism or misuse of sources.

Josh Cowen:

First, why are these new voucher schemes such bad public policy? To understand the answer, it’s important to know that the typical voucher-accepting school is a far cry from the kind of elite private academy you might find in a coastal city or wealthy suburban outpost. Instead, they’re usually sub-prime providers, akin to predatory lenders in the mortgage sector. These schools are either pop-ups opening to cash in on the new taxpayer subsidy, or financially distressed existing schools desperate for a bailout to stay open. Both types of financially insecure schools often close anyway, creating turnover for children who were once enrolled.

And the voucher results reflect that educational vulnerability: in terms of academic impacts, vouchers have some of the worst results in the history of education research—on par or worse than what COVID-19 did to test scores. 

Those results are bad enough, but the real issue today is that they come at a cost of funding traditional public schools. As voucher systems expand, they cannibalize states’ ability to pay for their public education commitments. Arizona, which passed universal vouchers in 2022, is nearing a genuine budget crisis as a result of voucher over-spending. Six of the last seven states to pass vouchers have had to slow spending on public schools relative to investments made by non-voucher states.

That’s because most new voucher users were never in the public schools—they are new financial obligations for states. The vast majority of new voucher beneficiaries have been students who were already in private school beforehand. And for many rural students who live far from the nearest private school, vouchers are unrealistic in the first place, meaning that when states cut spending on public education, they weaken the only educational lifeline available to poorer and more remote communities in some places. That’s why even many GOP legislators representing rural districts—conservative in every other way—continue to fight against vouchers.

Dan Luu:

In this case, search engines return various kinds of hallucinated results. In the snow forecast example, we got deliberately fabricated results, one intended to drive ad revenue through shady ads on a fake forecast site, and another intended to trick the user into thinking that the forecast indicates a cold, snowy, winter (the opposite of the actual forecast), seemingly in order to get the user to sign up for unnecessary snow removal services. Other deliberately fabricated results include a site that’s intended to look like an objective review site that’s actually a fake site designed to funnel you into installing a specific ad blocker, where the ad blocker they funnel you to appears to be a scammy one that tries to get you to pay for ad blocking and doesn’t let you unsubscribe, a fake “organic” blog post trying to get you to install a chrome extension that exposes all of your shopping to some service (in many cases, it’s not possible to tell if a blog post is a fake or shill post, but in this case, they hosted the fake blog post on the domain for the product and, although it’s designed to look like there’s an entire blog on the topic, there isn’t — it’s just this one fake blog post), etc.

Michaela Bourgeois:

Multnomah County is urging residents to practice good hygiene amid an uptick in shigella cases in Old Town Portland.

Shigella — a bacteria that is spread through fecal matter — can cause fever, stomach cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea, which can last three to 10 days, and can include blood, health officials warn.

“Shigella spreads when one person’s infected poop gets into another person’s mouth through food or water, from objects or surfaces with shigella bacteria on them, or during sex,” Multnomah County said. “Shigella spreads very easily. Even a very small amount is enough to make someone sick.”

Emma Freire

Other neighborhoods across Baltimore had hired private security firms to patrol their streets. Why shouldn’t Federal Hill do the same? From there, Neuman, Anderson, and several others got to work. They consulted local government officials and police officers, who told Neuman they appreciated more eyes on the street. I called the Baltimore Police Department to verify their support, but they declined to comment.

Neuman and the others eventually set up a corporation, Federal Hill Neighborhood Patrol Inc. Next, they needed money. They hoped to raise $18,000 to fund the patrol for a three-month trial. But their neighbors nearly tripled that: About 90 households in Federal Hill contributed $50,000. In May 2021, the first patrol hit the streets.

More than 1 million people work as security guards in America, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and that number has doubled in the past 20 years. Since 2020, neighborhoods like Federal Hill have started hiring private security services. In Minnesota, for example, the number of licenses approved for new private security firms rose from 14 in 2019 to 27 in 2021, according to the state’s Board of Private Detective and Protective Agent Services. In Oregon, 1,635 private security guards had a license to carry a gun in September 2019. Today, that number has grown to 2,268.

Joanne Jacobs:

Humanities professors, under heavy pressure to prove their discipline is “useful,” have gone political, writes Tyler Austin Harper in The Atlantic. The pitch is that “studying the humanities promotes nebulous but nice-sounding values, such as empathy and critical thinking, that are allegedly vital to the cause of moral uplift in a multicultural democracy.” Someone’s got to bend that arc of justice.

Unwritten rules? MPS has many.“Any employee who violates any district policy procedure rule or regulation whether written or unwritten shall be subject to disciplinary actions.”🧵1/3@MacIverWisc @CityofMKE @compujeramey @ShaunGalNews @SamKraemerTV @RoryLinnane @DanODonnellShow pic.twitter.com/c3gIbekFE5

— Debbie Kuether (@debkueth) December 31, 2023

Years ago, I asked each of the 3 Madison Superintendent candidates if they supported hiring the the best teachers and letting them do their thing or a top down approach…

Ongoing substantial k-12 $pending growth vs classroom teacher comp provides another look at our predicament.

“Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.“

By Brooks B. Anderson and Joshua A. Kaplan

University President Claudine Gay should resign.

It has been less than half a year since Gay assumed one of the most prestigious posts in all of academia. Since then, scandal after scandal has plagued our beloved university.

The president of Harvard must be a formidable leader, capable of managing thousands of the brightest minds on the planet, a widely revered international brand, and a multi-billion-dollar bureaucratic behemoth. Further, by way of its field-leading eminences, Harvard exerts influence — and encounters controversy — at the highest levels of politics and policymaking, which often presents challenges for its leader and public face.

In other words, Harvard’s presidency is no mere empty honor; it is a deeply challenging managerial job with deeply challenging duties, not least of which is navigating national outcry.

“we made the decision to grant this author anonymity”

I have served as a voting member of the Harvard College Honor Council, the body tasked with upholding the College’s community standards of academic integrity.

In my time on the Council, I heard dozens of cases. When students — my classmates, peers, and friends — appear before the council, they are distraught. For most, it is the worst day of their college careers. For some, it is the worst day of their lives. They often cry.

It is because I have seen first-hand how heart-wrenching these decisions can be, and still think them necessary, that I call on University President Claudine Gay to resign for her numerous and serious violations of academic ethics.

Let’s compare the treatment of Harvard undergraduates suspected of plagiarism with that of their president.

A plurality of the Honor Council’s investigations concern plagiarism. In the 2021-22 school year, the last year for which data is publicly available, 43 percent of cases involved plagiarism or misuse of sources.

Kyle Morris:

The decision to avoid a second trial charging Sam Bankman-Fried with a conspiracy to make unlawful political donations and bribery of foreign officials has many conservatives up in arms.

Federal prosecutors said Friday that they do not plan to proceed with a second trial against Sam Bankman-Fried, citing public interest in a speedy resolution of the case that has seemingly irritated those who were hoping to see the disgraced FTX founder prosecuted to the fullest extent.

BREAKING: Campaign finance charges on Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX have been dropped, in addition to six other charges.

This is unusual.

He gave millions to politicians.

Who exactly?

Nearly everyone.

See the list here: https://t.co/uK8CTsLugJ pic.twitter.com/5HLUb7FjA8

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) December 30, 2023

There's another reason States might consider prosecuting SBF.

There's some risk Pres. Biden will pardon SBF on the Federal conviction on his way out the door if he's not re-elected.

That might sound far-fetched.
But only if you're not paying attention.👇https://t.co/B0cbhQnow2

— MetaLawMan (@MetaLawMan) December 31, 2023

Yngve Hoiseth

Even though I take pride in my ability to adjust my opinions in the face of new evidence, it can really hurt, and it sure did this time. Now what should I believe? And what fragments of false belief were left behind in my mind? On top of that, I had to notify the people I gave the book to. When there are that many errors in a single chapter, who knows how many there might be in the rest of the book? It was clear to me that the book could not be trusted. 

I reached out to Penguin, UC Berkeley and the Norwegian publisher Press (which published the Norwegian translation).

The worst reaction was from Press — they didn’t respond at all. Penguin said that the editorial team would take a look, but I never heard back from them. UC Berkeley responded promptly but concluded that they would not conduct a formal investigation.

Below, I’m publishing my email exchange with UC Berkeley so that others can see it rather than it just gathering dust in my email archive. In a way, it’s unfair to pillory UC Berkeley, considering that they actually have a process for dealing with research misconduct and at least responded to my complaint. Compare that to the publishers, who neither have a process nor responded. Nevertheless, I expect more from a renowned research institution like UC Berkeley, so I still believe I’m right to publish our correspondence.

zwischenzugs.com

I used private and public LLMs to answer an undergraduate essay question I spent a week working on nearly 30 years ago, in an effort to see how the experience would have changed in that time. There were two rules:

• No peeking at the original essay, and 
• No reading any of the suggested material, except to find references.

The experience turned out to be radically different with AI assistance in some ways, and similar in others.

If you’re not interested in my life story and the gory detail, skip to the end for what I learned.

A thread of threads.

It’s been an interesting year. My writing primarily focused on institutional capture in higher ed. Put simply, DEI.

Now more than ever, the issue is front and center.

So consider this both a highlight reel and list of (self) recommended pieces.

— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) December 30, 2023

Aaron Brown:

The philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” but also, less famously, “History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.”

I was thinking of both quotes as I read a recent paper comparing the wildly different causes given for the Great Depression between college American history and economics textbooks (Jeremy Horpedahl, Phillip Magness, and Marcus Witcher, “Teaching the Causes of Great Depression to College Students: Evidence from History, Economics, and Economic History Textbooks,” Journal of Economics and Finance Education).

By Mike Damiano

Just before winter break, four prominent Harvard faculty members met for a private dinner with two of the university’s most powerful leaders.

Landing the dinner meeting was something of a coup for the faculty members who are co-leaders of a campaign, launched last spring, to reverse what they see as a rising culture of self-censorship, decreasing tolerance for dissenting views, and a tendency for the university to take official positions on the issues of the day.

When it was launched in March, the campaign might have seemed quixotic, even contrarian. But in the midst of campus tumult in recent months with bitter debates over antisemitism, pro-Palestinian speech, and the future of the school’s president, Claudine Gay, their dinner engagement with Tracy Palandjian and Paul Finnegan, members of Harvard’s insular governing board known as the Corporation, was a sign that their views have taken on new relevance. It was a marker that such efforts are being discussed at the highest levels of academia as possible guidelines that schools could adopt.During the Dec. 19 dinner at Bar Enza in The Charles Hotel, the four faculty members — Jeffrey Flier, a former dean of Harvard Medical School; Steven Pinker, a psychology professor; Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor; and Flynn Cratty, associate director of a Harvard research program — made the case for their platform.

Peter Jamison writing in the Bezos Washington Post

When Melanie Elsey stepped up to the lectern at the Ohio Statehouse in April, it looked like a triumphant season for home-schoolers.

Lawmakers would soon roll back what little oversight the state exercised over its booming population of home educators. Now they were discussing what should have been an equally welcome policy. As part of an expansive school-choice bill, Republican legislators wanted to offer home-schoolers thousands of dollars in taxpayer funding each year.

Benjamin Weingarten:

Why would former President Barack Obama spend his time and political capital defending a protector of genocidal Jew-haters — “depending on the context” — later exposed to be a serial plagiarist?

That became a live question with Jewish Insider’s revelation Obama had “privately lobbied” for Harvard President Claudine Gay to keep her job amid calls for her head following the mealymouthed and morally bankrupt testimony she delivered before Congress — testimony illustrating exactly why Jew-hatred had erupted and been allowed to fester on campuses following Hamas’ barbaric Oct. 7 attack.

She showed that Harvard, like its elite peers, had become a “safe space” for one group above all others — Hamasniks and their bigoted intersectional allies — putting Jewish students under threat of not only harassment but bodily harm in the name of an absolute commitment to free speech afforded to virtually no one else on the heavily censorious campus.

In the New York Post, I explain why Obama interceded on Gay’s behalf to defend an indefensible presidency.

As I wite in part:

D Breunig:

Last February, curious about how LLMs might comply with privacy regulations like CCPA and GDPR when it comes to their training data sets, I filed a CCPA request with OpenAI. Over 101 days, we went back and forth. They never really settled the original request, but the exchange illuminated their approach to privacy and training data (or lack thereof) and raised more questions than answers.

Below is the complete thread. I’ve redacted the names of OpenAI’s support staff.

Joy Mayer:

We’ve worked with partner newsrooms to create and refine a tool for journalists — a checklist designed to make room in the editing process for journalists to be intentional about:

• examining how their story might be perceived by people with different values and experiences
• identifying what they are communicating to their audience intentionally or unintentionally about how they see an issue
• considering including enhanced transparency about their goals and process

What this guide is not

The goal of the checklist is NOT to make all content palatable to all people. That’s not possible or desirable. Some people will not find your coverage fair no matter what you do. And some are seeking confirmation bias to such an extent that anything that does not confirm THEIR worldview feels biased, not neutral.

Remarkable….

Matthew Hennessey:

The lockdowns and lockouts of 2020 dealt a reputational blow to the education blob—that quasipublic syndicate of teachers unions, government bureaucracies, brand-name credentialing institutions and their media allies whose mission is to keep taxpayer money flowing to public schools. Most of that money is linked to students, many of whom left during the plague year and haven’t returned. Now the crisis is over and the blob wants its monopoly back.

The pandemic scrambled Americans’ attitudes toward education. With entire families stuck at home, parents got a chance to examine in detail what their kids were doing all day. Many didn’t like what they saw. Wasted time, woke-infused curricula and poor instruction convinced these parents they could do better. They decided they liked the freedom and convenience of home schooling. It worked for them and for their kids. They kept at it after the lockdowns ended.

Somebody somewhere has decided this experiment in liberty has gone on long enough. An Oct. 31 piece in the Washington Post sounded the alarm about the stubborn popularity of “a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe.” The education blob is a closed shop. Teachers and the unions that represent them are married to the idea that only properly trained professionals can handle a classroom. It’s a cult of expertise. Pedagogical science isn’t for amateurs, never mind that the idea of mass public education is no more than 200 years old. Also never mind that most credentialed teachers aren’t subject-matter experts.

WISCONSIN SCHOOL SPENDING

NATIONAL
19th adjusted for cost of living, +0
23rd unadjusted, +0

I missed the new rankings in October, but so did everyone. These are for the 2020-2021 school year.

HISTORY
2016: 19th
2017: 20th
2018: 20th
2019: 17th
2020: 19th
2021: 19th pic.twitter.com/Ii6vcooKSw

— Quinton Klabon (@GhaleonQ) December 30, 2023

QUESTION NO ONE SEEMS TO BE ASKING in the news that #SBF won’t be tried on the campaign finance charges (thus protecting many US politicians’ behavior from discovery): why did Bahamas not agree to waive the rule of specialty to permit trial on the campaign finance violations?🤔 https://t.co/XnA2MLezPd

— Caitlin Long 🔑⚡️🟠 (@CaitlinLong_) December 30, 2023

“Equal Protection” and the US Constitution.

The last place DEI will be cut is in the public education system. It’s a cash cow for every progressive trend that comes along. Instead of cutting waste when money gets tight, they simply take more from the taxpayers. We need legislators to take the necessary steps to defund DEI. https://t.co/I0HD1gsmKq

— Beanie (@Beanie0597) December 29, 2023

Daniel Jeffries:

If you want to understand why the Times case has a near zero probability of winning, then read this thread. This fellow does a nice write up and he seems sincere in his belief that what he is saying about the suit is accurate and correct when in fact it’s basically just a lot of wishful thinking, misunderstanding of copyright law and red herrings. He’s really hopeful that this case will cement the media’s right to charge machines to learn, something not even remotely covered by copyright law. The text does not say what he thinks it says and it does not even come close to a “slam dunk.” In fact, the opposite.

Thelma Bryant:

I’m proud to be the president of an organization that represents 146,000 psychologists while advancing psychology’s impact and horizons in the global arena. If we are going to be ethical in our approach to global psychology, we must address context. This means paying attention to history, politics, power, and culture.

Too many of our training programs are exclusively centered on the United States and either never mention other nations or overgeneralize findings from the United States to other nations. Let’s broaden psychology’s horizons and expand the potential impact of our research, practice, teaching, and applied interventions by engaging with international psychology and embracing decolonial psychology.

Highlighting decolonial psychology is one of my presidential initiatives. Decolonial psychology asks us to consider not just the life history of the individual we are working with but also the history of the various collective groups they are a part of, whether that is their nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, or disability. The past informs the present. It is necessary to acknowledge and honor the past if we are to truly see people as whole beings.

Decolonial psychology also calls for an appreciation for indigenous science. We need cultural humility and recognition that the traditional field of psychology is not the only source of knowledge or healing. We need to study, assess, and appropriately apply wisdom and practices that emerge from Indigenous cultures.

— Petition at change.org:

Dear APA Board of Directors, President Thema Bryant’s recent article on Decolonization as well as her other statements and responses to concerned members along with APA’s refusal to address the Anti-Zionism/Antisemitism rampant in Division 39 has made membership in APA and Division 39 untenable for many psychologists who are leaving the organization in droves. The rhetoric Dr. Bryant employs represents an ideology that promotes dichotomous thinking and undermines the academic standards, history, research and science of the profession of psychology. The evolution of a discipline needs to build and expand on the great work of its pioneers and not demonize its history by imposing a myopic narrative which will be remembered as the McCarthyism of academia.

George Korda:

Education isn’t the societal, or even political, force it’s cracked up to be, and anyone who says differently is selling something. American education is instead captive to ever-mushrooming political, educational and societal agendas.

If learning were a priority, public education wouldn’t find itself with just 36% of Americans saying they’re satisfied with the system, tying a record low, according to Gallup. Education is frequently cited as the country’s most important issue because (pardon the cliché), children are our future. Candidates for public office are expected to present education platforms. Education frequently ranks high on lists of voter concerns.

However, based on dismal-for-decades analyses and assessments of American and Tennessee educational progress, all the talk, platforms and polls aren’t getting us much of anywhere. If that weren’t true, educational achievement wouldn’t be at the same mediocre levels at which it’s been for many years, and Knox County and the nation would be well beyond education’s continuing achievement doldrums.

Wall Street Journal:

This has been the year for school choice—from vouchers, to homeschooling, to pod schools with parents who use education savings accounts. The winners include charter schools, as union-run K-12 schools lost hundreds of thousands of students during Covid-19 who haven’t returned.

Yes they do. The trend holds for states of all sizes and political persuasions. From 2019-2023, charter enrollment grew in 40 of the 42 states analyzed, while traditional schools lost students in 40 states. Charter attendees surged nearly 20% in Texas (67,148 students), 19% in North Carolina (22,308), and 10% in Pennsylvania (15,353). District enrollment fell 0.83% in Texas and nearly 3% in North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Part of the story is that states are working to improve charter offerings. The report says Indiana raised its per-student charter grant to $1,400 from $1,250, while allocating $25 million to a capital fund to help schools with facility costs. Enrollment in Indiana charters is up 9% over four years, versus down 2% for traditional schools. Legislative changes in New Mexico and Idaho come in for kudos as well.

The report flags evidence in New Jersey that growing demand for charters might be eroding political resistance to school choice in a state where public unions have traditionally all but run the government in Trenton.

Corrinne Hess:

Since high school, Taylor Kolls wanted to be a dairy farmer. But that dream was put on hold for about 15 years as life happened.  

Kolls, 34, joined the Marines after high school. Since then, he has spent time working various white-collar jobs.  

“Getting into farming was so expensive that I kind of just put it to the wayside and tried to figure out a different career path,” Kolls said. “Finally, I said, ‘I’m going after what I have a passion for.'”  

Kolls started working every other weekend at a farm in Pierce County. It was there he learned about the Farm and Industry Short Course at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.  

The 16-week program started in October.

Wall Street Journal:

What if you could create public schools that are racially and economically diverse with 90% of children reading at grade level? That’s the profile of a handful of selective-enrollment schools in Chicago that have been a success for many parents. Instead of replicating the model, the Chicago Public School system (CPS) wants to end it.

The Chicago school board last week passed a resolution that endorses phasing out selective enrollment. The purpose would be to “transition away” from test-based enrollment policies “that further stratification and inequity in CPS and drive student enrollment away from neighborhood schools,” the board said. That would cover Chicago’s 11 selective high schools that rank academically among the best in the state and nationwide.

The schools are a beacon for children from all neighborhoods, and admission is weighted to allocate spots among different income groups. The idea is to bring in high achievers from all backgrounds, ensuring that children from difficult circumstances can thrive. At Jones College Prep High School, 91% of students read at grade level. At Northside College Prep, 92% do, according to Wirepoints and the Illinois State Board of Education.

But Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson sees the success of black and Hispanic students at selective-enrollment schools as a threat. “When those students succeed at a selective enrollment, particularly black students,” Mr. Johnson said in a 2018 conversation, “what ends up happening is all other black students who don’t meet those same standards get shamed. . . . ‘See, so and so made it out, what’s your problem?’”

Douglas Belkin and Arian Campo-Flores:

From the time she began carving her path through the most elite private schools in the nation to the presidency of Harvard University, Claudine Gay earned plaudits and promotions.

She also amassed detractors who were skeptical of her work and qualifications and outraged by what they saw as the political decisions she made as an increasingly powerful administrator.

Those two forces collided in spectacular fashion this month after plagiarism allegations that began circulating online about a year ago spilled into public view due to the efforts of conservative activists including Christopher Rufo, who has said he wants to damage Gay’s career. The allegations have sparked criticism of Harvard over the process that led to Gay’s selection as president, the first Black person to hold the post, and the university’s transparency around how it responded to the plagiarism claims.

Harvard said it first learned about allegations of plagiarism against Gay in October and that the Harvard Corporation, the school’s 12-member governing board, engaged three political scientists from outside the university to carry out their own investigation. The school has declined to identify them or release their review.

DEI in hiring is particularly insidious because it creates an end-to-end problem: if you hire someone incompetent based on race, you cannot easily fire that person, because of the same racial calculation. When you put identity over competence, your institution is compromised.

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 29, 2023

While looking at Gay's important 2001 paper, I became skeptical of the whole research approach.

I am not a political scientist, and it is possible that I am mistaken. If I am not mistaken, it is such an obviously flawed method, that I don't understand why the paper could pass…

— Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen) December 28, 2023

Wall Street Journal:

Public unions once in power rarely have to prove their value to workers in order to keep power. A new law in Florida set out to change that, and it’s getting results.

Signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in May, the law requires public unions to prove that at least 60% of workers in a bargaining unit are dues-paying members, or face potential decertification. Unions also can no longer automatically deduct dues from paychecks. United Teachers of Dade (UTD)—the largest teachers union in the state and one of the largest in the country, representing school employees in Miami-Dade County—recently announced it fell short.

Another union, led by Miami teachers who are dissatisfied with UTD, is trying to get on the ballot too. The Miami-Dade Education Coalition (MDEC) needs a 10% showing of interest by mid-January to qualify. The new union’s pitch is that it will fight for teachers’ and students’ interests without the politicking and divided alliances of the UTD.

“We are going to be totally and completely nonpartisan,” says MDEC Vice President Renee Zayas, a district high school teacher and former UTD member. “We will not be endorsing candidates.” In 2022 UTD endorsements included Democrat Charlie Crist against Mr. DeSantis, and union president Karla Hernandez-Mats ran for Lieutenant Governor.

“We are going to be totally and completely nonpartisan,” says MDEC Vice President Renee Zayas, a district high school teacher and former UTD member. “We will not be endorsing candidates.” In 2022 UTD endorsements included Democrat Charlie Crist against Mr. DeSantis, and union president Karla Hernandez-Mats ran for Lieutenant Governor.

Ms. Zayas says she left UTD this summer because she was tired of its partisanship and felt that it wasn’t doing enough for teachers’ wages and practical classroom needs. “More and more I saw the lack of representation of our educational staff,” she says. Meanwhile, Ms. Hernandez-Mats made a base salary of more than $200,000 in 2021.

MDEC also won’t be affiliated with outside organizations, Ms. Zayas says. UTD teachers pay roughly $1,000 in dues each year, much of which goes toward national union outfits like the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.

Related:

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

“An emphasis on adult employment”.

Greg Conti:

It has quickly become a commonplace that American elite higher education is in a more perilous position than it has been in recent memory. Long-standing conservative discontent has crystallized as a result of recent events; multiple proposals targeting universities’ pocketbooks have been floated by lawmakers in the past weeks. Republican officials have made clear that they will no longer defer to private universities’ conventional autonomy from government scrutiny.

But what really is the peril that these elite universities confront? Unlike lesser-resourced institutions, they face no real prospect of financial catastrophe, even if they lose some big donors. Ivy League universities have effectively entered what social scientists call (referring to the post-working-class left) a “postmaterialist” phase: wealthy enough to prioritize all manner of values that are plausibly averse to their bottom line. Despite this recent rough patch, I would still put my money on Harvard outliving the United States of America by at least as long an interval as it preceded the nation’s founding. 

However much right-wing actors might wish to remake these institutions in their own image, that eventuality also has little chance of coming to fruition. For one thing, our legal and political system, with its solicitousness for “private” institutions, wouldn’t permit it. (Given the vital role they play in training the elite and the massive financial and legal privileges that universities like Yale and Harvard and Stanford receive, they aren’t well understood as “private” at all, but should be seen as public but nongovernmental institutions, or at least as existing between the public and private spheres, as the political theorist David Ciepley argues about corporations in general.) Accomplishing any such thing would anyway involve a sustained period of top-down revolutionary activity spurred by a cohesive central authority on the order of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries; but no one would mistake Mike Johnson for Thomas Cromwell.

“Universities are to Republicans what guns are to Democrats.”

Acknowledging a few exceptions among conservative commentators and public officials, we can still say that universities are to Republicans what guns are to Democrats: an issue they are certain is at the root of great evils, but about which they face a massive knowledge gap that hampers their ability to do anything effective, even within the limited space our legal order allows.

Rob Thomas:

But the seeds of Mattes’ crusade to expose wrongdoing in government were planted not in sunny Florida, but in wintry Madison.

As the new Bunker Crew/MSW Media podcast“Lawyers Guns and Money” chronicles, the Connecticut-born Mattes attended school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late ‘60s and joined the antiwar movement there. In the 1970s, while still a student radical, Mattes was elected to the Dane County Board and later the Madison City Council.

“We were in a bar, and my friend said, ‘One of us ought to run for county supervisor and throw these bums out,’” Mattes recounts on the first episode of the six-episode podcast, which is available on iTunes, Spotify and other podcast apps. “We flipped a coin and I lost, so I had to run. Somehow I won.”

While serving on the county board, Mattes said he conducted a yearlong investigation into nepotism in county hiring and spearheaded a change in hiring practices based on merit. “That was really the first time I ever used my research skills to make something happen in government.”

Mattes later became a city alderman, and he said there was talk about him running for mayor. Instead, he left politics in 1981 to attend law school in Florida.

Anna Bryson:

The Virginia Department of Education in February launched an academic recovery and coaching program to help students recover from the pandemic’s impact on learning and attendance. But Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration decided to scrap the program, and it is scheduled to end Dec. 31.

Some parents and school division leaders were dismayed to learn this month that the Engage Virginia program would cease halfway through the academic year, and more than 7,200 students will lose its services. An additional 2,000 students on the waitlist will not get the support their families sought.

The Youngkin administration says the one-time federal funding for the program has been exhausted and the program is wrapping up, but that school divisions could individually engage with the program by using their allocations from the governor’s ALL In VA plan.

People are also reading…

In his September announcement, Youngkin directed localities to develop their own state funded programs to combat issues such as learning loss and chronic absenteeism, through mechanisms such as intensive tutoring.

Aaron Brown:

The philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” but also, less famously, “History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.”

I was thinking of both quotes as I read a recent paper comparing the wildly different causes given for the Great Depression between college American history and economics textbooks (Jeremy Horpedahl, Phillip Magness, and Marcus Witcher, “Teaching the Causes of Great Depression to College Students: Evidence from History, Economics, and Economic History Textbooks,” Journal of Economics and Finance Education).

The Economist:

This is not just happening on the fringes. Our package this week also contains an essay by James Bennet, our Lexington columnist, a former editorial-page editor of the New York Times who was fired for publishing a piece by a Republican senator that sparked a newsroom revolt. He argues that the Times increasingly affirms its readers’ leftish bias even as it reassures them that it is independent. Unlike the right-wing media, the mainstream lot do not routinely peddle falsehoods or conspiracy theories. But their bias undermines their ability to put the record straight. They used to be like the best public broadcasters in other Western democracies, establishing common facts and setting the boundaries for debate; today, less so.

Why does this matter? Although most Americans do not regularly read a newspaper or watch cable news, elites matter in democracies. When different political camps exist in separate information universes, they tend to demonise each other. If you are told Joe Biden is in the grip of a cabal of antisemitic socialists, then voting for Mr Trump makes perfect sense. If Trump supporters are anti-democratic racists, why bother trying to win them over? As a result, the parties will find it even harder to reach the compromises that are essential for sustained good government. If the elites cannot see the world as it is, they will make bad decisions.

Tyler Durden:

A federal judge in Manhattan has ruled thatinvestigative journalism outfit Project Veritas should have to turn over documents detailing how the organization came into possession of the alleged diary of President Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley Biden.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres of the Southern District of New York ruled in favor of a special master’s recommendation thatProject Veritas should be made to turn over all documents in its possession that detail how it came into possession of the diary in the fall of 2020. Judge Torres ruled against claims by Project Veritas that it has journalistic non-disclosure privileges under the First Amendment and thus should not be made to turn over its records.

With Judge Torres’s ruling, federal prosecutors could soon take possession of more than 900 documents detailing how Project Veritas came into possession of the diary. Judge Torres ordered a government evidentiary filter team to sort out any documents not protected under attorney-client privilege and turn those documents over to government investigators by Jan. 5.

The legal battle over Ms. Biden’s alleged diary began in the fall of 2021, when federal agents carried out search warrants at the homes of several Project Veritas employees, including the group’s founder and then-CEO James O’Keefe. Project Veritas has asserted that federal investigators should be compelled to return records seized from the organization, arguing that the records seizure violated their First Amendment rights as a press organization.

Ronald J. Deibert, Gary Miller

However, hidden within this seemingly routine transaction lies one of the most extensive, yet lesser-known surveillance risks of our age: the technical vulnerabilities at the heart of the world’s mobile communications networks. Accompanying the complex arrangement of global networks, international roaming service providers, and financial agreements are surveillance actors who access and covertly manipulate decades-old protocols to extract your sensitive personal information from the mobile network. Human rights and national security risks abound. A new report by the Citizen Lab (a research center with which we are affiliated) details how it all works.

Telecommunications companies constantly exchange huge volumes of messages using a private global network to “signal” when users attempt to roam and use services on partner networks in virtually any country around the world. This private network, called the IP Exchange (IPX), was originally conceived to provide a single connection from one mobile network to other partner networks to facilitate the transport of signaling messages needed for ubiquitous international roaming. Because these signaling messages provide essential user authentication, registration, and service information, they also allow telecommunications companies to retrieve extraordinarily detailed information about a user, including whether a phone number is active, which services are available to them, to which network the phone is currently connected, and most importantly, where they are geolocated at any time relative to the multitude of cell towers to which they connect as they traverse a city.

While at one time this information was restricted to a relatively small club of mobile telecommunications companies, membership has since diversified to private companies selling geolocation surveillance services. Some of these entities gain access to these highly sensitive signaling protocols by buying entry into the club from country network operators seeking more profit—such as small Caribbean, Asia-Pacific, eastern European, and African-based telecommunications firms as revealed in a 2020 article by the Guardian. In other cases, telecommunications firms are compelled by their country’s government to integrate a vendor’s software system into country networks to become an element of their surveillance apparatus—allowing that vendor to access the location and communications of domestic users or those using other country networks connected to the IPX.

Via Tyler Cowen:

The problem for the board of Harvard is going to be the problem for most any elite institution – it is the sort of position that is used as a prize for status hierarchies among the folks who already have everything.

This means that concerns for the board are overwhelmingly going to personal brand management. And the constituency that matters will not be the public, Harvard grads, or even in the Harvard professorate. It will be the folks who might be able to snub millionaires and disinvite them from the finer things in life.

And once you get into such situations, be they left wing or right wing, you have a very hard time avoiding signaling spirals. After all, there are plenty of folks who want the social cachet of these positions and an effective cudgel to get it will always be to signify greater loyalty to “the cause” than the current incumbents. Which means that the board will be good at playing status games and terrified of enforcing standards in a way that might make them look bad.

David Bass:

It’s no secret that many North Carolinians rely on governmental assistance programs to make ends meet. But they often get caught in something called a “benefits cliff” that disincentivizes them from looking for more meaningful work and gaining independence.

Benefits cliffs occur when an individual, family, or household experiences a sudden, steep loss of government assistance as their income increases. This net loss perversely undermines the natural desire to earn more income because it takes a huge pay bump to overcome the cliff. The unintended consequences of a benefits cliff can be devastating—trapping individuals and families in a cycle of poverty.

Examples of this Catch-22 situation are far too common. Joyelle was a single mother of four who always paid her rent on time and made ends meet. But she was forced to flee an abusive relationship and live in public housing. Despite these challenges, she graduated from school and was offered a full-time job. Joyelle turned to shock when she soon realized that her new salary put her over the poverty line and she would lose her subsidized housing allowance—forcing her to pay nearly $1,000 a month in rent. After falling off this benefits cliff, Joyelle was forced to move but couldn’t afford to rent an apartment rent—even with her salary increase.

Michael Segal:

Even support for Hamas’s Islamic supremacist ideology didn’t surprise anyone reading student newspapers. The most significant change in students’ moral philosophy in recent years has been the popularity of an identity-based ideology known as “intersectionality” that demands special privileges for all groups deemed oppressed. Intersectionality creates a pecking order with blacks, Muslims, and LGBTs on top and whites, East Asians and Jews on the bottom. The result is a zany coalition in which gay-hating Islamic supremacists and gay intersectionality devotees go to the same demonstrations, and groups emerge that sound like parodies, such as Queers for Palestine.

Nutty ideas persist longer than they used to because ideas can dwell in the safe space of like-minded groups on the internet. But to have an effect on real life, ideas need to emerge from the shadows, and they may not survive. As Louis Brandeis observed, “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”

White supremacists found that out in 2017, when they emerged into the sunlight in Charlottesville, Va. If they expected support from leaders on the right, they were disappointed. Although Donald Trump’s critics accused him of not denouncing the supremacists forcefully enough, in fact Mr. Trump declared from the beginning that “they should be condemned totally.” The same is happening to the identity-based demonstrators who emerged into the sunlight after the Oct. 7 massacre. If they expected support from leaders on the left, they were disappointed. President Biden backed defeating Hamas, and so did Democratic Sen. John Fetterman. In a letter last week denouncing Israel for the way it is conducting its Gaza campaign, even Sen. Bernie Sanders acknowledged that the Jewish state “has a right to go to war against Hamas.”

Richard Hanania:

Amy: How are you going to sell that to minorities? Why are there no black oncology professors or whatever, cardiology professors or people in prestigious tech positions? Why are there so few blacks at Google, etc? What’s our explanation for that?

Richard: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. But let me ask you this. So why, so we do see group disparities that we don’t care about all the time. So we see Jews in positions of elite power and influence. How do we explain that? You know, we don’t talk about Jews….

Amy: Well, I’m not sure we can say people don’t care about that, but leaving that aside.

Richard: Well, people on the internet care. Yeah. Right. Well, if you bring it up, the answer is not, well, they just have higher IQs. That’s not the mainstream answer. The mainstream answer is, you are an anti-Semite, and you’re going to lead us to the Holocaust, basically, if you start talking about Jewish power. We have black over-representation in sports. People generally don’t care. So it seems like it’s socially constructed whether we care about these disparities or not. It doesn’t seem like it’s something in nature that we have to care about it. We could, or we could ignore it. 

And 90% of disparities, we just ignore. So I say we just ignore the rest and defame anyone who wants to start pushing for government… Because this is the median position of the American voter. They’re not into behavioral genetics, and they don’t like racial preferences. Seems to me people maybe are not, it’s not a philosophy seminar. People can hold things in their mind that are sort of contradictory, right? And so maybe you don’t need this sort of honesty that you would need in a philosophy seminar. Maybe you just need regular politics and raising the salience of some arguments and decreasing the salience of others.

From Hanania's interview of Amy Wax.

This is exactly what I've been saying for years: Policies of actual "colorblindness" will produce huge racial disparities in any cognitively-demanding area in society.

"Antiracism" is the only program that can remove racial disparities.… https://t.co/Rex2gg83tj

— i/o (@eyeslasho) December 28, 2023

This is absolutely astonishing 😳 Francis Collins admits the massive, unnecessary “collateral damage” from their botched covid public health response was due to an elitist beltway-centric myopic POV …oopsie! pic.twitter.com/ofXggcz5jB

— Erich Hartmann (@erichhartmann) December 28, 2023

I watched the full Francis Collins interview about masking, lockdowns, school closure, Great Barrington Declaration and what he got wrong, and frankly he is still not completely honest@DrJBhattacharya @MartinKulldorff
I break down the argumentshttps://t.co/gSBSkELWm0

— Vinay Prasad MD MPH (@VPrasadMDMPH) December 30, 2023

Commentary.

Jay Bhattacharya:

Having climbed the greasy pole of the federal bureaucracy himself, he was upset that outsiders, with expertise in epidemiolgy and public health that he lacked, might have access that he thought only other powerful government science bureaucrats should have. For the same reason, he resented Dr. Atlas — who opposed lockdown — having access to Trump. So he shut down the debate.

He got his lockdown. And the schools closed, small businesses shut down, unemployment soared, people skipped basic preventative care, and covid spread anyway, killing countless vulnerable people because the government focused on mass quarantine of the healthy, rather than focused protection of the vulnerable.

Waiting for an analysis of the long term costs of taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public Health “mandates”

Teachers in US on a deteriorating society where kids are out of control.

She is right: parenting is an issue, but so are schools and unsupervised internet.

Lack of adult authority at home AND school! 😳

PS. Gotta love how 36 is considered old! 😂pic.twitter.com/OMjoQf3X8K

— Katharine Birbalsingh (@Miss_Snuffy) December 28, 2023

Alex Tabarrok

The current Harvard disaster was clearly signaled by earlier events, most notably the 2019 firing of Dean Ronald Sullivan. Sullivan is a noted criminal defense attorney; he was the director of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia and he is the Director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School, he advised President Obama on criminal justice issues, he represented the family of Michael Brown. He and his wife were the first black Faculty Deans in the history of the college.

Controversy erupted, however, when Sullivan joined Harvey Weinstein’s legal defense team. Student protests ensued. The students argued that they couldn’t “feel safe” if a legal representative of a person accused of abusing women was also serving in a role of student support and mentorship. This is, of course, ridiculous. Defending an individual accused of murder does not imply that a criminal defense attorney condones the act of murder.

Harvard should have educated their students. Harvard should have emphasized the crucial role of criminal defense in American law and history. They should have noted that a cornerstone of the rule of law is the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial, irrespective of public opinion.

Harvard should have pointed proudly to John Adams, a Harvard alum, who defied popular opinion to defend hated British soldiers charged with murdering Americans at the Boston Massacre. (If you wish to take measure of the quality of our times it’s worth noting that Adams won the case and later became president—roughly equivalent to an attorney for accused al-Qaeda terrorists becoming President today.)

Frederick Hess:

The Biden administration has abolished the federal student-loan program, at least if a “student-loan program” is one in which students borrow money and then eventually repay it. What’s being erected in its stead is a scheme that’s rife with moral hazard, seemingly designed to inflate college costs, and best described as a “student-fraud program”—in which students borrow money, promise to repay it, and then … don’t.

Biden’s loan-forgiveness shenanigans leapt into public consciousness when he tried to farcically read the 2003 HEROES Act to allow him to shovel $500 billion in loan “forgiveness” to his highly educated base and stick taxpayers with the tab. When that bit of unconstitutional maneuvering was struck down by the Supreme Court this summer, many observers moved on—imagining that the issue was resolved.

Christopher Brunet:

She was granted tenure at Stanford in 2005 with just 4 peer-reviewed political science articles to her name: 1998 PolPsych, 2001 APSR, 2002 AJPS, 2004 APSR.

Her 2001 APSR paper, which was central to her already-meager tenure case, was debunked by Michael C. Herron, the Remsen 1943 Professor of Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth, and Kenneth W. Shotts, the David S. and Ann M. Barlow Professor of Political Economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business, in a paper presented at the 2002 conference of The Society for Political Methodology (PolMeth) after she would not share her data or code with them.

Proton:

Competition is part of the natural course of business, but dishonestly isn’t. And here’s where the problem lies. Claims such as “Switzerland also has warrantless surveillance”, are simply false and ignore the huge problems in other countries’ privacy laws. For example, the US Congress recently re-approved FISA Section 702, which enables the FBI to conduct 3.4 million warrantless searches per year.

History of Science and Technology Q&A (December 27, 2023) https://t.co/btijrSM8WB

— Stephen Wolfram (@stephen_wolfram) December 27, 2023

Abbey Machtig:

The Madison School Board is scheduled to hire a new superintendent by February or March. The board began interviewing candidates in closed meetings this month and will continue into January. The board is expected to announce two or three finalists and hold open interviews where the public can participate.

The new superintendent will eventually replace Lisa Kvistad, a longtime district educator who has been serving as interim superintendent since June. She was selected to replace Jenkins earlier this year.

This time around, the board is looking for a superintendent familiar with Madison who can “lead large-scale change” and has a track record of improving outcomes for students of color, according to a job profile drafted and approved in October.

School Board elections also will take place on April 2. Incumbents Maia Pearson and Savion Castro have announced their reelection campaigns. Board members serve in staggered, three-year terms.

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?

Tyler Cowen:

1. Harvard is by no means “wrecked.”  In 2023, as in every other single year, Harvard along with MIT had the best and most interesting job market papers in economics.  That isn’t about to change.  I see good evidence that Harvard remains excellent in many other fields as well.  Perhaps the humanities are in trouble there, I don’t know enough to speak to that.

2. There is still a lot else wrong about Harvard, especially at the level of undergraduate education and pressures for peer conformity. And academic pressures placed on faculty, and lack of freedom of speech, and inconsistent standards at the administrative level, depending on the particular issues at stake in a disciplinary case. On all those issues, Harvard gets poor marks, much poorer marks than my own George Mason University. That shouldn’t be the case for what is supposed to be “America’s best university.”

Romila Santra:

Oliver McGowan was 18 years old when he was hospitalized in England with recurrent seizures and pneumonia. He was autistic, and he and his parents had one specific request for the medical team: no antipsychotic medications. When he had taken them in the past, they made his seizures worse and had devastating effects on his mood. Despite the family’s vehement protests, doctors gave him an antipsychotic. A few days later, Oliver suffered a lethal neurological side effect. A week later, he was taken off life support. An inquest into his death found that the drug had led to the rapid deterioration.

After his death in 2016, his mother, Paula, launched a campaign to mandate training on intellectual disability and autism for health care workers. In 2022, the U.K. National Health Service listened. Now, all health care workers in the NHS must complete both an online module and a live interactive session covering communication and accommodations needed for this population. The U.S. needs to follow suit, starting with medical schools.

Federick Hess:

The surprise is that these students don’t have all that much work to do. Many are bored, and all that time on their hands may give them an appetite for mischief. Many are lonely. The surgeon general recently warned about an American “epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” particularly among those ages 15 to 24. In that age group, time spent in person with friends has plunged by 70 percent since 2003, down to an average of 40 minutes a day in 2020. College-age youth are spending five or six hours a day online, surfing videos, gaming, and scrolling social media. And few have jobs. In the 1980s, 40 percent of America’s college students worked full-time (35 hours or more); by 2020, that figure had fallen to one in ten. There’s also been a substantial decline in students working part-time. In 1995–96, 42 percent of undergrads held part-time jobs (34 hours or less). By 2018, that number was down to 30 percent.

The restlessness is less pervasive at regional institutions and community colleges, where students are far more likely to attend part-time, live at home, be older, and have kids or jobs. Among community-college students, nearly a third work more than 30 hours a week and 15 percent have two or more jobs. Students are far less likely to hang out in dorms or on a manicured quad and are more focused on transportation, work schedules, and child care. At these institutions, the vibe is more about getting down to business than gearing up for trouble: Busy students just don’t have as much leisure for performative rebellion. Tellingly, the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators’ report on “Advancing Racial Justice on Campus” quoted an official at one “commuter school” who fretted that, absent “formal outlets set up for consultation, support, or awareness of what advocacy can be,” busy students will “just go home at the end of the day.”

Greg Weiner:

The debate over antisemitism at elite universities has largely missed the point. The most important question isn’t how academic administrators respond to antisemitism but why the educations they provide seem to foster such hatred. For American Jews, the question cuts deeper: Given our traditional love of learning, do we care about the quality of education or only the prestige of the institutions providing it?

Former President Liz Magill can hardly be blamed for the failures of the University of Pennsylvania, an institution she led for barely a year. Neither can Claudine Gay of Harvard or Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institutes of Technology, whose tenures began in July and January, respectively. That lawmakers had to ask about students’ genocidal sympathies at all reveals that some of our most prestigious universities are abjectly failing to cultivate virtue or wisdom.

Menacing mobs on campus suggest an absence of what has, since Socrates, been recognized as the essential prerequisite for learning: a readiness to acknowledge one’s ignorance. Students once aspired to learn what they didn’t know. At some institutions, it now appears the purpose of education is to express views of which the putative learners are already certain.

Allysia Finley:

Corporation is an apt appellation for Harvard and other Ivy League schools, considering they operate more like for-profit businesses than educational institutions. Unlike businesses, however, they lack shareholders to hold them accountable. This makes them models of the left’s “stakeholder capitalism” paradigm.

The Harvard Corp. consists of 13 members, including the president. It is self-selecting—members elect new members—and boasts that it is “the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere.” Governing bodies of other Ivy League schools, including Yale and Columbia, are also referred to as corporations, which are structured to limit alumni influence in their affairs.

The Internal Revenue Service recognizes Harvard and most private colleges as nonprofits, meaning they don’t have to pay taxes. This exemption saves Ivy League schools hundreds of millions of dollars each year and has enabled them to grow their fiefs and endowments.

Columbia is New York City’s largest private landowner, with more than 320 properties, valued at nearly $4 billion. The school saves more than $182 million annually by not paying property tax. Harvard avoids some $50 million annually. Property tax exemptions allow colleges to offer low-cost housing to faculty and reduce the cost of building facilities to house new bureaucracies.

I wonder why the Biden Administration hasn’t sued the largest &/or most prestigious teachers college (i.e., Teachers College, Columbia University) for its deceptive and debunked Balanced Literacy curriculum, Units of Study?

It is, for all intents and purposes, singlehandedly…

— Marilyn Muller (@1in5advocacy) December 28, 2023

The last event in Educational Policy Studies at UW's 2022-2023 lecture series is coming up! Join the author of "The Culture Trap," Dr. Derron Wallace of @BrandeisU on Friday, January 26th at 11:00AM. Register for the talk here: https://t.co/8xKAY1ulFg pic.twitter.com/V2f05zuaUt

— IRIS NRC @ UW-Madison (@uw_iris) December 27, 2023

The Milwaukee Public Schools budget is over a BILlION dollars. $87M referendum was supported by voters in 2020. Fmr Board Pres, Bob Peterson was deposed in Oct 2023. Folaron v MPS. https://t.co/lufJzV8zB5 @ShaunGalNews @SamKraemerTV @AdamRifeReports @DanODonnellShow @DanielBice pic.twitter.com/B8mKFllVpR

— Debbie Kuether (@debkueth) December 27, 2023

Wall Street Journal:

The diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy on campus has proliferated in recent years, but there are signs it’s finally meeting resistance. The latest good news is from Wisconsin, where public universities will pare back some DEI programs and freeze them going forward. 

Under a deal shaped by Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the state approved $800 million in pay raises for university staff and for plans to build a new engineering building at the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison. In exchange, the university will freeze all DEI hiring, eliminate a third of DEI positions on campus, and create an endowed chair to teach “conservative political thought, classical economic theory or classical liberalism” at UW Madison. At least now there will be one conservative

Jeffrey Flier:

The Hamas terror attacks of October 7 and the ensuing war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza caused disruptions on many university campuses that moved concerns about campus speech from a limited constituency to front page news, exposing it to new audiences. The grilling of the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn by a Congressional committee on the topic of campus antisemitism generated intense coverage, and a near unanimous conclusion—by actors across the political spectrum—that the presidents did a poor job of explaining campus turmoil, how antisemitic speech and conduct were handled under prevailing campus policies, and what they might have done differently to protect their students. Public uproar, the resignation of both the UPenn president and board chair and a narrow escape from that fate by the Harvard president ensure that campus speech won’t soon recede back into the shadows. But the ability to create a campus environment in which students can express their views free of harassment depends on understanding the role of free speech and academic freedom in higher education.

Bradley A. Smith and Eric Wang:

A federal judge on Monday will consider a Minnesota law that surreptitiously attempts to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s holding in Citizens United v. FEC (2010) that corporations have a constitutional right to speak independently about politics.

While Citizens United and other judicial decisions have loosened restrictions on corporate political speech, courts have upheld longstanding bans on political speech by foreign nationals. Therefore, Minnesota and other opponents of corporate speech now seek to redefine large swaths of American businesses as “foreign influenced” to stop their political engagement. Seattle, St. Petersburg, Fla., and Alaska have joined Minnesota in passing laws banning political speech by so-called foreign-influenced corporations. Lawmakers in numerous other states and Congress have introduced similar bills.

The Minnesota law is typical of these measures, making Monday’s hearing an early test of their constitutionality. The law defines “foreign-influenced corporations” as including any U.S. company in which a single foreign investor has “direct or indirect beneficial ownership” of as little as 1% of total equity. This status also may be triggered if hundreds or even thousands of foreign stockholders collectively own 5% of shares. It doesn’t require these stockholders to be of the same nationality or to collude to influence so much as the corporate cafeteria menu.

Daniel Buck

In 2023 alone, more than half a dozen states passed universal school-choice bills with even more expanding on former laws. School-choicelegislation is going gangbusters. But is school choice itself growing?

How much competition do public schools actually face? How many alternative-schooling options exist in each locality? We’d hardly consider it a win if a child were given their choice of meals, but the only options were Wendy’s or McDonalds.

A new report from my Fordham Institute colleagues seeks to answer this question by comparing the total enrollment in the nation’s 125 largest districts to enrollment at nearby charter, private, and homeschools. …