Daniel Buck:

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

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

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

Steve McGuire:

In this New Yorker piece on Students for Justice in Palestine, a member of the national steering committee says their model is to attract ignorant kids and indoctrinate them into Marxism (newyorker.com/news/annals-of…):

Micaiah Bilger:

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

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

Meanwhile, its student enrollment numbers remained relatively stagnant.

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

Micaiah Bilger:

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

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

Meanwhile, its student enrollment numbers remained relatively stagnant.

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

I’m less bothered by the standard liberal criticisms here than by the fact that @WNYCStudios and a @Yale lecturer appear to have never considered or taken seriously, nor even know about, the standard conservative rejoinders. https://t.co/5ITOZqMFvu

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) December 16, 2023

Harm Venhuizen:

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

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

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

Claudia Aohara

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

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

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

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

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

Haha Khalil:

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

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

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

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

Alex Nowrastesh:

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

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

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

Wall Street Journal:

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

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

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

Paul Mirengoff:

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

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

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

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

It feels that way for good reason.

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

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

——-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Podcast:

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

When I first started tutoring, I saw only BL casualties. I had thought that when local schools and districts switched to SOR, my tutoring practice would dry up. But that's not what happened. 1/x https://t.co/FyoaUNsmRR

— Tisha Rajendra (@TishaRajendra) December 15, 2023

Richard Hanania

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just a reminder in the UW-Legislature DEI dispute: UW officials have already laid out plans (& have implemented @ one campus) a re-branding of DEI as “inclusive excellence,” with DEI positions being moved around (possibly to avoid scrutiny). Not much reporting on this, but… pic.twitter.com/hLxVpxr9J2

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) December 15, 2023

related:

This might be the weirdest and creepiest bit of propaganda I have seen since 2020. pic.twitter.com/Zv0Kn0Aly2

— Aaron Kheriaty (@AaronKheriatyMD) December 16, 2023

404 Media

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

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

WILL:

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

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

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

Aside from whatever the benefits or drawbacks of such courses are, it doesn’t take much googling to realize they are common in left-dominated spaces and that the #MSM has had no serious interest in covering them. https://t.co/1jU5nmd7hA

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) December 16, 2023

Rick Hess:

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

Jane Roberts:

Until a new program is approved, students in the major cannot take the state licensure exam.

David Bernstein:

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

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

Joseph Walker:

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher Brunet:

Dr. Dybvig told Karlstack:

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

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

Anti-White Racism @ Middleton, Wis.
School District starts "transformative journey" with whites-only groups to explore your "privilege, whiteness, & racism."
Segregating based on race & claiming someone is racist because of their race is illegal & unconstitutional @VickiMcKenna pic.twitter.com/KG8LfazPt6

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) December 15, 2023

David Blaska:

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

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

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

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

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

We’re still paying for MTI’s self interest

—-

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

——

Meanwhile, decades go by….

——

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Eugene Volokh

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

Christopher Rufo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

hxstem

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

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

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

Corrinne Hess:

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

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

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

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

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

Matt Taibbi:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cathy Gellis:

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

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

Nick Kostov:

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

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

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

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

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

James Bennet:

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

The endowments at Penn, Harvard & MIT have a combined $95B+ in assets – yet only pay a 1.4% tax rate on net investment income.

Then they use these funds to push DEI and woke insanity.

My bill would tax the largest endowments at 35% – it's going to the Senate floor right now. pic.twitter.com/NtSuUtzluL

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) December 14, 2023

Jill Barshay:

School finance expert predicts teacher layoffs ahead in 2024

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

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

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

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

Expect more of this given declining student enrollment nationwide and massive increases in teaching positions at schools. https://t.co/kbOe0iFoqP https://t.co/Niz29knoVK

— Jill Barshay (@jillbarshay) December 14, 2023

Teacher of 17 years in Maine has tendered her resignation, effective immediately.

Read the reasons why…

We at @DefendingEd hear from educators all the time who share these same concerns and want their districts exposed. pic.twitter.com/WJGhS5iJcs

— Erika Sanzi (@esanzi) December 14, 2023

Scott Girard:

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

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

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

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

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

Kristen Graham:

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

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

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

Wall Street Journal:

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

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

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

Cara Lombardo:

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

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

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

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

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

John Seery

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

WGTD and Deneen Smith:

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

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

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

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

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

Corrinne Hess:

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

Only 30.5% of Elkhorn Area Middle School 6th graders meet state standards for English and Language Arts, which is well below the statewide average. pic.twitter.com/OQti7zD92G

— Joey (@burtgurney) December 14, 2023

Elkhorn Schools’ student test results.

Nate Silver:

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

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

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

Scott Bok:

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

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

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

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

Philip Ball

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

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

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

Chris Dawson:

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

Christopher Rufo:

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

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

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

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

Q: Why are you so focused on the Chicago Teachers Union?

A: No one spends more on Chicago politics. It’s the new machine. pic.twitter.com/Uyw54sp0tq

— Austin Berg (@Austin__Berg) December 13, 2023

more.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

David Blaska:

Madison school board members Savion Castro and Maia Pearson are seeking re-election in April. They are thoroughly Woke. Get 100 signatures to get on the ballot. Nomination papers are not due until January 3. The forms candidates need can be found here even though, strangely, the city’s website has not been updated!

Blaska’s Bottom Line: DEI is the hill upon which Tony Evers and his Democrats have chosen to fight. The shame and guilt taught from UW-Parkside to UW-Superior is injected directly into our kids’ classrooms and, increasingly, into workplace sensitivity training — public and private sector. It sharpens the oppressor/victim dichotomy now weaponized against Jews and Asians. It stifles free inquiry.

—-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

The statement of the Harvard fellows on President Gay makes an absolute mockery of this document on Harvard's website addressed to students: "When you write papers in college, your work is held to the same standards of citation as the work of your professors." pic.twitter.com/dfOQJgvWNY

— Jeryl Bier (@JerylBier) December 12, 2023

Adam Andrzejewski:

BACKGROUND: Stanford University was the biggest recipient of federal funds over the past five years. It counted more than $7 billion. It received more than any of the Ivies, and Northwestern. Only Dartmouth received less than $1 billion in federal contracts and grants.

Most of the funds – roughly $29 billion (88-percent) versus $4 billion (12-percent) – were provided by the feds via grants, not contracts. Grants are giveaways and, typically, the recipient university owns the work product — meaning they profit from the resulting intellectual property. Contracts are for work done on behalf of a federal agency – taxpayers own the output.

Open the books:

KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

John Robb:

Over the last decade, we’ve seen an uptick in the number of hate crimes (regardless of the target) in the US that involve defacement, posted fliers, videos of confrontations, or phoned-in threats (bombs, etc.).

However, if you take the time to watch for the resolution of the incident, you’ll find that almost ALL of these incidents have been faked to cause social disruption or elicit empathy for the victim.

Here’s a good example.

Matt Taibbi:

Last March, right as Michael Shellenberger and I were preparing to testify in Washington about digital censorship, former NGO worker-turned-Racket-contributor Andrew Lowenthal found Twitter Files emails pertaining to something called the Virality Project. An analog to the earlier “Election Integrity Partnership” content-moderation program that worked with thr Department of Homeland Security and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, the Virality Project’s significance leaped off the page. 

“As we continue our work, we would appreciate understanding what content would be most helpful,” Stanford’s Jack Cable wrote to potential platform partners like Twitter on March 17, 2021. He asked if platforms were interested in “true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy,” including“true stories of vaccine side effects” or “recent celebrity deaths after vaccine.”

Twitter’s Joseph Guay wrote Cable the next day, March 18th, saying it would be “most interesting for us” to address exactly the sort of true-but-troublesome content Cable described. 

Guay listed “unsubstantiated reports of pregnancy-related injury or death,” as well as “concerns that COVID-19 vaccines are ‘experimental,’” the “misuse of official reporting tools and statistical data,” along with “misleading theories regarding escape variants,” and “campaigns against vaccine passports, inciting fear about mandatory immunizations”:

Grade inflation has turned grades into participation trophies pic.twitter.com/YzpxFqnRlZ

— Daniel Buck (@MrDanielBuck) December 12, 2023

Noah Smith:

You probably thought this was going to be a post about the controversy over the university presidents who recently gave disastrous Congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus, and the big donors who have been trying to get them fired. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but it’s not really about that — or at least, only tangentially. I will admit that the fracas over antisemitism is what made me think of this topic, but the problem of elite university donations is something that has been rattling around in my head for a while. 

Decades, actually. I went to an elite college (Stanford), and we were always being reminded of how important donations were to the institution. Gifts from alumni, foundations, and various other individuals were what fed the university endowment, and returns on that endowment were a huge source of cash. In 2019, Harvard’s CFO claimed that 45% of that school’s annual revenue could be attributed to current or past donations. A look at the national statistics shows that Harvard is not that much an outlier; among nonprofit 4-year universities, about a third of revenue comes from gifts or endowment returns.

KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

Christopher Peak:

“The more research I do, the more I realize it’s problematic,” Kelley said. “The assessment itself is faulty. And my son’s story is proof of that.”

(Kelley requested that her son not be identified so she could candidly discuss his academic performance and medical history while maintaining his privacy.)

For six years, Kelley has been fighting to get her son, now 13, a proper education in how to read. And she has tried to convince the district to drop the test that missed his reading difficulties. 

This spring, after years of defending the BAS, San Francisco Unified finally conceded the test is too frequently inaccurate. It’s joining other schools around the country, including Fort Worth (Texas), Baltimore County (Maryland) and Nashua (New Hampshire) in dropping the BAS as their district-wide assessment. 

At a March school board meeting, San Francisco’s top administrators presented internal data showing the test did a poor job predicting how kindergarteners and first graders eventually scored on the state’s standardized test. Superintendent Matt Wayne said he’s looking for a replacement — one that “ensures that children are literate.”

Heather Mac Donald:

It was those fantastically counterfactual assertions of loyalty to academic freedom that should have doomed Magill and the other two presidents. On any common understanding of truthfulness, their claims to protect “objectionable” views were flagrantly contrary to the facts. Having been exposed as hypocrites, dissemblers, and enforcers of politically correct thinking, they should all be fired as unfit to lead institutions ostensibly dedicated to the pursuit of truth and the transmission of knowledge.

Ironically, however, it was their one correct stance during the entire hearing debacle that put them in peril. However woodenly they asserted their alleged reason for not shutting down the pro-Hamas demonstrations, that reason should have been controlling. Speech shouldbe protected unless it crosses the line into direct threats to individuals or incitement to imminent violence. Student parroting of Islamist slogans does not meet those tests. Allowing a central authority to ban speech that it declares injurious to the common good is a license for precisely the abuse of power that has been the norm throughout human history, a norm that the Founders were so insistent on overturning. Moreover, it has been in the name of creating what Magill called a “safe, secure, and supportive” campus “climate” that universities have suppressed unwelcome facts and unpopular speakers.

Of course, even the presidents’ explanation for why they tolerate the pro-Hamas demonstrations is likely a lie. The real reason for their equivocation is fear of the campus Left—or, in the case of the diversity bureaucrats who often took the lead in responding to the terror attacks—agreement with the campus Left that anti-Israel terrorism is merely a matter of Palestinian self-defense.

Niall Ferguson:

In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published La trahison des clercs—“The Treason of the Intellectuals”—which condemned the descent of European intellectuals into extreme nationalism and racism. By that point, although Benito Mussolini had been in power in Italy for five years, Adolf Hitler was still six years away from power in Germany and 13 years away from victory over France. But already Benda could see the pernicious role that many European academics were playing in politics. 

Those who were meant to pursue the life of the mind, he wrote, had ushered in “the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.” And those hatreds were already moving from the realm of the ideas into the realm of violence—with results that would be catastrophic for all of Europe.

A century later, American academia has gone in the opposite political direction—leftward instead of rightward—but has ended up in much the same place. The question is whether we—unlike the Germans—can do something about it.

For nearly ten years, rather like Benda, I have marveled at the treason of my fellow intellectuals. I have also witnessed the willingness of trustees, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of “woke” progressives, adherents of “critical race theory,” and apologists for Islamist extremism. 

Throughout that period, friends assured me that I was exaggerating. Who could possibly object to more diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus? In any case, weren’t American universities always left-leaning? Were my concerns perhaps just another sign that I was the kind of conservative who had no real future in the academy?

Daniel Nuccio

Baker-Bell did not respond to an email from The College Fix inquiring whether she believes it is ever appropriate for professors to insist students use standard English or if she believes doing so is always an inherent act of bigotry.

At the workshop, which was co-sponsored by NIU’s English Graduate Student Association, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Faculty Academy on Cultural Competence and Equity, Baker-Bell spent roughly 30 minutes lecturing about the historical roots of black language in slavery, made the argument that black English syntactically qualifies as its own language, and discussed different pedagogical approaches to black English speakers, prior to distributing the workbook.

The first half of the workbook provided participants with multiple exercises to give them the “opportunity to think through how [they] might be complicit in the reproduction of anti-Black racism and anti-Black linguistic racism through curricula, language instruction, pedagogies, practices, and language policies,” as well as how they can “move toward an antiracist approach to language pedagogy.”

Wall Street Journal:

Texas is a rare GOP-led state with no school-choice programs, but Gov. Greg Abbott has made establishing one a top priority. This autumn he called legislators back to Austin to pass a universal education savings account (ESA) bill. Each student would be eligible for $10,500 annually, which parents could spend on private school tuition and other education expenses.

Thirteen states including Florida, Arizona and Iowa boast broad ESA programs. But the teachers unions are trying to contain their spread and mounted a firewall in Texas. Melting under union heat, 21 House Republicans last month joined Democrats in stripping ESAs from an education-funding bill that also included some $7 billion in new money for union-run public schools.

Unions falsely claimed that public schools, especially in rural areas, would be harmed by the bill even though they would have received more state funding. The ESAs might encourage more education alternatives such as learning pods in rural areas, requiring the unions to compete for students.

Adam Andrzejewski

The auditors at OpenTheBooks.com, a nonprofit government-spending watchdog which I direct, examined 10 universities—the Ivy League, plus Stanford and Northwestern. We found that during a five-year period from 2018-22 these wealthy universities collected $45 billion in taxpayer subsidies, special tax treatment, and federal payments. In fact, these universities collected a stunning $33 billion in federal contracts and grants. It therefore seems these schools are more federal contractors than educators—with federal payments exceeding undergraduate student tuition.

Additionally, the universities we surveyed profit handsomely from “nonprofit” tax breaks amounting to a benefit of roughly $12 billion. Wealthy universities pay only a 1.4% “excessive endowments” tax on their gains whereas wealthy individuals pay up to 23.4% on their capital gains.

The University of Pennsylvania, whose then-president (she resigned on Saturday), Liz Magill, seemed to smirk at the idea of being questioned by Congress, collected $3.7 billion in U.S. government grants and contracts, mostly for research, between 2018 and 2022. Over the same five-year period, Penn’s endowment ballooned to $21 billion from $13.4 billion.

by Rahem D Hamid, Nia L Orakwue, and Elias J. Schisgall

arvard President Claudine Gay is facing allegations of plagiarism after a report in the Washington Free Beacon on Monday and a Sunday post on Substack claimed she plagiarized portions of four academic works over 24 years, including her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard.

The allegations come at a uniquely perilous time for Gay, who has been called on to resign by alumni, donors, and members of Congress following her controversial remarks at a congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses last Tuesday.

Though The Crimson reported early Tuesday morning that the Harvard Corporation, Harvard’s highest governing body, will express confidence in Gay’s leadership and not remove her, the allegations of plagiarism represent yet another scandal for an increasingly weary president just reaching the end of her first semester.

In a statement to affiliates Tuesday, members of the Harvard Corporation reaffirmed their support for Gay’s leadership. Still, they addressed concernsraised regarding Gay’s scholarship, writing that the “University became aware in late October of allegations regarding three articles.”

“At President Gay’s request, the Fellows promptly initiated an independent review by distinguished political scientists and conducted a review of her published work,” they wrote.

Miles J. Herszenhorn and Claire Yuan:

The Harvard Corporation expressed concerns about allegations of plagiarism in University President Claudine Gay’s academic work Tuesday morning, even as the board declared its unanimous support for Harvard’s embattled president, providing Gay with a path forward to remain in office.

“As members of the Harvard Corporation, we today reaffirm our support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University,” the board wrote in a University-wide statement on Tuesday. “In this tumultuous and difficult time, we unanimously stand in support of President Gay.”

The Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — finally broke its silence one week after Gay’s controversial congressional testimony, giving Gay some immediate job security while raising new questions about the integrity of her scholarly work and bringing into doubt whether her tenure will be safe in the long term.

KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

Why Did Harvard University Go After One of Its Best Black Professors?

I rarely get angry, but I am angry 😡 right now about the racial double standards that are TEMPORARILY giving #ClaudineGay an opportunity to resign. White progressives created her and white progressives are protecting her. The rest of us have had to work our rear ends off to… pic.twitter.com/5ls2f4PUtB

— Dr. Carol M. Swain (@carolmswain) December 12, 2023

Jessie Opoien

Wisconsin is set to see its largest increase in property taxes since the Great Recession — but the actual effect on homeowners will be cushioned by a boost to two state tax credits that lower the amounts homeowners and businesses must pay.

That’s according to a new report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum, which analyzed preliminary figures from the state Department of Revenue to project a 4.7% increase in net property taxes as bills go out this month — the largest increase since 2007.

The actual increase is likely to be closer to 2% or 3%, the report found, due to increases to two state tax credits included in the 2023-25 budget.

The budget increased the school levy tax credit by $255 million and increased the state lottery tax credit by $15.9 million. Both of those measures reduce the amounts taxpayers will pay while still allowing for revenue increases for schools and local governments.

The increase also comes despite a historical bipartisan deal that boosted shared revenue — money the state sends to counties, towns, villages and cities that local governments can use freely. That deal gave a minimum 20% increase to municipalities with a population under 110,000. Counties and the state’s two largest cities, Milwaukee and Madison, received at least a 10% increase in shared revenue.

———

Locally, Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K-12 $pending 22 to 29k annually, depending on the District numbers observed.

India McKinney

The HPSCI bill also includes a call “to define Electronic Communication Service Provider to include equipment.” Earlier this year, the FISA Court of Review released a highly redacted opinion documenting a fight over the government’s attempt to subject an unknown company to Section 702 surveillance. However, the court agreed that under the circumstances the company did not qualify as an “electronic communication service provider” under the law. Now, the HPSCI bill would expand that definition to include a much broader range of providers, including those who merely provide hardware through which people communicate on the Internet. Even without knowing the details of the secret court fight, this represents an ominous expansion of 702’s scope, which the committee introduced without any explanation or debate of its necessity.

Michael Walsh:

What if we follow his lead, then, and abolish not the monasteries — the current incarnation of the post-Vatican II Catholic Church is taking care of that all by itself — but the Ivy League and a few other “elite” universities, the nests of “progressive” saboteurs who have inflicted incalculable damage on the United States since the arrival of the Frankfurt School on these shores just before World War II.

Surely, the stunning, clueless malfeasance of three female Ivy League presidents would indicate that a thorough housecleaning is in order. The ritual self-immolation of one of the most egregious offenders, Penn’s Liz McGill, was a good start, but let’s face it there’s lots more work to be done, boys and girls. Writes Andrew Sullivan:

It may be too much to expect that the Congressional hearings this week, starring the three presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn, will wake people up to the toxic collapse of America’s once-great Ivy League. But I can hope, can’t I? The mediocrities smirked, finessed, condescended, and stonewalled. Take a good look at them. These are the people who now select our elites. And they select them, as they select every single member of the faculty, and every student, by actively discriminating against members of certain “privileged” groups and aggressively favoring other “marginalized” ones. They were themselves appointed in exactly the same way, from DEI-approved pools of candidates. As a Harvard dean, Claudine Gay’s top priority was “making more progress on diversity,” i.e. intensifying the already systemic race, sex and gender discrimination that defines the place.

KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

Joanne Jacobs:

The “new disciplinary policy also eliminates mandatory suspensions for students who threaten or harm others.” Those students may be removed from the classroom, but not from the school.

To settle a month-long teachers’ strike, the district agreed to center school disciplinary procedures on “racial equity and social justice” and use “restorative” practices to maintain discipline.

“Portland-area students experienced an uptick in fights and behavioral problems after returning to the classroom for the 2021 school year,” reports Schemmel. The district responded by shifting from “punitive” responses to “restorative justice practices,” said Char Hutson, a district official.

ACLU:

We’re representing the NRA at the Supreme Court in their case against New York’s Department of Financial Services for abusing its regulatory power to violate the NRA’s First Amendment rights.

Danielle Allen

Last week Congress put squarely on the table the question of whether the health of our democracy requires renovation of our colleges and universities. I believe the answer to that question is “Yes.”

On Tuesday, the House Education and Workforce Committee held a hearing to investigate how Harvard University, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania are responding to antisemitism on their campuses. The hearing’s viral moment came when Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) asked a chain of questions that resulted in the three university presidents saying that if someone urged the genocide of Jewish people, that merely might — “depending on the context” — be a violation of campus policies against bullying and harassment. Two of the three presidents — Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill — issued apologies or clarifications, and Magill has now resigned.

Claire Finkelstein:

The testimony of three university presidentsbefore a House committee last week provoked outrage after they suggested that calls on their campuses for Jewish genocide might not have violated their schools’ free speech policies. One of them, Liz Magill, was forced to step down on Saturday as president of the University of Pennsylvania, where I am a faculty member.

But their statements shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Congress could have assembled two dozen university presidents and likely would have received the same answer from each of them.

This is because the value of free speech has been elevated to a near-sacred level on university campuses. As a result, universities have had to tolerate hate speech — even hate speech calling for violence against ethnic or religious minorities. With the dramatic rise in antisemitism, we are discovering that this is a mistake: Antisemitism — and other forms of hate — cannot be fought on university campuses without restricting poisonous speech that targets Jews and other minorities.

University presidents are resisting this conclusion. Rather than confront the conflict between the commitment to free speech and the commitment to eliminating the hostile environment facing Jewish students on campus, many simply affirm their commitment to both or buy time by setting up task forces to study the problem. Some have attempted to split the difference by saying they are institutionally committed to free speech but personally offended by antisemitism. Others have said the answer to hate speech is education and more speech.

Melissa Korn and Joseph De Avila:

A major donor to the University of Pennsylvania has told the school he would rescind a $100 million gift if the school doesn’t replace President Liz Magill, who has faced intensifying criticism for her handling of antisemitism on campus—most recently because of how she defined harassment in a congressional hearing earlier this week.

Ross Stevens, founder and chief executive of Stone Ridge Holdings Group, a financial-services firm, informed Penn on Thursday he would cancel $100 million worth of Stone Ridge shares held by the university, according to a letter sent by his attorneys to the school. Stevens, a 1991 Penn graduate, donated shares to fund the Stevens Center for Innovation in Finance at the university’s Wharton School, according to the letter. The donation was made in 2017.

Stone Ridge had grounds to cancel the shares based on Magill’s recent congressional testimony, the letter said. The company has the discretion to cancel the shares if Penn engages in conduct that is “materially injurious to [Stone Ridge’s] business, reputation, character or standing,” the letter said.

During her testimony Tuesday in front of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Magill was asked if calling for the genocide of Jewish students would violate school policies. Magill said it depended on the context.

WATCH: Imagine if @EliseStefanik's questioning of the university presidents was about other groups instead of "Jews." Someone did that using AI voice generation.

How much rage would there be?

Video by https://t.co/9iexNOiRj5 pic.twitter.com/ntpYf99vIG

— Sia Kordestani (@SiaKordestani) December 12, 2023

Dave Cieslewicz

You can blame Gov. Tony Evers and the majority of his appointments to the UW Board of Regents. 

The grand compromise that Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman negotiated with Vos was a great deal for the UW. Vos has been withholding inflationary pay increases for UW employees, approval of a much needed new engineering building on the Madison campus, and $32 million in funding that Vos said was going to diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

In the deal, announced Friday, Rothman got the new engineering building plus money for additional building projects, he got the $32 million restored, and he got the wage increases released, all while not having to eliminate a single DEI position. As a sweetener, the UW also would have been able to keep some revenue that comes from the reciprocity program with Minnesota that had gone to the general fund. All told, the UW would have gotten $800 million. 

What Vos got was mostly window dressing. Some of the DEI positions would have been reclassified as “student success” positions, whatever that means. There would have been a three-year moratorium on creating new administrative positions, not just in DEI but everywhere. The only problem with that idea was that it was only three years and it didn’t call for the outright elimination of some of that bureaucratic overhead. One of the big drivers of the high cost of higher education, after all, is the proliferation of non-teaching positions. 

There would have also been a new endowed professorship in “conservative thought.” It’s not clear what department the position would have been in or what it would have done exactly. Teach? Research? Be an advocate for conservative views in multiple departments? Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin may have thought it was a great idea as student marches and sit-ins could have been redirected there. In any event, it was symbolic and didn’t amount to much of anything. It would have been a small pill to swallow, especially when washed down with that $800 million.

More: Regents Destroy the UW.

And:

Members of the Universities of Wisconsin Board of Regents will consult with attorneys Tuesday about a lawsuit challenging the power of the Legislature, a move that comes just days after the board rejected a deal with Assembly Speaker Robin Vos involving pay raises and limits on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

And:

Most of Evers’ appointees to the board are serving without full approval from the Senate. Only board President Karen Walsh and Ed Manydeeds, who both voted against the deal, have been confirmed.

The GOP-controlled Senate committee on colleges and universities voted last month to approve eight of Evers’ appointees. Three more appointees are still awaiting a committee vote.

Ultimately, the full Senate has final say on the governor’s appointments. Senate Republicans have rejected Evers’ picks in the past, including Wisconsin Elections Commission member Joseph Czarnezki and several members of the state’s natural resources policy board.

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

Thing everybody is mad about:
the UW System DEI dispute.

Things nobody is mad about:
56% of Black UW System students drop out with debt and no degree (65% without UW-Madison).

43% of Latin students do (50%).

30% retake high school math.

It's weird how no one cares! pic.twitter.com/IGzMdkayIN

— Quinton Klabon (@GhaleonQ) December 12, 2023

Kelly Meyerhofer:

Brenkus, who did not respond to emails requesting an interview, described Rothman’s exit from the emergency meeting Saturday as “disrespectful and abrupt.” He said the vote striking down the deal showed Rothman was misaligned with the board on what is in the best interest of universities.

“I’m eager to see if he follows through (with) his threat,” Brenkus wrote.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers appointed Brenkus, an Oneida student enrolled at UW-Green Bay, to the board last May. Brenkus is one of several regents of color who delivered stirring speeches Saturday urging their fellow board members to reject the deal.

“You can attempt to justify it, that that these roles are reallocated, or we are going to improve this system in the future, but the truth is this: You are selling our minorities out for millions of dollars,” he said. “There is no number that makes this right.”

So @UWSystem Prez Rothman, @repvos negotiate good faith deal, Gov Evers’ Board appointees dump on it – and Gov agrees with them. Now story out suggesting Rothman threatened resignation, Evers’ appointee taunts him. Disarray.

.@UWSystem President Jay Rothman declines to say what was discussed today during the Board of Regents closed session today.

He also dodges Q's on @KellyMeyerhofer's reporting that Rothman debated resigning.

It comes after BOR rejected a deal over campus diversity, pay raises. pic.twitter.com/ECPoLRPKiH

— Emilee Fannon (@Emilee_Fannon) December 12, 2023

Danielle Allen

Important and clarifying as that moment was, the opening statement of Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) gave the hearing a broader frame. Foxx questioned the health of universities generally and called attention to “a grave danger inherent in assenting to the race-based ideology of the radical left,” arguing that we are at “an inflection point” requiring a reshaping of “the future for all of academia.” The chairwoman’s theme was not antisemitism alone but whether the diversity, equity and inclusion efforts of college campuses have been a wrong turn for America’s intellectual culture.

While I stand by the goals of inclusion and belonging for college campuses — and consider those goals valuable for America writ large — I agree with Foxx that we have lost our way in pursuing them. We have gotten lost both in the thicket of debates about the First Amendment and in the swamps of particular tenets of anti-racism. How do we find our way back?

Jim Gash:

It seems every week produces another story of intolerance, hate, or worse on college and university campuses across the nation. As society rightfully expresses concern about students engaged in such behavior, it is past time for higher education administrators to take on their responsibility to cultivate academic communities that embody America’s founding virtues.

The Founders’ idea was truly revolutionary: citizens from all walks of life, religions, and political persuasions mutually submitting themselves not to the authority of a king or queen, but to the rule of law. The strength of this idea is rooted in a people who so valued the rule of law that they would even die to protect the freedoms established in the Constitution.

Our Founders believed that freedom, faith and self-governance — leavened with humility — are interwoven and indispensable foundational values upon which a pluralistic and enduring society can flourish. More than any institutions, perhaps other than the family and houses of worship, our schools are responsible for cultivating the character and resilience required of a productive citizenry capable of reaffirming the American experiment.

Tyler Cowen:

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

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

Aaron Sibarium

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

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

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

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

Jill Barshay:

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

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

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

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

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

Matt Stoller:

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Kristen Ruby (@sparklingruby) December 11, 2023

Al Gore:

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

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

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

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

Andrew Sullivan:

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

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

Nicholas Confessore:

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

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

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

— Christian Odendahl (@COdendahl) December 5, 2023

Mike Ford (UW Oshkosh)

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

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

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

Jason Willick @ Bezos Washington Post

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

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

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

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

Commentary.

FIRE:

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

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

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

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

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

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 10, 2023

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

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) December 10, 2023

Oxford Literary Festival

Ali Smith Interviewed by Richard Ovenden

Julie Jargon:

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

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

Bishop Robert Barron:

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

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

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

David Blaska:

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

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

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

More:

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

Kelly Meyerhofer:

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

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

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

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) December 10, 2023

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

— Timur Kuran (@timurkuran) December 10, 2023

Claudine Gay:

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

Amplify teaching and research on racial and ethnic inequality

——-

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

Bill Ackman:

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

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

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

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

Gabriel T. Rubin and Rosie Ettenheim:

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

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

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

Victor Davis Hanson

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Rob Montz (@Robmontz) December 8, 2023

commentary

gexall:

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

Thaleigha Rampersad:

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

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

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

After the Plague:

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

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

Joseph De Avila and Melissa Korn:

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

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

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

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

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

— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) December 6, 2023

Elise Stefanie:

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

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

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

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