Elise Stefanie:

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

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

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

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

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

— Rory Stewart (@RoryStewartUK) December 9, 2023

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

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

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) December 9, 2023

apple

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

Tyler Cowen:

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

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

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

Commentary.

Ava Menkes:

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

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

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

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

Patrick Mcilheran:

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

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

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

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

— WILL (@WILawLiberty) December 8, 2023

Ron Hassner:

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

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

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

Jonathan Haidt:

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

Fino Menezes:

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

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

Bev Weintraub:

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

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

Matt hen:

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

Nick Minock:

That’s more money than what the Governor of Virginia, the White House Press Secretary, and many federal government attorneys are earning.

7News was the first to report how Loudoun County Public Schools hired Natalie Allen as Chief Communications Officer and that taxpayers are paying her a salary north of a quarter million dollars, plus a monthly vehicle allowance, a monthly data allowance and moving costs.

On Tuesday, 7News asked LCPS was Allen’s position publicly advertised and how many people applied for the position. 7News is waiting for answers from LCPS.

Linda Jacobson:

“The more the children know you and trust you, the more they’re willing to engage in what you’re trying to teach them,” said Susana Aguilar, one of The Oakland REACH’s “literacy liberators.” 

The evaluation, from the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University, calls community members “untapped pools of talent” in the effort to improve student achievement.

Oakland Unified’s model, said researcher and lead author Ashley Jochim, also has broader implications for how schools teach basic skills in reading and math. For too long, she said, one teacher has been responsible for modifying lessons to meet the needs of 25 or more students.

“This model is clearly failing students and puts extraordinary demands on educators, especially coming out of the pandemic,” she said. “Oakland’s tutoring model shows what’s possible when we create the conditions needed to individualize instruction based on students’ learning needs.”

Rachel Saslow:

The first rule of Portland Public Schools budget cuts: Don’t call them budget cuts.

“We refer to it as a ‘gap,’” says Will Howell, a PPS spokesman.

So, the school district faces a $130 million gap because of the labor contract it signed last week with the Portland Association of Teachers—an agreement that was largely a tremendous victory for educators. Now the district will need to find $10 million in savings this school year, $41 million next year, and $79 million the year after that.

That last number assumes that school funding remains flat; it could change depending on what, if anything, happens on the May 2024 ballot and at the spring 2025 session of the Oregon Legislature.

But at least one official is saying the C-word.

“The size of the cuts we need to make are going to require cuts to direct services,” Portland School Board member Andrew Scott says.

The district will likely find the $130 million in the following places, starting with your wallet:

Tyler Cowen

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

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

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

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

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

——