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.

​

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.

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.

——