She provided a remarkable summary of her views in her memorandum on August 20, 2020, to the Faculty of Arts & Sciences when she was serving as Dean. In that memo she set out her radical vision of the “transformational project” she had in mind for Harvard—a project that would redefine every aspect of the university in an effort to advance what she called “racial justice.” This meant prioritizing race in faculty appointments; pursuing “inclusive excellence” (a euphemism for lowering academic standards); expanding the diversity bureaucracy—aka expanding “leadership opportunities for staff of color;” and selectively favoring minority candidates for promotion of staff in managerial and executive roles.There's more in the memo, none of it good.
None of this was hidden, though the general public appears to have little understanding as to what it meant and how forcefully President Gay would implement it.
The project of building a truly inclusive scholarly community begins with what we consider worthy of research and teaching. A full account of contemporary American society demands scholarship that affirms the relevance, significance, and worth of diverse cultural backgrounds and histories. Moreover, preparing our students for leadership in today’s globalized yet profoundly unequal society, requires an education that includes the voices, stories, and lived experiences of those too long pushed to the margins. With these goals in mind, I plan a series of investments across our academic enterprise.I wonder how tight the priors are of the candidates who screen for the jobs, and of the faculty committees who make the call (nobody is offered a job at Harvard, you see.) Actually, I don't. "Relevance, significance, and worth" are criteria that can include irrelevance, insignificance, and worthlessness, but good luck finding any research dead ends along the lines of "nothing happened," let alone of students offered the opportunity to consider the criteria by which these scholars deem outcomes to be relevant, significant, and worthy.
This fall, we will reactivate the cluster hire in ethnicity, indigeneity, and migration, with the goal of making four new faculty appointments. These appointments are critical to our long-term efforts to strengthen our research and teaching capacity, and ensure that our students have access to this vital body of knowledge. In order to accelerate our progress, however, I am also establishing the Harvard College Visiting Professorship in Ethnicity, Indigeneity, and Migration to recruit leading scholars of race and ethnicity to spend a year at Harvard College actively engaged in teaching our undergraduates. Beginning in 2021-2022, the FAS will appoint up to two new visiting scholars each year, based on recommendations from academic departments. Finally, to seed new research directions and develop the next generation of scholars, we will also invest in the academic pipeline. The Inequality in America postdoctoral fellowship program, which currently recruits two new fellows each year, will be expanded in the coming year to recruit two additional early career scholars whose work focuses specifically on issues of racial and ethnic inequality.
WHATEVER MAY BE THE LIMITATIONS WHICH TRAMMEL INQUIRY ELSEWHERE, WE BELIEVE THAT THE GREAT STATE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN SHOULD EVER ENCOURAGE THAT CONTINUAL AND FEARLESS SIFTING AND WINNOWING BY WHICH ALONE THE TRUTH CAN BE FOUND.At the time, the legislators wanted the University to fire economist Richard T. Ely, who had some favorable things to say about socialism. That Ely, and his colleague John R. Commons, both wrote things that don't measure up to contemporary standards is at once irrelevant, because it was the past, and central, because it's the implementation of those contemporary standards, to the current tussle between legislature and the regents of the Wisconsin system.
A nearly six-month standoff between the Universities of Wisconsin and the Republican-led state Legislature over diversity, equity and inclusion spending seemed poised to end Saturday morning. The Board of Regents had agreed to vote on a deal between system leaders and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos that would freeze and cap DEI hiring in exchange for funding held up by the Legislature.The situation seems tailor-made for the regents to invoke the sifting and winnowing clause, rather than engage in such unedifying horse-trading of some diversity deanlets for a new engineering building and a few other things, including an endowed chair in conservative studies. Wisconsin governor Tony "Pencil Neck" Evers (D - Public Instruction) sounds amenable to such an invocation.
But 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.
On Friday, UW system president Jay Rothman and UW Madison chancellor Jennifer Mnookin announced they’d reached a deal with Vos after weeks of secret negotiations. The system would make significant concessions on DEI initiatives and staffing in exchange for a release on much-needed funding for pay raises, utilities and construction projects—including a new engineering building at UW Madison—which the Legislature rejected last month.
The Board of Regents should be able to make decisions about what’s best for our students, faculty, staff, and, ultimately, what’s best for the University of Wisconsin System without fear of threats and political pressure or retribution.It appears, though, that the regents are not going to invoke the "sifting and winnowing" proposition, nor are the legislators going to buy it.
Yes, and it is in the blood of contemporary writers and directors to turn every story into Dynasty, or perhaps Keeping Up with the Kardashians with hand-sewn costumes. It's. A. Contemporary. Movie. If it leaves people with the impression that Josephine's menopause was the proximate cause of a decade of misery east of the Rhine, so be it. Anything can happen in a cartoon, or a soap opera, even one set up as a blockbuster movie about a Corsican corporal.That's where The Daily Signal's Tyler O'Neil wound up.
It takes a certain kind of genius to ruin a film about Napoleon Bonaparte.Look no further than the cover of Beethoven's Eroica to see that tension between apotheosis and betrayal.
For crying out loud, this is the Corsican artillery commander who became the de facto emperor of continental Europe, the man who carried the French Revolution into Spain, Italy, Austria, and Germany, sparking the political movements that would culminate in the First World War.
This man doomed the Spanish empire, freeing Latin America from its rule and enabling the U.S. to double in size in the Louisiana Purchase. He did all this and found time to craft a law code on par with the Roman Emperor Justinian.
This man coopted an atheistic revolution, convinced the pope to come to Paris to crown him, and then, in a fit of pique, decided to crown himself instead.
Depending on your perspective, Napoleon smothered Europe with divisive passions or brought enlightenment to a backward continent. He either represents the apotheosis of the French Revolution or its ultimate betrayal.
So many moments in Napoleon’s life would make excellent standout films. The subject is an artist’s dream.
Yet somehow, director Ridley Scott managed to make this quintessentially enigmatic historical figure drop-dead boring.
A local woman is suing Roy’s Meat Service, a local meat market and barbeque restaurant located in East Nashville, claiming that the smell of grilling and smoked meats is a “nuisance.”After you've exhausted the opportunities for Coasian bargaining, perhaps your only conclusion must be that some people lead really empty lives. Nothing new there, either. "Woke wine women aren't as enthusiastic about diversity when it rolls up to the local park as they might be at work."
According to Newschannel 5, Natalie Castillo moved into the home next to the restaurant two years ago. But apparently she didn’t do her research, because Roy Meat Service has been grilling up meat in the neighborhood for the past 9 years.
I mean, what do you really expect when you move next to a restaurant that serves smoked meats? If you ask me that just adds to the value of the property, getting to smell smoked meats all day.But the neighbor isn’t happy, and filed a lawsuit against the local business, alleging among other things that part of the restaurant encroaches on her property and that the smoke from the constant grilling is a nuisance. Castillo says in the complaint that the constant smoking of ribs, chicken and pork affect her “ability to enjoy her property as well as negatively affects her health.”
For his part, owner Jeff Roy says that the restaurant has tried to address the neighbor’s complaints, but nothing has seemed to satisfy her.
So we take part of the expressway out of service to do the construction, which might reduce the vehicle flow whilst temporarily increasing the cramming: then comes the ribbon-cutting, and afterwards, the number of trucks will soar further, and the cramming will return to pre-construction levels. "The idea of simply paving our way to reduced travel times should thus be a non-starter."Five years and a new president later, it's not any better.
Let's, instead, look at that special pleading in the third paragraph of the report. "[Unspecified] Transportation officials [whose salaries and promotion opportunities depend on building and maintaining their fiefdoms] say the widening is necessary [in the absence of any market tests] because a soaring number of trucks is cramming each day onto an inefficient route [in the absence of any market tests] that needs to be modernized [where 'needs' is in the sense of 'we're sticking someone else with the bill']."
For instance, taxpayers alone presumably will be on the hook for that separate truck lane in the vicinity of the 405 interchange. I see no reference to a toll lane or to special assessments on the motor carriers. (Again, as an aside, with a California full of politicians who are implacably hostile to Our President, getting this project into an infrastructure bill might not be easy.)
Brake lights, honking horns and drivers battling it out to the very end of merge lanes — all familiar scenes for California drivers.The top three are the San Diego Freeway, I-405, which “carves its path through the heart of Los Angeles, earning notoriety as a symbol of gridlock nightmare,” Interstate Five, "Some contributing factors to what makes this highway undesirable include endless construction and the dreaded 'rush hour,'" and California 101, particularly in the big cities. Rounding out the top five are the Pennsylvania Turnpike, particularly near Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and Interstate 70 from Denver into the ski areas. Whether an interstate highway should have been run through Glenwood Canyon is for another day.
For those who live in the Golden State, gridlock is part of life. This may be why three California freeways are among the “most loathed highways in America,” according to a recent survey.
Vehicle dealer Gunther Volvo Cars Daytona Beach surveyed 3,000 drivers across the U.S. in October 2023, and then ranked the top 100 most loathed roads to drive on based on those results.
As it turns out, the top three detested highways in the country, according to this survey, are in the Golden State.
The morale conditioners at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh decided to take a stand against disrespectful interaction, envisioning "An environment that is free of harassment and free of insulting and demeaning comments and epithets based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age, disability, military status, socioeconomic status, family status or political views; and consistently enforces federal, state and university protections against discriminatory treatment yet is free from any official speech codes." Anybody catch the internal inconsistency? "So students have a right to expect an environment free from insulting and demeaning comments and from any official speech codes?" Good luck with that.That post anticipated what transpired in that Congressional hearing last week.
I wonder if asserting that a statement is "racist" or any of the other -isms or -phobias is insulting or demeaning on its face. Or if referring to someone as "neanderthal" or "deplorable" or generally engaging in the usual casual common-room smugness is also grounds for a harassment complaint? The policy appears to leave that opportunity available. "Members respect and accommodate the views and needs of others in order to allow the development of individual potential."Clearly, to those poseurs presiding at Harvard, MIT, and Penn some harassment is more actionable than others. The asses have been kicked. The names have been taken. Now is time to take stock.
If officiating wasn’t already on the radar for the NFL’s winter meetings this week, a host of blown calls on Sunday may have driven it into the agenda.Not necessarily including the Kansas City Chiefs going to the old hook-and-trailer, only to have one of the receivers line up offside.
Just one week after an officiating crew drew intense scrutiny for missing multiple egregious pass interference penalties in the matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and Green Bay Packers, multiple games on Sunday had a rash of flags thrown (or not thrown) that left coaches and players lashing out in frustration. In three instances, calls appeared to significantly impact games that will likely have implications on playoff seeding at the end of the season. That reality again raises the specter that the league continues to fail in its quest for consistent officiating — which is even more troubling now that the NFL has embraced gambling as a driver of new revenue streams.
While missed or improper penalties are often the most spotlighted issues each week of the season, the growing concern and frustration of team front offices and coaching staffs is how the league’s crews are varying in the way they call games. The inconsistency between one crew to the next often leaves teams feeling as if they’re facing two jobs each Sunday: figuring out the team on the other sideline, and then figuring out how a crew is calling a game while it’s still unfolding. When the latter effort falters, it can create some explosive moments from teams in the immediate wake of a game.
Even in a league where the officiating is regularly under fire, the run of issues over the past two Sundays is significant, particularly when the miscues impact wins and losses for a multitude of teams positioning themselves for playoff seeding. That alone calls into question why the league’s team owners continue to prioritize cost over more aggressive approaches to resolving the problems through the use of technology, full-time officials, or simply taking a tougher approach to crews or individual officials that have a history of blowing calls.Continue the after-action reviews, but get rid of the challenges and the reviews, particularly those opportunities for the replay office to butt in in the final two minutes. What incentive, other than pride, does an official have to get a close call right as the half or the game ends, when there's always the eye in the sky to issue the corrections?
Elizabeth Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, is stepping down following months of rising tensions on campus and among alumni. Her resignation is effective immediately, according to an email sent to the Penn community today.We'll take stock of the challenges of breaking out of the punishment cycles of the Grim Strategy later this week. Let me go on record as suggesting that strengthening the existing speech codes to proscribe ever more conduct as "harassing or demeaning" is not the way to go.
Scott Bok, the chair of Penn's board of trustees, will also be stepping down, according to the school's newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian.
Magill has been the subject of complaints from donors, alumni, and students for her reactions to the October 7 attacks on Israel and incidents of antisemitism, or purported antisemitism, on campus.
The criticisms escalated when Magill evaded a question during a December 5 congressional hearing on whether calling for Jewish genocide violated school policy.
Following the hearing, the board of Wharton, Penn's business school, called on Magill to resign. Separately, Penn's board of trustees met Thursday, and scheduled a second meeting on Sunday, the school's paper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, reported.
Magill's troubles started before the October 7 attacks by Hamas.
In September, students and alumni signed an open letter to the president condemning the school's Palestine Writes Literary Festival, which they said platformed speakers with histories of antisemitism. (Organizers of the festival denied that anyone involved embraces antisemitic ideas).
The letter was signed by 4,000 people and accused the school of not denouncing antisemitism at the festival.
“The courts and other public entities continue to debate reform measures that in many cases would seriously damage parts or all of college athletics,” Baker said in a letter to leaders in Division I, the NCAA’s highest competitive level. “Therefore, it is time for us—the NCAA—to offer our own forward-looking framework.”Why, it's as if it's the end of the association as we know it.
The plan Baker laid out after months of study would allow all Division I institutions to directly compensate athletes for use of their name, image and likeness.
It would also create a new subdivision for the richest and most powerful programs that would give them significantly more autonomy over how they spent their money, as long as they agree to “invest at least $30,000 per year into an enhanced educational trust fund for at least half” of their athletes.Let's see, "40 to 60" gets us pretty close to 64, doesn't it, and the current bowl structure requires about seventy teams to put mayonnaise company logos on special jerseys, doesn't it?
Sportswriters and commentators described Baker’s plan as “groundbreaking” and “revolutionary,” and in certain ways it would be. It would pierce a historical barrier, self-imposed by the NCAA, that has prevented colleges from paying athletes directly over and above the costs of their educations.
And it would acknowledge the long-standing thirst of the association’s 40 to 60 most powerful football-playing members for more control over their own fates, separating them more formally from the 200 to 300 other institutions that also compete in Division I basketball, and even from the rest of the 130-odd universities that currently play in the Football Bowl Subdivision.
But it is also clearly a nod to the reality that the NCAA is hanging on to its authority over college sports by a thread: an attempt both to discourage Congress and the courts from undermining its authority further, and to deter the biggest programs from walking away from the NCAA altogether and forming their own freestanding association.There's not much new there, either, in part the football format we have now is the consequence of the trustees at Notre Dame and the regents at Oklahoma wanting out of what they argued were restraints of trade, because at the time their dominant strategy was to defect from the restraint.
“What Ross calls ‘revolutionary,’ I call belated and reactionary,” Marc Edelman, a professor of law at Baruch College, said in response to a characterization of Baker’s proposal by Yahoo’s Ross Dellenger. “This association, the #NCAA, ignores experts in the field and does nothing to promote reform until their backs are legally against the wall. Right now, their backs are legally against the wall and Baker knows it.”
Karen Weaver, an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania who writes widely about college athletics, described Baker’s proposal as “a way to keep the organization together under the NCAA umbrella … while giving enormous flexibility and almost unchecked spending to the highest-profile schools.”
Oliver Williamson's 1966 peak load pricing article (JSTOR) lays out the argument with some glorious Lagrangians and some intuitive diagrams. The high-occupancy toll problem (and the related problem of selling cuts in the roller-coaster line) is one in which the provider is simultaneously providing a premium service at a higher price and a congested service at a lower cash outlay, but with the people who choose the cheaper congested service incurring disutility. As a modeling exercise, the marginal commuter is indifferent between the marginal utility adjusted by the higher price of the premium service and the marginal utility adjusted by the lower price of the congested service.The all-you-can-eat buffet is a related problem. The way to encourage the lighter eaters to order a la carte is to make the all-you-can-eat bundle more expensive. Red Lobster management figured it out.
Red Lobster's parent company, Thai Union Group, disclosed earlier this month that the seafood chain took an unexpectedly large loss in the third quarter of the year because its $20 shrimp promotion wasn't very profitable and was more popular than the company anticipated.Study price theory, people. The Williamson model and the self-selection constraints stipulate that whatever tariffs are offered generate enough revenue to cover the enterprise's costs. "Those people who are willing to spend the larger sum of money [on the buffet, in this instance] are, consistent with the incentives of a fixed access fee, willing to consume the experience more intensively."
"The proportion of the people selecting this promotion was much higher compared to expectation," Chief Financial Officer Ludovic Garnier said in Thai Union Group's investor and media presentation Nov. 7.
Red Lobster has had an all-you-can-eat shrimp promotion for years, but this year it changed the shrimp deal from a limited-time offer to a permanent one. The company wanted to boost traffic in the third and fourth quarters of the year, when its business tends to slow down.
Garnier said the strategy worked, bringing in customers and bolstering Red Lobster’s market share. But the improvement wasn’t as large as the company expected, and combined with the low margins on the surprisingly popular deal, that presented a problem.
He said U.S. consumers are getting more budget-conscious, meaning they are eating at less-expensive restaurants and even ordering cheaper items when they go out. That contributed to the unexpected popularity of "Ultimate Endless Shrimp."
While the deal brought in some more customers, Garnier's comment suggested that people who might have ordered something on the menu that was more lucrative for Red Lobster instead traded down to the unlimited shrimp instead.
It was a clarifying moment, wasn’t it? The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania testifying for the House Education Committee about the wave of rabid antisemitism on their campuses. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York asked the same question of UPenn’s Liz Magill, MIT’s Sally Kornbluth and Harvard’s Claudine Gay. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your campus’s rule of conduct, yes or no? That was the question.The way those presidents all acted for a do-over the next day, abasing themselves in the fashion of the grade-grubbing student attempting to wheedle a grade bump, or perhaps, as the populist websites have characterized it, in hostage videos strongly suggests either they, or their handlers, suspected that the common room commonplaces weren't going to cut it on Capitol Hill.
You might think it was a pretty simple question. Stefanik, exhibiting a mixture of incredulity and barely contained rage, stressed: “This should be be the easiest question to answer,” as one president after the next emitted a pained I-can’t-believe-this-unenlightened-pol-is-asking-me-me-the-president-of-Harvard/MIT/Penn-this-stupid-question.” Each in turn reverted to a script they must have worked out with their handlers/lawyers. “It all depends on the context.”
“Context.” It was the weasel word of the moment. We’re all champions of free speech, don’t you know, so we wouldn’t dream of intruding upon our flock’s exercise of that sacrosanct right in pursuit of their dream of self-congratulatory moral perfection — unless, of course, that dream involves some prohibited attitude, criticizing St. Anthony Fauci, for example, or St. George Floyd, or, heaven forfend, supporting Donald Trump or expressing skepticism about the 2020 election or January 6. Then, of course, it’s open-season on “free expression.”
I almost felt sorry for those three women. Almost. There they were, emanating the self-righteous demeanor they had perfected over years, and, bang, an angry congresswoman exploded that cheap facade in minutes. The upshot was not obvious to them immediately. But the world’s outrage at those moral pygmies instantly washed over the PR offices of those obscenely rich bastions of self-entitlement. “Uh, oh: the girls really stepped in it this time.” That was the universal reaction.
Actual photo of the Biden Express pic.twitter.com/BXbJuritYb
— Jason Stafford (@Skeletor_2196) December 5, 2023
Every year contains light and dark; 2023 was a year with significant shares of darkness. In a divided world, where too many institutions are failing, Taylor Swift found a way to transcend borders and be a source of light. No one else on the planet today can move so many people so well. Achieving this feat is something we often chalk up to the alignments of planets and fates, but giving too much credit to the stars ignores her skill and her power.Small beginnings we have always had with us. People who achieve prominence because they outwork others with more talent or more advantage we have always had with us.
Swift is the rare person who is both the writer and hero of her own story. Her path is untraveled, something she’s known for some time.
Riley Gaines appeared in a House hearing on Tuesday, and she left one Democrat congresswoman infuriated. Gaines was testifying on the dangers of men competing against women in sports, something that caused Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) to accuse her of being "transphobic," a lazy retort if there ever was one.I've always liked the cut of Ms Gaines's jib, and she surely understands what making them play by their own rules is about.
Order of events:
— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) December 6, 2023
-Lee says my stance is transphobic bigotry
-I respond by saying if I'm a transphobe, Lee is a misogynist
-Lee moves to have my words removed from record
-Her move is withdrawn so technically she's still a misogynist
They can dish it out, but they cant take it pic.twitter.com/MKCd5M1DwO
A lengthy discussion ensued, with Gaines at one point interrupting to address the fact that Lee had first called her "transphobic." Then, after the huddle was over, Lee leaned forward and moved to withdraw the point of order, i.e., her demand to have Gaines' words removed from the record.The parliamentarian correctly ruled that the witness was responding to an observation the right honorable gentlewoman had made in her opening statement.
This is another example of Democrats being able to dish it out but not being willing to take it. When someone accuses a woman of being "transphobic" for simply believing that men beating up on women in sports is wrong, they should be fair game for the same level of criticism. If Lee doesn't like that, maybe she should keep her lazy insults to herself.
It is not bigotry to believe that women's sports should be protected, both because they represent a space for women to succeed and earn accolades (and scholarships) and because, in some sports, the participation of men is physically dangerous. Gaines has put her reputation on the line to stand up for what she thinks is right. If Democrats like Lee disagree with that, they should be expected to make an actual argument backed by data, not just name-call.
What followed was hurried consultation and presumably a few explanations for Lee on why witnesses are allowed to respond to such attacks by a member. Lee then withdrew her demand.Perhaps in that explanation, Professor Turley has explained why those college presidents were so pusillanimous despite being handled much more roughly by Representative Stefanik. "Democrats have embraced an anti-free speech agenda to silence opposing viewpoints. That desire becomes insatiable even as citizens seek to rebut personal attacks from members in a congressional hearing." It never occurred to those college presidents that the anti-free speech agenda could be applied to them.
Rule XVII, clause 1(b) prohibits Members from engaging in “personalities.” That is a rule cited to the Speaker or chair to bar personal attacks from other members that are deemed unparliamentary. There is no definition of what words are considered to be violative of the rule.
However, Lee was attempting to use this against a witness who was defending herself against her own personal attack. It is a dangerous extension. Members of Congress generally are protected under the “speech or debate” clause in Article I, Section 6, of the Constitution. The privilege protects legislative proceedings and generally does not apply to news releases, speeches and other public comments. This was the holding in Hutchinson v. Proxmire, when Sen. Proxmire was found to be acting outside of the clause in making media comments regarding his golden fleece award.
Members often knowingly make defamatory comments in congressional debates, but then decline to repeat those same words in public to avoid any legal accountability.
It states, "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."Follow the link for the figure. Today I propose an Affirmative Action and Diversity Corollary to the Peter Principle. People who tick the right Diversity, Inclusion, or Equity boxes will likely be promoted until they reach several rungs above their respective levels of competence. Look no further than the testimony of three presidents of academic institutions you might be familiar with.
In other words, if you work in an organization with a top-down management structure and you are good at your job, you will likely be promoted until you reach one rung above your level of competence. Dr Peter called this level your "final placement."
While the book is written in a lighthearted manner, there's more than a grain of truth in its well-researched analysis of one of the main flaws in hierarchical structures.
In Figure 1 below, you can see a very simple representation of the Peter Principle. It shows a career path where your success is rewarded with advancement, until you are promoted above your level of competence and success is replaced by failure.
🚨🚨🚨Presidents of @Harvard @MIT and @Penn REFUSE to say whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” is bullying and harassment according to their codes of conduct. Even going so far to say it needs to turn to “action” first. As in committing genocide.
— Rep. Elise Stefanik (@RepStefanik) December 5, 2023
THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE AND… pic.twitter.com/hUY3SgoOOi
It turns out the most elite, richest, and privileged geniuses among us have very thin skins when it comes to the peasants using their own self-congratulatory recordings to eviscerate their big plans and mock them mercilessly.Hyperbolic? Perhaps. In that right-populist Hot Air? Definitely. But wrong?
But the fact of the matter is, they don’t like us very much and would be thrilled to have fewer of us both to control and despoiling their precious Gaia. Life would be better all around.
Proponents of the idea that the world would be a better place sans a significant amount of the current population have a name unto themselves – it’s “Malthusians.”
Over the past sixty or seventy years, that "upwardly mobile" has been a way for empire-building administrators to convert state teachers' colleges and former seminaries into universities. On the academic side, sometimes that translates into additional graduate and professional schools, and on rare occasions grant-getting and the indirect cost returns therefrom, the better to be plowed back into fancier development offices.So has it played out at Calvin University.
Calvin University bet big last year on a new NCAA Division III football team, as well as a three-wing athletics complex to house a stadium and facilities for other new teams such as acrobatics and men’s volleyball.Older readers might remember Calvin College in Grand Rapids. That was once a Dutch Reformed Church theological seminary, named after John Calvin. I have to wonder what he would make of mission creep that could involve beer 'n' circuses rather than good works and predestination, although he would no doubt approve of the work ethic of St. Vincent of Green Bay.
The private Christian university in Grand Rapids, Mich., wasn’t losing students, but it wasn’t growing much, either. Faced with strengthening headwinds, including regional demographic shifts and a shrinking market for small liberal arts institutions, Calvin hired a former University of Oregon offensive analyst as the head football coach, broke ground on the new field and started recruiting players in earnest.
This fall, first-time enrollment grew by 15 percent, from a little over 1,000 students in 2022 to a historic high of 1,150.
Calvin provost Noah Toly said student athletes made up about half of that gain and that the program has already paid for itself. The football team, a 62-man squad that is playing only practice games this year as it prepares for its first season in 2024, drew a crowd of over 3,500 to its inaugural homecoming scrimmage—larger than Calvin’s entire student body.
“It’s a great outcome for us,” Toly said. “It positions us well to recruit more players and nonathletes who just want to come to a college that has football, that has that kind of spirit.”
According to report received today, chicken thieves are operating regularly at farms near Shabbona, and unless the thievery ceases, there is likely to be a posse formed and someone given an extra dose of buckshot or rock sale. Reports were received at the office yesterday that the people committing the petty crimes are known, and there is to be a concentrated effort put forth to see that it is stopped.That Digital History excerpt made much about people from the federal government being there to help, all that talk about rugged individualism notwithstanding.
Turner argued that the conquest of the western frontier as the nation's formative experience, which had shaped the nation's character and values. Western expansion accounted for Americans' optimism, their rugged independence, and their stress on adaptability, ingenuity, and self reliance.But not, apparently, for bringing chicken thieves to book, although by 1923 the idea that chicken farming was interstate commerce had the force of law.
In actuality, however, the settlement of the West had depended, to a surprising degree, on intervention by the federal government. The federal government had dispatched explorers to survey the region and cavalry units to confine Native Americans on reservations. It also provided land grants that funded railroad building, and, in the 20th century, support for dams and other waterworks.
“Marcellus is cooking hot meals to hand out to a small group of twelve Black Lives Matters protestors demonstrating against separating families held at the U.S./Mexico border. He is making a meal of rice, cornbread, and red beans. He wants to make enough red beans for each person to have more than ¾ cup. Determine whether each inequality or number lines correctly models c, the number of red bean Marcellus needs to make."She quips, "Of course, if Marcellus was doling out Irish stew or if Helga was cooking sauerkraut for neo-Nazis, the answer be the same." But that wouldn't be social justice mathematics, would it?
Later in the journal article, she complains that test questions are written in standard English, rather than African-American Vernacular English. Solving that would require "separate but equal" assessments written in students' preferred modes of communication. Perhaps text-speak and emojis?That's right, there's peer-reviewed research, and apparently "separate but equal" is again a thing. Predictably, the abstract has that stupid use of "interrogate."
Jennifer Randall argues that it is not possible to build race-neutral and cultural-neutral tests, and what the field thinks of as race-neutral actually represents whiteness masquerading as neutrality. She provides a heuristic for interrogating the initial stages of our assessment development process from an antiracist framing to disrupt white supremacist approaches to construct definition and representation.All the predictable Theory-speak, and when it's done, the students will not be any better at doing mathematics, although the "heuristics" in the paper (unsupported by any field evidence) will create ideological clones of the people play-acting as teachers. If that sort of language can't make it into a Kelly Turnbull story, it is at least providing entertainment for Real Clear Education's Max Eden.
The mathematical goal is for students to multiply twelve by three-quarters to get nine, and then represent “greater than nine” symbolically. But professor Randall rather butchered the task of making this math question “anti-racist.”It has long been the practice of a class of education theorists to invoke Rawls without understanding him, let alone to go behind the veil of ignorance and ask themselves if they would prefer to be born innumerate and raised innumerate. I never thought that what once circulated as a parody of the Howard Law School bar exam would become a recommended practice in middle school number theory.
A 6th-grade level literate student might note that the “red beans” is carelessly misspelled in the final sentence. A culinarily literate student might note that the question doesn’t actually ask for the number of cups of red beans that Marcellus needs to make. A generally literate sixth grader might note that Professor Randall misspelled “Black Lives Matter.” A politically literate sixth grader might wonder why, exactly, an organization that recently endorsed Hamas’s rape of women and murder of babies needs to be referenced at all on a standardized test.
But the fundamental idea behind Randall’s work is even more stupid than her exemplar question. In recent years, conservative critics have accused the woke of believing that “2+2=4” is racist. Randall all but agrees that, in fact, it is. “Students are rarely taught ‘2+2=4’ absent of context,” she writes. “And, I argue, that when context is not clear (or seemingly not present), the implied context, historically, has been whiteness.” She is not quite arguing that “foundational math items such as “2+2” are always racist.” But, “[b]ecause we are unaware of this context and the cultural norms/values that students must draw on to respond, “2+2” is not necessarily a neutral item-type and should no longer be referred to as one.”
She means us to believe that it’s better, in other words, to write something like: “Two BLM protestors join two other BLM protestors at a rally against police brutality. How many BLM protestors are rallying for racial justice?”
Even if asking “2+2=4” is the best and most efficient way to know whether students understand the addition of single-digit integers, Randall argues that still shouldn’t ask that question, citing John Rawls. Randall writes, “We understand from the work of Rawls (1999) that policies/practices must be abolished—regardless of their perceived or actual efficiency and standing—if those policies/practices are inherently unjust.”
Professor Randall’s royal “we” here likely refers to critical race theorists (CRT). Her work is shot through with CRT phrases and references to CRT authors.
Journalist moderators have been chosen for these debates for decades. The problems with moderators are two-fold. First, journalists have come to occupy a prominent argumentative position in the debates. In the 1990s, journalist moderators would occupy roughly 5 percent of the speaking time in debates. In the most recent series, moderator Chris Wallace consumed more than 25 percent of the speaking time.That is the most annoying part of those performances. The argumentative journalist offers a Complex Proposition going on for longer than the time limit the candidate is expected to respect. Does it come as any surprise that under such circumstances the candidate might deflect or resort to tangentially salient talking points? Make Sean Hannity moderator and claim he shows favoritism to the Republican, and Mr Newsom's behavior is true to the candidate form.
There are no established limits for moderator monologues about politics to which candidates are expected to respond. Secondly, journalist moderators indicate a pattern of favoritism toward the Democratic nominee.
Though it was sold as a showdown between the chief executives of what may be America's most iconic "red" and "blue" states—and perhaps a preview of a presidential campaign next year or in 2028—the debate quickly devolved into a nearly unwatchable mess. The two men kept talking over one another while the moderator, Fox News host Sean Hannity, struggled to keep the conversation focused.About the best Mr Newsom could do was note that there's a net out-migration of Floridians to California.
Newsom had little interest in engaging with the premise of the debate: which state had a better style of governance. It's hard to blame him for that. California is losing population, it has a higher unemployment rate than Florida, and its residents suffer under significantly higher taxes. The first 20 minutes of the debate consisted of Hannity teeing up those facts one after the next, letting DeSantis swing away, and then asking Newsom to explain why California seems to suck. That was never going to produce a productive discussion, and it didn't.
Instead, Newsom played the role of loyal Joe Biden surrogate—he started his very first answer of the night with "I'm here to tell the truth about the Biden/Harris record." And since he had little interest in defending his own track record, it quickly became obvious that Newsom was on the debate stage to rope-a-dope DeSantis into losing his cool and looking unserious.
He largely succeeded. "Ron, relax," he chuckled at one point near the end of the 90-minute affair, after hooking the Flordia governor into another loud and meaningless shoutfest.
There are a lot more students enrolled in upwardly mobile Compass Point State universities than there are in the Ivies, or the Catholic institutions with or without basketball or football, or in the state flagships. Notionally, the policy within each state is to ensure a place somewhere in the state university system to graduates in good standing of the high schools in the states, and the upwardly mobile and converted teachers' colleges ought not be viewed as consolation prizes for high school seniors who didn't make the cut at their state's flagship institution. The athletic department might view football as the front porch to the university. What goes on in the kitchen and the rumpus room and the study also matters.Over the past sixty or seventy years, that "upwardly mobile" has been a way for empire-building administrators to convert state teachers' colleges and former seminaries into universities. On the academic side, sometimes that translates into additional graduate and professional schools, and on rare occasions grant-getting and the indirect cost returns therefrom, the better to be plowed back into fancier development offices. More commonly, though, the students attracted by the concept of a university disengage, perhaps inspired by careerist professors playing the Glass Bead Game rather than competing in their disciplines.
