TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 783.

FROM JONATHAN ADLER, thoughts on infants in college:

1) It’s not entirely clear how prevalent this phenomenon is. The demand for insulating students from potentially upsetting ideas does, for the moment, appears to come from a vocal minority and does not appear to have widespread support. Yet isn’t that always how these sorts of things start? And isn’t it well established that a vocal and highly motivated minority interest group can have an outsized influence on institutional policies?

2) Efforts to insulate students from challenging and even potentially offensive ideas cuts them off from the world and compromises much of the value of a traditional “liberal” education. It’s like some want to turn universities into the secular equivalents of Ave Maria Town.

3) One of the benefits of having been right-of-center in college was that my political and philosophical views were constantly challenged. There was no “safe space” — and I was better for it. I often felt that I received a better education than many of my peers precisely because I was not able to hold unchallenged assumptions or adopt unquestioned premises.

If you cater to a vocal minority, you’ll destroy your market position. This is happening in colleges now.

V.S. NAIPAUL ON ISIS: A grotesque love of propaganda. Unspeakable barbarity. The loathing of Jews – and a hunger for world domination. In this stunning intervention, literary colossus V.S. NAIPAUL says ISIS is now the Fourth Reich.

PROPOSAL: Tie Law Faculty Salaries to Bar Passage Rates.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: GOP Could Score Big By Targeting Hollywood, Silicon Valley — But Can Republicans Bring Themselves To Criticize Big Business?

OBAMA IS ENRAGED … by Netanyahu quoting Kerry at him. Well, it’s bad enough to have Kerry as Secretary of State, without people rubbing your nose in it.

Related: Advice to Israel: Beware Of Obama.

First he comes for the banks and health care, uses the IRS to go after critics, politicizes the Justice Department, spies on journalists, tries to curb religious freedom, slashes the military, throws open the borders, doubles the debt and nationalizes the Internet.

He lies to the public, ignores the Constitution, inflames race relations and urges Latinos to punish Republican “enemies.” He abandons our ­allies, appeases tyrants, coddles ­adversaries and uses the Crusades as an excuse for inaction as Islamist terrorists slaughter their way across the Mideast.

Now he’s coming for Israel.

Barack Obama’s promise to transform America was too modest. He is transforming the whole world before our eyes. Do you see it yet?

Against the backdrop of the tsunami of trouble he has unleashed, Obama’s pledge to “reassess” America’s relationship with Israel cannot be taken lightly.

Perhaps America should reassess its relationship with President Obama.

BYRON YORK: Silenced workers who lost jobs to H-1B visa abuse (quietly) speak out.

The Senate Judiciary Committee recently held a hearing into abuses of the H-1B skilled guest worker visa program. Lawmakers heard experts describe how the use of foreign workers has come to dominate the IT industry, with many tech giants using the program to fire well-paid current workers and replace them with workers from abroad at significantly lower pay.

“The current system to bring in high-skill guest workers … has become primarily a process for supplying lower-cost labor to the IT industry,” two experts who testified at the hearing, Howard University’s Ron Hira and Rutgers’ Hal Salzman, wrote recently. “Although a small number of workers and students are brought in as the ‘best and brightest,’ most high-skill guest workers are here to fill ordinary tech jobs at lower wages.” . . .

It’s certainly true that other workers in other industries have lost jobs because companies wanted to cut costs. Highly-paid middle-aged workers have been replaced by younger employees working for less. That can be an unhappy fact of life in today’s economy. But in the case of H-1Bs, the federal government is expressly giving a special permit to foreign workers — actually, to large outsourcing firms that use H-1Bs to bring those workers to the U.S. — in order to displace American workers. And now many lawmakers in both parties — their task made simpler by the enforced silence of fired and angry workers — want even more H-1Bs. Is that something the government should do?

If borders don’t mean anything anymore, then I will pay Cayman Islands income taxes.

ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS: Our current mission is consulting and training Iraqi Christians to fight ISIS.

NEW HAMPSHIRE UNION LEADER: Jeanne Shaheen vs. women: Her loathsome sex trafficking vote.

TECHNOCRACY’S CHICKENS, COMING HOME TO ROOST: Joel Kotkin: Race, class issues starting to split Silicon Valley alliance of tech, progressives. “This class divide is increasingly central to progressive politics, which is bad news, indeed, for the tech oligarchs. Among the perceptive parts of the Left, the dissonance between the progressive-tilted techies and the economic reality they are creating is too obvious to ignore. . . . The immediate response from the oligarchs, and their swelling ranks of highly paid public-relations consultants, will likely be symbolic, mouthing the politically correct stance on climate change, even as they take off in their private jets. Also expect them to put more money into charitable activities, which could turn displaced cab drivers or factory assemblers into future wards of the tech elite. In the end, it seems little different from a glossy form of the Gilded Age – or feudalism.”

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Teacher Gets Probation After Sex With Student. “Mary F. Gilles, 28, of Austin, Minn., pleaded guilty to two felony counts of criminal sexual conduct for her relationship with a 17-year-old student. Gilles’ probation comes with more than 20 conditions, including registering as a predatory sex offender, no contact with minors or the victim and no Internet access without permission. If she violates the conditions of her sentence, Gilles could face four years in prison.”

Would a male teacher have gotten probation? I kinda doubt it.

JIM LINDGREN LOOKS AT LAW FACULTY DIVERSITY: The most over-represented groups in law teaching compared to working lawyers: minorities and women. The most under-represented group in law teaching compared to working lawyers: white males.

This is no big surprise, but he’s got a lot of data. Excerpt:

Table A is a shortened version of Table 17 in the Measuring Diversity paper. It ranks groups from the most over-represented to the most under-represented in law teaching compared to working lawyers, ranked by the absolute percentage above or below parity. By that measure, all ethnic minorities combined are the most over-represented group in law teaching (19.9% of professors compared to 14.2% of lawyers). That corresponds to about two extra minorities on a typical law faculty of forty. Next are African Americans (5.3% over-represented), followed by females (3.5% over-represented, only about one extra women on each faculty of forty). As the ratio column shows, there are over twice as many African-American law professors as their percentages among working lawyers would suggest.

The most under-represented ethnic or gender group in law teaching compared to working lawyers is non-Hispanic white males, who are about three faculty short of parity. If, however, a faculty were to do targeted hiring of only white males without firing any current faculty, they would need to hire seven white males on every faculty to reach parity. To reach parity for non-Hispanic whites overall, every law faculty of forty would have to hire nineteen whites. The third most under-represented group by absolute percentage differences is males overall (3.5% short of parity).
….
In terms of race and gender, law faculties are now as diverse as the English-fluent, full-time working lawyer population of a similar age. To make further progress on this front, perhaps one should focus more on ethnic and gender equity within the leadership of law faculties and on diversifying the population of working lawyers to widen the pool from which professors are drawn. Moreover, traditional diversity hiring of women and ethnic minorities does not necessarily lead to a diversity of viewpoints — and regarding political views, usually leads in the opposite direction.

If as a society we are to engage in social engineering, we need to pay more attention to realities and to think more critically about what we are actually accomplishing. We should study our success with affirmative action to learn how it can be exported to other fields, but we should also study our failure to promote diversity of viewpoints to learn how to reverse it. Now that the important work of race and gender integration has succeeded on law school faculties — with the traditional affirmative action groups now matching or exceeding their percentages in the broader lawyer population — the next step should be to desegregate law schools politically.

Indeed. This is something that state legislatures should look at.

KURT SCHLICHTER: No Point in More Defense Spending With Liberals in Charge. “The patriotic conservative hawks who are terrified by the deterioration of our military are absolutely right – our military is in crisis. But lifting the sequester caps and pumping more money into the Pentagon isn’t going to solve the problem. First, we need a president who actually cares about defending this country. Second, we need to change the Defense Department from a feeding trough for government workers and contractors into a lean, mean, warfighting machine. . . . There’s no point in even trying to rebuild our forces until we get a president who actually understands the nature of our enemies and sides with America and our allies against them. You need to understand – liberals do not want America to be a superpower. They want us neutered. The decline of our military isn’t an accident; it’s a goal.”

I’M GOBSMACKED: Ted Cruz’s midnight announcement is… ‘I’m running for President.’ I mean, who could have seen that coming?