HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Brooklyn Law School Parts Ways With Dean.

Allard’s abrupt departure is unusual in legal education, where law deans typically announce their intention to step down months or even a year in advance. Even when law school leaders clash with university officials or faculty, they are typically allowed to plan graceful exits out of the dean’s office. …

Allard’s deanship coincided with the national downturn in law school applications, and the school struggled with financial issues during that time. It has sold a number of its residential properties in the highly sought-after Brooklyn Heights neighborhood, and in 2016 sold off an office building across the street from its downtown Brooklyn campus for $76.5 million.

But those sales don’t appear to have been enough to keep the school in a strong financial position.

Last month, Moody’s Investors Service lowered the law school’s outlook from stable to negative, citing, “ongoing tuition pricing challenges and operating deficits that are deeper than previously projected and will continue for a period longer than anticipated, leading to a likely deterioration of spendable cash and investments.” But Moody’s also noted that the school’s unrestricted reserves give it time to “move to operating equilibrium.” Moody’s reported that the school generates $43 million annually.

More at the link.

MEN WITHOUT CHESTS: Deadbeat son is a sign of America’s failure to raise boys.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, CULTURE OF BIGOTRY EDITION: What’s Wrong With Being From the South? Just Ask an Academic in the North.

That kind of crass regionalism creates well-earned suspicion of ivory-tower elites. The stereotyping works in both directions. Each sustains the other, leading to electoral results that help neither the professors up north nor the pig farmers where I grew up. Regionalism creates openings for populists to exploit and worsen these divides. These attitudes pit rural against urban, college-educated against non-college-educated. If those of us in academe are truly so smart, we ought to be the ones taking the first step toward bridging this divide.

Unfortunately, the opposite is occurring. In the age of Trump, anti-Southern attitudes seem to have crystallized and worsened throughout higher education. Any Trump-voting area, in fact, seems to be fair game for ridicule. These attitudes undercut the efforts of those seeking to advance the rights of marginalized groups in regions of the country where evidence-based scholarship might be needed the most. . . .

It is strange to me that so many academics cannot see when they show prejudice against the rural, the religious, and the less formally educated. We are trained to recognize systematic bias in terms of race and gender — but we remain too often unaware of our geographic prejudices. . . .

Intellectual laziness is on the rise with disturbing results. After the mass shooting in Las Vegas, I spoke with a student who was bothered that she felt no sympathy at first for the victims. As we talked, she began to realize the rash of assumptions she had made about them: If they were attending a country-music concert, they must have voted for Trump, which meant they loved guns and thus deserved death. It’s an extreme example of our discourse of dehumanization — a vivid one in my memory. But it isn’t rare for me to hear similar assumptions expressed by students or faculty members, often without the critical self-reflection.

Looking down on the flyover people, and the unearned feeling of moral superiority it brings, is the coin with which the left pays its foot soldiers. Without that, many of them would be gone.

UPDATE: From the comments: “What’s most laughable is that the fans believe they are part of the team.”

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MICHAEL WALSH: Germany’s German Problem — And Ours.

WELL, GOOD: POTUS delivers Naval Academy inspiring speech, remains in the hot sun to shake all 1,042 hands.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: A shotgun does not produce a “wall of lead” that sweeps intruders off their feet without the need for aiming.

WHY THE HECK do so many Koalas have chlamydia?

I dunno, but Bill Clinton visited Australia in 1996.

OPEN THREAD: Hey, it’s Saturday night, everybody’s havin’ fun. I’m in the comment thread, trying to get some comments done. Watching the comments go round, watching the comments go round. . . .

ADDRESSING THE IMPORTANT ISSUES: Every Durango Kid Movie, Ranked From Worst to Best, With No Further Explanation. I confess, I am not enough of a Durango Kid fanboy to dispute these. Is anyone?

CNN IS STRUGGLING IN THE AGE OF TRUMP. REALLY STRUGGLING.

CNN struggles to break 1 million viewers on a nightly basis.

There are plenty of reasons for this. CNN has to compete with MSNBC for a liberal audience and, unlike MSNBC, its liberal anchors pretend to be unbiased. MSNBC’s primetime anchors are more similar to Fox News’s talent, which embraces its distinctive ideological voice.

But so far, it seems, America is turned off by CNN’s panels of pundits yelling at each other about an aggrieved porn star.

How much crazier could CNN get if its anchors stopped pretending to be “unbiased?”

AN ALLY IN TRUMP’S ANTI-IRAN CAMPAIGN: Saudis Cut Trade With Germany.

ENDORSED.

THE BOOK HARVEY WEINSTEIN CARRIED TO HIS ARRAIGNMENT MAY HAVE BEEN A WARNING.

As Harry Shearer tweets, “Just Asking: Is the message Harvey Weinstein was sending by holding a copy of the bio of Elia Kazan at his arraignment, ‘I can name names, too’?”

CHANGE: Ireland Votes to Liberalize Abortion Law.

JOE PAPPALARDO: 10 of America’s Hidden Battlefields.

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CHRISTIAN TOTO: Seven Funny, Fawning Reviews of HBO’s ‘The Final Year.’

The Guardian tries oh, so hard to rally to Team Obama’s side in its review. But the film, as the critic begrudgingly admits, can’t ignore reality.

The Final Year uneasily concedes the possibility that Obama was on the back foot on Syria and may have been outsmarted by Putin: a constant, shrill complaint from the right.

Spoiler alert: The Right was right.

And there’s the other unintentional comedy coming from the film. The movie trumpets Obama’s trio of foreign relationship coups – the Paris Climate Accord, the Iran Deal and warmer relations with Cuba.

President Trump torpedoed the first two, and the third is fading. A sharper documentary might have dug deeper into Obama’s unwillingness to work with Congress rather than flexing his executive power pen.

Two can play at that game, apparently.

Meanwhile, film critics mourned the end of the Obama era via their “Final Year” reviews. The New York Times summons our lust for superhero movies in its closing comments about the film.

“The Final Year” may make viewers miss President Obama’s people. Unlike Marvel or DC superheroes in the movies, they won’t be back any time soon.

Read the whole thing — Christian is milking the soft power dividend of schadenfreude for all it’s worth here.

A “BIONIC VEST” that helps assembly-line workers work over their heads with less fatigue. “What also sets the vest apart is that it’s completely mechanical. There’s no cord, no battery, no electricity; it’s powered by springs. They kick in gradually once the wearer raises their arms to about chest-height and beyond.”

I’ve always found working over my head one of the most fatiguing jobs there is. It’s gotten modestly better as my shoulders have gotten stronger — as I discovered when taking down some blinds for my daughter recently — but I can’t imagine doing this for 10 hours a day without feeling like crap and eventually messing up my shoulders. Which is exactly what happens, and what this vest is in response to. Result with the vest: “Aw, I feel fine. My neck — instead of having to Icy Hot it down three or four times like I told you earlier, I feel fine at the end of the day.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Colleges Bend the Rules for More Students, Give Them Extra Help: With an influx of students classified as disabled, schools move to accommodate their needs.

As many as one in four students at some elite U.S. colleges are now classified as disabled, largely because of mental-health issues such as depression or anxiety, entitling them to a widening array of special accommodations like longer time to take exams.

Under federal law, students can be considered disabled if they have a note from a doctor. That label requires schools to offer accommodations depending on the student’s needs. A blind student, for example, would have access to specialized software or a reader for an exam.

The rise in disability notes for mental-health issues has led to a surge in the number of students who take their exams in low-distraction testing centers, are allowed to get up and walk around during class or bring a comfort animal to school, among other measures. . . .

At Pomona, 22% of students were considered disabled this year, up from 5% in 2014. Other elite schools have also seen a startling jump in disabilities, according to data from the federal government and from the schools. At Hampshire, Amherst and Smith colleges in Massachusetts and Yeshiva University in New York, one in five students are classified as disabled. At Oberlin College in Ohio, it is one in four. At Marlboro College in Vermont, it is one in three.

Small, private schools have the greatest concentration of students with disabilities. Among the 100 four-year, not-for-profit colleges with the highest percentage of disabled students, 93 are private, according to a WSJ analysis of federal data.

Public schools have also seen a significant uptick in test accommodations. From 2011 to 2016, the number of students with special accommodations increased by an average of 71% among 22 flagship state schools, according to data obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

The most common accommodations come during testing. Students who receive extended time may get twice as long as their classmates to take an exam.

Some professors question how this affects the fairness of exams.

With reason.

CHRIS MATTHEWS, GUEST CLAIM FOX NEWS WANTS AMERICANS TO ‘HATE EACH OTHER’; NFL POLICY IS LIKE ‘APARTHEID.’

“Apartheid” is a strong word that requires immediate action. Why aren’t Chris and the rest of his fellow MSNBC anchors heading to the Comcast boardroom to demand a blackout of NBC’s Sunday Night Football?

And the NBA as well, since the NFL is simply implementing their rules for the national anthem?

THE CONFIDENTIAL INFORMANT WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD: Democrats Always Drag The Conversation Into An Argument About The English Language!

Related: How The Code Name ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ Undermines The FBI’s Russia Story.

10 REMINDERS OF AMERICAN BRAVERY AND COURAGE: Here is a fascinating Memorial Day weekend selection of illustrations, beginning with George Washington’s Revolutionary War camp kit to Hanoi Hilton pajamas from the Vietnam era and Texas hero Sam Houston’s Bowie Knife.

There’s also a sequence of videos that should stir the heart of every patriot. As LifeZette’s Kyle Becker explains: “They invite us to understand what went into the creation — and the defense — of our country over the years.” And much more.

MEDIA BLACKOUT AFTER ANTI-ISLAMIST ACTIVIST JAILED IN ENGLAND FOR REPORTING ON MUSLIM RAPE GANG TRIAL:

Tommy Robinson, a British activist and journalist, has been arrested outside a Leeds courtroom for livestreaming information about a Muslim gang on trial for raping and grooming hundreds of victims, some as young as eleven. Robinson was taken immediately to prison.

George Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning, not a how-to guide for British government. Read the whole thing.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Frustrated Profs Shut Down A Chancellor Search, Leaving President ‘Mortified.’ “The search for a new chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Boston was shut down on Monday after the three finalists for the job dropped out. The candidates made their decision following faculty criticism of both the finalists and the search process. That’s an unusual outcome to a very common controversy. The widespread use of search consultants, the decline in shared governance, and the politicization of higher education have all contributed to the marginalization of faculty input in searches.”

Outside search firms are all the rage, but they don’t seem especially good at what they’re hired for. In fact, at my own institution, I think it’s fair to say that the quality of our administration has dropped since we started using them as opposed to promoting internally.