VIDEO FROM FIRE: PRO-PALESTINIAN PROTESTOR INTERRUPTS DINNER AT BERKELEY DEAN ERWIN CHEMERINSKY’S HOUSE. Chemerinsky, a well-known First Amendment scholar, is also definitely a man of the left. Yet that hasn’t immunized him from the result of the endless “the personal is political” baloney the left has been pushing for my whole life. (Remember the glee over dinner interruptions during the Kavanaugh hearings?) Will there be any consequences for it, though? You know the answer…

UNC LAUNCHES SCHOOL OF CIVIC LIFE AND LEADERSHIP. It chose Duke classicist and Civil Discourse leader Jed Atkins as inaugural dean, too, which is a good sign: “Students surveyed in Duke’s program, Atkins said, are more likely than other students to have a faculty member as a mentor, to be friends with someone with different beliefs and have a sense of purpose. He also said these students are less likely to be anxious or lonely.” The reaction to the school from some UNC faculty suggests that maybe they could stand having a couple of friends with different beliefs…

89 INVESTIGATIONS OF CAMPUS ANTI-SEMITISM SINCE OCTOBER, NO PROGRESS FROM DEPT OF ED. Consider this: campuses have been openly recruiting faculty (and even students) who are highly racist and hostile towards those of European descent for decades, to change the culture in ways the ruling class prefers. It turns out that when you do this, a lot of those people turn out to also hate Jews, and probably plenty of other ethnicities as well. (Why wouldn’t they? Principle?) If ED really investigated these incidents, this would be impossible to hide. So they won’t. It’s that simple.

LESS DOMESTIC SPYING, MORE ACTUAL CYBER DEFENSE, PLEASE. How cool would it be if our internal security agencies spent their time on protecting us from near-apocalyptic hacking from foreign powers instead of monitoring random Americans’ Facebook pages? Props to hero Andres Freund of Microsoft, though, for doing the job the NSA and FBI won’t do.

Needed Disclaimer for Any Criticism of US Intel Agencies: I am not suicidal, nor do I have information that would lead to the arrest and conviction of Hillary Clinton.

DO OUR “CONFORMITY COLLEGES” NEED A CAVITY FILLING OR A ROOT CANAL? David Barnhizer argues the latter in his new book. Going from FIRE to private practice taught me that the rot is deeper than you can imagine, especially in schools of education and social work.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Maybe more of an extraction.

SOMEONE HAS HACKED MY FACEBOOK ACCOUNT and is posting scams about investments and Bitcoin on it. I have tried to report it, as have many of my family members, but the reporting function keeps giving me an error. So, 2 things:

1. If you follow me on Facebook, please do not fall for any scams! I am not trying to sell you something. Nor will I ever do so on Facebook.
2. If you have any suggestions about how to get through to Facebook that I have been hacked, so they can at least shut it down and stop them from trying to scam people, I’d appreciate it in the comments!

N.B.: I had two-factor authentication on, too, so I really don’t know how they managed this. So it might be worth changing your password, or what have you, if this is some kind of new exploit. It’s probably not – I probably did something dumb, somehow – but you never know.

ANTI-DEI AND RACIAL PREFERENCES MEASURES GAIN STEAM IN ARIZONA. If there is one area where our education system has miserably failed the hardest and least excusably (given how much attention is given to race and racism), it’s on educating students why segregation and discrimination is a bad idea regardless of who’s doing it. All they needed to do was teach the Golden Rule, which is at least 3,600 years old, and they couldn’t even manage that.

KANGAROO COURT LANDS UNC IN REAL COURT. Working as a lawyer in this field, I see, over and over again, that campus HR and discrimination investigators don’t feel bound even by their own rules. Courts usually go out of their way to enable this behavior, too, to an extent where I wonder if judges have an unspoken understanding that if they started holding colleges to their own rules, the resulting explosion of litigation would cripple the judicial system. Hopefully this case will be different!

STANDARDIZED TESTS CONTINUE THEIR COMEBACK. Should have been a no-brainer, but the education system will go to virtually any length to avoid objective measures of its total failure to deliver on its promises at the K-12 level.

DEI’S NEW WEAPON: ‘CULTURAL TAXATION.’ DEI ideology demands members of minorities act in their capacity of members of the group instead of individuals. This results in more work for those people, which DEI labels “cultural taxation” without pointing out that the DEI pushers are the tax collectors. DEI pushers’ solution: everyone else should compensate the victims for the damage the DEI pushers caused. Which, of course, would enable them to make more DEI demands of people. Nice “work” if you can get it…

GAMERGATE 2.0: SWEET BABY INC. AND THE GRIFTERS WOKE-IFYING VIDEO GAMES. If you’ve played a video game lately and been puzzled by what kind of weirdo would add the kind of absurdly clumsy and off-putting political propaganda that’s now common, well, at least some of the weirdoes have now been discovered.

NY GOV DEPLOYING NATIONAL GUARD TO NYC SUBWAYS DUE TO CRIME WAVE. You know what would have been more helpful? Not letting crime get so out of control that you have to deploy the military to keep order in Manhattan on an ordinary Wednesday.

(OVER)ZEALOUS DEI PROGRAM LANDS PENN STATE IN COURT. Among many other things, a faculty “professional development” meeting featured “a training video entitled ‘White Teachers are a Problem,’ another sweeping attack on white faculty members simply because of their race.”

The simple fact is that if Penn State made black faculty members sit through a video called “Black Teachers are a Problem,” they would rightfully be livid, and everyone would recognize that as a hostile environment.

Disclosure: my firm, Allen Harris PLLC, represents De Piero.

FORMER NORTH CAROLINA GOVERNOR JIM MARTIN: DAVIDSON’S DEI EFFORTS GO TOO FAR. “Recently, all Davidson College student-athletes were required to watch a film entitled, ‘I’m Not Racist, Am I?’… Regardless of what you think, say or do, it insists that if you’re white, you are racist. If you’re of color, you cannot be racist. In their lexicon, ‘racist’ is just a synonym for ‘white.'”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Sounds like a hostile educational environment on account of race to me.

BRYAN CAPLAN ON GEORGE MASON’S ORWELLIAN ‘JUST SOCIETIES’ COURSE REQUIREMENT. “This is quixotic, I know, but let me try to break through the woke academic echo chamber with some harsh truths. If you promote DEI for a living, the reality is that normal, apolitical people see you as a racist, sexist, censorious fanatic. They don’t say so publicly … because they are afraid of you. They don’t tell you privately … because they are afraid of you. But when they’re speaking to people they trust, they vehemently disagree with you—and yearn to see you all fired.”

TWO MORE IVY LEAGUE SCHOOLS DROP THE DEAN’S LIST. I suppose it makes sense from an economic perspective–if going to a fancy school is simply a status signifier, why should paying full freight get you less than full benefit?

WHAT’S UNC (AND PROBABLY EVERY OTHER SCHOOL) TEACHING THESE DAYS? “For example, when I enrolled in an introductory philosophy course at UNC, I was surprised to find, on the front page of the syllabus, a series of photos of notable philosophers, from the Greeks to the present day, in which each of the “dead white men” (a popular condemnation on campus) had an “X” through his face. The photos of the modern, “diverse” philosophers were unadulterated.” Sounds like someone let Google Gemini generate their syllabus…

FLORIDA LEGISLATURE PASSES ‘BAN’ ON SOCIAL MEDIA FOR UNDER-16 KIDS. This seems obviously unconstitutional, and DeSantis may not sign it. But man, as a parent of teens, I can tell you that the peer pressure on your kids to get on these platforms (and expose themselves to the destructive behavior of other kids) is intense. It would be wise for the big platforms to make it much easier for parents to regulate this stuff, because that’s far preferable to the law stepping in.

DUKE SETTLES MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR PRICE-FIXING LAWSUIT. Along with Brown, Columbia, Emory, and Yale. Will it occur to anyone in academia that they are vulnerable to such settlements precisely because nobody would put it past them?

DOJ SUES TENNESSEE OVER LAW INCREASING PENALTIES FOR ENGAGING IN PROSTITUTION WHILE KNOWINGLY HAVING HIV. I’m starting to think the Justice Department might have a different set of priorities than your average American might expect.

AGAINST “SCHOLAR-ACTIVISM.” Not everything has to be about “advancing democracy” all the time, nor should doing so be an excuse for not rigorously pursuing the truth.

BAN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AT THE MILITARY ACADEMIES TOO. “SFFA argues that West Point and Annapolis focus inappropriately on race during the admissions process and that West Point’s ‘director of admissions brags that race is wholly determinative for hundreds if not thousands of applicants.'” Yeah, there’s no way that could go horribly wrong.

I long for the good old days when America’s military “leaders” were just talking about how they would warn the Chinese in advance if we decided to attack them.

DO CAMPUS SPORTS DO MORE GOOD THAN HARM? I suspect they do at the small colleges the author discusses, but turning large college athletics into a minor league for pro teams has been a big mistake.

COURTESY OF ELON MUSK, DISNEY’S ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT ‘INCLUSION STANDARDS.’ Assuming these are real, of course.

Whatever moral justification there might be for quotas for “underrepresented” groups cannot possibly stretch to using those quotas to create a new underrepresented group composed of the people you like less. If accusations of racism are starting to lose their sting, this kind of thing is why it’s happening.

“LET FLORIDA TRY” ITS HIGHER ED REFORM EFFORTS: An FSU prof does what the media will not, giving a rundown of the changes in Florida higher ed and the potential benefits and drawbacks of things like anti-DEI efforts and post-tenure review. Seriously, it was so refreshing to read an article about this subject that’s not just straight propaganda.