COURT SAYS LAWSUIT ALLEGING RACIAL DISCRIMINATION IN PENN STATE’S DEI APPROACH CAN GO TO TRIAL. The Atlantic: “The ruling noted De Piero’s claim that he was subject to ‘race-based theories condemning white people for no other reason than they spoke or were simply present while being ‘white,’ and that his supervisor ‘spoke of race conscious grading’… Once, faculty members even had to watch a training video titled ‘White Teachers Are a Problem.'”

Disclosure: Allen Harris, the firm where I work, represents the plaintiff, Zack De Piero.

“AGAINST VOTER-FRIENDLY CAMPUSES.” The reason you know college registration schemes aren’t actually nonpartisan is that there is probably no population in this country less in need of help registering to vote than college students.

UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS AS COMMODUS. “It is as if the university has become a strange and alien place, home to the sinister and brutish and driven by paranoia, hate, and conspiracy.” Probably could have left off the first 4 words of that…

We really, really deserve a better class of “elites.”

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON, ONLY CANDIDATES OF COLOR NEED APPLY. 

A member of the Faculty of Color group complained about having white faculty present for the job interviews:

[W]hen the candidate is White, it is just awkward. The last meeting was uncomfortable, and I would go as far as burdensome for me. Can we change the policy to not do these going forward with White faculty?

Imagine a culture so perverse that people with doctorates are just throwing this stuff out there like it’s not full Jim Crow.

CUNY FACULTY TAKE ON THEIR UNION. Debates about unionization aside, it’s malpractice for union leaders in NYC to be taking aggressive positions about the Israel-Hamas conflict. It has no effect on the war and no benefit for the workers it represents. Yet unions keep doing this stuff, and then wondering why they keep losing members and influence. I’ve talked to enough faculty members to know that they would really appreciate it if their unions laser-focused on getting them good pay and protecting their academic freedom rights.

WILL FREE SPEECH IN LAW SCHOOL BE SAVED BY (CHECKS NOTES) WAIT, IT’S THE ABA? The answer is, just possibly, yes.

At some point, the odds were that some part of academia would wake up and smell the whole place burning down. If it passes, chalk one up for us lawyers, I guess!

HOW THE AHA KILLED VIEWPOINT-NEUTRAL HISTORY TEACHING. Yes, perfect neutrality is impossible. That’s no excuse for not even bothering to try. Most of my teachers and profs did at least explain the opposing view when there was controversy. That’s not too much to ask.

IS YALE TO BLAME FOR GRADE INFLATION? I blame the Ivy League for all manner of ills, so yes. Assuming things are on the level, though (ha ha, I know), there’s a reasonable argument that highly selective colleges can fill their classes solely with students that they know are capable of doing “A” level work.

More importantly, nobody’s paying 80 grand a year to get “C”s.

WHEN THE WOKE JARGON CONFLICTS: Was just filling out a medical form and saw the now-customary “Sex at Birth” (sigh) field, in which the options given were male, female, and “unidentified.” I’m pretty sure the “at birth” was added in order to avoid the problems of trying to insure (say) a hysterectomy for the “unidentified,” but you can hardly blame them for being confused at this point.

Bonus round: someone should do an analysis of how many people actually use such “other” categories on official forms. I’ll bet it’s way fewer than you’d think – which is why the analysis will never be allowed to occur.

DEI CLASSES BRING MORAL CORRUPTION TO COMMUNITY COLLEGES. “At Wake Tech in Raleigh, N.C., the school’s ‘DEI Council’ is creating a course entitled ‘DEI 100: Introduction Course.'” Geez, haven’t the elites done enough to blue-collar Americans already? What did they do to deserve being subjected to this?

I live in Wake County and am seriously tempted to sign up for this class to find out what’s going on here…

A PROFESSOR GAVE A WOKE COURSE AND NOBODY CAME: Bucknell’s English department appears to be having trouble filling such classes as “Latinx Theater,” “Sex, Sexuality, and Rape Culture in the 18th Century,” and “Affrilachia: Regional Literature, Race, and Power.” But they sound so fun!

TIME TO ‘FORTIFY’ THE ACT, THEN. Falling ACT Scores Hold a Lesson for Universities.

ACADEMIA’S “ETHNIC CLEANSING” HITS MUSIC. Totalitarianism means that literally no issue or field is too small to bend to your will, whether it be “Schenkerian musicology” or your personal choice to abandon homosexuality. (Disclosure: my firm, Allen Harris, represents Professor Jackson, the unfortunate Schenkerian.)

THE COMING WAVE OF FRESHMAN FAILURE. The COVID shutdown gifts just keep on giving…

STATES SHOULD MANDATE STANDARDIZED TESTING FOR COLLEGE APPLICANTS. Colleges are already trying to dodge the ban on racial preferences; an objective measure of some kind, even if it’s not used for admission decisions, is the only way to know if they’re defying the law.

BIDEN’S EVEN WORSE VERSION OF ‘FREE COLLEGE.’ Surprise, he’s spending money without Congressional approval to make sure colleges feel no pressure to educate rather than indoctrinate.

HATRED OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION STOKES THE CAMPUS ANTISEMITISM CRISIS. Campuses have spent more than a generation pushing “who-whom” tribalism, and pretending to be surprised that it’s quickly degrading into a war of all against all. Thanks for nothing, “intellectual leaders.”

‘DETERRENT’ ACT WOULD REQUIRE BETTER REPORTING OF OVERSEAS GIFTS TO COLLEGES. I don’t think donors usually “buy off” nonprofits or colleges–donors give to institutions who are sympathetic to begin with. But were I running China (for example), I’d want to undermine American higher ed as much as possible, and if that’s driving what’s happened, well, you can’t argue with results.

HAVE COLLEGES FINALLY PUSHED IT TOO FAR? Rich Vedder thinks maybe they have, as does The Blogfather. With a special appearance from the late, great Milton Friedman: “Fully two decades have passed since the preeminent American libertarian economist Milton Friedman wrote to me, saying, ‘A full analysis … might lead you to conclude that higher education should be taxed to offset its negative externalities.'”

DOES DUKE REALLY NEED ‘ECONOMIC DIVERSITY?’ We had it “back in my day” before it was 80 grand a year… (grumble)

CHATGPT CAN GET OFF MY LAWN. Should professors do anything differently when students can use ChatGPT to generate answers and essays? I have a suggestion: go back to handwritten, closed-note (and closed-device) bluebook exams. Exam problem solved. Papers are trickier, but I suspect making ChatGPT generate a 10- or 20-page paper that sounds believable is about as hard as writing the paper itself.

WAKE FOREST’S ADMISSIONS GAMBIT: Is replacing explicitly race-based affirmative action with “early action” that favors first-generation college students a workaround to that pesky Supreme Court? Wake wants to find out. Seems like a big risk that you might have to let in lots of the dreaded white people from Appalachia, though…

ACADEMIC CONFERENCES ARE A SCAM. “Rules preventing the display of book covers with images of bones.” At an anthropology conference. You will not be surprised that the author’s talk this year got canceled for being about gender, which is at this point par for the course.

REFORMING POST-TENURE REVIEW. I’ve seen it weaponized too often to be enthusiastic about post-tenure review, but ironclad academic freedom guarantees for all faculty, regardless of tenure, would go a long way towards addressing the concerns with the degrading of tenure protections.

‘WHITE LOGIC’ AND ‘JEW PHYSICS.’ I was hoping they’d at least give us a cool cyberpunk-style dystopia, but the totalitarians just keep doing the same boring and predictable stuff over and over again. We deserve a better class of authoritarians stamping on our faces forever.