GIVING TEETH TO LAWS AGAINST AFFIRMATIVE ACTION RACIAL DISCRIMINATION. Relying on administrative agencies won’t cut it. It has to be individual liability and private rights of action, at minimum, to be real. Jail time for purposeful violations (not this “implicit” or “structural” baloney) should also be on the table. There is zero justification for letting apparatchiks use skin color to substitute for individual judgment.

MORE ON TRUMP’S REPORT THAT HE WILL BE ARRESTED FOR JANUARY 6 “INCITEMENT.” If the First Amendment protects an antiwar protester saying “We’ll take the f–king street later” while cops cleared out demonstrators, it surely protects Trump’s speech saying “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

CAN PRUDENCE SAVE YOU FROM WOKE SCOLDS ON CAMPUS? It certainly helps. It’s probably necessary. But when your number is up, it’s not enough.

4TH CIRCUIT ALLOWS NC STATE TO PUNISH ANTI-WOKE PROFESSOR ON ‘COLLEGIALITY’ GROUNDS. At least in higher ed, “collegiality” requirements are 100% a scam. Both those I helped at FIRE and my current clients (and the professor here is a client of my firm) regularly tolerate nauseating levels of “uncollegiality” aimed at them. If they complain, their complaints are deemed uncollegial. Courts need to stop falling for this stuff.

A PROGRESSIVE PRESCRIPTION TO FIX HIGHER ED. “To sum up Bunch’s argument, the U.S. should make universal postsecondary education a ‘public good.'”

The K-12 system is universal and it’s not doing so hot–how about we fix that first?

THE DECLINE (AND FALL?) OF COLLEGE. As I believe Glenn has already pointed out, part of the reason affirmative action got shot down is that courts no longer have the confidence that colleges are making sound academic judgments. Schools doing things like eliminating the SAT to obfuscate admissions processes aren’t going to help with this, either.

THE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION OPINION IS OUT. From the summary:

Because Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points, those admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. At the same time, nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university. Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice. Pp. 39–40.

UPDATE – also from the opinion:

Most troubling of all is what the dissent must make these omissions to defend: a judiciary that picks winners and losers based on the color of their skin. While the dissent would certainly not permit university programs that discriminated against black and Latino applicants, it is perfectly willing to let the programs here continue. In its view, this Court is supposed to tell state actors when they have picked the right races to benefit. Separate but equal is “inherently unequal,” said Brown. 347 U. S., at 495 (emphasis added). It depends, says the dissent.

Ouch. Also: “But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. (A dissenting opinion is generally not the best source of legal advice on how to comply with the majority opinion.)”

WHAT IS THE ‘EdD’ AND WHY IS IT A PROBLEM? While I was at FIRE, cases from education schools were hands down the most insane of all our cases, followed closely by social work and nursing. And since I’m a pseudo-“doctor” myself (and basically a knight, too), you are required to submit to my expertise.

OHIO NORTHERN U, WHILE REFUSING TO TELL A PROF WHAT HE’S ACCUSED OF DOING, ASKS CRITICS TO ‘WITHHOLD JUDGMENT.’ I await its petition to the court for mercy in the killing of its parents on the grounds that it is an orphan. (Note: my firm represents Prof. Gerber here. Not the school, thank goodness.)

This country is in the grips of a massive crisis of institutional accountability. From Hunter Biden, the FBI, and Fauci, to colleges that violate the law and school boards that silence parents, those in power believe (with solid evidence) that they will never even have to answer questions. It’s all of our jobs as citizens, not subjects, to make them wrong about this.

‘CLUSTER HIRES’ KEY TO UNC DEI PUSH. If the Supreme Court does ban affirmative action in admissions as many suspect, expect a massive wave of innovation from colleges. Not technologically, but in terms of ways to engage in racial discrimination without being detected.

PROF. ROBERT GEORGE IN THE ATLANTIC: TIME FOR INSTITUTIONAL NEUTRALITY. 50+ years ago, the University of Chicago adopted the “Kalven Report,” aimed at keeping the institution out of political struggles: “The University is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” The amount of trouble potentially avoided by such rules is so immense that the fact that they are not widely adopted is itself a sign of something gone very wrong.

TUITION DISCOUNT RATES ARE RISING. Mid-tier private colleges likely hardest hit, which makes sense. It’s one thing to pay Yale all of your money to indoctrinate your kids to hate you. It’s another to pay, say, DePaul for the same dubious privilege.

THE SCOTT GERBER CASE, REVISITED. NAS’ Peter Wood: “This matter involves an effort by the dean of ONU’s law school, Charles H. Rose III, to coerce Professor Gerber to resign… Perhaps most troubling of all to some of his colleagues, he is a leading authority on the jurisprudence of Justice Clarence Thomas.” Thrown out of class in April, he still has not been told what he did. If they can do this to a tenured professor, nobody is safe. (Disclosure: my firm represents Prof. Gerber.)

HILLSDALE PROF WILFRED MCCLAY ON ‘THE DEATH OF LEARNING.’ And why we still need the liberal arts.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER: RADICALIZING MILITARY EDUCATION. Why is it that nobody is looking into whether the Russians (or Chinese) are behind this? That’d be some real bang for their ruble/yuan…

MAYBE NOBODY BLEW UP THE UKRAINIAN DAM. Last December, the Ukrainians decided to take some experimental HIMARS potshots at it: “The Ukrainians…even conducted a test strike with a HIMARS launcher on one of the floodgates at the Nova Kakhovka dam, making three holes in the metal to see if the Dnieper’s water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages.” This spring, the Russians controlling the dam mechanisms let the water get so high it was overtopping the dam for a month, generally A Bad Thing. Thinking back to the Oroville Dam in 2017, I wonder how long our dams would last under such conditions.

THE NEW YORKER COVERS THE ‘GATHERING OF THOUGHT CRIMINALS.’ In a sane country, such a gathering would not exist. As it is, I know a bunch of them myself (and work with two of them). Yikes. I guess I should note for the record here that I am not suicidal and do not have any information that would lead to the arrest and convic—

HOW ALUMNI CAN HELP IN THE BATTLE AGAINST INSTITUTIONALIZED DEI-ISM. Your alma mater needs you! (So do your kids and grandkids, if college is not to be bald-faced indoctrination.)

HOW OUR COLLEGE LEADERS “CULL THE HERD.” DEI is a religion, except there’s no Golden Rule and anyone can be part of the Inquisition. No school is beneath its gaze–the victim here, Matthew Garrett, is a tenured prof at Bakersfield College, a California community college. Scott Gerber, who is going through a similar ordeal, is a tenured law professor at Ohio Northern University in tiny Ada, Ohio. (Disclaimer: Gerber is my client.) The people running higher ed are running it right into the ground, and at this point, they have to know it.

THE UNIVERSITY OF AUSTIN GEARS UP FOR ITS FIRST INCOMING CLASS IN 2024. If they can pull it off, the opportunity is huge. Simply hiring any professor thrown out for badthink would give it a first-class faculty.

SEVENTH GRADER SENT HOME TWICE FOR ‘ONLY 2 GENDERS’ T-SHIRT. (Well, the second time, it said “CENSORED” genders.) Back in my day you had to wear a “Big Johnson” or “Coed Naked” t-shirt to get sent home!

DUKE HEALTH’S ANTIRACIST “PLEDGE” IS NOT GUIDED BY SCIENCE. From the article: “After much back and forth, I received the following reply from a Duke Health senior administrator: ‘I concede that I cannot find a [clinical] trial that proves implicit bias is the cause of worse health outcomes for African Americans. Believe me. I have looked.'”

Science cannot be the arbiter of moral choices. If “science” proved that the world would be better off in the aggregate if we carpet bombed (say) Dog River, Saskatchewan, off the map, would that make it right? Obviously not, so cut it out, “science.”

FLORIDA PASSES BILL INTENDED TO IMPROVE CAMPUS DEBATES AND BAN FLAGRANTLY IDEOLOGICAL HIRING. I think there is good reason to be cautious about such bills. But you know what would stop them in their tracks without any concerns about legislative bigfooting? Campuses could improve debates and stop the flagrantly ideological hiring.

ARE LAWYERS AND DOCTORS ACTUALLY OVEREDUCATED? Rich Vedder points out that compared to other countries, our grad students of all kinds probably are, at least in terms of time to degree. (I had no idea a Ph.D. in 3 years “wasn’t that atypical in the 1960s.”) I do think that a two-year law school with a year of apprenticeship (not just a wine-and-dine summer position) would be much better than our three-year track.

WHAT TO DO WHEN THE MOB TARGETS YOU. My colleague Mike Allen discusses the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s feature piece on what happened to Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Junot Díaz after a woman accused him of sexual misconduct in front of a crowd at an academic conference. This was seized upon by the usual suspects: BuzzFeed led the auto-da-fe, with the Washington Post, NPR, Vox, and CNN not far behind, and so the mobbing began, with more and more accusations coming out of the woodwork, most of them simply wrong.

So what do you do when you’re the Diaz of the moment? 5 tips: 1) Expect moral disorientation. 2) Don’t apologize. 3) To the mob, your personal life is political. 4) Realize facts don’t matter to the mobbers. 5) You need to get help. This may seem obvious when you’re not at the center of it, but actually following these is tough when you are. Mike has more at the link. If you know someone who’s going through this, they could really use these tips.