WILL AI AND CHATGPT CHANGE HIGHER ED FOR THE BETTER? Maybe not in the way you think.

‘APPLE HAS BEGUN SCANNING YOUR LOCAL IMAGE FILES WITHOUT CONSENT.’ I hope this guy’s mistaken, because I am close to 100% certain that the “child porn” for which claim they are scanning includes pictures like this…

…selected by people like this:

BOYS AND MEN NEED BETTER EDUCATIONAL POLICIES. 

TITLE IX ABUSE IS BACK ON THE MENU, BOYS! And I do mean boys. And men. Also it never really stopped, but the Trump/DeVos regs did slow it down.

GARLAND APPOINTS SPECIAL COUNSEL TO INVESTIGATE BIDEN CLASSIFIED DOCS. Welp, that’s what happens when you showboat to get bad orange man.

With both Biden and Trump, this almost certainly has way more to do with the government being addicted to secrecy and classifying everything in sight than it does with “muh nuclear codes!!”

RIPPED OFF BY THE THOUGHT POLICE. The Twitter Files show how censorship’s supporters got snookered.

OBJECTIVITY MUST BE DEFEATED. UNC is still “waiving” standardized testing until 2025. Because COVID. Must be the SR-71-X-AE-A10.5 strain I have been hearing about.

HOW’S THAT CENSORSHIP WORKING OUT FOR YOU, BRAZIL? Glenn Greenwald on about the Brazilian supreme court’s authoritarianism over speech, with 10 members of its Congress banned from social media by order of the court. Meanwhile, Brazilians made January 8 of this year a real version of what everyone pretends January 6, 2021, was in D.C. It’s almost like people think a government that silences its opponents lacks legitimacy!

Now, if you want to be really scared, consider that it’s quite possible that Trump will run under these conditions in 2024, with the connivance of (if probably not at the order of) the federal government.

MORE EVIDENCE THAT ON CAMPUS, SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS. It’s creepy and corrosive to watch campuses repeatedly turn a blind eye to expression that is anti-Semitic or anti-white while instituting totalitarian crackdowns on those who say the same or even milder things about groups that are politically en vogue. I don’t believe America can survive with speech policing generally, but I know it can’t survive by making groups of people second-class citizens.

IN WHICH I AM BALDER THAN DR. PHIL. Dr. Phil’s show yesterday was called “You Can’t Post That” and featured FIRE First Amendment plaintiff Kim Diei, who was nearly expelled for a tweet, with me in a supporting role. (They didn’t post her part online, so you get me instead. Sorry!) It was fun to do the show at Paramount in Hollywood–I was told it was the same sound stage as The Wizard of Oz.

‘THE MOST ACCURATE MOVIE ABOUT CAMPUS LIFE THAT I CAN REMEMBER.’ So said the late Roger Ebert about Wonder Boys, based on Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon’s book of the same name. Back then, it took some mighty serious offenses to fire a tenured professor like main character Grady Tripp. (Now it just takes an insufficiently woke tweet, yet somehow we’re not better off.) If you haven’t read or seen it, it might be worth checking out.

ALTERNATIVES TO AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN HIGHER ED. With any luck, this will soon become a pressing concern. Also makes an interesting point: while the U.S. population has increased by around 50% since the 1970s, the number of “prestigious” schools, and the number of students they admit, has barely budged. This lends a lot of credence to the idea that, despite their protests, they’re selling prestigious credentials, not education.

NEW YEAR’S REFORMS FOR HIGHER ED: Sadly (as a former Cameron Crazie), I think we probably do need to end big-time college sports. Not just because it’s obviously just a minor league for the pros now, but because colleges use sports “homerism” to distract from the vile things they actually promote and mandate for the vast majority of students.

Update: I corrected my embarassing substitution of the word “prose” for “pros.” Is anyone else having this weird thing as they get older where they substitute homophones while writing? Or am I just losing my mind?

OK, I’VE HAD JUST ABOUT A-FRICKIN-NOUGH. The New York Times gives us “The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs.” Every single paragraph in this is a boot stamping on a human face, forever. I know it’s behind a paywall, but if you can read it, you should, because this is the voice of the establishment.

The ethical universe, according to Signal, is simple: The privacy of individuals must be respected above all else, come what may. If terrorists or child abusers or other criminals use the app, or one like it, to coordinate activities or share child sexual abuse imagery behind impenetrable closed doors, that’s a shame — but privacy is all that matters.

One should always worry when a person or an organization places one value above all. The moral fabric of our world is complex. It’s nuanced. Sensitivity to moral nuance is difficult, but unwavering support of one principle to rule them all is morally dangerous.

The way Signal wields the word “surveillance” reflects its coarsegrained understanding of morality. To the company, surveillance covers everything from a server holding encrypted data that no one looks at to a law enforcement agent reading data after obtaining a warrant to East Germany randomly tapping citizens’ phones. One cannot think carefully about the value of privacy — including its relative importance to other values in particular contexts — with such a broad brush.

What’s more, the company’s proposition that if anyone has access to data, then many unauthorized people probably will have access to that data is false. This response reflects a lack of faith in good governance, which is essential to any well-functioning organization or community seeking to keep its members and society at large safe from bad actors.

If you’re not either laughing your ass off or cocking your shotgun after reading that last part, you are probably reading the wrong blog.

ON FIRE FOR FREE SPEECH: Glenn has always been so generous in recommending FIRE (my former employer) as an end-of-year gift for those looking to give. DonorsTrust (a donor-advised fund, also very good folks) highlights FIRE’s work today on its Giving Ventures podcast.

HIGHER ED’S TOP LOBBYIST IS RETIRING. But, as Rich Vedder points out, while colleges are awash in federal dollars, problems and scandals in accreditation, athletics, and research spending are looming larger than ever. Ask yourself this: would you take the job as his successor? (I’d run away as fast as I could…)

COLLLEGE ACTUALLY GETS HELD TO ITS PROMISE TO BE FAIR. Not a great outcome on Title IX grounds, but it’s great to see a circuit court see a college promise “to conduct a fair and thorough investigation” and actually hold the college to it–that’s rare indeed. Bets on a quick settlement?

STANFORD IS ANTI-AMERICAN. No, this is not news from 1981. I mean that the IT department literally doesn’t want you to use the word “American.” Stanford took it down but WSJ saved a PDF. (Maybe it’s a parody? I hope?)

But beware! “Content Warning: This website contains language that is offensive or harmful. Please engage with this website at your own pace.”

THE STRANGE ATTACK ON BLIND REVIEWING OF ACADEMIC PAPERS. In my years at FIRE, one thing I learned is that the best way to judge what academic institutions of any sort are up to is to determine what they would do if they were the moustache-twirling villain caricatures right-wingers think they are, and assume they are doing that. (With the important modification that, while it happens less often, they’re happy to steamroll left-leaning dissenters as well.)

WHY SOCIAL MEDIA CENSORSHIP IS CREEPIER THAN OLD-FASHIONED CENSORSHIP. Lessons from the #TwitterFiles. People haven’t put enough thought into the ways in which social media censorship IS different from past versions. (Or maybe they did and got “deamplified…”)

TWITTER CLOWNWORLD IS NOW BEYOND PARODY: “Apparently former head of Trust & Safety at Twitter had a ‘secret dirty twitter account’ which has since been scrubbed.” The head of “trust and safety” at a multi-billion dollar media corporation ought to be the most boring, fair-minded, and pecadillo-free type imaginable. They could afford someone off the Supreme Court shortlist, for crying out loud.

WHO’S TO BLAME WHEN STUDENTS FAIL A COURSE? Usually the students, I suspect, but there is something to the idea that colleges are doing too much to try to please students. Yet they don’t seem pleased. Why is that, I wonder?

‘COLLEGES HELPED CAUSE THE ENROLLMENT CRASH.’ In myriad ways. Like all of our other institutions, higher ed is cashing in all of its built-up goodwill and credibility just to make the racket last long enough for the current folks to cash out.

WAPO: SHARK WEEK LACKS DIVERSITY. It’s about time Discovery got called out on this. It’s always Hammerhead shark this, Great White(!) shark that. When do undrerepresented Zebra and Pyjama sharks get their due?? #TimesUpGreatWHITEs

Just kidding, it’s about people. This self-jumping article is paywalled, but it’s exactly what you think if you are familiar with Clown World. H/T to my colleague Samantha Harris for this link.

GEORGIA MAN RECEIVES 25-YEAR SENTENCE FOR VOTER FRAUD. This is obviously a miscarriage of justice since voter fraud is either impossible or never happens.