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.

SAVING JOHN WITHERSPOON: Re: Sarah’s earlier post about Princeton evaluating whether to remove the statue of John Witherspoon from campus, I hereby publicly offer to take it off its hands. I am not even kidding. I am Presbyterian and am a grown man who understands that great historical figures like Witherspoon can have major flaws but still leave the world a far better place than they found it. If Princeton takes it off the pedestal and signs it over to me, I will have it transported down here to North Carolina, at my expense, and donate it to my church. If we can get more people to do this kind of thing, maybe we can save some of our cultural heritage from the vandals. President Eisgruber can contact me at witherspoon (at sign) maildepot (period) net.

NEW YORK BANS NEW BITCOIN MINING, CITING “CLIMATE CHANGE.” Not explored: the “climate change” implications of building billions of dollars in microwave relays to New York so that traders there can pull a never-ending Office Space-style heist on you and me by front-running the market by 2.5 milliseconds. (This is a literal selling point.)

‘STUDENTS FIRST‘: New book on higher ed reform (and from a liberal college president, no less) has some suggestions that might help, like replacing credit-hour inputs with competency outputs.

“I FOUND OUT TODAY THAT I HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO VOTE ‘AYE’ OR I WILL BE ARRESTED AND CHARGED WITH A FELONY.” To certify an Arizona county’s vote total. Again, we have a joke of an election system because people in power want it that way. They don’t care what this does to the actual or perceived legitimacy of elections, even though it’s only the perceived legitimacy of elections that separates us from full Mad Max.

MUSK: “THE TWITTER FILES ON FREE SPEECH SUPPRESSION SOON TO BE PUBLISHED ON TWITTER ITSELF.” It’s really too bad that he committed suicide tomorrow before he could publish that info. Who knew he was even depressed?

IVORY BLOAT: NC STATE SPENT $131 MILLION MORE ON ADMINS THAN TEACHING LAST YEAR. And I’m sure it’s hardly the worst example. The frequent focus on high college president salaries (colleges are complicated organizations, and imagine what you’d demand to run a place like Berkeley) may mask the real problem of the sheer number of admins. I suspect many colleges could use the Musk/Twitter treatment.

STANFORD ACADEMIC FREEDOM CONFERENCE WAS NOT OPEN TO THE PUBLIC–DOES THAT MAKE IT WRONG? It’s obviously not ideal, but colleges have repeatedly done nothing to ensure that speakers cannot be shouted down or, worse, literally run off of campus. (I guess they’re not up on their Frederick Douglass.) This is why we need a culture of free speech, not just laws and rules about it. There’s little advantage in being free to talk if people aren’t willing to, or even free to, listen.

A SOCIETY THAT RUNS ON EXTORTION. I used to spend a lot of time wondering why so many smart, powerful people in government and business make so many obviously dumb and self-defeating moves. Then I realized that most of these can be explained if you assume the elites spend a huge percentage of their time engaging in legal and illegal forms of extortion against one another (and the public–you don’t wanna kill grandma, do you?). Throw in an all-seeing corporate/state surveillance apparatus, and things start to make sense. But if you’re going to extort someone for favors, you have to actually deliver the goods.

“SYSTEMIC RACISM” IN STEM FIELDS AND STATISTICAL ILLITERACY. They go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Here’s a suggestion: stop trying to get every high school student into calculus, about which 99% of the kids are right when they complain “I’ll never use this!,” and make the default last year of math a course in basic statistics, which 99% of them will need in order to avoid being bamboozled every day of their lives.

NYT (WITH SENATE SAFELY IN DEM HANDS): HEY EVERYONE, SOME RANDO SAYS ALITO IS PROBABLY THE DOBBS LEAKER! “(CNN)–A former evangelical activist claimed…” So, no ulterior motive there.

TWITTER’S EX-‘TRUST AND SAFETY’ HEAD IN THE NYT: MUSK BETTER WATCH OUT. Paywalled, because for people who hate free markets, NYT sure does like its revenue. But a couple of his points (excerpted here) while good ones, have easy solutions:

Twitter remains bound by the laws and regulations of the countries in which it operates. Amid the spike in racial slurs on Twitter in the days after the acquisition, the European Union’s chief platform regulator took to the site to remind Mr. Musk that, in Europe, an unmoderated free-for-all won’t fly… Mr. Musk’s principle of keying Twitter’s policies on local laws could push the company to censor speech it has been loath to restrict in the past, including political dissent.

For the nominally “free” world, this has a solution so obvious that the fact nobody ever suggests it is itself disturbing: censor the tweet content as required by law but have it still remain on the timeline with a notice saying “This tweet is blocked due to local laws.” (Do it here, too!) If governments want to pass laws requiring the censorship be secret, let them try.

There is one more source of power on the web — one that most people don’t think much about, but which may be the most significant check on unrestrained speech on the mainstream internet: the app stores operated by Google and Apple…. In my time at Twitter, representatives of the app stores regularly raised concerns about content available on our platform. On one occasion, a member of an app review team contacted Twitter, saying with consternation that he had searched for “#boobs” in the Twitter app and was presented with … exactly what you’d expect. Another time, on the eve of a major feature release, a reviewer sent screenshots of several days-old tweets containing an English-language racial slur, asking Twitter representatives whether they should be permitted to appear on the service.

First, tell me more about how Apple likes to blackmail app developers over allowing free expression. (Maybe Congress would like to know about that too.) Second, throwing Twitter out of the app store for free speech is just too dumb a move for Apple to make. They can do it to smaller, less politically important apps, but we live in a country where we put Microsoft through the antitrust wringer for bundling a browser with Windows. Apple’s app store is a cash geyser; they can’t afford to risk getting it trustbusted just to shut down the Babylon Bee again.

THE TYRANNY OF THE CAMPUS HR DEPARTMENT. In 19 years at FIRE, I saw a lot of abuses, but now that I’m in private practice I can see that HR has been weaponized even more than I thought. Here are just a few of the “offenses” that spurred abusive HR investigations we’ve dealt with in our small, fairly new practice alone:

• Hanging a movie poster in a faculty office that the movie director had personally autographed.
• Instructing an undergraduate that the faculty member’s recommendation was needed to get into graduate school.
• Refusing to write an undergraduate recommendation after the student failed to provide application materials.
• Exchanging gardening pictures of flowers with a staff member.

If you or someone you know is going through this now, shoot them a link — it might tell them what to expect, and I presume it applies at many companies as well.

THE BEST NEWS YET: “TWITTER’S MODERATION SYSTEM IS IN TATTERS.”

“At this moment, we have nobody to reach out to,” says Nina Santos, a researcher at the Brazilian National Institute of Science & Technology in Digital Democracy. “All the people that we were talking with are no longer there.” Santos says that until Musk’s takeover, Twitter had been “quite responsive” in taking down rule-breaking content that could undermine trust in the election or spread disinformation, compared to Meta and Google. The entirety of Twitter’s Brazil team was included in the 7,500 people laid off earlier this month.

Although Lula was declared the winner of the election, Santos says she still sees tweets questioning the result or calling for mobilization against the government. All of these, she says, are dangerous.

No, lady, you are dangerous, and you and those like you here in the U.S. need to be stopped.

YIKES: “28 PERCENT OF FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS WEREN’T EVEN AWARE THEY HAD FEDERAL STUDENT LOANS TO BEGIN WITH.” Seems like low-hanging fruit to address before we go straight to unconstitutional giveaways.

RATIONAL ARGUMENTS VS. DIVERSITY STATEMENTS–CAN REASON WIN? At NC State, the answer seems to be, yeah, maybe. However, even irrational oppositon to DEI statements is quite warranted, given their record.