OH GOODY: FEDERAL ‘SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY TASK FORCE’ TO POLICE RESEARCH MISCONDUCT. Brought to you by the same folks who punished and silenced those who suggested COVID might have leaked from a lab.
Author Archive: Robert Shibley
June 28, 2024
June 26, 2024
PRETTY WEIRD HOW MUCH TIME “LAW” ENFORCEMENT SPENDS ENFORCING NON-LAWS. Not just the FBI, either – Vermont State Police are paying this FIRE client $175,000 for violating his First Amendment rights, not just over the stupidest thing imaginable but in the stupidest way imaginable. (Video at link.)
June 24, 2024
DON’T TRUST COLLEGES ON RACE-NEUTRAL ADMISSIONS. “This spring, University of Chicago law professor Sonja Starr reported in the Indiana Law Journal that, of the U.S. News and World Report’s top 65 colleges and universities, 43 had essay prompts addressing diversity, identity, or adversity in the latest application cycle, 31 of which mandated responses from students.”
Why exactly are college admissions such a closely-guarded secret anyway?
June 10, 2024
WAS UNC RIGHT TO CALL THE COPS ON THE PRO-PALESTINIAN CAMPERS? Rules should be consistently enforced. If enforcing them would be wrong, the rule needs to be changed. Here’s a rule of thumb for admins: if your campus is treating pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli rulebreakers differently from how it would treat the Patriot Front or Proud Boys in the same situation, it is in the wrong.
June 5, 2024
WHILE OKLAHOMA DAWDLES, ITS UNIVERSITIES ROT. “Red state” public universities are staffed by the same people who staff every other college, except with the added missionary zeal of bringing the Gospel According to Foucault to the rubiest of rubes.
May 31, 2024
COLLEGE UPHEAVAL AS PSYCHOLOGICAL ‘GROUP PURITY’ CRUSADE. Bitterly ironic that this is the fruit of the generations-long “diversity” push. Imagine if we had spent 40 years and umpteen billons pushing the Golden Rule instead…
May 24, 2024
NEW FROM PROF. CAROL SWAIN: ‘THE ADVERSITY OF DIVERSITY.’ With the current products of the campus DEI bureaucracy rooting as hard as they can for people on the other side of the world to kill each other, it’s getting awfully hard to pretend there’s something past the adversity…
May 20, 2024
THIS TIME IT’LL WORK! ADDING ‘BELONGING’ TO FIX DEI. Now it’s DEIB? At this rate it’s going to have as many letters as LGBTQQIAA+ soon.
The Israel-Hamas blowup on campus post October 7 is all the evidence one needs to end the DEI bureaucracies forever. It turned out that the result of spending billions, ruining the lives of dissenters, and warping the purpose of education in an effort to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is campuses that explode with ethnic unrest and violence when a war erupts on the other side of the planet. You had one job, DEI bureaucrats, and you failed in spectacular fashion. For a situation like this, Cromwell put it best: “It is not fit that you should sit here any longer. You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing lately … In the name of God, go!“
May 16, 2024
MORE STUDENT LOAN FORGIVENESS CHICANERY. Yes, it’s unlikely that the trillion-plus in student loans are going to be paid back in full. But a giveaway to current debtors without changing the system that caused the problem is beyond foolish. And call me old-fashioned, but if we’re going to spend the money, Congress should probably vote on it.
May 14, 2024
“CHATGPT IS REALLY HELPFUL.” A non-heavy breathing interview about AI in education. (I should note that at my kids’ school, they seem to use ChatGPT to write more elaborate insults about one another, such as a Shakespearean sonnet about how someone’s face looks dumb. Really adds some gentility to the middle school experience.)
May 10, 2024
“JUST STOP OIL” ATTEMPTS TO DESTROY THE MAGNA CARTA. There are some acts that are utterly unacceptable in a civilized society, or any society, and trying to destroy the freaking Magna Carta is one of them. This is futile, purposeless destruction of the heritage of mankind, sponsored by millionaires and billionaires.
April 26, 2024
NEW HOPE FOR NON-SELECTIVE COLLEGES: VOCATIONAL TRAINING. They might be woke too, but it won’t be 80 grand a year, and maybe you will learn a useful skill. Beats being on the receiving end of a quarter-million dollar mostly peaceful eye-stabbing.
April 24, 2024
WHY PLAGIARISM MATTERS. “To the extent that [former Harvard president] Claudine Gay’s behavior is common, it points to a widespread culture of corruption, favoritism, and elitism in academia… What does it say to our students when we punish them for something that’s dismissed as ‘no big deal’ when one of us is caught? It says: If you’re an elite, one of the Chosen, then you can get away with what ordinary folks are destroyed for. Rules are only for common folks, not the elite.” A startling amount of what we hear from every institution these days seems intended only to get this message across to the plebs.
April 11, 2024
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…
April 9, 2024
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…
April 2, 2024
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.
April 1, 2024
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.
March 29, 2024
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.
March 24, 2024
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.
March 20, 2024
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.
March 19, 2024
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!
March 14, 2024
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.
March 8, 2024
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…
March 7, 2024
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.
March 6, 2024
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.