NORTH CAROLINA LEADING THE WAY ON CAMPUS FREE SPEECH POLICIES. Lots of unironically good news. But as Professor Stephen Porter points out in “I’ve declared war on DEI at NC State,” you’re going to see plenty of resistance to actually following the rules.

IF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN IS GIVING UP ON DEI, DEI IS REALLY IN TROUBLE. U of M has been one of its most prominent boosters, historically.

AI TEACHING INTELLIGENT DISAGREEMENT ON CAMPUS. And it seems to work. I for one welcome this particular set of AI overlords.

CRUSHING FREE INQUIRY MAKES ALMOST NOBODY HAPPY, YET IT KEEPS HAPPENING. From an outside look at FIRE’s faculty survey of 6000+ profs: “Things are actually pretty bad all around. Anywhere from 20 percent (research topics) to 56 percent (email and social media) of all faculty reported self-censoring in some context.”

UNIVERSITY ‘INSTITUTIONAL REVIEW BOARDS’ ARE OUT OF CONTROL. “In one study, researchers sent three versions of an application for a proposed study to university IRBs. When the topic of the proposed study was discrimination against short or obese applicants in hiring, the proposal sailed through IRB approval. However, an identical study on discrimination against women or minorities was denied about half the time, and about two-thirds of proposed studies on discrimination against white males were not approved.”

GEORGIA JOINS STATES SHUTTING DOWN CAMPUS DEI PROGRAMS. I share the concerns many have that they are just moving the efforts to places where they can be hidden more easily. I am sure a lot of that will happen. At the same time, I think many will be surprised just how much the most destructive parts of DEI relied on being the established religion in our institutions.

2 MINUTES UNTIL THE LIKELY SUPREME COURT RULING ON TIKTOK. Whatever they decide, and whatever you may think of TikTok, setting the deadline at January 19 was a ridiculous stunt. If the national security concerns were so profound and obvious that they warrant banning a whole platform, they’d be just as obvious on January 21.

UPDATE: The decision is out. The Court upheld the ban, but they don’t seem all that happy about it.

REFORMERS ASK: WHAT’S THE ACTUAL GOAL OF HIGHER ED? Students overwhelmingly say it’s to get a job. But it’s not efficient at delivering on that, and that’s not the traditional goal of higher ed (nor, in my opinion, should it be–that should be K-12 and tech schools.) So what are we going for? Interesting thoughts here.

THREE-YEAR MED SCHOOLS ARE COMING. IS DOOM NIGH? I’m of two minds on this. On one hand, med school appears to have a lot of pointless scut work that is meant not to educate but to weed people out. On the other, you do have to worry about lowered standards. That said, your perspective on doctors changes a bit when you get older and you realize that the dude who was no smarter than you are and who you last saw doing a keg stand at “The Hazards of Duke” party in 1997 is now a respected cardiologist.

HIGHER ED REFORMS TO CHEER FOR IN 2025. I do a lot of Title IX stuff and I didn’t know that the Biden admin was planning to apply Title IX to name, image, and likeness money for college athletes. (The suggested reform is stopping that, BTW.) Putting access to those billions in the hands of the Title IX apparatus is a nightmare scenario.

WHAT TODAY’S ECONOMICS STUDENTS AREN’T LEARNING ABOUT ECONOMICS. Yeah, I know, it’s tempting to say “everything…”

HISTORY CENSORSHIP AT GEORGETOWN. This is why nobody “trusts the experts” — scholars no longer judge one another on expertise.

NC GOVERNOR’S SCHOOL SUMMER PROGRAM IS MISEDUCATING ELITE HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS. Another miserable DEI takeover ruins a valuable institution for gifted kids. I attended Duke’s TIP program in the early 90s in high school and it was life-changing for me. Duke killed it off thanks to COVID and the “racial reckoning.” But would I have sent my kids anyway? They would have loved the 90s TIP. Today? I’m not so sure.

DOGE SHOULD ELIMINATE THE AIR FORCE. IT’S USELESS. They had one job–keep the bad guys out of our airspace. Unknown “car-sized” drones are flying all over NJ and NY and they do nothing. How is this not a bigger story?

NIH DESIGNEE JAY BHATTACHARYA REPORTEDLY CONSIDERING FIRE RANKINGS TO EVALUATE GRANT RECIPIENTS’ ACADEMIC FREEDOM. Whether or not FIRE’s surveys end up being considered, it’s critical that NIH grant recipients provide academic freedom so they can’t warp the results you paid for in whatever way they find politically convenient. Dr. Bhattacharya, you may remember, has plenty of reason to know the importance of scientists’ ability to follow their academic consciences.

DIFFERENTIAL TUITION: SHOULD ENGLISH MAJORS PAY LESS? Colleges are starting to charge different amounts for different majors. There are pros and cons to this. The cons worry me more – do we really want to push people into the cheapest majors to teach? – but decide for yourself.

HIGHER-ED REFORM SUGGESTIONS FOR THE AGE OF TRUMP 2.0. Some very good ones here from Richard Vedder.

RENEGADE INSTITUTE FOR LIBERTY FOUNDER MAKES RECOMMENDATIONS FOR HIGHER ED REFORM. After a years-long persecution that (thankfully) ended in a settlement. So he should know!

AGAINST POST-ELECTION INFANTILIZING. Behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated.

IS A NEW COLLEGE RACISM STUDY ‘PEAK WOKE?’ If not, it’s probably not for lack of trying…

STRICTER CHRISTIAN COLLEGES EXPERIENCING ENROLLMENT INCREASES AS RELIGIOUS FAMILIES BECOME MORE WARY OF SECULAR INSTITUTIONS. Because religious families are not idiots.

AAUP’S JOAN SCOTT FLOPS ‘RACISM’ ATTACK ON FIRE. In the AAUP bigshot’s hit piece on FIRE in today’s Inside Higher Ed, she writes, “An initial motivating force [in FIRE’s founding] was the endorsement of the right of racist expression on the University of Pennsylvania campus. This is a telling choice of where [FIRE’s] political affiliations lie.”

Prof. Scott needs to pick up a book. The “water buffalo affair” at Penn was so deeply disturbing not just because Penn was punishing speech, “racist” or not, but because it was trying to punish a student for “racist” speech that it knew was not even racist. As the Daily Pennsylvanian wrote in a 10-year retrospective:

[L]legally minded individuals were upset by the fact that a student was charged with harassment for calling someone by a term that had no known racial connotations and were disturbed by what they perceived as the University justice system’s mishandling of the case.

That false accusation of racism in 1993 ultimately became FIRE’s “origin story.” Yet 31 years later, one of the AAUP’s leading lights on “academic freedom” parrots only the lie, now repurposed to falsely accuse FIRE instead of a hapless freshman from Long Island. It’s hard to imagine a better reminder of the need for a principled defense of free speech and due process.

THE ADVENTURES OF BEING A DUKE COLLEGE REPUBLICAN. “For the PBS event, we had a Duke media administrator watching the interview. I shared my perspectives as a Republican on campus and the fact that people aren’t willing to engage in difficult conversations. He [the administrator] was whispering to a producer, and he said, ‘Make sure you fact-check everything that he said about Duke.’ I called him out and said, “How are you gonna check my personal experiences as a Republican at Duke University?”

One of the reasons I applied for a job at the then seven-person FIRE back in 2003 was that I worked for Duke’s conservative newspaper. We alone were not allowed to use distribution bins. People routinely threw whole stacks of our paper away, to the extent that distribution routinely involved pulling unread stacks of copies out of the recycle bins for the next few days. Duke and other colleges should know they’re making tomorrow’s free speech radicals today.

‘AS TRUMP THREATENS DEPORTATIONS, CAMPUS LEADERS TREAD CAREFULLY.‘ Carefully? Wesleyan President Michael Roth, fresh off complaining about how college presidents are not sufficiently vocal about being leftists, proudly claims Wesleyan will do nothing to voluntarily help the government pursue undocumented students before more quietly acknowledging that yes, colleges have to obey subpoenas, etc.

In what universe is it “careful” or responsible in any way to admit students here unlawfully (and take their money) when those students can have the rug pulled out the moment someone decides to enforce the law already on the books?

NYT: RFK JR. IS WRONG ON USA VS. CANADA FROOT LOOPS. ALSO NYT:

Spitting out my coffee after reading this NYT “fact check” of RFK Jr. pic.twitter.com/sqL9jaeUR1

— Brad Cohn (@BradCohn) November 17, 2024

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?