…that only the “Right” believes any more.
I continue to wage war on the Left’s assault on the language. They are not liberal (or, for that matter, progressive), and never have been.
Category Archives: Education
SCOTUS
More opinions coming today. Follow live at (where else?) Scotusblog.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Heh. From Amy Howe: “Don’t type the phrase ‘the Ninth Circuit is affirmed’ that often. My fingers rebelled.”
[Update a couple minutes later, scrolling through]
Court ruled against the government in Horne, in favor of the raisin farmers. This is potentially huge. It could be major blow to idiotic anti-market agriculture policies dating back to the Depression.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here is Amy’s round up of today’slast week’s court action, prior to today’s rulings [oops].
[Late-morning PDT update]
Hearing that more decisions will be announced not only on Thursday, but Friday as well. Both King v. Burwell and the same-sex marriage rulings will be huge.
[Late-afternoon update]
Ilya Somin discusses the implications of the Horne ruling:
whatever one thinks about the compensation issue, the Court’s holding on the question of whether a taking has occurred is an important victory for property owners. It ensures that personal property gets the same level of protection as real property under the Takings Clause, and that the government cannot avoid takings liability by giving owners a small share of the proceeds from the disposition of their property.
The ruling also calls into question a number of other similar agricultural cartel schemes run by the federal government. In addition to property owners, consumers of agricultural products are likely to benefit from the decision, if these cartel schemes can no longer operate. Freer competition between producers in these agricultural markets will increase the amount of goods sold, and thereby lower prices. Lowered food prices are of particular benefit to poor and lower-middle class consumers, who generally spend a higher proportion of their income on food than the affluent do.
Republicans don’t emphasize enough how these market interventions by the government hurt the poor. Including minimum wages laws.
Harvard
…is finally getting an engineering school.
Not sure what the rush is. It’s only been 380 years or so since it was founded. Looks like they’re not going to have an aerospace department, though.
Eugene Volokh
“I’m going to continue microaggressing.”
Of course, he has tenure. You’d be crazy to teach at or attend these places.
Remembering Runnymede
My thoughts on today’s anniversary, over at PJMedia. I haven’t been posting much because I’ve been attending a mini-conference on the subject, which was fascinating. I learned a lot of history from a lot of learned people. Sadly, it’s a history that we have not been teaching our youth. It doesn’t fit the narrative.
[Tuesday-morning update]
More thoughts from Iain Murray.
[Bumped]
[Afternoon update]
We need a Magna Carta for the regulatory state.
Indeed.
The University Of California
Alumni of the UC system should immediately cease wasting their charitable dollars on such an anti-intellectual, fascist institution. And any intelligent young person should avoid it like the plague. The system has clearly been captured by individuals with micro-brains possessing micro-tolerance and micro-confidence.
It’s fascinating to sit back and watch the academy destroy itself. Unfortunately, it’s also tragic, and destroying millions of young peoples’ lives, with taxpayer dollars.
[Update a while later]
“The Left’s “microaggressions” are a sign of their micro-totalitarian tendencies.”
Camille Paglia
Next was the argument over hormones. Again, screaming argument over hormones. I was told by the founding members of the Women’s Studies Department at the State University of New York at Albany that I had been brainwashed by male scientists to believe that hormones even existed, much less had any role in the shaping of our identity and character.
So I was banned from the women’s movement from the start, but I kept going on. I was pro-pornography, pro-prostitution on libertarian grounds. For years, my wing of feminism—which had been silenced and ostracized by the Steinem wing, the establishment wing, partisans of the Democratic party, my party, but nevertheless, I don’t feel that feminism should be subordinated to any party—finally, we rose in the ’90s and the pro-sex wing of feminism won in the ’90s thanks to Madonna having changed the culture.
…If you’re going to be a woman president, she must communicate strength, reserve, and yet compassion. That formula—I’ve been waiting, and waiting, and waiting for it. The only person in America who’s had it as far as I’m concerned was Dianne Feinstein, and she didn’t put herself forward for whatever reason as president.
But Hillary does not have it. Hillary is a mess. And we’re going to award the presidency to a woman who’s enabled the depredations and exploitation of women by that cornpone husband of hers? The way feminists have spoken makes us blind to Hillary’s record of trashing [women]. They were going to try to destroy Monica Lewinsky. It’s a scandal! Anyone who believes in sexual harassment guidelines should have seen that the disparity of power between [Bill] Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was one of the most grotesque ever in the history of sex crime. He’s a sex criminal! We’re going to put that guy back in the White House? Hillary’s ridden on his coattails. This is not a woman who has made her own career. The woman failed the bar exam in Washington! The only reason she went to Arkansas and got a job in the Rose Law Firm was because her husband was a politician.
And then there’s this:
I’m happy that this talk about medical sex changes was not in the air, because I would have become obsessed with that and assumed that that was my entire identity and problem. This is why I’m very concerned about the rush to surgical interventions today.
At any rate, I was attracted to men—I dated men—but I just fell in love with women and always have. Yes, there’s absolutely no doubt: I was on the forefront of gay identification. When I arrived at graduate school at Yale, 1968–1972, I was the only openly gay person, and I didn’t even have a sex life. To me, it was a badge of militance. And I was the only person doing a dissertation on a sexual topic. It’s hard to believe this now.
I’m sorry, but isn’t it blindingly obvious that if you’re attracted to men, and also attracted to women, that you are not gay, but bi? I wonder how she’d respond to this question.
White Is The New Black?
Some thoughts on race and affirmative action:
If gender is merely a matter of self-identification, should not race be also? I have always thought that, given the affirmative action-laden higher education admissions process, applicants should self-identify as “black” or “Native American” whenever they so desire. I mean, why not? If they feel black or Native American, should not they be able to claim such an identity, as Rachel Dolezal has done? Doing so would quickly cause affirmative action to collapse of its own ridiculous weight.
Indeed, all of this race balkanization–with such extreme emphasis as belonging to this or that race–only further divides us, as race baiters like Al Sharpton well know. So why not accept the progressives’ terms of the debate–that our gender and race is all simply a matter of self-identity–and identify as a member of races that are favored/more protected by law? After all, no one can ever really know what lies in another’s heart. Does Bruce Jenner sincerely believe he is a female, or does he simply like to dress up in women’s clothes? Does Rachel Dolezal sincerely believe she is black? No one can possibly know the answer, perhaps not even Mr./Ms. Jenner and Ms. Dolezal.
What would a university do if an applicant self-identified as “black” on an application but showed up looking “white”? And if the university made such a judgment, what on earth would that mean? How would the university defend its belief that a student didn’t “look” black? What sort of bizarre racial stereotypes would it rely upon in making such an appearance-based judgment? And if the university actually decided to take action against the student for racial misrepresentation, what on earth would that mean? How would the university judge whether the student was really “black”? What percentage of blood would suffice for such a progressive institution? Fifty percent? Ten percent? One percent?
For decades I’ve been saying that “white” people should put down “black” on racial quiz forms, and defy anyone to prove them wrong. Race is, after all, a social construct.
Tulip Subsidies
A parable:
Higher education is in a bubble much like the old tulip bubble. In the past forty years, the price of college has dectupled (quadrupled when adjusting for inflation). It used to be easy to pay for college with a summer job; now it is impossible. At the same time, the unemployment rate of people without college degrees is twice that of people who have them. Things are clearly very bad and Senator Sanders is right to be concerned.
But, well, when we require doctors to get a college degree before they can go to medical school, we’re throwing out a mere $5 billion, barely enough to house all the homeless people in the country. But Senator Sanders admits that his plan would cost $70 billion per year. That’s about the size of the entire economy of Hawaii. It’s enough to give $2000 every year to every American in poverty.
At what point do we say “Actually, no, let’s not do that, and just let people hold basic jobs even if they don’t cough up a a hundred thousand dollars from somewhere to get a degree in Medieval History”?
I’m afraid that Sanders’ plan is a lot like the tulip subsidy idea that started off this post. It would subsidize the continuation of a useless tradition that has turned into a speculation bubble, prevent the bubble from ever popping, and disincentivize people from figuring out a way to route around the problem, eg replacing the tulips with daffodils.
(yes, it is nice to have college for non-economic reasons too, but let’s be honest – if there were no such institution as college, would you, totally for non-economic reasons, suggest the government pay poor people $100,000 to get a degree in Medieval History? Also, anything not related to job-getting can be done three times as quickly by just reading a book.)
If I were Sanders, I’d propose a different strategy. Make “college degree” a protected characteristic, like race and religion and sexuality. If you’re not allowed to ask a job candidate whether they’re gay, you’re not allowed to ask them whether they’re a college graduate or not. You can give them all sorts of examinations, you can ask them their high school grades and SAT scores, you can ask their work history, but if you ask them if they have a degree then that’s illegal class-based discrimination and you’re going to jail. I realize this is a blatant violation of my usual semi-libertarian principles, but at this point I don’t care.
Never happen. It makes too much sense.
[Afternoon update]
“College is not a commodity. Stop treating it like one“:
A college education, then, if it is a commodity, is no car. The courses the student decides to take (and not take), the amount of work the student does, the intellectual curiosity the student exhibits, her participation in class, his focus and determination — all contribute far more to her educational “outcome” than the college’s overall curriculum, much less its amenities and social life. Yet most public discussion of higher ed today pretends that students simply receive their education from colleges the way a person walks out of Best Buy with a television.
The results of this kind of thinking are pernicious. Governors and legislators, as well as the media, treat colleges as purveyors of goods, students as consumers and degrees as products. Students get the message. If colleges are responsible for outcomes, then students can feel entitled to classes that do not push them too hard, to high grades and to material that does not challenge their assumptions or make them uncomfortable. Hence colleges too often cater to student demands for trigger warnings, “safe rooms,” and canceled commencement speakers. When rating colleges, as everyone from the president to weekly magazines insist on doing nowadays, people use performance measures such as graduation rates and time to degree as though those figures depended entirely upon the colleges and not at all upon the students.
What a government-driven disaster.
First They Came For The Male Athletes
“…and I said nothing, because women deserve to play sports, too. Then they came for the frat boys, and I not only said nothing, I cheered it on, because frat boys are the scum of the earth. Then they came after men in general, and I said nothing, because they need to understand the fear women have of rape, and to fear engaging in sex.
Then, oh, wait. Holy s**t, they’re coming after me!”