White saviorism/racial paternalism/social engineering by race/bureaucratized tokenism is foundational sacred dogma for gentry white liberals, it is their modern moral crusade and how they award themselves the divine right to rule and hog not only all the assets and power, but all the virtue too. THEY are the people who give a helping hand to the dark-skinned victim, unlike those crass and bigoted OTHER whites, their out-group, and even if your dark-skinned victim turns out to be wealthy like the Gay family of Haiti, that doesn't matter, only the symbol matters and its concomitant frisson of righteousness.
There is no Supreme Court decision, no lawsuit, no outrage, no referendum result, no meteor or earthquake that could ever change this, short of going full Eisenhower and sending the National Guard into the recruiting/admins office of every upscale institution in the country. (And even then they'd try to work around it.)
Anecdata lagniappe: my richest friend has a kid who's half Brazilian bc he married into a rich Brazilian family. For the kid's college admission application, he went with one of the family servants to a favela and made a "documentary" about their squalid sufferings and about how much he cares and wants to help. Ivy League material!
CP, love your take, as usual. You get the Substitute Saviors' primal drive to raise up worthy offerings to their gods -- i.e. themselves, and those like them.
I appreciate your second paragraph especially. As much as I've enjoyed the Trump administration's seemingly all-out war on Big Ed's Goliath, i.e. Harvard, at best it's a flight of arrows that will mostly bounce off the citadel walls. They're well-aimed, but just not that weighty.
Harvard may be subject, sort of, to US law, but remember that it can also call on allies and resources from around the globe. I realize the Trump admin is trying to choke off this money-and-influence pipeline via the cancellation of foreign student visas, but does anyone really believe Harvard will open its 2025-2026 academic year missing out 25% of its student body?
Here in Hong Kong Harvard's name is still spoken with hushed reverence amongst prestige-crazed students and their parents. Yesterday's (attempted) visa cancellation was at the top of local newscasts and headlines, even though it directly affects a negligible number of Hong Kong people. Within hours several top local universities issued public statements flinging open their admission doors to those turned away from Harvard Holy Land by the Badorangeman. Several people, knowing I'm an American, asked me about it -- they immediately assumed crazy Trump was simply persecuting a noble institution: poor Harvard, and poor, poor students! What could be more heartbreaking than to draw nigh unto the blazing hearth of Edhalla -- and then be expelled into the bitter darkness of some lesser institution?
In short, Harvard still sits pretty upon a *colossal* stockpile of inter-cultural capital, in addition to their 53 billion dollars. It's going to take a sustained, ruthless, ugly campaign to knock them off it. I'd love to see it, but I don't think I will.
If Clarence Thomas does the right thing and retires from the Supreme Court a month or so from now, I hope Trump announces that no Harvard candidate to replace Thomas will be considered. Just declare war on the state of Massachusetts. Close Fort Devens as a start. Close Joint Base Cape Cod. Hanscom Air Base. Mandatory AIDS testing in Provincetown. Okay, just kidding.
That would be a nice change, wouldn't it? But then Amy CB is from Notre Dame, which certainly isn't an ivy, much less Harvard, and she doesn't seem all that great.
I think Amy Coney Barrett occasionally disappoints because, like her mentor, Antonin Scalia, she is an EXTREMIST on Constitutional construction. I remember being a little mad at Scalia's siding with the liberals on Eminent Domain about 12 years ago. Scalia's point was that it wasn't up to the Supreme Court to limit Eminent Domain but it was up to the different states to limit it. Amy Barrett disappointed on DOGE, I believe, because she thinks that the Legislative Branch controls the purse strings and not the Executive Branch. And she's right, in a way.
Harvard has too much social, cultural, symbolic and financial capital to be sunk by Trump and this attempt to rub their noses in all their shit will probably just get some lawyers rich while getting Harvard to sign on to some consent agreement they will quickly ignore. This is what happens when you snooze for decades as your opponents completely capture every cultural and educational institution (if you think college is Left indoctrination, public schools are probably worse)—the most you can achieve are small victories that will only lead somewhere if they're quickly followed by hundreds of other small victories.
The real problem is that every person in any position of authority has been conditioned to turn a blind eye to Left capture, and if they do happen to notice that political indoctrination has replaced scholarship, it just seems like a natural occurrence, as long as it was implemented by people w the proper credentials speaking proper guild jargon; whereas when Trump or any conservative says "We will no longer subsidize people who hate our country and culture" or "DEI violates the law", this is a spark that's quickly blown up into a wildfire by media piranhas who then get to all sing in unison about teacher's rights and Free Speech (things they don't give a shit about). Even someone like Steve Pinker, who's devoted a big part of his career to documenting the most demented campus thinkers and their theories, immediately retreats behind platitudes the moment someone steps in to clean house. The most our liberal class can ever achieve are strongly worded letters, anything else would smudge their exalted self-image.
But it is great fun to watch Trump and his people put the smack down on our failed class of academic parasites. Even if you can't completely defeat your opponents, it is gratifying to punch them in the nose and see some blood trickle.
And that's about all you're going to get. When I solidified defeat of hate crime laws in Georgia in 2000 with a mere editorial describing their secret enforcement plans, and who would be left out, such as heterosexual women attacked by serial killers and rapists (the bill passed stripped of all victim categories and was overturned for vagueness in the courts), Republicans carried my AJC editorial around over their heads; the ADL woke me in bed pre-dawn to tell me I was now Abe Foxman's "enemy," and "I didn't want to be that"; and my department chair called me into her office a few hours later to tell me they were "watching me," though I was acting as a private citizen and had won the school's Humanitarian Prize for precisely the same type of work for women to win the prize.
Fast forward to 2020. I couldn't even physically get into the Capitol to testify against the next hate crime bill because rioters destroyed hotel and business windows that week all around the Capitol, surrounded the building and swarmed corridors. My hotel had to shut down (a Representative was going to sneak me in the legislators' entrance at dawn for my safety, but I couldn't physically get there). It would not have mattered anyway. This time, exurban Republicans carried the bill, and it passed, with important Republicans clapping their little tambourines as loudly as Democrats for it. I spent 23 years documenting all the obvious lies, damning statements, frauds, and abuses perpetrated by the hate crimes and Innocence Project industries: how they politicized the FBI and encouraged black-on-white and black-on-cop violence, and there was the GOP singing We Shall Overcome on behalf of a bunch of legal thugs.
Nobody had to threaten me this time. I had already lost my freelance work, my academic career, and my ability to safely show my face at the Capitol, where I still
lobbied pro-bono for groups like dialysis patients and molestation victims. The mob won, and we are now officially second-class citizens, or worse, before the law.
Notice that as soon as anyone talks about cutting federal funding, the first 100 things the universities will trot out are all "aristocracy of merit and accomplishment" STEM or STEM-adjacent, and never the endless stream of grievance studies slop and the work of all the vast armies of bureaucrats and petty-tyrant administrators that outnumber faculty and perhaps even students at this point. There is no good reason to bundle these things together anymore if the only defensible parts are held hostage as human shields against any effort for the public to use its right to allocate public monies to deal with the catastrophic degeneration of the rest.
As the reckoning comes for higher ed, humanities and social sciences programs are going to get hit hard, from two directions. One you've identified here, i.e. colleges and universities that are running into financial troubles are already cutting down on programs that cost a lot and now garner little prestige. The other is AI -- I've been reading numerous first-hand reports from university professors admitting that it's now essentially impossible to assign meaningful homework in humanities courses. No matter what kind of term paper, essay, or whatever students are given to do, they're not doing it. Their writing skills = prompts.
Yes and that’s insane. How are students going to learn writing and critical thinking skills? They’re just paying for a degree. Using AI on an assignment in college should mean immediate expulsion.
They are absolutely just paying for a degree -- at least many of them are. There are still diligent love-of-learning types out there (Daughter C is definitely one), but for many -- maybe, or soon to be, most? -- the temptation to take the easy road is overwhelming. I've also seen numerous 'I wish I had actually studied for my degree' articles citing recent uni grads, but it seems for many students, once they start using AI, it's hard to stop.
Universities are trying all kinds of clever ways to structure out-of-class assignments to compel students to do their own thinking and writing, but it's obvious this is just stop-gap cope. The revolution in higher ed is on, and nobody really knows what's going to happen.
An economist might bite the bullet and say if you can use AI to do it then it has no value in the market so why waste investing huge amounts time and money in forcing a human to fight an uphill battle the get just a little better at it only to then graduate and never use those skills again. People who can read and write well in the future will be those who were good at them in high school or beforehand.
Maybe or maybe this is an 'old man yells at cloud' situation. When I was a young 'un they said similar things about calculators. Using AI effectively will likely be one of the differentiating skills for employment over the working lifetime of current day college kids.
Do they need to be able to figure out that ole Hamlet is unable to act?
When I was in the corporate world, the CEO noticed that I, like him, could do arithmetic in my head during discussions, so he hired me to work directly for him. Everybody else needed calculators, but executives were reluctant to pull them out and use them while a conversation was going on.
I bet being a baseball fan and knowing baseball statistics helped you along. Ted Williams has 500 at-bats and 172 hits. What is his batting average? .344
If I was a professor in the era of AI, I would have my students write their essays in class in those little blue books they had when I was a lad. Or I would question my students orally. Sir, name three reasons why support for American Independence developed after the conclusion of the French and Indian Wars? Please stand. Lady, who was Sir John Falstaff in Shakespeare? That sort of thing.
Sure; invigilated long-essay and viva voce exams are the gold standard for higher ed. But they take up oceans of expensive faculty time, and they're strenuous for both students and examiners. The higher ed sector is so bloated and degraded that retrofitting these stringent examinations back into the 'all win prizes and get A's' consumerist mindset that reigns now seems almost impossible.
Higher education administration is as bloated as Fat Bastard in those Austin Powers movies. If they were ever popped, an ugly ooze will slowly filter out like a West Texas river in the Summer.
I started every semester with a brief, handwritten essay. From that point forward, I had a template to detect cheating. Important exams were also in-class and hand-written.
I've noticed AI has increasingly become as dull and uncreative as my lesser students. Am I the only humanities person to notice this?
The females were actually worse. I'd had an, I suppose, sexist theory that applying make-up would make them more dexterous. But a lot of driven males transferred into my composition classes because every single one of the other assigned freshman comps had titles such as "The Lesbian in Literature." I taught "Prose and Poetry." That was a second-tier elite school. When I taught at a poor community college, I loved my several Jamican students, who had benefitted in education and discipline from the Colonial British schools there. Also the single moms holding down jobs to become nurses. They worked hard. 60% of the others were wasting their time. They could barely read or write. Forget math.
My signature is today almost identical to what it was in 1967. My theory is that it might be helpful if people could read my signature, so I scrawl it carefully in my third grade Catholic school style. I'm not very coordinated, so it's awkward-looking, but it is readable.
I write so little in cursive other than writing checks that I can actually write my name a little better than fifty years ago when I attended Catholic schools my first four years. But my right thumb is showing signs of arthritis so I am glad I don't have to write in cursive any longer.
I'm a lefty and the product of the best public school in Poughkeepsie, when IBM was the biggest computer company in the world. Homeroom was me and ten guys named Wu. We played chess, talked calculus, and bitched about affirmative action. In 1980. Between offcast Selectrics and the first "portable" IBM, that weighed in at about 40 pounds and had three lines of print (IBM tragically never believed people would want personal computers -- see the great Halt and Catch Fire series), I was typing by grade school and never really learned handwriting. Oddly, though, I did my convention construction work, much of it lightweight and fussy (being female), though requiring mechanical drafting and geometry skills strong enough for a three-story tennis court for Andre Agassi -- aluminum, allen wrench "system" construction -- using only my right hand as the dominant. Still do. I can't read my own handwriting, but I can shingle a roof. The Wu homeroom guys worked their asses off but all had to settle for lesser schools. I'm sure they're doing very well now anyway, being actually competent.
Lots of professors are blaming AI too much. If anything what AI has actually made impossible is the continued sustainability-through-willful-blindness and rampant denial that a lot of professors have been engaging in for a long time. It is just the tide going out and revealing nakedness. For two decades it's been getting easier and easier for the marginal student to use computers as short-cuts to produce output of high enough quality to get a pass.
That goes for STEM stuff too, but I'll focus on English composition. I work in a place that gets a steady turnover of new graduates who tend to come from the just-below-elite schools, and it was depressingly clear for a long time that, in part because of computers, the average competency in writing and reading comprehension skills has been collapsing. Even for those who can read and comprehend long-form, most find it painful to do so. Professors know that well - ask them what it was like grading essays 10 years ago - they've just been dropping the standards of rigor and giving out ok grades and letting college students slide and graduate anyway.
All that's really changed is that suddenly the stuff coming in is suddenly much high quality, and instead of just a few or some large fraction of students doing it, everybody is doing it. It took this level of ridiculousness to make a critical mass of professors complain about the same thing at the same time and provide the kind of flag-raising signal to leverage all that pent-up shame and frustration and finally, at long last, launch a sham-participation-confession falsification cascade. If they have to use the cover story that "It's the AI! Yeah, AI, that's the ticket. That's the only reason we need radical reform around here," then, ok, if that's what's needed to get the job done, go for it guys.
The "trend discontinuity" revelation power of AI in showing what's been fake or unproductive or socially-constructed-nonsense is going to be a lot more important than the actual AI capabilities themselves. When big changes happen fast it's hard for the lies and rationalizations to adapt quickly enough to keep up.
I'm willing to believe that writing ability has been collapsing, although looking at the public internet I think it's mostly a failure (or lack) of editing.
I can't be too proud. Looking back on it, I was a terrible writer in high school and college and I'm (among other things) a wordcel--even back then in oral arguments I was great, but pen to paper? I think high school emphasized the wrong things because they were trying to help average students write passable essays.
So they drilled into you : first paragraph tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em. Then tell them for the next three paragraphs, one idea per paragraph. Then in the final paragraph tell 'em what you told 'em!
Nothing more granular than that. Never any good actionable criticism. One teacher warned us never to concede any point that worked against our thesis.
So I sucked. Not my fault your honor. I never had a chance!
People write well on the parts of the Internet I hang out on. The one exception is Dodger Twitter. Dodger fans tend to be dopes when it comes to the written word.
I'm certain there is good stuff out there. I would be happy to take recommendations from you. The problem I see mostly is writers I've never read who don't get the idea of the inverted pyramid. If I don't know your writing, I need your thesis to be clear by the end of paragraph three. I'm not trusting you to take me on a five page journey of discovery.
I see this with YouTube videos as well. I had a doc share a 2 hour lecture video that he promised was going to blow my mind WRT COVID. ten minutes in I was unblown so I asked the recommender if he good summarize what I was going to learn. Impossible! I needed to get it step by step from the guy on the video. Really? Couldn't you just give me his literature references and I can check them. No.
Free Republic, the conservative low-brow internet site, is made up on poor writers on the whole. I am sure many are old geezers knocking down whiskey as they write.
I had to help my niece with a humanities university assignment recently.
Her topic was the use of AI in foreign language teaching. She used (a lot) of AI in writing the assignment, which I tried to obscure with a lot of edits. I didn’t do enough and she still got busted by an AI-detector used by her professor, which is in turn powered by AI itself.
last I checked consensus was that AI detectors didn't work. Too many false positives. Originally you could detect it by its bland wikipedia style but lately it develops personality.
I'm using Chat GPT a lot these days. It's a little like having a personal reference librarian combined with an eager personal assistant. If I were a college student, I fantasize that I would be using this to immeasurably beef up the quality of my work. Realistically, I would probably let it do more of the heavy lifting. Until? Since the technology is improving it's hard to tell.
McKinsey is going to want whomever is best/most efficient as churning out slide decks. Using whatever tools are available. A huge challenge for higher education traditional practices. Much less of one for ordinary people.
I use an LLM at work a fair bit for natural and machine language tasks. I can’t use it for everything but for the things I can it is something like 20%-30% better.
I frequently recommend its productivity-raising potential to my colleagues, none of whom take any interest and go back to emailing around MS Word attachments like it’s 2001.
At a Beltway Bandit in the 80s, we made color vugraphs mostly by hand. Apple Lisa to Compugraphic typesetter to negative film, apply color sticky film/tape. Hours of fun on a deadline. I was one of two who could proofread. We did a whole pile of them to change Rep. Dick Cheney's mind, then he (rightly) killed the whole system c. 1990.
I think Trump’s dangling of Harvard’s federal grant funds is entirely fair. If Harvard won’t obey the law, those funds can go to other universities that will, and Harvard‘s cancer researchers will follow.
There was a university in Hong Kong that offered immediate and unconditional acceptance to any of the Harvard foreign students or exchange professors that might lose their visas in the extremely unlikely event the courts allow the government to stray even an inch from the Status Quo Ante Trumpum. Likewise, there are ten thousand universities who will eagerly take the American taxpayer grant money and all the labs and researchers and grad students with no hesitation for the small price of giving up discriminating and being fair to everybody according to their talent, potential, and track record of accomplishment. Indeed, one wonders if there were a "just like Harvard but fair" twin with open borders, how many of those researchers and labs would just migrate all by themselves and jump ship overnight.
I live in Hong Kong, and as I mentioned in another comment, the Harvard visa cancellation was BIG NEWS here, immediately. It's a reflection of the astonishing degree of clout the Harvard name carries.
But I think there's a miniscule chance at best that anybody's going anywhere unexpected. Trump is going to get shot down hard on the visa issue. And even if there were more money on offer at other institutions, many academics would still pass it up for the chance to be associated with Harvard.
I’ve always thought that foreign obsession with Harvard was driven by the expectation that going there would allow foreigners to live in the U.S. permanently and make lots of money. Sure it’s a status market but the real driving force was immigration. I wonder what percentage of foreign students end up as citizens and LPRs. I imagine it’s quite large.
In HK, at least, I don't think that's it. A foreign kid can go to any number of US universities and find a way to stay stateside and get a job.
Americans tend to overestimate the immigration desires of foreign students from non-shithole countries. Sure, some of them may be looking to stay, but the ones who are driving for Ivy+ admissions are usually from families with enough money and resources to find other ways to emigrate anyway. Plenty of them return to their home countries to swan around with their Harvard Halos subtly but effectively displayed for all to admire.
So I think it's mostly status. The Harvard name carries clout and opens doors around the world.
My county went from 1% SE Asian to 19% SE Asian in well under a decade. These are almost all wealthy professionals from the same region of India, many with American degrees and post-docs. They want to escape tensions and lack of opportunities there, and I know a few and like them (one unusual farmer couple is being quite innovative, discovering the common southern/SE Asian love language of okra). But families who have been here for generations are being squeezed and priced out of available homes. Rural schools are suddenly flooded with .001% wealthy, high achievers from another culture. It's not that SE Asians are richer and smarter: it's that the ones who come here from that vast nation are. It creates cultural and class tensions along with opportunities. But the newcomers are the ones who need to integrate, and there is virtually no effort to do so, despite being welcomed, and they learn from public schools to see themselves as discriminated-against minorities while being taught that white rural Americans are oppressors (which is risible, given their caste system). They also live conservative but vote liberal -- and have the money to buffer their families from the consequences of that as illegal gang violence and Atlanta-import crime soars, while modest residents are left vulnerable. Outcome uncertain.
The creme de la crème of a 1.4 billion person country coming to the U.S. and complaining about being oppressed and discriminated against. Only in America . . .
I have found that Hindus vote as monolithically Democrat as Jews and blacks. Loudoun County VA, once a hotbed of rural conservatism, has been transformed in the last twenty years into being a leftist playground of Indians and Orientals living in McMansions in what was once horse country and fields of grain.
Even with money and resources, it’s very difficult to immigrate to the U.S. absent an EB5 or L-1 visa it’s impossible. Maybe this isn’t an issue for HK but it’s certainly the hope and expectation of most other foreigners. Especially India and China.
I don't know how they do it, but the demographic change is massive. We have great public schools despite the relentless identity politics, and there are positive things to say about exposing children to these SE Asians' intense cultural expectations to achieve. Get rid of the DEI agenda, and the next generation may be fine. Youth from families around here also come from strong extended kin networks, and they're also very hard workers.
The Supreme Court included some dumb stuff, like it is fine to talk about one's race in the context of other things in essays. And it's okay, evidently, to still weigh one's adversities–as if that's what we should be selecting for.
John Roberts is not nearly as liberal as David Souter, who was little different than William Brennan. Scalia thought Roberts' reasoning on Obamacare to be dishonest, conniving and deceitful.
Roberts has been just as bad on dozens of other major holdings, and he's been getting even worse lately. If Welch were to write "The Politician" on some subject today, it would be about Roberts. There can be no doubt whatsoever at this point that his appointment was an immense mistake, and that Trump also got bamboozled by Leonard Leo with Gorsuch and Barrett (Kavanaugh was the deal made with Kennedy.) Just read what Blackman's been writing about Roberts over at the Volokh Conspiracy for the last few years and you'll get a taste. His level of nakedly incoherent and contradictory nonsense has been rising continuously without limit.
No one is going to recall his tenure fondly, and it certainly won't be one of those instances of some lone righteous person standing on principle against the currents of rival wicked camps. Roberts will be remembered as the Chief Justice who would stoop to any level to save the elites and progressives on the key issues of his era while pretending otherwise. Someone is going to yell, 'Dobbs!' but you may notice that after the dust settled nothing much happened and everyone moved on to the next thing and went on with their lives because it wasn't in actual reality as big a deal as people made it out to be.
I sat through many hours of various graduation speeches at Harvard last year under the nice trees.
Until it rained.
Listening to a lot of Chinese around me.
And also listening to pro Palestine drums for the students who were kicked out of graduation.
One thing that struck me was that they found two student speakers from Nebraska.
Who were both Muslim women.
Who both commented about how frustrating it was growing up in Nebraska because no one looked like them, and how happy they were at Harvard because a lot of students looked like them. Or maybe they were meaning so few students looked Nebraskan?
At my son's quite good school, there were a fair number of kids who applied to Harvard, including the valedictorian who got a full ride from Yale and the salutatorian who was also a professional magician and went to Stanford.
Two got in to Harvard: the giant star black center on the basketball team, who was a popular choice with the other students because they knew how hard he worked at basketball, even though he didn't much care for sports, so he could get an Ivy League scholarship. (He seems to be doing well in the corporate world.) And a young Muslim lady whose main distinction was wearing a hijab. She was not a popular choice.
I checked the Nebraska speakers and realized one was Indian, but she spent so much time talking about Gaza i had thought she was Muslim.
The other was Iranian Malaysian.
Regardless, not so proud (and in fact quite critical) representatives of Nebraska at Harvard.
2024 at Harvard was all about Gaza with all the cool kids, as far as I could tell, so the more Muslim the better. Of course, Harvard also has a Jewish student or two, so there was some drama.
Planes were flying overhead carrying pro-Israel banners.
Meanwhile, I kept thinking about the Nebraskans who couldn't get in and missed all the excitement.
The "Nebraskan" Indian could have been a Muslim Indian. India is about 1/7 Muslim. Maybe she got into Harvard by complaining how much she was discriminated against by BOTH Indian Hindus AND Nebraskan whites: a virtue signaling two-fer!
If she was Hindu, Hindu Indians typically don't care much for Muslims or Muslim causes, but the woke reprogramming of US "higher ed" might have overridden that.
Personal observation, but I think the "elite" schools may have doubled down on their DEI admissions this year. My youngest just graduated from a military school; the school typically releases where everyone got into college on their social media pages. College admittances were only announced at the graduation this year instead, because it was pretty unimpressive. The school has done pretty well in the past with the bigger named schools. Not this year... which was surprising given some of the student's strong credentials.
The school taught you to love your country and believe in God (which screams "Republican!"), so of course that makes you a sitting duck for discrimination these days.
You have made a very superficial statement and a gratuitous one about whether harvard is antisemitic by mentioning the flabby minded jews who help run harvard. That really misses the big question about arab money, arab students and an israel hating faculty...and the consequent campus atmosphere which almost by definition, as defined by the most hateful and emotional and active leaders does now or always will hate the main rung of support for the existence and survival efforts of israel which is jews and evangelical protestants. If you do this to soothe the tucknuts and candace fans in your following that is sad at best.
Authorities say both men were leaders of rival Armenian organized crime syndicates, referred to as “avtoritet,” which is Russian for “authority,” and that they have been engaged in a violent feud to maintain control of the San Fernando Valley since 2022.
Artuni is charged with ordering the attempted murder of Amiryan during the summer of 2023. In retaliation, Amiryan allegedly conspired with members of his own criminal organization to kidnap and torture one of Artuni’s associates in June 2023.
"Artuni and his organization allegedly targeted e-commerce giant Amazon by enrolling as carriers for the online retailer. Artuni and his men would contract trucking routes with Amazon, and while transporting the goods, diverge from the route and steal all or part of the shipments. "
With the white working class turning Republican or anti-woke, Harvard could legally give bonus points for low-income parents (or single motherhood) and maybe not scoop up too many poor whites, who wouldn't want to go where they won't be welcome. But they probably already gamed that out, and it didn't work the way they wanted.
Trump attacking them will probably help them raise funds, plus they'll feel so righteous even if they are forced by the courts to fold (not likely IMO). How long did the previous case take, a decade?
Such a weird system where the majority disenfranchises itself. I have always thought it was an extreme form of virtue signaling. If you study anthropology you come across some weird rituals and seemingly unproductive customs; this is some modern version of this I guess. But I’m beginning to wonder if virtue signaling is not really the problem but an underlying contempt by the admissions’ offices for people named Billy Bob or Bobby Joe. Going back to my first sentence, in 2025 the idea of a white majority doesn’t exist.
There was an old "All in the Family" episode where Meathead and a black man compete for a college professor job. Meathead loses and the administrator explains to Meathead that reverse discrimination might have to be practiced for a while to give a leg up to the blacks.
Times were different then. There was a certain logic to affirmative action after a hundred years of Jim Crow. Now it has morphed into something sinister.
Kind of related/unrelated, but a good place to toss out none the less: My husband's cousin is in her mid-50's. She went to Yale... back in the days when we still kind of thought the Ivies were nothing but prestige and overflowing in intelligence. When I met her about twenty years ago, I remember a dinner conversation where she said that she never felt like she learned anything at Yale, because everyone was so busy just walking around telling themselves how fabulous they were to have gotten into Yale. This was 30 years ago! Imagine how little they are learning these days, given my in-law's experience.
What was her major? I went to MIT and my memories of that time are equally divided between hilarious conversations with my fraternity brothers (and how disappointing the average post college conversations have been) and huge quantities of knowledge flowing into my brainpan through a firehose. I can no longer do the math, but I remember it.
I find most middle aged people forget most of what they learned in college. Maybe that's what she was reporting?
Haha- I think going to a good school, surrounded by people as smart and smarter should engender humility. Humility was a big thing in GenX. I understand it fell out of style later.
I forgot that the Supreme Court nefariously used the 14th Amendment to strike down Harvard's Affirmative Action policies. Serves Harvard and the left right. The left has used the 14th Amendment for all sorts of legal mischief for decades. It's great to see it bite them in the ass.
I am a very strict constructionist to the Constitution. The 14th Amendment's purpose was to give citizenship rights to all "born or naturalized in the United States...including formerly enslaved people." There would be "equal protection under the laws." Unfortunately, the left has used a very expanded, Gumbyized version of "equal protection under the laws" that can mean anything to any person or a rogue collection of five Supreme Court Justices. A proper reading of the 14th Amendment would limit it to the former slaves and nobody else.
In the end, a coterie of vile Yankees like Senator Charles Sumner and Senator Thad Stevens jammed the 14th Amendment illegally down the throats of the country after Abraham Lincoln's murder. The Southern states weren't allowed any input on the 14th Amendment. Bluntly, I think the 14th Amendment was not ratified properly and, in a perfect world, wouldn't be part of the Constitution.
No illegals, tourists, etc. it is pure insanity that the 14th amendment allows poor Mexicans and wealthy Chinese to pop out a baby on U.S. to obtain citizenship and welfare and we allow it because it’s an unchallenged precedent. Pite hogwash.
That's the birthright citizenship part. I'm talking the equal protection part. I don't think they intended to write in birthright citizenship, but they kinda did. It all comes down to what was meant by 'under the jurisdiction of'.
I get the original argument that a tourist is not under the jurisdiction of the US but then I ask, okay, what if a tourist kills someone? Does that mean he goes back to his own country for trial? Or does that mean we deal with it here but since he is not 'under the jurisdiction of the US' that we don't owe him a fair trial and can go straight to a lynching?
I don't actually know what the intended meaning of that was, but in the original case that people think established birthright citizenship, the court was clear that merely being here as a tourist wouldn't count
"Subject to the jurisdiction of" was supposed to be a more grammatically correct way of saying that the child's parents are "American subjects." It goes back to the way people used to the word subject instead of citizen.
That makes sense. If it were 'has to obey the laws of' why include it? Is there a distinction between 'subject to the jurisdiction of' and 'within its jurisdiction'? The latter is for equal protection, the former for citizenship,
the act declared that all people born in the United States who are not subject to any foreign power are entitled to be citizens, without regard to race, color, or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude.
White saviorism/racial paternalism/social engineering by race/bureaucratized tokenism is foundational sacred dogma for gentry white liberals, it is their modern moral crusade and how they award themselves the divine right to rule and hog not only all the assets and power, but all the virtue too. THEY are the people who give a helping hand to the dark-skinned victim, unlike those crass and bigoted OTHER whites, their out-group, and even if your dark-skinned victim turns out to be wealthy like the Gay family of Haiti, that doesn't matter, only the symbol matters and its concomitant frisson of righteousness.
There is no Supreme Court decision, no lawsuit, no outrage, no referendum result, no meteor or earthquake that could ever change this, short of going full Eisenhower and sending the National Guard into the recruiting/admins office of every upscale institution in the country. (And even then they'd try to work around it.)
Anecdata lagniappe: my richest friend has a kid who's half Brazilian bc he married into a rich Brazilian family. For the kid's college admission application, he went with one of the family servants to a favela and made a "documentary" about their squalid sufferings and about how much he cares and wants to help. Ivy League material!
CP, love your take, as usual. You get the Substitute Saviors' primal drive to raise up worthy offerings to their gods -- i.e. themselves, and those like them.
I appreciate your second paragraph especially. As much as I've enjoyed the Trump administration's seemingly all-out war on Big Ed's Goliath, i.e. Harvard, at best it's a flight of arrows that will mostly bounce off the citadel walls. They're well-aimed, but just not that weighty.
Harvard may be subject, sort of, to US law, but remember that it can also call on allies and resources from around the globe. I realize the Trump admin is trying to choke off this money-and-influence pipeline via the cancellation of foreign student visas, but does anyone really believe Harvard will open its 2025-2026 academic year missing out 25% of its student body?
Here in Hong Kong Harvard's name is still spoken with hushed reverence amongst prestige-crazed students and their parents. Yesterday's (attempted) visa cancellation was at the top of local newscasts and headlines, even though it directly affects a negligible number of Hong Kong people. Within hours several top local universities issued public statements flinging open their admission doors to those turned away from Harvard Holy Land by the Badorangeman. Several people, knowing I'm an American, asked me about it -- they immediately assumed crazy Trump was simply persecuting a noble institution: poor Harvard, and poor, poor students! What could be more heartbreaking than to draw nigh unto the blazing hearth of Edhalla -- and then be expelled into the bitter darkness of some lesser institution?
In short, Harvard still sits pretty upon a *colossal* stockpile of inter-cultural capital, in addition to their 53 billion dollars. It's going to take a sustained, ruthless, ugly campaign to knock them off it. I'd love to see it, but I don't think I will.
If Clarence Thomas does the right thing and retires from the Supreme Court a month or so from now, I hope Trump announces that no Harvard candidate to replace Thomas will be considered. Just declare war on the state of Massachusetts. Close Fort Devens as a start. Close Joint Base Cape Cod. Hanscom Air Base. Mandatory AIDS testing in Provincetown. Okay, just kidding.
That would be a nice change, wouldn't it? But then Amy CB is from Notre Dame, which certainly isn't an ivy, much less Harvard, and she doesn't seem all that great.
I think Amy Coney Barrett occasionally disappoints because, like her mentor, Antonin Scalia, she is an EXTREMIST on Constitutional construction. I remember being a little mad at Scalia's siding with the liberals on Eminent Domain about 12 years ago. Scalia's point was that it wasn't up to the Supreme Court to limit Eminent Domain but it was up to the different states to limit it. Amy Barrett disappointed on DOGE, I believe, because she thinks that the Legislative Branch controls the purse strings and not the Executive Branch. And she's right, in a way.
That post is too wordy. Please remove the last sentence.
Harvard has too much social, cultural, symbolic and financial capital to be sunk by Trump and this attempt to rub their noses in all their shit will probably just get some lawyers rich while getting Harvard to sign on to some consent agreement they will quickly ignore. This is what happens when you snooze for decades as your opponents completely capture every cultural and educational institution (if you think college is Left indoctrination, public schools are probably worse)—the most you can achieve are small victories that will only lead somewhere if they're quickly followed by hundreds of other small victories.
The real problem is that every person in any position of authority has been conditioned to turn a blind eye to Left capture, and if they do happen to notice that political indoctrination has replaced scholarship, it just seems like a natural occurrence, as long as it was implemented by people w the proper credentials speaking proper guild jargon; whereas when Trump or any conservative says "We will no longer subsidize people who hate our country and culture" or "DEI violates the law", this is a spark that's quickly blown up into a wildfire by media piranhas who then get to all sing in unison about teacher's rights and Free Speech (things they don't give a shit about). Even someone like Steve Pinker, who's devoted a big part of his career to documenting the most demented campus thinkers and their theories, immediately retreats behind platitudes the moment someone steps in to clean house. The most our liberal class can ever achieve are strongly worded letters, anything else would smudge their exalted self-image.
But it is great fun to watch Trump and his people put the smack down on our failed class of academic parasites. Even if you can't completely defeat your opponents, it is gratifying to punch them in the nose and see some blood trickle.
Cheers
And that's about all you're going to get. When I solidified defeat of hate crime laws in Georgia in 2000 with a mere editorial describing their secret enforcement plans, and who would be left out, such as heterosexual women attacked by serial killers and rapists (the bill passed stripped of all victim categories and was overturned for vagueness in the courts), Republicans carried my AJC editorial around over their heads; the ADL woke me in bed pre-dawn to tell me I was now Abe Foxman's "enemy," and "I didn't want to be that"; and my department chair called me into her office a few hours later to tell me they were "watching me," though I was acting as a private citizen and had won the school's Humanitarian Prize for precisely the same type of work for women to win the prize.
Fast forward to 2020. I couldn't even physically get into the Capitol to testify against the next hate crime bill because rioters destroyed hotel and business windows that week all around the Capitol, surrounded the building and swarmed corridors. My hotel had to shut down (a Representative was going to sneak me in the legislators' entrance at dawn for my safety, but I couldn't physically get there). It would not have mattered anyway. This time, exurban Republicans carried the bill, and it passed, with important Republicans clapping their little tambourines as loudly as Democrats for it. I spent 23 years documenting all the obvious lies, damning statements, frauds, and abuses perpetrated by the hate crimes and Innocence Project industries: how they politicized the FBI and encouraged black-on-white and black-on-cop violence, and there was the GOP singing We Shall Overcome on behalf of a bunch of legal thugs.
Nobody had to threaten me this time. I had already lost my freelance work, my academic career, and my ability to safely show my face at the Capitol, where I still
lobbied pro-bono for groups like dialysis patients and molestation victims. The mob won, and we are now officially second-class citizens, or worse, before the law.
Notice that as soon as anyone talks about cutting federal funding, the first 100 things the universities will trot out are all "aristocracy of merit and accomplishment" STEM or STEM-adjacent, and never the endless stream of grievance studies slop and the work of all the vast armies of bureaucrats and petty-tyrant administrators that outnumber faculty and perhaps even students at this point. There is no good reason to bundle these things together anymore if the only defensible parts are held hostage as human shields against any effort for the public to use its right to allocate public monies to deal with the catastrophic degeneration of the rest.
As the reckoning comes for higher ed, humanities and social sciences programs are going to get hit hard, from two directions. One you've identified here, i.e. colleges and universities that are running into financial troubles are already cutting down on programs that cost a lot and now garner little prestige. The other is AI -- I've been reading numerous first-hand reports from university professors admitting that it's now essentially impossible to assign meaningful homework in humanities courses. No matter what kind of term paper, essay, or whatever students are given to do, they're not doing it. Their writing skills = prompts.
Yes and that’s insane. How are students going to learn writing and critical thinking skills? They’re just paying for a degree. Using AI on an assignment in college should mean immediate expulsion.
They are absolutely just paying for a degree -- at least many of them are. There are still diligent love-of-learning types out there (Daughter C is definitely one), but for many -- maybe, or soon to be, most? -- the temptation to take the easy road is overwhelming. I've also seen numerous 'I wish I had actually studied for my degree' articles citing recent uni grads, but it seems for many students, once they start using AI, it's hard to stop.
Universities are trying all kinds of clever ways to structure out-of-class assignments to compel students to do their own thinking and writing, but it's obvious this is just stop-gap cope. The revolution in higher ed is on, and nobody really knows what's going to happen.
An economist might bite the bullet and say if you can use AI to do it then it has no value in the market so why waste investing huge amounts time and money in forcing a human to fight an uphill battle the get just a little better at it only to then graduate and never use those skills again. People who can read and write well in the future will be those who were good at them in high school or beforehand.
Maybe or maybe this is an 'old man yells at cloud' situation. When I was a young 'un they said similar things about calculators. Using AI effectively will likely be one of the differentiating skills for employment over the working lifetime of current day college kids.
Do they need to be able to figure out that ole Hamlet is unable to act?
When I was in the corporate world, the CEO noticed that I, like him, could do arithmetic in my head during discussions, so he hired me to work directly for him. Everybody else needed calculators, but executives were reluctant to pull them out and use them while a conversation was going on.
Could indicate the value of the skill or could indicate the value of the boss seeing some of himself in you. I claim to hate to be cynical...
I bet being a baseball fan and knowing baseball statistics helped you along. Ted Williams has 500 at-bats and 172 hits. What is his batting average? .344
If I was a professor in the era of AI, I would have my students write their essays in class in those little blue books they had when I was a lad. Or I would question my students orally. Sir, name three reasons why support for American Independence developed after the conclusion of the French and Indian Wars? Please stand. Lady, who was Sir John Falstaff in Shakespeare? That sort of thing.
Sure; invigilated long-essay and viva voce exams are the gold standard for higher ed. But they take up oceans of expensive faculty time, and they're strenuous for both students and examiners. The higher ed sector is so bloated and degraded that retrofitting these stringent examinations back into the 'all win prizes and get A's' consumerist mindset that reigns now seems almost impossible.
Higher education administration is as bloated as Fat Bastard in those Austin Powers movies. If they were ever popped, an ugly ooze will slowly filter out like a West Texas river in the Summer.
I started every semester with a brief, handwritten essay. From that point forward, I had a template to detect cheating. Important exams were also in-class and hand-written.
I've noticed AI has increasingly become as dull and uncreative as my lesser students. Am I the only humanities person to notice this?
You are quite wise. And you must be very patient with the scribble called male cursive.
The females were actually worse. I'd had an, I suppose, sexist theory that applying make-up would make them more dexterous. But a lot of driven males transferred into my composition classes because every single one of the other assigned freshman comps had titles such as "The Lesbian in Literature." I taught "Prose and Poetry." That was a second-tier elite school. When I taught at a poor community college, I loved my several Jamican students, who had benefitted in education and discipline from the Colonial British schools there. Also the single moms holding down jobs to become nurses. They worked hard. 60% of the others were wasting their time. They could barely read or write. Forget math.
My signature is today almost identical to what it was in 1967. My theory is that it might be helpful if people could read my signature, so I scrawl it carefully in my third grade Catholic school style. I'm not very coordinated, so it's awkward-looking, but it is readable.
I write so little in cursive other than writing checks that I can actually write my name a little better than fifty years ago when I attended Catholic schools my first four years. But my right thumb is showing signs of arthritis so I am glad I don't have to write in cursive any longer.
I'm a lefty and the product of the best public school in Poughkeepsie, when IBM was the biggest computer company in the world. Homeroom was me and ten guys named Wu. We played chess, talked calculus, and bitched about affirmative action. In 1980. Between offcast Selectrics and the first "portable" IBM, that weighed in at about 40 pounds and had three lines of print (IBM tragically never believed people would want personal computers -- see the great Halt and Catch Fire series), I was typing by grade school and never really learned handwriting. Oddly, though, I did my convention construction work, much of it lightweight and fussy (being female), though requiring mechanical drafting and geometry skills strong enough for a three-story tennis court for Andre Agassi -- aluminum, allen wrench "system" construction -- using only my right hand as the dominant. Still do. I can't read my own handwriting, but I can shingle a roof. The Wu homeroom guys worked their asses off but all had to settle for lesser schools. I'm sure they're doing very well now anyway, being actually competent.
Lots of professors are blaming AI too much. If anything what AI has actually made impossible is the continued sustainability-through-willful-blindness and rampant denial that a lot of professors have been engaging in for a long time. It is just the tide going out and revealing nakedness. For two decades it's been getting easier and easier for the marginal student to use computers as short-cuts to produce output of high enough quality to get a pass.
That goes for STEM stuff too, but I'll focus on English composition. I work in a place that gets a steady turnover of new graduates who tend to come from the just-below-elite schools, and it was depressingly clear for a long time that, in part because of computers, the average competency in writing and reading comprehension skills has been collapsing. Even for those who can read and comprehend long-form, most find it painful to do so. Professors know that well - ask them what it was like grading essays 10 years ago - they've just been dropping the standards of rigor and giving out ok grades and letting college students slide and graduate anyway.
All that's really changed is that suddenly the stuff coming in is suddenly much high quality, and instead of just a few or some large fraction of students doing it, everybody is doing it. It took this level of ridiculousness to make a critical mass of professors complain about the same thing at the same time and provide the kind of flag-raising signal to leverage all that pent-up shame and frustration and finally, at long last, launch a sham-participation-confession falsification cascade. If they have to use the cover story that "It's the AI! Yeah, AI, that's the ticket. That's the only reason we need radical reform around here," then, ok, if that's what's needed to get the job done, go for it guys.
The "trend discontinuity" revelation power of AI in showing what's been fake or unproductive or socially-constructed-nonsense is going to be a lot more important than the actual AI capabilities themselves. When big changes happen fast it's hard for the lies and rationalizations to adapt quickly enough to keep up.
This is great analysis; thanks much.
I'm willing to believe that writing ability has been collapsing, although looking at the public internet I think it's mostly a failure (or lack) of editing.
I can't be too proud. Looking back on it, I was a terrible writer in high school and college and I'm (among other things) a wordcel--even back then in oral arguments I was great, but pen to paper? I think high school emphasized the wrong things because they were trying to help average students write passable essays.
So they drilled into you : first paragraph tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em. Then tell them for the next three paragraphs, one idea per paragraph. Then in the final paragraph tell 'em what you told 'em!
Nothing more granular than that. Never any good actionable criticism. One teacher warned us never to concede any point that worked against our thesis.
So I sucked. Not my fault your honor. I never had a chance!
People write well on the parts of the Internet I hang out on. The one exception is Dodger Twitter. Dodger fans tend to be dopes when it comes to the written word.
I'm certain there is good stuff out there. I would be happy to take recommendations from you. The problem I see mostly is writers I've never read who don't get the idea of the inverted pyramid. If I don't know your writing, I need your thesis to be clear by the end of paragraph three. I'm not trusting you to take me on a five page journey of discovery.
I see this with YouTube videos as well. I had a doc share a 2 hour lecture video that he promised was going to blow my mind WRT COVID. ten minutes in I was unblown so I asked the recommender if he good summarize what I was going to learn. Impossible! I needed to get it step by step from the guy on the video. Really? Couldn't you just give me his literature references and I can check them. No.
Scott Alexander tends to eventually get to the same point I do, but I do it more quickly, so I'm more verboten than he is.
Free Republic, the conservative low-brow internet site, is made up on poor writers on the whole. I am sure many are old geezers knocking down whiskey as they write.
Text messaging has ruined grammar. My younger brother is unable to construct a grammatically correct sentence.
I had to help my niece with a humanities university assignment recently.
Her topic was the use of AI in foreign language teaching. She used (a lot) of AI in writing the assignment, which I tried to obscure with a lot of edits. I didn’t do enough and she still got busted by an AI-detector used by her professor, which is in turn powered by AI itself.
I don’t really know what the future is here.
last I checked consensus was that AI detectors didn't work. Too many false positives. Originally you could detect it by its bland wikipedia style but lately it develops personality.
I'm using Chat GPT a lot these days. It's a little like having a personal reference librarian combined with an eager personal assistant. If I were a college student, I fantasize that I would be using this to immeasurably beef up the quality of my work. Realistically, I would probably let it do more of the heavy lifting. Until? Since the technology is improving it's hard to tell.
McKinsey is going to want whomever is best/most efficient as churning out slide decks. Using whatever tools are available. A huge challenge for higher education traditional practices. Much less of one for ordinary people.
I use an LLM at work a fair bit for natural and machine language tasks. I can’t use it for everything but for the things I can it is something like 20%-30% better.
I frequently recommend its productivity-raising potential to my colleagues, none of whom take any interest and go back to emailing around MS Word attachments like it’s 2001.
At a Beltway Bandit in the 80s, we made color vugraphs mostly by hand. Apple Lisa to Compugraphic typesetter to negative film, apply color sticky film/tape. Hours of fun on a deadline. I was one of two who could proofread. We did a whole pile of them to change Rep. Dick Cheney's mind, then he (rightly) killed the whole system c. 1990.
What is a Beltway Bandit?
Federal contractors who "consult."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltway_bandit
I think Trump’s dangling of Harvard’s federal grant funds is entirely fair. If Harvard won’t obey the law, those funds can go to other universities that will, and Harvard‘s cancer researchers will follow.
There was a university in Hong Kong that offered immediate and unconditional acceptance to any of the Harvard foreign students or exchange professors that might lose their visas in the extremely unlikely event the courts allow the government to stray even an inch from the Status Quo Ante Trumpum. Likewise, there are ten thousand universities who will eagerly take the American taxpayer grant money and all the labs and researchers and grad students with no hesitation for the small price of giving up discriminating and being fair to everybody according to their talent, potential, and track record of accomplishment. Indeed, one wonders if there were a "just like Harvard but fair" twin with open borders, how many of those researchers and labs would just migrate all by themselves and jump ship overnight.
I live in Hong Kong, and as I mentioned in another comment, the Harvard visa cancellation was BIG NEWS here, immediately. It's a reflection of the astonishing degree of clout the Harvard name carries.
But I think there's a miniscule chance at best that anybody's going anywhere unexpected. Trump is going to get shot down hard on the visa issue. And even if there were more money on offer at other institutions, many academics would still pass it up for the chance to be associated with Harvard.
I’ve always thought that foreign obsession with Harvard was driven by the expectation that going there would allow foreigners to live in the U.S. permanently and make lots of money. Sure it’s a status market but the real driving force was immigration. I wonder what percentage of foreign students end up as citizens and LPRs. I imagine it’s quite large.
In HK, at least, I don't think that's it. A foreign kid can go to any number of US universities and find a way to stay stateside and get a job.
Americans tend to overestimate the immigration desires of foreign students from non-shithole countries. Sure, some of them may be looking to stay, but the ones who are driving for Ivy+ admissions are usually from families with enough money and resources to find other ways to emigrate anyway. Plenty of them return to their home countries to swan around with their Harvard Halos subtly but effectively displayed for all to admire.
So I think it's mostly status. The Harvard name carries clout and opens doors around the world.
My county went from 1% SE Asian to 19% SE Asian in well under a decade. These are almost all wealthy professionals from the same region of India, many with American degrees and post-docs. They want to escape tensions and lack of opportunities there, and I know a few and like them (one unusual farmer couple is being quite innovative, discovering the common southern/SE Asian love language of okra). But families who have been here for generations are being squeezed and priced out of available homes. Rural schools are suddenly flooded with .001% wealthy, high achievers from another culture. It's not that SE Asians are richer and smarter: it's that the ones who come here from that vast nation are. It creates cultural and class tensions along with opportunities. But the newcomers are the ones who need to integrate, and there is virtually no effort to do so, despite being welcomed, and they learn from public schools to see themselves as discriminated-against minorities while being taught that white rural Americans are oppressors (which is risible, given their caste system). They also live conservative but vote liberal -- and have the money to buffer their families from the consequences of that as illegal gang violence and Atlanta-import crime soars, while modest residents are left vulnerable. Outcome uncertain.
Loudoun County VA perhaps?
The creme de la crème of a 1.4 billion person country coming to the U.S. and complaining about being oppressed and discriminated against. Only in America . . .
I have found that Hindus vote as monolithically Democrat as Jews and blacks. Loudoun County VA, once a hotbed of rural conservatism, has been transformed in the last twenty years into being a leftist playground of Indians and Orientals living in McMansions in what was once horse country and fields of grain.
Even with money and resources, it’s very difficult to immigrate to the U.S. absent an EB5 or L-1 visa it’s impossible. Maybe this isn’t an issue for HK but it’s certainly the hope and expectation of most other foreigners. Especially India and China.
I don't know how they do it, but the demographic change is massive. We have great public schools despite the relentless identity politics, and there are positive things to say about exposing children to these SE Asians' intense cultural expectations to achieve. Get rid of the DEI agenda, and the next generation may be fine. Youth from families around here also come from strong extended kin networks, and they're also very hard workers.
In addition, what Trump may be trying to do is pick a fight with the biggest bully. If he were to cave, he would lose leverage with all of academia.
Having said that, expect a negotiation to take place at some point.
The Supreme Court included some dumb stuff, like it is fine to talk about one's race in the context of other things in essays. And it's okay, evidently, to still weigh one's adversities–as if that's what we should be selecting for.
By all accounts, John Roberts is a mealy-mouth. Antonin Scalia despised him.
Most of his colleagues despise him too now. It's a shame no one ever took "No more Souters" seriously.
John Roberts is not nearly as liberal as David Souter, who was little different than William Brennan. Scalia thought Roberts' reasoning on Obamacare to be dishonest, conniving and deceitful.
Roberts has been just as bad on dozens of other major holdings, and he's been getting even worse lately. If Welch were to write "The Politician" on some subject today, it would be about Roberts. There can be no doubt whatsoever at this point that his appointment was an immense mistake, and that Trump also got bamboozled by Leonard Leo with Gorsuch and Barrett (Kavanaugh was the deal made with Kennedy.) Just read what Blackman's been writing about Roberts over at the Volokh Conspiracy for the last few years and you'll get a taste. His level of nakedly incoherent and contradictory nonsense has been rising continuously without limit.
No one is going to recall his tenure fondly, and it certainly won't be one of those instances of some lone righteous person standing on principle against the currents of rival wicked camps. Roberts will be remembered as the Chief Justice who would stoop to any level to save the elites and progressives on the key issues of his era while pretending otherwise. Someone is going to yell, 'Dobbs!' but you may notice that after the dust settled nothing much happened and everyone moved on to the next thing and went on with their lives because it wasn't in actual reality as big a deal as people made it out to be.
I sat through many hours of various graduation speeches at Harvard last year under the nice trees.
Until it rained.
Listening to a lot of Chinese around me.
And also listening to pro Palestine drums for the students who were kicked out of graduation.
One thing that struck me was that they found two student speakers from Nebraska.
Who were both Muslim women.
Who both commented about how frustrating it was growing up in Nebraska because no one looked like them, and how happy they were at Harvard because a lot of students looked like them. Or maybe they were meaning so few students looked Nebraskan?
Anyway, it was an interesting day.
At my son's quite good school, there were a fair number of kids who applied to Harvard, including the valedictorian who got a full ride from Yale and the salutatorian who was also a professional magician and went to Stanford.
Two got in to Harvard: the giant star black center on the basketball team, who was a popular choice with the other students because they knew how hard he worked at basketball, even though he didn't much care for sports, so he could get an Ivy League scholarship. (He seems to be doing well in the corporate world.) And a young Muslim lady whose main distinction was wearing a hijab. She was not a popular choice.
I checked the Nebraska speakers and realized one was Indian, but she spent so much time talking about Gaza i had thought she was Muslim.
The other was Iranian Malaysian.
Regardless, not so proud (and in fact quite critical) representatives of Nebraska at Harvard.
2024 at Harvard was all about Gaza with all the cool kids, as far as I could tell, so the more Muslim the better. Of course, Harvard also has a Jewish student or two, so there was some drama.
Planes were flying overhead carrying pro-Israel banners.
Meanwhile, I kept thinking about the Nebraskans who couldn't get in and missed all the excitement.
The "Nebraskan" Indian could have been a Muslim Indian. India is about 1/7 Muslim. Maybe she got into Harvard by complaining how much she was discriminated against by BOTH Indian Hindus AND Nebraskan whites: a virtue signaling two-fer!
If she was Hindu, Hindu Indians typically don't care much for Muslims or Muslim causes, but the woke reprogramming of US "higher ed" might have overridden that.
The Nebraskans:
https://youtu.be/Ap6PqQ9wPYA
https://www.youtube.com/live/bPV1IEhZzqQ?t=2954
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
—Yeats
Okay, Shruti probably not Muslim. Suspect she is a devotee of Kali...
Personal observation, but I think the "elite" schools may have doubled down on their DEI admissions this year. My youngest just graduated from a military school; the school typically releases where everyone got into college on their social media pages. College admittances were only announced at the graduation this year instead, because it was pretty unimpressive. The school has done pretty well in the past with the bigger named schools. Not this year... which was surprising given some of the student's strong credentials.
The school taught you to love your country and believe in God (which screams "Republican!"), so of course that makes you a sitting duck for discrimination these days.
You have made a very superficial statement and a gratuitous one about whether harvard is antisemitic by mentioning the flabby minded jews who help run harvard. That really misses the big question about arab money, arab students and an israel hating faculty...and the consequent campus atmosphere which almost by definition, as defined by the most hateful and emotional and active leaders does now or always will hate the main rung of support for the existence and survival efforts of israel which is jews and evangelical protestants. If you do this to soothe the tucknuts and candace fans in your following that is sad at best.
Steve must be busy today with the Valley Armenians and Harvard, and everything else...
What's up with the Valley Armenians? I haven't heard a peep.
I'm not sure how many gold chains were worn.
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/armenian-crime-rings-charged-attempted-murder-83-million-amazon-cargo-theft
Authorities say both men were leaders of rival Armenian organized crime syndicates, referred to as “avtoritet,” which is Russian for “authority,” and that they have been engaged in a violent feud to maintain control of the San Fernando Valley since 2022.
Artuni is charged with ordering the attempted murder of Amiryan during the summer of 2023. In retaliation, Amiryan allegedly conspired with members of his own criminal organization to kidnap and torture one of Artuni’s associates in June 2023.
Wow. thanks.
"Artuni and his organization allegedly targeted e-commerce giant Amazon by enrolling as carriers for the online retailer. Artuni and his men would contract trucking routes with Amazon, and while transporting the goods, diverge from the route and steal all or part of the shipments. "
That's actually pretty funny.
I was going to suggest the Steven Pinker article when I saw the title. Good piece.
But Harvard has Veritas. It can't be wrong. So much for the US Supreme Court.
Should be "credulous" recounting, no adverbial.
Until Harvard cuts its black % by at least 2/3 it should receive no federal funding.
With the white working class turning Republican or anti-woke, Harvard could legally give bonus points for low-income parents (or single motherhood) and maybe not scoop up too many poor whites, who wouldn't want to go where they won't be welcome. But they probably already gamed that out, and it didn't work the way they wanted.
Trump attacking them will probably help them raise funds, plus they'll feel so righteous even if they are forced by the courts to fold (not likely IMO). How long did the previous case take, a decade?
Any fence that's as useless as Harvard at keeping out predators would've been torn down and replaced decades ago.
Such a weird system where the majority disenfranchises itself. I have always thought it was an extreme form of virtue signaling. If you study anthropology you come across some weird rituals and seemingly unproductive customs; this is some modern version of this I guess. But I’m beginning to wonder if virtue signaling is not really the problem but an underlying contempt by the admissions’ offices for people named Billy Bob or Bobby Joe. Going back to my first sentence, in 2025 the idea of a white majority doesn’t exist.
There was an old "All in the Family" episode where Meathead and a black man compete for a college professor job. Meathead loses and the administrator explains to Meathead that reverse discrimination might have to be practiced for a while to give a leg up to the blacks.
Times were different then. There was a certain logic to affirmative action after a hundred years of Jim Crow. Now it has morphed into something sinister.
https://www.stoneageherbalist.com/p/the-maori-genocide-of-the-moriori
I’m not sure the relevance here, but the guns, germs and steel guy wrote about this in one of his books.
Kind of related/unrelated, but a good place to toss out none the less: My husband's cousin is in her mid-50's. She went to Yale... back in the days when we still kind of thought the Ivies were nothing but prestige and overflowing in intelligence. When I met her about twenty years ago, I remember a dinner conversation where she said that she never felt like she learned anything at Yale, because everyone was so busy just walking around telling themselves how fabulous they were to have gotten into Yale. This was 30 years ago! Imagine how little they are learning these days, given my in-law's experience.
What was her major? I went to MIT and my memories of that time are equally divided between hilarious conversations with my fraternity brothers (and how disappointing the average post college conversations have been) and huge quantities of knowledge flowing into my brainpan through a firehose. I can no longer do the math, but I remember it.
I find most middle aged people forget most of what they learned in college. Maybe that's what she was reporting?
English/communications. She went on to work at national publications.
They had communications at Yale? That explains it.
My in-law clearly didn't learn her humility at Yale :)
Haha- I think going to a good school, surrounded by people as smart and smarter should engender humility. Humility was a big thing in GenX. I understand it fell out of style later.
I forgot that the Supreme Court nefariously used the 14th Amendment to strike down Harvard's Affirmative Action policies. Serves Harvard and the left right. The left has used the 14th Amendment for all sorts of legal mischief for decades. It's great to see it bite them in the ass.
I am a very strict constructionist to the Constitution. The 14th Amendment's purpose was to give citizenship rights to all "born or naturalized in the United States...including formerly enslaved people." There would be "equal protection under the laws." Unfortunately, the left has used a very expanded, Gumbyized version of "equal protection under the laws" that can mean anything to any person or a rogue collection of five Supreme Court Justices. A proper reading of the 14th Amendment would limit it to the former slaves and nobody else.
In the end, a coterie of vile Yankees like Senator Charles Sumner and Senator Thad Stevens jammed the 14th Amendment illegally down the throats of the country after Abraham Lincoln's murder. The Southern states weren't allowed any input on the 14th Amendment. Bluntly, I think the 14th Amendment was not ratified properly and, in a perfect world, wouldn't be part of the Constitution.
Only former slaves? But I want equal protection under the law too.
No illegals, tourists, etc. it is pure insanity that the 14th amendment allows poor Mexicans and wealthy Chinese to pop out a baby on U.S. to obtain citizenship and welfare and we allow it because it’s an unchallenged precedent. Pite hogwash.
That's the birthright citizenship part. I'm talking the equal protection part. I don't think they intended to write in birthright citizenship, but they kinda did. It all comes down to what was meant by 'under the jurisdiction of'.
I get the original argument that a tourist is not under the jurisdiction of the US but then I ask, okay, what if a tourist kills someone? Does that mean he goes back to his own country for trial? Or does that mean we deal with it here but since he is not 'under the jurisdiction of the US' that we don't owe him a fair trial and can go straight to a lynching?
I don't actually know what the intended meaning of that was, but in the original case that people think established birthright citizenship, the court was clear that merely being here as a tourist wouldn't count
"Subject to the jurisdiction of" was supposed to be a more grammatically correct way of saying that the child's parents are "American subjects." It goes back to the way people used to the word subject instead of citizen.
That makes sense. If it were 'has to obey the laws of' why include it? Is there a distinction between 'subject to the jurisdiction of' and 'within its jurisdiction'? The latter is for equal protection, the former for citizenship,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1866
the act declared that all people born in the United States who are not subject to any foreign power are entitled to be citizens, without regard to race, color, or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude.