If you are looking for a campus speech crisis - a real one - look at the wave of laws and administrative directives that make it harder for people to protest at their university. Sadly @MarquetteU is the latest. See this letter from faculty. chronicle.com/blogs/letters/…
@MarquetteU@JeffreyASachs@PhilipRocco Two aspect of Marquette's new protest policy worth noting: 1) All protests must be approved by the administration and in the designated protest era. This recalls the "free speech zones" of the Trump era. Essentially: denude protest of power by hiding it.
@MarquetteU@JeffreyASachs@PhilipRocco 2) Second, @MarquetteU is telling people that they are not responsible for their own behavior, but also for those around them. Someone in your group, or a guest, misbehaves, you are all guilty. Hard to think of a more chilling threat to collective action.
@MarquetteU@JeffreyASachs@PhilipRocco Its also helpful to understand the political background: An outspoken conservative Marquette professor won a state Supreme Court case to protect his speech rights to, uh, dox grad students. Protestors are unlikely to receive the same judicial sympathy.
@MarquetteU@JeffreyASachs@PhilipRocco@UWSystem And so in the space of a few years, politicians (incl judges) & political appointees (regents) dramatically reshaped campus speech policy in Wisconsin to protect perceived threats to conservatives, while weakening the protest rights of faculty and students they regard as hostile.
@MarquetteU@JeffreyASachs@PhilipRocco@UWSystem Since it is twitter policy that I have to mention Brett Stephens somehow, let me note that this attack on free speech was done under the guise of protecting it. People like Stephens lent intellectual respectability to this sleight of hand by framing students as the problem.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
The connections are pretty clear. Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society helped bankroll the work of Ginni Thomas. He also arranged for Clarence Thomas to attend Koch fundraisers. propublica.org/article/claren…
The shared purpose of Leonard Leo, Ginni Thomas, Clarence Thomas and the Koch network was to put right-wing judges on the court. And Clarence Thomas used his public position on the court to raise money for that.
Clarence Thomas used to support the Chevron doctrine, which allows delegation to administrative expertise. But the people who fund the Koch network can't buy off administrators, so they want to remove their influence from the process. Now Thomas agrees with the donors.
Also this guy: young people today can't afford a house because they occasionally buy new clothes
If the people @FinancialReview care for free speech at all, they will do the decent thing and allow replies to this tweet, allowing a full and frank exchange of views.
America has 22 times the firearm homicide rates as the European Union.
We are less safe and less free because of how available guns are in this country. healthdata.org/news-events/in…
America makes up about 15% of gun homicides, and together with five other countries constitutes half of gun homicides in the world. vox.com/2018/8/29/1779…
The reason more people in America are dying from guns is because there are more guns in America.
America is the only country with more guns than people. cnn.com/2021/11/26/wor…
New, from me: I wrote about how the emerging debacle at New College (one-third of faculty gone, students can't find classes, housed in airport hotels) reflects the incompetence of populists like DeSantis.
Competence, the ability to perform organizational core tasks, is an underrated quality. It is an especially overlooked quality by people who value other things, like ideological goals, or believe that existing institutions are corrupt, or who have never actually run things.
Fuck Around (left, celebrating the firing of a faculty who criticized the Regents)
and
Find Out: (right, soliciting faculty applications because you don't have enough to teach classes - one-third have left for some reason).
The DeSantis takeover of New College was meant to offer a model of a conservative-run higher ed.
The result is chaos, which is what happens when incompetent people who don't actually care about organizational mission take over public services. insidehighered.com/news/students/…
The NY Times recently featured Chris Rufo to explain how DEI was undermining liberal education.
You know what actually undermines a liberal education?
Losing one-third of faculty.
Not offering core classes to students.
Raging incompetence and blind indifference.
Rufo is seeking to personally recruit replacements. Which is completely at odds with what university trustees are supposed to do. No way that could go wrong, right?
From the internal Texas A&M reports: it was A&M Regents who signaled their opposition to McElroy, at which point the university figured out they would not tenure her.
Seems like the Regents cost A&M $1M. Nice job.
: ... tamus.edu/wp-content/up
Not great when a university President is saying "I'm assuming all texts were deleted" and then tells faculty she was not involved in hiring process. (She has since resigned).