It's big things and little things. Serious stuff and stuff that's very, very silly.
This was inevitable. As anti-woke rhetoric and framing assume a larger place on the right, it was only a matter of time before more dishonest factions in the media got a hold of it. It means people who want to act in good faith need to be much more skeptical about what they see.
And it does little good to say "Well if you look at what the woke are doing, it's all so crazy that our occasional lapses are understandable." That's just you making excuses for yourself. Woke people can play that game too with stuff they care about. It won't wash.
OK, here endeth the sermon.
But before I go, did anyone else hear about how Kamala Harris is forcing kids in migrant detention centers to read her book while eating lab-grown hamburgers? I for one am outraged.
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OK, let's talk about Idaho. This bill, which is now on its way to the Governor's desk, is getting a lot of attention this morning. But the mess in that state is so, so much bigger than just HB 377. Let me explain.
First, I'll just dispel one confusion. Contrary to what @ClintSmithIII excerpts here, HB 377 does not prohibit "discussing" the role of race/sexism. That's a misunderstanding based on an earlier draft of the bill. But the reality is still very bad.
Under HB 377, no public K-12 school or college/uni may "direct or otherwise compel students to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere" to a series of beliefs about race, sex, religion, etc., nor may any state money be used to do so.
My position on court packing hasn't changed: It's a bad idea and shouldn't happen. While the GOP has successfully packed multiple state supreme courts without any clear damage to those courts' legitimacy, there's every reason to think Dems packing SCOTUS would be catastrophic.
I'm open to other, more moderate reforms. And of course I think Dems would be absolutely within their rights to never vote to confirm a single Republican nominee to SCOTUS ever again. That's the Garland precedent and Dems would be fools not to follow it.
Should Dems also start packing apex courts at the state level? That's a tougher call. Again, they can point to GOP precedents in Georgia, Arizona, and West Virginia. But there are surely nuances there I'm missing, so I don't know what to do.
I want to highlight two critical responses to the Cromwell Report, which cleared senior UofT admins of any wrongdoing in Azarova Affair. Valentina Azarova, you may recall, was in final talks to accept a directorship position when a donor intervened over her pro-Palestinian views.
The first is from Vincent Wong, who had served on the hiring committee and subsequently resigned in protest. The entire thing is a must-read and I won't single out any one passage. Not only is it a damning indictment of Cromwell, but of UofT Law.
The second is from Joseph Carens, a political theorist and emeritus prof at UofT, who nicely lays out why Cromwell's report fails to actually clear the administration of corrupt interference.
This profile of @collincollege and its president, Neil Matkin, simply has to be read to be believed. It describes a community college of nearly 60k students across 10 different campuses, all ruled over by an out-of-control and despotic bigot.
There are too many incredible anecdotes and incidents to summarize in this thread, but here are some highlights.
At its core, though, it describes a college where faculty live in a constant state of fear that they will offend the president or its Board of Trustees. Those who crossed the administration would find themselves humiliated, disciplined, or even fired.
How do university students, parents, and admissions officers evaluate institutional diversity statements? This PNAS study asked them to read and evaluate an "instrumental" rationale for diversity and a "moral" one. Here they are.
White students/parents preferred the first statement and said they would do best at University A. Black students/parents said the opposite. Admissions officers anticipated these preferences but said that while w std. would do well anywhere, b std. would do best at University B.
Were these expectations right? For white students, the prevalence of instrumental vs. moral rationales for diversity made no difference for grad rates. But for black students, it did. Low use of moral rationales was associated with lower grad rates for black students.
Californians for Equal Rights, the org that led the charge against Prop 16, has filed a complaint with the DoEd against the San Diego School District. They allege that a 10-day mandatory CRT training session last fall violated teachers' civil rights.
This is one group to watch. @wu_wenyuan will have to correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe CER has also signed on to a bunch of other lawsuits over alleged anti-Asian bias in university admissions, e.g. Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
CER is part of larger arc of groups working the anti-CRT issue, including FAIR, Southeast Legal Foundation, and Parents Defending Education. All are either currently suing or promising to sue K-12 and higher ed institutions over discriminatory pedagogy and/or training.