Last May, North Dakota passed a law punishing universities and faculty who promote abortion. The state AG is now trying to explain why this law is constitutional. As @adamsteinbaugh explains, he is not successful. thefire.org/north-dakota-a…
None of this happened in secret, by the way. It was all right there out in the open.
Are you faculty at an ND university? I suggest inviting someone to give a pro-Roe lecture. A student? Try forming a pro-choice club that meets on campus. Let’s test this out.
I will never, ever cease to be stupefied by the tolerance some people seem to have for state-based censorship.
Just related to this is the media’s unfathomable coastal bias. Our great engines of Anti-Woke Critique would be on fire over an equivalent law in California or Connecticut. But for North Dakota, what do they offer? Silence.
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So says a survey of 2000 university profs and administrators. And it raises an interesting question, one inspired by @conor64: Do universities have an obligation to reject money from rightwing sources?
@conor64 Donor $$$ + weak institutional finances = higher levels of perceived pressure on profs and admins to hire/promote certain faculty over others. The effect was far greater and more statistically significant for rightwing $ than leftwing $, even for rightwing and moderate profs.
@conor64 "Thus Tables 5 and 6 together dispel an argument defenders of political money might make. Such defenders will claim that perceptions of undue influence are result not from actual undue influence, but from respondents having a contrary ideology. Our study indicates otherwise....
Allyn Walker, the ODU prof who was criticized for their comments and scholarship on pedophilia, has resigned. They required an armed escort to safely get off campus.
This is quite the coup for Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson, and the rest of that crowd. For weeks now, they'd been hounding Walker and demanding their termination. But here's the reality: scholarship like Walker's is precisely the sort of thing academic freedom exists to protect.
Unfortunately, there has been a HUGE amount of misinformation about Walker's research and commentary. Also quite a bit of transphobia too. In the end, it seems to have been too much.
I attended a conference last week at AEI on free speech and one of the presenters was Rodney Smolla, an impossibly funny and interesting man. Dean of Delaware Law School, SCOTUS lawyer, defamation attorney to the stars. Anyway, he described an interesting problem in 1A doctrine.
Suppose I falsely refer to you as being trans. You're a celebrity and feel that I am defaming you in a way that's hurting you financially (e.g. by costing you customers or fans). So you sue me.
Here's the question, which I'm sure every lawyer on Twitter knows about but was new to me:
When the court evaluates your suit, it has to determine whether my speech is likely to have hurt your reputation in some people's eyes. But by what standard? A bigot's?
Here's a nice one for you. @UTAustin has suspended a research study on anti-racist education after rightwing criticism and a Title VI complaint. The details are extremely damning.
@UTAustin What was the study? The researchers had 200 white pre-K children watch professional videos related to anti-black racism. The goal was to study whether/how they affected the kids' attitudes toward racism.
@UTAustin It's an important question, regardless of what you think of anti-racism efforts. For instance, @mattyglesias wrote just this week about a study showing that this sort of thing can have a major downside. This is research we should all support!
Two South Carolina reps have just pre-filed what is the most extreme, absurd, and flat out destructive anti-CRT bill I have come across in any jurisdiction in the country to date. Bar none.
The bill would prohibit any school (public or private), university, non-profit, state agency, contractor or sub-contractor, or private business that receives state funds from "promoting, engaging, or treating" individuals in relation to the following concepts:
Note well the inclusion of terms like "political belief" and "culture". Under this bill, it would illegal to make, say, a Nazi feel guilt or discomfort because of their beliefs.
Duke’s student senate continues to embarrass itself by refusing to recognize a student chapter of Students Supporting Israel — and for the most patently absurd and pretextual reason possible. If necessary, @DukeU must intervene. thefire.org/duke-student-s…
For those unwilling to click, the gist is that the student senate is accusing SSI of “singling out” a student in an offensive and unwelcoming way. How so? By posting this to Instagram.
Scandalous stuff! The sheer gall of SSI, inviting its critics to have a conversation. How dare they.