“Claudine Gay was in Rome on a family vacation on Dec. 27 when Penny Pritzker, the leader of Harvard University’s governing board, called to ask: Did she think there was a path forward with her as the school’s president?”
Informative account of Gay’s resignation in the NYT.
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Dr. Gay was planning a “spring reset,” but some board members thought the plan “showed that she didn't understand the urgency of the expanding crisis.”
The first member of the Corporation to turn was Timothy R. Barakett, the treasurer.
(Others joined him, as we know, after having dinner with members of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard.)
Board members received a fresh round of input from friends, family, and acquaintances over Christmas vacation:
In a new survey, 34% of prospective undergrads and 33% of their parents say the recent protests have decreased their interest in college:
Among parents, roughly half of Republicans, a third of independents, and a fifth of Democrats say the protests have decreased their interest in sending their kids to college:
The survey shows that the protests have had a negative impact on trust in higher education too:
@elianayjohnson and @aaronsibarium report that the Dean of Columbia College has put three deans on leave for text messages mocking concerns about antisemitism.
Then, as he tries to distance himself from the affair, they release more evidence of his involvement.
It’s based primarily on the recent People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit, which featured members of terrorist organizations and was attended by college students from around the country.
The WSJ set up a bunch of new Instagram accounts, set the age at 13, and within 3 minutes they were watching content made by “adult sex-content creators.”
Meta’s response? “This was an artificial experiment that doesn’t match the reality of how teens use Instagram.”
“Instagram served a mix of videos that, from the start, included moderately racy content such as women dancing seductively or posing in positions that emphasized their breasts. When the accounts skipped past other clips but watched those racy videos to completion, Reels recommended edgier content.”
“Adult sex-content creators began appearing in the feeds in as little as three minutes. After less than 20 minutes watching Reels, the test accounts’ feeds were dominated by promotions for such creators, some offering to send nude photos to users who engaged with their posts.”
In the press release, ABA President Mary Smith mentions “autocrats and dictators” threatening democracy “at home and around the globe,” but she doesn’t say anything about intolerance and ignorance on elite American law school campuses:
“The West Coast’s central problem is not so much that it’s unserious as that it’s infected with an ideological purity that is focused more on intentions than on oversight and outcomes.”
“We are more likely to believe that ‘housing is a human right’ than conservatives in Florida or Texas, but less likely to actually get people housed. We accept a yawning gulf between our values and our outcomes.”
“Politics always is part theater, but out West too often we settle for being performative rather than substantive.
“For example, as a gesture to support trans kids, Oregon took money from the tight education budget to put tampons in boys’ restrooms in elementary schools — including boys’ restrooms in kindergartens.”