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Jeffrey Sachs Profile picture
Jeffrey Sachs
@JeffreyASachs
Acadia University. Judicial politics, authoritarianism, Islam, free speech and education. Tweets do not represent the views of my Employer.
11 subscribers
Oct 30 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
🚨The IHRA definition of antisemitism, if adopted and enforced by public universities, is unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. So says a federal judge in Texas. A terrific (if, for reasons I'll explain in a second, somewhat inconclusive) decision.
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…Image Here's the gist. Last March after a series of protests by SJP and related groups on college campuses, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed GA-44, an executive order requiring public colleges and universities to prohibit and punish antisemitic speech.
gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/…Image
Aug 21 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Humiliation. The Rufo Strategy is well and truly a dead end. This is actually part of a much larger and quite significant story. The entire “anti-woke” strategy in Florida is in full retreat. @PENamerica noticed it fairly early on and put together a good piece on it.

pen.org/report/cracks-…
Dec 29, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
There is no person on earth with a stronger claim to my house than me because when I am in it, I remember that it is where my daughter took her first steps. No theory of Indigeneity or ethno-religious descent is more powerful than that.

IOW, what matters is community.

A rant: It's important to keep in mind what the real crime of settler colonialism is. Not "theft" per se. No single ethnic group or cultural lineage can own the land, and if your political theory claims otherwise, it is evil and I want nothing to do with it.
Jul 28, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Another lawsuit has been filed against an anti-CRT bill. This time it's in Tennessee. @ThePlumLineGS has the details, which are pretty crazy.
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/… @ThePlumLineGS The 2021 law at issue is what @PENamerica calls an "Inclusion" ban. That means it forbids K-12 teachers from including certain ideas in classroom instruction. The other types of bans, Compulsion and Promotion, are also bad, but less so.

publications.tnsosfiles.com/acts/112/pub/p…
Jul 11, 2023 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
!!!
Under the Stop WOKE Act, Florida faculty and guest speakers are PROHIBITED from expressing support in class for affirmative action.

That's not me talking. It's Florida's own lawyers.
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/… This incredible admission comes after plaintiffs pointed out (and a lower court agreed) that the law's ban on saying that "[a] person, by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex should be discriminated against...to achieve DEI" would bar support for AA.

Jul 7, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The brain drain is real. Tampa Bay Times pulled records on faculty retention at four Florida universities. Resignations are way up, failed searches are common, fear and self-censorship are palpable. A disaster in the making.

tampabay.com/news/education… Several out-going faculty single out Rufo and their fear of being targeted online as a prime motive.

Meanwhile, New College has announced it is seeking $2m from the state to fund an institute to combat “cancel culture in higher education.”

flaglerlive.com/floridas-new-c…
Jul 5, 2023 • 17 tweets • 6 min read
Let me tell you a story about why one Florida school district is yanking works by Flaubert, Milton, and Shakespeare off the library shelf.

Because that's how bad things are getting in Florida. They're pulling Shakespeare.
orlandosentinel.com/2023/07/03/ora… Under HB 1069 (signed by DeSantis in May), county residents may object to any book they feel "depicts or describes sexual conduct." Challenged books must be immediately removed and quarantined pending the outcome of a formal review.

Jun 4, 2023 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
How do you look at these numbers as anything other than a total GOP messaging defeat?

Even a slight plurality of K-12 *parents* believe that teachers should play the lead role in their child's education.

ipsos.com/en-us/american… Image The DeSantis platform is wildly unpopular. With parents, with the general public... ImageImageImageImage
May 24, 2023 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
I tend to agree. “Restrict” is a better term. That said, one school in Florida recently took Brave New World out of the general library and “restricted” it to the 11/12th grade AP English classroom. So it’s still available (and therefore not a ban?) but only to +/- 50 kids. Here’s that story. The point is straightforward: would-be censors have many tools at their disposal short of a formal ban to essentially achieve a ban’s effect. We all know this.

May 18, 2023 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
One more contribution to this debate, then off for the night.

The reason I focus on "a handful of examples" is because those were the examples Greene himself chose to highlight. I didn't pick them. He did. He just had the poor luck (I guess?) of choosing ones with obvious flaws. The other thing I want to say is that temporary removals should, indeed, be recorded as bans -- albeit as ones that were later reversed.

And the reason is simple. First, b/c many genuine bans do get reversed. I cite in my thread this case in Missouri.
May 18, 2023 • 24 tweets • 9 min read
Okay, so you know that "debunking" of PEN America's banned book Index? I didn't work on the Index myself and have no insider knowledge, but did finally have time to look it over yesterday and I'm calling bullshit. You may have seen tweets like this, where a Heritage staffer named Jay Greene says that PEN America falsely listed The Bluest Eye as banned in Wentzville, Missouri classrooms.

Image
May 16, 2023 • 8 tweets • 5 min read
From the files of Are Colleges Brainwashing Your Child? comes a new entry by @JonathanMijs. When students have a roommate of a different race, their attitudes about meritocracy and racial discrimination change...but *only* if the student isn't white.

sciencedirect.com/science/articl… Image @JonathanMijs The gist: When black or Hispanic students are randomly assigned a different-race roommate in their freshman year, they become less likely to see America as a meritocracy or discrimination as on the wane.

Statistically, that roommate is likely to be white. ImageImage
May 15, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
I just want to follow up to address two soon-to-be mis-framings of this law. The first is that it’s an anti-DEI law. It is not. Supporters will try to persuade you that “all” the law does is ban DEI. It does do that, sort of. But there are only two provisions related to DEI in the law and they’re quite brief. The bulk is about other things: curriculum, faculty speech, etc.
May 15, 2023 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
Alongside last year's Stop WOKE Act, this new law is the worst anti-CRT bill to have become law so far. It is vague, highly punitive, and flagrantly unconstitutional. No wonder DeSantis likes it.

washingtonpost.com/education/2023… Most of the attention is going to be on the anti-DEI stuff, but there's a lot more going on. Let me break it down.

1. Curricular censorship: The BoG will review universities for compliance with the Stop WOKE Act (currently enjoined). Also no classes about systemic racism, etc. Image
May 9, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
A Florida elementary school has pulled from its *library* (not curriculum) this children's graphic novel about desegregation. Why? Because while it's appropriate for 5th graders, it's not for 3rd graders.
amazon.com/Little-Rock-Ni… The logic here (a logic that no school follows in any other circumstance) is that unless every child in a school can read a book, no child in the school may read that book. Which is too absurd to be anything other than a pretext for "This book is about racism".
May 1, 2023 • 15 tweets • 10 min read
New from @PENamerica: Educational Gag Orders are changing. After setbacks both in court and in legislative chambers (to say nothing of public opinion), supporters are shifting tactics from restricting academic speech to academic *structure*. Which is bad.

pen.org/from-classroom… @PENamerica First, a round-up of where we stand. 108 EGOs were introduced in 2023, of which 87 are still live. Five have become law or state policy, including four in April and May. ImageImage
Apr 26, 2023 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
On Monday, North Dakota Gov. Burgum signed into law SB 2247. Among other things, it prohibits public colleges and universities from asking students about their "ideological or political viewpoints."

legiscan.com/ND/text/SB2247… Image Even with this carve-out, the potential for censorship both inside and outside the classroom is significant. Think for a sec about all the times that university employees innocently and appropriately ask folks about something that might be an "ideological or political viewpoint". Image
Apr 17, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The entire theory of the case for the CRT/Parents Rights-as-electoral-strategy thing rests on Youngkin 2021 and DeSantis 2022. That's it. Already it's a very thin reed, but it also requires you to ignore a mountain of counter-examples. Take school board races, where 2022 delivered some very mixed results. And bear in mind that this is when any residual anger over vaccines and school shutdowns would be at its most potent.

usatoday.com/story/news/edu…
Mar 29, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
This story covers an important legislative development. If activists know they can get a book yanked off the shelf for months with just a single objection, they'll start objecting to every book in sight. It's a system ripe for abuse. And in Florida, it's about to become law. Already, several counties in Florida and across the country have similar policies. For instance, Clay County requires libraries to remove any challenged book from circulation until such time as an investigation can be concluded.
drive.google.com/file/d/17WDKl_…
Mar 27, 2023 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
The phenomenal speed of bullshit. You’d think a narrow screenshot tweeted without context or link would set off this mook’s radar.

“This is how they get away with it.” Indeed.

cnn.com/style/amp/flor… Slate has the board chair saying the same thing. The principal failed to warn parents that their kids would see the David, which apparently is the sort of thing that parents at this school expect.

slate.com/human-interest…
Mar 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
You think it can't possibly get any dumber?

Let me explain something to you. It can always get dumber.
tallahassee.com/story/news/edu… "Parents rights are supreme," they explained.