Should fraternities be shut down?

The Guardian asks, “Fraternities are the most likely place for US campus rapes. Should they be shut down?“

What a stupid question. YES.

It’s a lengthy article that goes through all the problems with the fraternity system — the alcoholism, the hazing deaths (two annually!), the rapes. I kept reading for the positive reasons, and they give a few. One is the threats.

“All the Greek alumni would have pitchforks, and it would be a whole debacle rather than kind of letting this play out in the press and then just going back to business,” said Lucy Taylor, a University of Maryland graduate and the creator of the podcast Snapped about the sordid history of fraternities and sororities.

Another is a variant of that threat.

“When you get rid of Greek life, you get rid of some of the most passionate people that cared about the school, right? And so why would someone like that donate to the school if the school is eliminating something that was a key part of their time at Cornell?” he said.

This is similar to the argument in favor of college sports, and ultimately it’s all about money. Fraternities and sports are orthogonal to the function of universities and education, and they should only be tolerated as long as they don’t interfere with the education students are supposed to be there for.

No good reasons for frats are given other than platitudes from North American Interfraternity Conference, a trade association of fraternities.

Hillary Brewer, the organization’s chief communications officer, did not respond to a question about whether sexual misconduct is pervasive at fraternities but stated in an email that they “are an accelerator for success in college and beyond. They create lifelong connections to the campus, community and friends.”

You don’t need frats to make connections and friends, especially not since the connections are with the kind of people who favor elitism, abuse, and misbehavior.

Shut them all down.

The Epstein mine isn’t tapped out yet

There is a lot of stuff in the Epstein files that has been redacted out of the public eye, I guess. We’d been suspicious of Leon Botstein, the long-running (but now former) president of Bard College, and Jamie Raskin kept digging and unearthed some incriminating rot.

Documents in the Department of Justice’s Epstein files show that in May 2014, Epstein sent an aspiring young vocalist he’d been trafficking, called Jane Doe, to meet with Botstein, “ostensibly for him to assess her musical talents and provide her with educational guidance,” Raskin wrote. In a May 15, 2014, email to Epstein, Botstein asked, “Is [Jane Doe] for me, or are you keeping her for yourself.” The Department of Justice redacted Botstein’s official presidential email address in the publicly available file, but members of Congress were allowed to view the unredacted file at the DOJ, according to Raskin’s office.

That’s a dense paragraph. We learn that:

  • Members of congress have access to the unredacted Epstein files. Wouldn’t this be better managed by journalists?
  • Botstein was actively involved in sex trafficking.
  • Botstein regarded students as potentially “for him”. The attitude is horrifying.
  • In 2014, Epstein was a convicted sex offender, and Botstein should not have had the power to recruit students, so what was the nature of the “guidance” he was offering?

I’m wondering what aspirations a young vocalist might have had that were met by being sent by a rich sex trafficker to meet with a bald old man in a bow tie. We’ve also learned what advice she was getting.

But instead of helping her pursue her career, the lawmakers said in their letter, Epstein pressured her to take sex education and massage courses, and “employed” her while he was sexually abusing her.

This was an effective revelation.

The latest development appears to have triggered the immediate resignation of Botstein from all Bard-affiliated positions, including his professorship and roles in Bard’s music programs. Botstein had led the college for 50 years and only recently stepped down as president.

Fifty years too late. Botstein had made at least one trip to Epstein’s island and multiple trips to his New York townhouse, and we all know there’s only one reason to visit those places.

Struck down mid-paragraph

Yesterday, my goal was to whip my cell biology syllabus into shape, and then to reorganize my first lecture. I did not get either done, because I instead was slammed with some wicked gut disruption that struck suddenly. I had to flee home, abandoning my laptop, with my syllabus open and one paragraph in the midst of some brutal butchery. This morning I know exactly what I will find when I walk into my office: an ugly section of my syllabus with words hacked up and sentences dangling unfinished. I hope I can wrap it up quickly.

It is also possible that when I see that screen, my sympathetic nervous system will explode in revulsion. Maybe it’s not a stomach bug at all, but an esthetic rebellion. I really, really hate writing my syllabus.

The problem is that it’s been growing for decades. It’s like a cancer fueled by administrative toxins fed into it from above. Every year we get told that we have to add a section addressing X and Y and Z and on beyond zebra, that we must tell the students explicitly what is in the course, and what grading expectations we have, and who to go see if you have a headache, and the address of the registrar, and endless useful stuff. I don’t disagree that much of it is useful, but am annoyed that we have to pack every course syllabus with a full guide to life as a student. When we hand them a volume so detailed that the essential specifics of the course are buried in redundant stuff that they get in every class, it reduces the cogency of what I’m telling them.

This year, we were informed that we must include a section on the use of AI. The administration helpfully provided a whole grand template of verbiage to use for this part of the syllabus, and as usual, it’s repetitive and excessively wordy. I was trying to adapt the multiple paragraphs of the template into the required section of my syllabus, and my brain was twisting itself into peevish knots, when my gut decided to emulate my cortex.

I’m going to sit down this morning, select a bunch of useless text, hit delete, and write “DON’T USE AI.” Simple. My digestive system will thank me.

Texas hates education

You spend years, decades even, in deep study of a complex topic, and you keep abreast of the current literature. You regularly attend meetings with fellow experts to compare information. You take this knowledge seriously and try to pass it on to the next generation of scholars.

Then some yahoo in shitkickers who teaches Sunday School and got voted into office tells you you’re wrong and puts a gag on your teaching.

That’s how I feel about the threats to higher education right now. Texas A&M led the way, with administrators clamping down and telling professors they had to reflect their bigoted ignorant views on race, gender and sexuality.

The professors are fighting back, though. They’re suing the regents.

The lawsuit asks the judge to rescind instructions requiring professors to remove particular readings or subjects and declare the policy unconstitutional. They allege the restrictions violate the professors’ First Amendment rights and are so vague that faculty cannot determine what they may teach without risking discipline.

Good for them. These are the heroes we need.

The American Association of University Professors brought the lawsuit alongside four professors: Texas A&M professors Leonard Bright, Vanita Reddy and Landon Sadler and Tarleton State University professor Aaron George. They are represented by the ACLU of Texas, the national ACLU and the Houston law firm Yetter Coleman. They sued the system’s regents in a federal court in Houston.

After they clean up the Board of Regents, it’s time for the citizens of Texas to step up and fire Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

You can’t get a philosophy degree in Wyoming

Wyoming students aren’t allowed to get a degree in philosophy.

Wyoming will become the first state in the US where you cannot receive a B.A. in Philosophy. The University of Wyoming will be the only R1 institution, the only state flagship university, and one of two land-grant universities that do not offer a B.A. in Philosophy.

It is unclear what the justification for this decision is.

It’s not unclear at all. Wyoming is a very Republican state, and the people who run the government there are doofuses who’ve never taken a philosophy course or even thought about philosophy. Ignorance breeds ignorance.

No! You’re saying students cheat?

You don’t say. This is a story about a professor who discovered his students will use AI to cheat.

Serrano decided that his spring 2026 section of the quite difficult ECON 1170 would allow take-home exams for both the midterm and the final. Suddenly, the course received an influx of students. El País has the story:

The course… typically attracts few students, but very good ones. [Serrano] has never had more than 30 students enrolled at a time, and on some occasions he had only eight. This semester, probably because of the new evaluation system, 86 students signed up for the class. The results of the midterm exam, which was administered on March 5, were extraordinary, with an average score of 96 out of 100. Forty students scored a perfect 100.

This was indeed extraordinary, because as Serrano told Inside Higher Ed, “Historically the average grade in the midterm of this course has ranged between 65 and 80 [percent], and this exam was harder than the exams I wrote in the past, because… take-home is an opportunity to challenge the class a little bit more, given that you’re giving the students unlimited time.”

I figured this out back during the pandemic, when by necessity I had to offer exams online. Scores shot up! I knew immediately what was going on, but I didn’t punish the students — I couldn’t blame them for taking advantage of the system. This professor decided to test his students.

A suspicious Serrano decided that he would make the final exam in-person; he would see if students did similarly well on it. He emailed his class, telling them, “I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong. That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly.”

Eighteen students suddenly dropped the course, while nine others didn’t even attend the final exam. Of those 27 students, El País noted, “22 had scored a perfect 100 in the midterm exam.”

Among those who took the test, the average score plunged—from 96 all the way down to 48.

He should have known that the scores on the final were not going to come close to the scores on the midterm. I knew in my classes that grades were going to drop when I stopped offering online exams. I wouldn’t have offered a phony deal like that to my students.

My classes were a bit different, though. It sounds like Serrano’s econ exams consisted of a lot of essay questions which could be flooded with AI slop; my exams are much more quantitative, with questions that are answered by numbers, which you’d think would be even more susceptible to AI cheating, but where I catch students who fail to grasp the process to solve the problem. You gotta know how to ask the AI how to solve the problem to get a good answer!

But still, exam scores were notably elevated during the pandemic, so once I could rely on instruction to return to normal, I made all exams to be in-class. However, I still offer weekly online quizzes. Quiz scores are significantly elevated, but constitute less than 10% of the final grade, and I don’t have a problem with that — I tell the students to cheat freely, to collaborate with their fellow students and work through the quizzes together. That’s been a benefit, because it forces students to think through the problems in a kind of practice exercise, and if they are working together they are teaching each other.

I’ve got one more year of teaching ahead of me. I plan on sticking to this same procedure in the next two semesters.

Professors are disposable now

Once we’ve primed the AI pump with our brains, university doesn’t have to pay us anymore.

rizona State University soft launched a web app earlier this month that allows anyone, for $5 per month, to create an apparently unlimited number of customized “learning modules” using artificial intelligence. The AI chatbot, called Atom, uses online instructional materials from ASU professors to create a course that’s tailored to the goals, interests and skill level of the user. After asking a handful of questions and processing for about five minutes, Atom debuts a personalized course that includes readings, quizzes and videos from a half dozen experts at ASU.

You might be wondering, as I was, about the quality of the “learning modules” produced by running a course through a buzzsaw and splicing fragments together. Apparently and unsurprisingly, it’s not good.

ASU literature professor Chris Hanlon was one of the first to raise awareness of ASU Atomic. Hanlon told 404 Media that no professors he’d spoken with had given their permission for this generative content.

“None of the ASU faculty whose course materials were harvested for the module I generated were aware that their image, lectures, lessons, or other teaching materials are being used,” posted Hanlon on Bluesky.

Hanlon said the course materials were pulled from Canvas, a course management system. Hanlon criticized the AI-generated clips as error-laden, jumbled, lacking context, and confused.

“Concerning the course itself, there’s no throughline I can see; none of the videos really speak to one another — it’s a mishmash, though the individual lessons that comprise it probably make a lot more sense in their original context,” said Hanlon.

Oh, great. We use Canvas here. I respect my fellow biology professors, but I don’t see how it would improve our courses to have a machine fuse us into a nightmarish agglomeration. But that’s what happens when you see education as a fungible collection of “modules”.

The initiative by ASU is called “Project Atomizer”. An atomizer is “a device for converting a substance, especially a perfume or medicine, to a fine spray.” That sounds like an apt description of the project.

You may be wondering who is responsible for this abomination. I think it’s safe to blame the president of the university, Michael Crow.

Not much exists publicly on Project Atomizer. The initiative was mentioned briefly in a February presentation by ASU President Michael Crow, part of a larger proposal to make AI the focus of the future: “current realities require current solutions,” according to the presentation.

Crow said in an interview last week with the Greater Phoenix Chamber that ASU has 50 AI tools, three of which are augmentative AI tools for students. Crow said he uses AI for “everything” in his daily life.

“[W]hen I’m driving to work, I use the Gemini tool. Basically, I’ll pick a subject that I don’t know enough about and I’ll get myself educated in like 22 minutes or 25 minutes,” said Crow. “I use it for basically quick analysis of really complicated things that I don’t have enough facts [for].”

Crow also revealed that he has used AI to write 20 white papers since November. He’s also used AI to create multiple architectural proposals: one for a site in Hawaii near the village of Javi, another for an addition to the West Valley campus in Phoenix.

Oh god. An administrator who thinks a subject is a collection of facts, who uses it to churn out papers, who uses it to design buildings…fuck me sideways.

What kind of incompetent goofball would schedule maintenance for the last week of classes/finals week?

Yeah, sure, we all put our files/lectures/exams on this central server that we have no control over, and then they do this to us:

For those who don’t know, Canvas is the courseware many schools use for managing various essential class materials for our students.

Maybe I should rethink our reliance on this thing. You know, it used to be we didn’t use software for communications between students and professors.

Free speech…unless you criticize the Gaza genocide

Derek R. Peterson, a professor of East African history at the University of Michigan, delivered a speech to the graduating class. It was a nice speech. He praised the activists on campus, and the students cheered.

Sing for the students of the Black Action Movement, whose members demanded a curriculum that would reflect the experience and identity of black people in this country.

Sing for the pro-Palestinian student activities who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.

The greatness of this institution does not only rest on the shoulders and on the accomplishments of our student athletes who deserve all the congratulations we can offer them.

It was honest, accurate, acknowledged student activists, and didn’t demean any of the people in the crowd. Except…hoo boy, it enraged Zionists and Republicans and Israeli donors to the university. The response was ridiculously over the top.

The same day, the university’s president, Domenico Grasso, issued a public apology, saying the comments were inappropriate and do not represent our institutional position.

We regret the pain this has caused on a day devoted to celebration and accomplishment, Grasso said, adding that Peterson’s speech deviated from the remarks he had shared before the ceremony.

The swift apology did not stop some Republican officials, including Florida Sen. Rick Scott, from calling for the school to be stripped of federal funding. A Republican member of the Board of Regents, which governs the public university, also hinted at possible discipline for the professor. The prominent Israeli-American investor Adam Milstein urged Jewish people to halt any donations to the school.

This is madness. Are they claiming that there is no unjust and inhumane war in Gaza? It’s ongoing. People are starving, they’re being shot by the IDF, their homes are being bombed and bulldozed. Professor Peterson said no lie. Is the institutional position pro genocide? Peterson has made an excellent reply to the hysterical nonsense.

I have respect for Regent Hubbard and her colleagues: theirs is not an easy job, and we here at Michigan benefit from their leadership.

I would however urge Regent Hubbard to review the comments I actually made at yesterday’s commencement. It should not be controversial to have one’s “heart opened to the inhumanity and injustice of Israel’s war in Gaza”, which is what I credited activists with doing. Having an open heart to other people’s suffering is a fundamental human virtue. It is a quality that I hope we teach our students, whatever their political posture might be.

So I am mystified about what I have done to earn Regent Hubbard’s ire. I have – like many of us here in Michigan – been convicted by the evidence of human suffering in Gaza; and I credit my awareness of that to pro-Palestinian activists. That is why I gave the speech that I did. On a day meant to honor students for their accomplishments, I thought it important that we would honor the student activists who have, over the course of time, pushed the institution toward justice.

The University has taken down the commencement video. But here is my talk, if you’d like to hear the whole of it. As you will see, it is a talk about the salience of student activism in this institution’s long history.

Allow me to add, if I may:

The idea that graduations should be apolitical is ridiculous. Michigan is not a finishing school for polite young men and women. Our students are not wilting flowers. They have just finished their degrees at the foremost public university in the country. They can handle controversy.

They do not need sentimental, cloying nostalgia. They need encouragement to face a flawed and unjust world head on, using the tools we’ve given them: critical reasoning, careful research, sympathy for the oppressed.

That is why I spoke as I did. If parents want sentimental graduation ceremonies, perhaps they should send their kids to a different institution. Here at UM we teach our students to face controversies, not run away from them. That’s what being the leaders and the best is about.”

There are a lot of people pushing the idea that a university should be apolitical; they are typically the kind of craven cowards who want to maintain the status quo, no matter how intolerable it might be. Alternatively, they have a political agenda which they want to promote by silencing critics, and they are backed by wealthy and influential supporters who do not question the vicious militants who want to carry out an ethnic cleansing in Israel.

I am shocked by the authoritarian, anti-free-speech actions taken by the University of Michigan and others (what the hell does Rick Scott have to do with Michigan?) who are loudly screeching about their intent to persecute Derek Peterson and the faculty and students of the University of Michigan.

We really need to kick these weird Zionist fanatics out of power.

A handful of students at U.S. universities also faced discipline in 2025 for seeking to highlight pro-Palestinian issues at graduation ceremonies, including a graduate of New York University whose diploma was withheld for criticizing Israel in a speech.

Expressing criticism in a speech is pretty much the definition of free speech, and those creepy zealots are the real opponents of freedom.

There’s no penalty to enabling pedophiles, I guess

My first surprise on reading this article about Bard College was learning that they’d had the same president for 51 years. That’s astonishing to me — I’ve been at one university for a quarter century, and I’ve seen a half dozen chancellors come and go. I am accustomed to the transient nature of administrators, and think it’s disturbing that one person would have control of a university for that long. Bard College is located near New York, though, and while about the same size as UMM, it is vastly more wealthy, owning lots of valuable property, with valuable connections. I’m sure it was profitable to be president there.

But no more! The president of Bard College, Leon Botstein, is stepping down. You may not be surprised by the reason: he was a good buddy with Jeffrey Epstein.

WilmerHale’s report, released on Friday, detailed Botstein’s extensive in-person contacts with Epstein, including “approximately 25 visits to Epstein’s townhouse, a two-day visit to Epstein’s Little St. James Island and a flight to the island with one such woman (along with Leon Black’s family), two visits by Epstein to Bard and to various concerts and recitals accompanied by multiple women who have since been identified as victims of Epstein, and multiple requests that President Botstein help such women — in the form of invitations to concerts and rehearsals, visits with the women and their parents, advice on their musical careers, etc.”

The Times Union has previously reported on Epstein’s visits to Bard’s campus in Annandale-on-Hudson as well as Epstein’s efforts to leverage his relationship with Botstein to lure women, including musicians, into his orbit, whom Epstein later victimized.

Holy crap. What a horror story — I’m sure Botstein is now persona non grata on campus and the college is rushing to repair the reputational damage of being led by an enabler of pedophiles. What parent would want to send their child to a college with such a parasite roaming the campus?

But no. Botstein is going to be stinking up the place for a good long while.

He will retire from the presidency but said he would remain as a faculty member, teacher and musician. He also said he will continue to operate the Bard Music Festival, SummerScape, as well as the Bard Conservatory, and will live on campus at Finberg House.

I don’t understand how they wouldn’t simply evict the guy out of hand. So this old creep is going to be hanging about with students and alumni and faculty until he drops dead?

It’s amazing how no one affiliated with Epstein has suffered any real consequences, other than Ghislane Maxwell, who recently got transferred to a cushier prison and has politicians considering granting clemency. I’ve never supported a rich pedophile, which, in hindsight, is looking like a poor career decision.