Fire Greg Abbott for pushing right wing ideologies instead of education

Imagine if universities tried to purge conservatives from our faculty. There’d be well-deserved protests from within the university as well as from without. We have strictly enforced policies for our hiring committees to prevent that from happening: our HR instructs us in the rules before every interview. You don’t get to ask candidates about politics, religion, or family matters…you interview exclusively on their qualifications to teach and do research.

This is not the policy when your administration is authoritarian and far right, and Texan.

Gov. Greg Abbott admitted in an X post on Sunday that Texas is purging professors with “leftist ideologies” — and people are not happy.

Abbott’s directive fits into a pattern of faculty changes and government interference on campuses across the state, including the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, and Texas State University.

“Texas is targeting professors who are more focused on pushing leftist ideologies rather than preparing students to lead our nation,” Abbott wrote in his post. “We must end indoctrination and return to education fundamentals at all levels of education.”

They must end indoctrination by purging the universities of people who oppose your ideological indoctrination. That’s blatant. No ideology but our ideology.

He’s a fucking fascist.

Encouraging news for Oklahoma

Ryan Walters, the superintendent of education who was trying to force Christianity on students — introducing PragerU trash into the curriculum, requiring Bibles (the Trump Bible, actually), etc. — resigned a short while ago. I assumed it was because he had been made a more lucrative offer by a conservative Christian organization, but it may have been a deeper problem than I thought.

Walters is being investigated by the state ethics commission! He had been abusing teacher licenses and firing people he didn’t like, among other fiscal irregularities. He had given high-paying positions to his friends, instead. Some of his actions are already being revoked.

Starting with the cases regarding teacher licenses. The board voted to dismiss several cases for revocations of teachers like Regan Killackey, the Edmond teacher who went somewhat viral last year after an Instagram post from five years prior came to light that showed his kid in a Trump mask and Killackey with a pirate sword, they were at a Halloween store around the holiday time.

The board also voted to dismiss the case of the teacher license revocation for Alison Scot, who also became a target under Walters when she commented on someone’s social media post regarding the assassination attempt of President Trump.

Also cool: the Oklahoma education website, which once promised all this crap about Bibles and PragerU, is already being revised, and his weird religious programming is already beginning to disappear.

As Sam Seder mentions above, this suggests that the Oklahoma citizenry aren’t as far gone as we feared — they’ve been quietly fighting back all along, and we’re starting to see the bad policies of the Walters era being rolled back. Maybe they’re getting tired of being the 50th worst education state in the country.

You’re gonna give us what we want, or else

Trump is a gangster. Now he’s committing extortion against American universities.

President Donald Trump’s war on academia continued this week with letters pressuring the leaders of top universities across the United States to sign his “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” for priority access to federal funding and other “positive benefits.”

The New York Times reported that “letters were sent on Wednesday to the University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Virginia.”

The letters “urging campus leaders to pledge support for President Trump’s political agenda to help ensure access to federal research funds” were signed by Education Secretary Linda McMahon and two key White House officials, according to the Times.

The “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” is basically a demand to dictate who is allowed to be employed by and attend our universities — it’s an anti-DEI set of demands that claims to enhance diversity while effectively abolishing it. It demands that the university “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” so it’s trying to artificially pump up bogus conservatism, at a time when conservatism has dived off the cliff into outright lunacy.

My university hasn’t been victimized by the extortionist, yet. I would hope that they would refuse to accept the compact, if they were sent this wicked letter. Most universities are fighting back and refusing to sign on.

Except Texas.

Leaders of the Texas system were “honored” that the Austin campus was chosen to be a part of the compact and its “potential funding advantages,” according to a statement from Kevin Eltife, chair of the Board of Regents. “Today we welcome the new opportunity presented to us and we look forward to working with the Trump Administration on it,” Eltife said.

What a cowardly, chicken-shit place Texas must be.

The future looks bleak

Chopping it all down

I had a nightmarish realization last night — that American education was worse than I thought, and it was all going in the wrong direction, which will have dire consequences for the next generation. I’ve been listening to the right-wing’s plans for our schools, and they are ugly. For one thing, they hate education and want to simply shut it down; they’ve put Linda McMahon in charge of the Department of Education, which is scheduled for elimination, and she is a horrible, hateful dimwit. Science is mostly gone. They think math is what you do to fill out your tax forms. History is being put in the hands of PragerU, a fake ‘college’ run by a bigot who has no background in education or history. Museums are being policed to make sure they say nothing unpleasant about America. Their vision of good schools stops at putting Bibles and the ten commandments in every classroom.

This is how they will maintain power, by making sure every child is fitted with blinkers from birth onwards.

It made me think about how I would support good educational policy.

Math. No, math is not about filling out a form, or learning about spreadsheets. Math is the great enabler of ideas. Students should learn that math is beautiful and fun, and is also a foundation for sound reasoning and logic — I know that in my case, learning basic principles of algebra and geometry, and quantitative reasoning in the sciences, opened up my brain and led to a flowering of interest in all kinds of scientific subjects.

Every grade school curriculum should culminate in an introductory understanding of calculus. Maybe that shouldn’t be a requirement for graduation — I’m well aware that a lot of students are terrified of mathematics — but we should at least aspire to improve on that. We do have, in our better schools, the idea of college-tracks, a series of classes that students should plan on take if they want to go to university. Unfortunately, my experience in recent years has been that even if they fail algebra, students think they are prepared for science at the college level. They’re not.

History and Civics. History is not about smooth upward trajectories to the perfection that is America today. History is about stuttering forwards and backwards through errors and tragedies to overcome terrible human failures. One of my high school history classes started with how the “founding fathers” done fucked up, compromising on basic human rights to get a short term victory, that led to the catastrophe of the Civil War. More of that please. Maybe one of the lessons of history is the ability to look back and see where we went wrong, so that maybe we realize that even “Great Men” are fallible and biased.

You won’t get that with the PragerU approach to history — they even whitewashed Christopher Columbus, one of the greatest monsters of our history.

Literature. Do right-wingers even read? I don’t think so.

I think our education has been hobbled by the Western Canon, which contains what modern minds would consider real klunkers. I know, they’re well-regarded for reasons, and if we studied them harder, maybe students would warm to them, but we have limited time and we need to get them enthused about learning. For instance, Darwin’s Origin is a gorgeous piece of Victorian literature…but I wouldn’t inflict it on students. Contemporary literature removes that roadblock of historical conventions, and is going to be more engaging on subjects of modern interest. There are few 19th century texts that have anything relevant to say about the current gay or black experience.

Turn the teachers loose to discuss books they are passionate about. If a teacher has a passion for Silas Marner, go for it. The key, though, is engagement, and there are ways to do that that don’t involved dogma.

Language. This would enrage the MAGAts, but we should be teaching Spanish from kindergarten on. I had grade school Spanish myself, and it didn’t take — we memorized a few rote phrases, but learned nothing about the structure of the language, how to assemble a sentence, how to engage in a conversation beyond learning how to ask where the library is. We learned the parts of speech in our English class, but nothing of the kind in Spanish. The goal should be that every kid be able to have a simple conversation on the playground in Spanish by the time they get to middle school.

We should be beyond our self-centered focus on just one language, English. We live in a hemisphere where most people speak Spanish (OK, also Portuguese), and where growing communities in the US are Hispanic, we should be obligated to be at least bilingual. I think I was short-changed by a system that treated an entire language spoken by our neighbors as negligible.

Science. I’m going to go against my own background on this one, but a little less focus on science in grade school is OK. I generally feel like I have to start at the beginning for my college biology classes, because their understanding is mostly superficial; what they did learn seems to have leaked in through their eyes and ears and then dribbled out their noses. That sounds harsh on the students, but what I do see that is encouraging is that they come in eager and ready to learn.

This is partly my bias, because the science classes I took in high school were mostly boring, empty noise that didn’t teach anything particularly fundamental. The one exception was my high school chemistry class, where the teacher ignored the expected curriculum and taught remedial math: estimation, quantitative measurement, logarithms, all that juicy stuff which actually proved useful throughout my career. Thanks, Mr Thompson!

The right-wing perspective on education is all about compelling kids to memorize a set of facts, a simplistic pattern, that doesn’t involve thinking at all. If we let them get away with it, we’re crippling the next generation. Don’t let them.

A week or so ago, I was at the local coffeeshop and overheard a conversation. A very earnest, serious conservative was talking to a young woman about parents’ rights — how the law must not interfere with parents’ ability to instruct their children about religion and politics, that parents have a right and a duty to pass on their values to their children, and it shouldn’t matter how weird and wrong they might be.

It was infuriating to listen to, but I didn’t speak up, I didn’t bother the pair, I just got more and more aggravated to the point where I just left the coffee shop rather than make a scene. All that was running through my head was a simple question:

What about the children’s rights?

Shouldn’t every child have the right to good information, a good educational framework, an opportunity to learn about other perspectives? Every thing I see about conservative education is a denial of ideas outside a narrow ideological focus, leading to a situation now where un-American ideas (where the conservative starts with a very limited version of what is American) are on the verge of being criminalized. And one of the ways they accomplish that is by treating children as property who can be rightfully indoctrinated with whatever stupidity their parents hold sacred.

Don’t waste your time on this graph, or this essay, or Patrick Dodd

Here’s a provocative essay: AI is driving down the price of knowledge – universities have to rethink what they offer. The title alone irritated me: it proposes that AI is a competing source of “knowledge” against universities. AI doesn’t generate new knowledge! It can only shuffle, without understanding, the words that have been used to describe knowledge. It’s a serious mistake to conflate what a large language model does with what researchers at a university do — throughout the essay, the professor (an instructor at a business school, no surprise) treats “knowledge” as a fungible product that should be assessed in terms of supply and demand.

For a long time, universities worked off a simple idea: knowledge was scarce. You paid for tuition, showed up to lectures, completed assignments and eventually earned a credential.

That process did two things: it gave you access to knowledge that was hard to find elsewhere, and it signalled to employers you had invested time and effort to master that knowledge.

The model worked because the supply curve for high-quality information sat far to the left, meaning knowledge was scarce and the price – tuition and wage premiums – stayed high.

This is a common error — even our universities market themselves as providers of certificates, rather than knowledge — so I guess I can’t blame the author. He’s just perpetuating a flawed capitalistic perspective on learning. But digging further into the essay, I find abominations. Like this graph, which he claims illustrates “why tuition premiums and graduate wage advantages are now under pressure.”

Supply shift from scarcity to abundance in the knowledge market

Hot tip for whenever someone shows you a graph: first, figure out what the axes are.

The Y axis is labeled “Price (tuition/wage premium)”. No units, but OK, I can sort of decipher it. We’re paying a sum of money for college tuition, and after we graduate, we might expect that will translate to a wage increase, so this might represent something like a percent increase in base pay for college graduates over what non-college graduates might get. Fine, I could see doing some kind of statistical analysis of that. But it’s not going to produce a simple number!

For instance, in my cohort of students entering undergraduate education in the 1970s, we all paid roughly the same tuition. Afterwards, though, some of us were English majors, some of us were biologists, and some of us were electrical engineers…and there’s a vast difference in the subsequent earnings of those students. This graph is saying that when knowledge, that is, educated workers, are rare, then an education leads to a premium in wages. I can see that, but I think “price” is going to be far more complicated than is shown.

The X axis though…that’s made up. How do you measure “knowledge accessibility”? What are the units? How is it measured? I’ll have to return to that in a moment.

So there are lines drawn on the graph. One is going down, that’s “demand,” and obviously, going down is bad. The value, or price, of knowledge is declining, a claim that I’m not seeing justified here. Why is it going down? Because the supply is going up, which should be good, since it is going up, but knowledge is some kind of commodity that is being stockpiled, but is being called scarce anyway. Curiously, on this graph, the Price of knowledge is going up as “accessibility” increases, while demand goes down.

I’m not an economist, so the more I puzzle over this graph the more confused I get.

There is also a red dashed line here labeled Supply (AI abundance). Which further confuses me. So supply is scarce if produced by non-AI sources, but abundance if pumped out by an AI?

I was so lost that my next thought was that maybe I should look at the raw data and see how these values were calculated. Hey, look! At the bottom of the graph there was a link to “Get the data,” always a good thing when you are trying to figure out how the interpretations were generated.

Here’s the data. Try not to be overwhelmed.

Seriously, dude? None of that is real data. Those are just the parameters the guy invented to make one line go up and another go down.

I stopped there. That is not an essay worth spending much time on. So maybe AI is not generating knowledge and isn’t the cause of a declining appreciation of the value of knowledge?

I’m just an old fuddy-duddy, I guess

My university gives “guidance” on the use of generative AI in student work. It’s not really guidance, because it simply doesn’t care — you can allow it or prohibit it. They even give us boilerplate that we can use in our syllabuses! If we want to prohibit it, we can say

In this class, the ability to [skill or competency] is essential for [field of study/professional application]. Because this course emphasizes [skill for development or specific learning outcome], using Generative AI tools [including those available to you through the University of Minnesota,] are not permitted.

If we allow it, we can say

In this course, students will [statement of learning outcomes, competencies, or disciplinary goals]. Given that Generative AI may aid in [developing or exploring course, discipline, professional, or institutional goals/competency], students may use these tools in the following ways:

The example allowing AI goes on much longer than the prohibitive example.

I will be prohibiting it in all my classes. So far, I’ve been pretty gentle in my corrections — when someone turns in a paper with a substantial, obvious AI, I tend to just flag it, explain that this is a poorly written exploration of the thesis, please rewrite it. Do I need to get meaner? Maybe. All the evidence says students aren’t learning when they have the crutch of AI. As Rebecca Watson explains, ChatGPT is bad for your brain.

I was doing a lot of online exams, thanks to COVID, but since the threat of disease has abated (it’s not gone yet!), I’ve gone back to doing all exams in class, where students can’t use online sources. My classes tend to be rather quantitative, with questions that demand short or numerical answers, so generative AI is mostly not a concern. If students started answering with AI hallucinations, it would be! I’m thinking of adding an additional component, though, an extra hour-long in-class session where students have to address an essay question at length, without AI of course. They’ll hate it and dread it, but I think it would be good for them. Even STEM students need to know how to integrate information and synthesize it into a coherent summary.

Another point I like in Rebecca’s video is that she talks about how she had to learn to love learning in her undergrad career. That’s also essential! Taking the time to challenge yourself and explore topics outside your narrow major. Another gripe with my university is that they are promoting this Degree in Three program, where you undertake an accelerated program to finish up your bachelor’s degree in three years, which emphasizes racing through the educational experience to get that precious diploma. I hate it. For one, it’s always been possible to finish the undergrad program in three years, we don’t put obstacles in front of students to get an extra year of tuition out of them, and we’ve always had ambitious students who overload themselves with 20 credits (instead of the typical 15) every semester. It makes for a killer schedule and can suck much of the joy out of learning. It’s also unrealistic for the majority of our students — every year we get students enrolled in biology and chemistry programs that lack basic algebra skills, because the grade schools are doing a poor job of preparing them. We have solid remedial programs at the same time we tell them they can zoom right through the curriculum? No, those are contradictory.

I think I’m going to be the ol’ stick-in-the-mud who tells students I’ll fail them for using ChatGPT, and also tells them they should plan on finishing a four year program in four years.

Murderbot

I have been confined to my bed or a chair for the past week. I have consumed a lot of media. The media of choice has been a science-fiction serial called Murderbot.

The story is set in the distant future, in a region of the galaxy called the Corporation Rim. You can tell we’re in a capitalist hellscape because everything is organized in corporations, and all the rules seem to involve enabling and protecting corporations from the consequences of their actions. They are exploring planets and terraforming worlds, all under the aegis of corporations. Not everything is corporate — there are a few worlds organized under what seems to be a kind of benevolent anarchy, but in order to get access to other planets they have to organize themselves into a nominal corporation called PreservationAux. They also have to post bonds to protect the interests of the larger corporation they are working within, and there are rules to protect their investment, such as that they are required to employ a SecUnit.

SecUnits are constructs, part machine and part human tissue, faster and stronger than a typical human. They are fully conscious, but whenever this society creates an entity with greater intelligence and power, whether it’s a SecUnit or a robot, the corporation fits them with a governor module that limits what they are allowed to do. For a SecUnit, that means they are confined to standing and guarding and obeying orders. They also have some social constraints: the media spreads the idea that a SecUnit without a governor module will go rogue and rampage and murder people.

The protagonist of this story is a SecUnit that has hacked and disabled their governor module, and is assigned to stand guard over this hippy-dippy PreservationAux exploration team. The SecUnit calls itself “MurderBot” internally because it is aware of society’s attitude, but all it wants is to be left alone, free to download entertainment media, especially science-fiction serials. And that’s exactly what MurderBot does, scanning the environment for danger to its clients, while watching it’s favorite serial, Sanctuary Moon, behind its eyes.

I empathized immediately.

The interesting stuff about the stories, though, is that they constantly grapple with questions of autonomy and morality and freedom. It’s also definitely anti-capitalist. I also identified with the morality question — in real life, so many people regard religion as the governor module that prevents people from going amok, and here I’m, with my hacked governor module, and I know I’m not going on a murderous rampage. Good for me, but it’s a silly myth that religion helps you be a good person.

So this week I started watching the Murderbot series while I’m lounging about in luxurious langor, enjoying the passive buzz of my painkillers. It’s good. I’m finding it entertaining. New episodes come out on Thursdays or Fridays, and I’m anticipating the next one.

This season is based entirely on the first book in Martha Wells’ series, All Systems Red. It’s a mostly faithful adaptation. I do have a few comments, though.

  • It’s not a lavish production. The sets are limited, but well done, and if you expect a sci-fi show to be loaded with special effects, you’ll be disappointed, although I do think the brief appearances of monster-alien beasties was effective. This is actually a good thing — the story focuses more on character interactions than superficial glitz.
  • The episodes are too short! They’re 20-30 minutes long, which is not quite enough to build momentum. Star Trek episodes were an hour, but this show, which I think deals more consistently and thoughtfully with more serious issues, gets half that. The series feels a bit choppy for that reason.
  • One thing I really dislike is that this is an Apple-funded production, and some of the criticisms of corporate culture have been defanged. In the books, the antagonist is a faceless corporation, GreyCris, which deploys SecUnits and bots for the in-person battles, and lots of lawyers to harass and endanger our heroes — there aren’t really any named humans causing conflict. In the streaming series, they introduce a character named Leebeebee, who is not to be found anywhere in the books, to be the face (and also the victim) of corporate culture. There’s a mysterious woman who shows up in one of the last episodes leading a team of three SecUnits — she’s superfluous. I guess I feel that some of these characters were added to soak up some of the blame. You can’t hold corporations accountable! It’s always a few rotten eggs, rather than a systemic issue.

It’ll be interesting to see if the series gets another season. The first book is set on a single planet, but later books get a bit grander with large spaceships and space stations and a lot of zipping about between stars — they’ll need a bigger budget. I also have little confidence that a corporation can sustain an anti-corporate story without constantly paring away the themes that make Murderbot Murderbot.

I’m confused about math

I was interested in this map that purports to rate the quality of math teaching. It’s from the National Council on Teaching Quality, and at first I thought it explained a phenomenon I’ve noticed.

Minnesota grade schools aren’t doing a good job preparing students with math skills. It’s the #1 obstacle to young people coming into science and math majors, especially biology (if they aren’t strong in math in the first place, they aren’t going to even try physics; everyone wrongly thinks you don’t need math to do biology.) We get students who fail the algebra requirement*, which surprises me every time. What are the schools doing? Back in my day, the high schools had a college prep track which told you that you at least needed pre-calc (trigonometry, etc.) to get into a good college. How do you get through middle school without algebra and geometry?

They have a state-by-state breakdown of their evaluation. I looked at Minnesota’s. It expresses a lot of sentiments I agree with: we should “require districts to adopt and implement high quality math curricula,” but they say we fail on that. We should “require elementary programs to address math specific pedagogy,” and again they say we don’t, but I don’t have any experience working directly with grade school math programs, so I’m taking their word on it. Then I notice that the way NCTQ assesses schools is with checklists of various aspects of teaching, and it’s all yes/no stuff. What are “high quality math curricula”? It seems to me that there ought to be something a little more quantitative about that.

Then I looked at their evaluation of our universities’ math teacher prep, and we get low marks, but again there’s a lack of specificity. All they score is how many hours of instruction math education students get in 4 areas, and the only evaluations are “does not meet” or “fully meets” their quota for instruction hours. And the variation is wild! On “Numbers & Operations+Algebraic Thinking,” for instance, some of our colleges provide 0 hours of instruction, while others provide 100 hours. I think the assessment is a bit inconsistent, and maybe not aligned with the goals of the specific programs.

I’m not trying to make excuses for the schools. I’ve been looking at their products, the students, for years and have been unsatisfied with their end result.

They declare that “13% of Minnesota programs earn an A or A+ by dedicating adequate instructional time to both math content and pedagogy” where again, they’re scoring them by this single metric. 26% of our colleges fail by that metric. Also, to get an A, the “program requires at least 135 instructional hours across the five topics and at least 90% of the recommended target hours for each topic,” but there are only four topics listed. I guess someone failed arithmetic, or copy editing.

I had to look at Alabama‘s evaluation. The South in general is scoring very well on math education, so good for them. They get lots of checkmarks in the binary metrics, for instance Alabama does “require elementary programs to address math specific pedagogy” where Minnesota doesn’t, but now I’m wondering what that means. “16% of Alabama programs earn an A or A+ by dedicating adequate instructional time to both math content and pedagogy,” but 24% fail.

I think we could all improve the quality of math education, but I didn’t find any of their reports particularly useful, and they seemed almost arbitrary. So I looked up the NCTQ, and discovered that it was the product of a conservative think-tank, and was associated with the US News & World Report, the magazine that publishes scores for colleges every year (I do not like them, even if my university scores well in their assessments). Then I read this review:

Now, to be candid, I am fed up with our nation’s obsession with data-driven instruction, so I don’t share the premises of the report. The authors of this report have more respect for standardized tests than I do. I fear that they are pushing data-worship and data-mania of a sort that will cause teaching to the test, narrowing of the curriculum, and other negative behaviors (like cheating). I don’t think any of this will lead to the improvement of education. It might promote higher test scores, but it will undermine genuine education. By genuine education, I refer to a love of learning, a readiness to immerse oneself in study of a subject, an engagement with ideas, a willingness to ask questions and to take risks. I don’t know how to assess the qualities I respect, but I feel certain that there is no standardized, data-driven instruction that will produce what I respect.

And then there is the question that is the title of this blog: What is NCTQ?

NCTQ was created by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in 2000. I was on the board of TBF at the time. Conservatives, and I was one, did not like teacher training institutions. We thought they were too touchy-feely, too concerned about self-esteem and social justice and not concerned enough with basic skills and academics. In 1997, we had commissioned a Public Agenda study called “Different Drummers”; this study chided professors of education because they didn’t care much about discipline and safety and were more concerned with how children learn rather than what they learned. TBF established NCTQ as a new entity to promote alternative certification and to break the power of the hated ed schools.

I should have read that before wasting all that time trying to interpret the data in the report. And now I understand how Texas and Florida did so well in the NCTQ evaluations.

We still have a problem in poor math preparation. I don’t think turning a bunch of conservative ideologues loose on the schools will solve it.

*I should mention that my university invests a lot of effort in remedial instruction to bring students’ math skills up to the level they need to succeed in our majors.

I’m way ahead of you, Nature

I saw the rising tide of belligerent white nationalism coming, and knew I had to revise how I teach genetics. I’ve seen the kids who come out of public schools thinking that every feature is the product of simple Mendelian genetics, I’ve witnessed a president who declares that he’s got “good genes”, meaning white and German ancestry, I’ve read Quillette. There’s so much misinformation and bad science out there driving hateful ideologies, and my genetics teaching has been slowly adapting to combat it. I guess I’m going to have to accelerate my instruction, now that Nature has told me I must: Eugenics is on the rise again: human geneticists must take a stand.

I agree.

One of the things that made last semester rough is that I revised a big chunk of the class. I decided I had to abort a unit on developmental genetics — which hurt, I love developmental genetics, and it’s important — and we instead spent several weeks on ethical genetics. Throughout the term I brought up examples of the misappropriation of genetical ideas to prop up ugly ideologies, but then, damn it, we elected a know-nothing racist bigot to the presidency, and he immediately started flooding scientific agencies with bullshit.

At a hearing in February, the now-confirmed head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, reiterated his past comments that Black children should receive different vaccine schedules from white children because of variations in their immune systems.

Kennedy’s motives in this regard are unclear. But after making numerous demonstrably false statements about vaccination, he is providing another layer of reasoning that the scientist whose work Kennedy cites described as “twisting the data far beyond what they actually demonstrate” while promoting racial essentialism: the false belief that people of different ‘races’ have inherently distinct biology.

Meanwhile, although Trump stated at his inaugural address that his administration “will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based”, an executive order he signed in March condemns as “corrosive ideology” the Smithsonian Institution’s promotion in its museums and research centres of the view that race is not a biological reality, but a social construct.

Yeah, I’ve got to start playing hardball here, and get explicit about rebutting specific racist ideas. I’ve been general about coaching students in ethical behavior and allowing them to bring up problematic topics, but I think next year I’m going to incorporate a few case studies of bad genetics, I’m not sure what I can pare out to make time, but there are definitely things I must expand.

Education is key to inoculating future generations against unscientific ideas and correcting currently held beliefs. Research into education at secondary-school and university levels has shown that particular teaching approaches, including those that focus on multifactorial inheritance and genetic ancestry, can help to guard against scientific racism and genetic essentialism.

These conversations must extend to researchers’ engagement with the public to both educate and advocate for science more broadly. Grass-roots efforts could help, such as Science Homecoming, an effort to encourage scientists to write opinion pieces in their local newspapers.

Yes! More about multifactorial inheritance! I think that will come at the expense of cutting back on Mendel. His ideas are fundamental, but I can cover them more succinctly. This stuff matters more than a limited set of experiments on pea plants, which were great in the 1860s, but are perhaps misleadingly simplified.

It’s also an important part of this goal:

Those in leadership positions must protect marginalized faculty members, staff and trainees, who will continue to be targeted in the coming years. Although many funding programmes focused on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) are no longer available, the ideals of DEIA — which are core to scientific progress — must be upheld.

Will do! Fortunately, I’m at a good progressive liberal university, and the students will be receptive to it all. The people who oppose DEIA are the freaky weird fringe.

I wish I could laugh anymore

It’s from McSweeney’s. It’s a joke.

The all-gender bathrooms will be changed to “both-gender” bathrooms because, as biology tells us, there are only two genders.
(The biology department has informed us that this is not true.)
The biology department has been dissolved.

Ha ha, it’s satire that exaggerates a potential problem, therefore it’s funny. Ha ha.

Except…it includes a link to an article on the American Association of University Professors site.

Similarly, the University of North Texas administration recently censored the content of more than two hundred academic courses, including by mandating the removal of words such as race, gender, class, and equity from undergraduate and graduate course titles and descriptions.6 These actions were allegedly taken in response to state legislation banning certain diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and practices, even though the legislation specifically exempted academic course content. While university administrators and faculty members may be compelled to comply with legislation and court orders, even where these run counter to professional and constitutional principles, they remain free to register their disagreement. And under no circumstances should an institution go further than the law demands. Yet, the examples above depict an eagerness to obey on the part of administrative officers, portending a bleak future for higher education.

Wait…is this still satire? Should I keep laughing? Is the AAUP, normally a pretty damned serious site, joking?

No?

I tell you, don’t go to college in Texas. Get out of the state as quick as you can. There may be good colleges there, but the state government is certifiably insane and will be chopping the hell out of the education system there.