Somehow, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this accusation is true.

In his defense, in this article from 6 years ago, his leftist “credentials” are unimpeachable. OK, man, if you say so.

Very leftist. Very free speech.

My daughter works here!

I notice the wall of cops with shields lined up against a group of students sitting quietly, watching the spectacle. Who has shown up prepared for violence?

Administrators claim they are “balancing students’ right to protest with a desire to minimize disruptions to their campuses and enforce a state rule banning encampments”. I don’t see much evidence of “balance” when one side brings in hired guns to enforce their will.

While my daughter is somewhere on campus, I’m pretty sure she’s nowhere near the protest. She had knee surgery a short while ago and is only able to hobble…so as much as I support the protest, it would be unwise to face off against brutal enforcers who wouldn’t be at all averse to compounding her current problems with a little violence.

All across the country, students are rising up to protest US support for the genocidal state of Israel. The response is growing!

Unfortunately, Columbia University is leading the way in authoritarian counter-reaction.

New York police arrested dozens of people on two campuses Tuesday night after officers cleared out a Columbia University building occupied by protesters.

At Columbia, New York police used a massive armored vehicle to push a bridge into a window of Hamilton Hall, the building demonstrators began occupying the previous night. Officers then streamed over the bridge — quickly retaking the building.

Yeah, to their shame, the Columbia administration called in a tank to put down their students.

In happier news, the protests have spread to Antarctica.

Once upon a time, a lot of liberals were gaga for Nate Silver, who always left me cold. He seemed to be more of a numerologist, or a horse race handicapper, and I suspected he was juggling the numbers to fit his expectations (remember: quantitative & provable with numbers is not necessarily true). It’s polite of him to now confirm that yes, he’s a soulless automaton with no speck of moral reasoning in his body.

Right. People who oppose genocide are just doing it because it’s a fad, exactly like how they pick out jeans at the store. Maybe we live in a society where even the conservative students learn at any early age that “thou shalt not kill,” and us more progressive people tell our kids to treat others as you want to be treated, but nah, students can see bombings and killings and snipers taking out civilians and be unperturbed by any foundational moral principles.

I think Silver is projecting here. He gets his morality from a spreadsheet, so of course no one else could possibly make a decision by examining the issues.

Hey, bonus: doesn’t this remind you of the same arguments made against trans people? It’s a passing fashion, they can’t possibly have thought about the consequences, they’re only doing it because their friends are doing it. There’s no way other people actually think — they’re all NPCs who need to be told what to do by us people with our numbers, which are totally free of bias.

The Morris campus of the University of Minnesota is quiet. We’re small and rural, so I think we lack the critical mass to spark substantial protests, but universities in the Twin Cities are taking up our slack. They’re organizing, building an encampment, and delivering demands.

Students rallied and set up tents at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus, as well as at Hamline University in St. Paul, as anti-war protests continue into a second week.

At the U of M, hundreds of protesters called on the school to divest from weapons manufacturers and companies tied to the Israeli military. The students also want the school to end study abroad programs in Israel.

At around 7:30 p.m., police gave dispersal orders, prompting many to link arms around the grassy area in front of Northrop Memorial Auditorum, where more than 30 tents stood.

Good for them! They are demonstrating peacefully and righteously, although that doesn’t prevent campus police from moving in and arresting students. And, as usual, there are accusations that protesting Israel and Zionism is anti-Semitic — it’s not, but we have to recognize that there are anti-Semitic groups all across the country who are exploiting these protests.

Columbia University administrators are doing a fine job of showing how not to respond to student protests. They set deadlines for students to leave and have threatened them with the thugs called cops, and in response, the students ignored the deadlines and have occupied several campus buildings. Stupid administrators. Instead of listening and recognizing student grievances, they’ve managed to escalate the situation. The problem here is that the administrators are incompetent and don’t believe they have any obligations to the students. The students are the reason the university exists!

The real rioters are cops and college presidents. Students and faculty are linking arms and condemning genocide, while administrators shriek and wail in dismay and send in cops with clubs, guns, and gas to break them up.

The past week or so has been, in many ways, unfathomable: Palestine solidarity protests sprung up at college campuses across the country; Local and state police resorted to violence to break many of them up; Some universities changed their rules last minute just so they could criminalize previously benign student and faculty activity; Prosecutors in most jurisdictions with arrests won’t say if they’ll charge the protesters. Meanwhile in Gaza, multiple mass graves filled with hospital patients were uncovered.

On top of it all, Christian Zionists—in and out of Congress—tried to take over as the true defenders of Israel, while failing to mention why they so zealously defend it. (Hint: If the Jews return to Israel, it will hasten the return of Jesus and an armageddon. Just don’t ask them what happens to the Jews once armageddon happens. Another hint: We go to hell.) Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested in a speech on Columbia’s campus that it might be time to send in the National Guard. Evangelical preachers led a crowd that yelled things like “Go home, terrorists!”, “Go back to Gaza!” and “You want to camp? Go camp in Gaza!” at student protesters. If this all sounds crazy, that’s because it is crazy.

Oh, and about those prohibited activities — here’s a list from the University of Florida.

As has been pointed out online, many of those prohibited activities would shut down tailgating at football games, which most universities regard as a sacred rite.

Faculty, with a few notable exceptions, have been supportive of students’ right to protest. In fact, the Barnard AAUP faculty voted unanimously to make a statement of “no confidence” in the college president. I had to gasp at that — a group of 102 faculty members all agreed on something? I can’t imagine the Morris campus senate doing anything like that, and it probably would take hours of wrangling back and forth to even get a tepid statement out of them. Things must be getting extreme at Barnard.

They tried to do something similar at Columbia, but fell short, and settled for a compromise resolution that was still pretty damning. That’s more like the fractious faculty I know.

At Columbia University, a proposal to censure university president Minouche Shafik fell short, but a resolution calling for an investigation passed by a vote of 62-14 on Friday, according to the New York Times. Shafik has been scrutinized since a decision last week to summon New York police to the campus and authorize them to dismantle an encampment, resulting in the arrest of more than 100 student protesters.

After a two-hour meeting on Friday, the university’s senate approved a resolution that Shafik’s administration had undermined academic freedom and disregarded the privacy and due process rights of students and faculty members by calling in the police and shutting down the protest.

I wonder what it takes to get college presidents to recognize how badly they are fucking up. We’ve got protests sweeping across the nation, they keep generating horrendously terrible optics by sending armored mobs of cops to beat up students and faculty and throwing them in jail, their faculty are sending them strongly worded complaints, and still they keep playing the same stupid games. I don’t have any kids in college anymore, but if they were, and if I saw them getting thrown down and handcuffed at the behest of some asshole college president, I’d be furious and looking to help my kids transfer to some place that isn’t a militarized camp run by wannabe fascists. If I had a kid looking to enroll in college, I’d be torn but what I see at Columbia: the students seem awesome, but man is that place mismanaged. Like a lot of schools right now.

The most encouraging thing I’m seeing about the protests is that wow, the kids are all right. They get it. They are doing the right thing. I would remind them of these words by Frederick Douglass:

Right now, I’m seeing some of the anti-protest Right whining about the encampments, but they’re blocking the siiiiidewaaaalk in the same way that people complained about Black Lives Matter marches, but they’re blocking traaaaffic. Yeah? Too bad. You’re being confronted with a minor inconvenience while Palestinian people are seeing whole families murdered. Get over it.

Stop the genocide, the students will stop troubling your conscience. It’s that easy.

They’re everywhere. In the cities, on the streets, on college campuses.

It’s always a one-sided conversation, but they call it free speech.

A tenured college professor explains why they are quitting.

I’m done. I’m out. I’m giving up my tenure. I earned that tenure through endless nights and weekends in libraries, in front of screens, banging away at deep thoughts on Bakhtin that a few dozen people would read. I earned it grading countless papers and leading countless peer-review workshops. Now, for the first time since my early 20s, there’s no more students to shepherd. No more papers to grade. No more pointless department meetings to sit through. No more conferences or professional development workshops that I’m supposed to get reimbursed for, but never do.

It feels weird.

I’m leaving because my university, like so many others out there, refuses to get with the times. Six months ago, my dean promised to support my bid for a remote teaching position. Nothing would’ve changed. I’ve been teaching online for the last four years. Before asking me to quit, my dean scheduled a special phone call to ask if I was okay teaching a heavier course load for a lower salary, in exchange for this special concession. On top of that, I was already designing a slew of new courses they desperately needed. I planned those courses down to the day, and even wrote a free textbook for it along with videos for other teachers to use. I was also unofficially doing administrative work, and that was going to become an official job duty.

So much of that hits home. Especially that asking “if I was okay teaching a heavier course load for a lower salary.” I’m at a good university that treats the faculty a little better than that, but we do get some bad ideas from the higher ups, like at a recent meeting, an administrator announced that they basically had a predetermined target faculty:student ratio, and because our enrollments were down, they weren’t going to hire any replacement faculty until that ratio was reached. That’s a decision made without regard for the education we have to deliver.

Imagine that you’ve got a budget that can’t cover the cost of four tires on your car, so you decide to maintain three, but the fourth one…well, we’ll just let it wear out, go bald, go flat, maybe shred itself to pieces as you drive down the freeway. The car still runs, it’s maybe just a bit unsafe and kind of inefficient and making horrible noises while you drive. Is that a smart move?

It’s the same with a university. You might think you’re economizing by shutting down foreign language programs or letting the physics department wither away or shaving away at faculty salaries, but it’s going to destroy you in the long run. While deploring the reduction in student enrollment, it doesn’t help to take a knife to the whole reason students come to the university — and it’s not because we have such wonderful administrators. But the university administrators are in charge of the pursestrings, and the purse is filled by politicians and trustees and bureaucrats who wouldn’t be caught dead in a classroom.

The logical conclusion of this trend is summarized by a modest proposal from another college professor.

I will use Pomona College, where I have taught for decades, as a specific example of how easily my proposal might be implemented. In 1990, Pomona had 1,487 students, 180 tenured and tenure-track professors, and 56 administrators — deans, associate deans, assistant deans and the like, not counting clerical staff, cleaners and so on. As of 2022, the most recent year for which I have data, the number of students had increased 17 percent, to 1,740, while the number of professors had fallen to 175. The number of administrators had increased to 310, an average of 7.93 new administrators per year. Even for a college as rich as Pomona, this insatiable demand for administrators will eventually cause a budget squeeze. Happily, there is a simple solution.

Pomona’s professor-administrator ratio has plummeted from 3.21 to 0.56. A linear extrapolation of this trend gives a professor-administrator ratio of zero within this decade. This trend can be accelerated by not replacing retiring or departing professors and by offering generous incentives for voluntary departures. To maintain its current 9.94 student-faculty ratio, the college need only admit fewer students each year as the size of its faculty withers away. A notable side effect would be a boost in Pomona’s U.S. News & World Report rankings as its admissions rate approaches zero.

And just like that, the college would be rid of two nuisances at once. Administrators could do what administrators do — hold meetings, codify rules, debate policy, give and attend workshops, and organize social events — without having to deal with whiny students and grumpy professors.

I think it was supposed to be funny, but I didn’t laugh. It’s far too close to the actual strategy being implemented on college campuses right now.

I suspect that most people who read this site don’t read the Gateway Pundit blog. I don’t either, but I know of it because that blog was founded a year or two after Pharyngula, and quickly skyrocketed to amazing amounts of traffic — it made me wonder what the secret was. It turns out that the secret was to lie constantly and make crap up, a strategy I wasn’t willing to adopt.

It was also run by Jim Hoft, The Dumbest Man on the Internet. I also wasn’t willing to lobotomize myself to compete.

Don’t waste your time reading it, though — Wikipedia has the short and extremely accurate summary.

The Gateway Pundit (TGP) is an American far-right fake news website. The website is known for publishing falsehoods, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories.

It’s also going away, I assume. Gateway Pundit is bankrupt fiscally in addition to morally.

The founder of the Gateway Pundit, the infamous conspiracy theory site, announced on Wednesday that the company had declared bankruptcy.

Jim Hoft published a message on the website that read, “TGP Communications, the parent company of The Gateway Pundit, recently made the decision to seek protection under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code in the Southern District of Florida as a result of the progressive liberal lawfare attacks against our media outlet.”

They told one lie too many. Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss won a lawsuit against them for their false report that they’d rigged the presidential election. One more propaganda outlet down!

A classic moral panic is growing in Utah. The target: furries. Or, rather, imaginary furries. A few middle school kids wearing headbands has been inflated into wild stories of kids in animal costumes rampaging through the school, bullying and harassing the conservative kiddos.

Last Wednesday, dozens of students skipped class to gather outside a Payson, Utah, middle school for hours and chant, “We the people, not the animals!”—a protest launched over the dramatic accusation that their classmates were running wild as “furries” and attacking other students without consequence.

Much of the hysteria, however, has been blown out of proportion.

Footage from the scene showed them hoisting signs declaring, “Compelled speech is not free speech,” “We won’t be compelled,” and “We just want to learn.” A fourth sign read, “You can’t ignore us,” with a drawing of an animal print covered with a prohibition sign.

“They’re sitting on all fours in class,” one student told conservative livestreamer Adam Bartholomew as the kids (and some parents) lined the road to Mt. Nebo Middle School. “They’re wearing animal costumes. They’re growling at us, barking at us in class, it’s very distracting.”

“It’s very sexual and inappropriate,” the pupil added of their tween classmates accused of being “furries,” a subculture that dresses up as anthropomorphic animals and which has become a conservative bogeyman.

“They’re wearing butt-plug tails underneath skirts. They’re wearing dog collars to school with leashes hanging off. It’s not OK.”

As you might guess from the right-wing buzzwords on the signs being paraded by the offended parents and their dutiful offspring, this is a ginned-up controversy. They’ve got Glen Beck and Libs of TikTok riled up, which is exactly what they want, but none of the ‘extreme’ events they’re talking about have actually happened.

“We’re not really sure how it exploded as quickly and as crazily as it did, but what we can tell you is there have been zero incidents of students biting, licking, all of those things that have been claimed,” Sorenson continued.
…
“We’ve never had any reports, either from students or any observations by teachers or administration,” Sorenson said. “We do have cameras in our buildings, so we can see literally every inch of the building. And we have not captured any of those types of events occurring. So those, as far as we’re concerned, are just completely fictitious.”

Sorenson said the district doesn’t allow kids to wear masks or costumes, but the accused “furries” were asked to stop wearing headbands with ears; they complied immediately.

Further, all you have to do is look at the parents to see where these stories came from, and why.

“I’m glad this is going to go national,” wrote Eric Moutsos, a dad and former cop who once made headlines for refusing to ride at the front of a Salt Lake City gay pride parade.

The chat also included Bartholomew’s wife Cari, who is running for the Utah State Board of Education and has decried the “hard left educational turn” in the state.

One parent of a student organizer insisted that her daughter single-handedly planned the protest and a petition that collected over 1,000 signatures. “If you are hearing otherwise, YOU ARE BEING LIED TO. #LIVE NOT BY LIES.”

Some messages, however, seemed to indicate the parents shaped the kids’ protest posters.

“The kids really want to hammer this home,” the woman wrote in an earlier message. “WE HAVE TO CHANGE OUR POSTERS. The message needs to be: I will not comply. Compelled speech is not free speech. Live not by lies.”

Pledger, in her own message, advised parents to tell their kids to remain calm and not engage in teasing or bullying. “THE OPPOSITION SIDE WANTS OUTRAGE!” she wrote.

I think I know who is benefitting from outrage, and it isn’t kids, or furries, or the school. Outrage is what the Libs of TikTok and far-right freaks live on, and if they have to, they’ll make shit up.

Caitlin Flanagan is one of those creepy conservatives who manages to get regularly published in so-called liberal magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and simultaneously is loved by right-wing free speech warriors. She gets away with saying things like this, somehow.

What, exactly, are these faculty members supposed to be arrested for? Is it for peacefully protecting the rights of minority students to express their political opinions? I thought that’s what we are supposed to do!

I mean, for decades now I’ve let creationists and far-right students state their beliefs in my classroom (of course, I would then tell them they were wrong, and why, but they could speak their minds). It would have been so much simpler if I could have just called campus security on dissenters from my holy opinions and had them hauled away. Do I get to do that now?