Category Archives: rights

Excellent but Insufficient

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Kristin Shapiro, of the Independent Women’s Forum, has an excellent idea for checking up on colleges’ and universities’ admissions criteria and seeing whether they’re still using race and gender in their admissions decisions, even though those plainly racist and sexist criteria are illegal.

[R]equire colleges and universities to report the average standardized test scores and grade-point averages of admitted and enrolled students by race.

This can be improved on, however. In addition to publicly reporting those averages for admitted and enrolled students, the institutions should be required to post the averages’ standard deviations, which measure the degree of dispersal of those scores around their averages, and they should be required to post as well the median scores of those distributions. Medians tend to be less heavily influenced by extreme outliers. In addition, the institutions should be required to do that for the populations of students whose applications were rejected.

Better still, would be to require the institutions to make publicly available and searchable their databases of raw scores and GPAs, redacted only of student-identifying data while leaving in the identifications of the high schools and transferred-from colleges and universities of admitted students and of students whose applications the institutions rejected.

Let independent analysts conduct their own investigations rather than requiring the public to rely on the claims of institutions whose integrity already is questionable.

Whose Property Is It?

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“Wall Street” is all in a tizzy over an entirely private deal made by the owner of all two of companies involved in the deal [emphasis added].

The valuation was surprising and so was how the companies got there. Only one set of advisers worked for both sides, when a deal of this size would normally take armies. In short, the unusual process resulted in a megadeal few public companies could get away with.

The news writers willy-nilly assume that all deals must have “armies” of advisers, just because. Why would an owner of two private enterprises need more than his own teams—or himself—to assess whether or how to merge his privately owned companies? Other than spreading fees out among a plethora of Wall Street investment advisor firms, I mean.

The news writers spent a whole section of their piece on the matter of The advisers worked both sides.

This proceeds, cynically, I claim, from a false premise: both private companies are/were owned by the same man. What “both sides?” There was only the single owner’s side.

And whence the question, in the first place? These are private enterprises, beholden to no one in the public sphere, especially the denizens of The Street. Even were the two private enterprises owned by two separate private individuals, no one on The Street has anything legitimate to say about the matter. Maybe this sort of interference-wannabe is part of the motivation for not going public and for taking public companies private.

No, the question implied, but never asked out loud, by these Wall Street Wonders is who owns the two companies—Elon Musk or “Wall Street?” The two news writers address this for themselves, but never put it to the wonders they claim to cite.

Supreme Court Has the Louisiana Redistricting Case

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After the 2020 census, Louisiana’s Republican-controlled legislature

only drew one majority-Black congressional district when it redrew the boundaries for the state’s six seats in Congress. A group of Black voters, who make up about a third of the state’s population, sued the state in 2022, arguing that section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race, required lawmakers to add a second majority-Black congressional district.

Here’s the entirety of what that Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act actually says:

SEC. 2. No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.

Drawing voting districts explicitly to favor one group of Americans over other groups in that same district is precisely what the CRA prohibits. However the Supreme Court rules in this case, it’s imperative that the Court finally recognize the truth of our Declaration of Independence and the foundational American law that’s before them in the form of the 14th Amendment of our Constitution, which says in pertinent part,

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

One of the most basic privileges accruing to us American citizens is our right to vote, and all of us voters are equal under law—regardless of skin color, or religion, or….

In fine, as citizens, as voters, we’re all exactly alike. Gerrymandering to create districts that favor one group over any others necessarily disadvantages those others—and it denies all groups, and more importantly, every individual regardless of group equal protection of the laws, and so it is unconstitutional.

As an aside, and one of the more favorable aspects of earlier times, the entire CRA fits within seven Word® pages, and contains less than 5500 words, at least as it is presented at the link.

University Dependence on Federal Funds

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And one other matter. Against the backdrop of President Donald Trump’s withholding/canceling of $400 million worth of grants and contracts for Columbia University, there are a couple of things that stand out.

One is this:

[S]ome board members deeply concerned the university is trading away its moral authority and academic independence for federal funds.

Columbia has already shed any pretense of moral authority—see below. Columbia’s dependence on Federal funding is Columbia’s conscious, deliberately done choice. The school has a $14.8 billion dollar endowment. Even if that were to be frozen—no further donations into it, the endowment’s investments would only break even—that’s enough to fund 37 years of grants and contracts at the rate of those $400 million per year Federal largesse. A lot can happen in those 37 years.

Then there’s this, from Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia:

It is really a red line for the independence of universities, for academic freedom, for shared governance.”

No it isn’t. Requiring a university to shed—to divest itself of—its antisemitic bigotry and (not or) its support for terrorists is not a threat to university independence or of academic freedom. Indeed, as Columbia’s support for that bigotry and that support demonstrates, removing them would produce a sharp increase in academic freedom, especially for the students—an aspect of academic freedom the Precious Ones of Columbia’s faculty carefully ignore.

Beyond that, there should be no “shared governance” at universities. Administrators should govern; professors should teach. Full stop.

Disingenuous Excuse-Making

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That’s what seems to be the case involving Columbia University’s interim president Katrina Armstrong and a variety of personages criticizing her decisions, or their lack, or their careful vagueness, regarding Columbia’s rampant antisemitic bigotry and overt support for “protestors” supporting terrorists in Gaza and the West Bank.

Armstrong’s waffling on those items already has cost her university $400 million in Federal grants and contracts, yet she continues to waffle.

Chief among her excuse-making supporters is Johns Hopkins Medicine International President, Charles Wiener:

She’s in a situation now where every minute, every hour, there’s no way she’ll be able to do anything that pleases everybody[.]

Armstrong isn’t there to please everybody; she’s not even there to please anybody at all. She’s there to do the right thing: put an end to the school’s antisemitic bigotry that exceeds the bounds of free speech by overtly denying others their rights to free speech and religion—even merely to attend class—and expel the terrorist-supporting “protestors,” including faculty members; have those “protestors” who are not students or faculty arrested for their trespass; and have those—student, non-student, or faculty—involved in stealing university buildings (which is what their “occupations” amount to) and vandalizations arrested and brought to trial for their criminal acts.

Full stop.

Then the newswriters of this WSJ piece offer their own shabby excuse:

Armstrong has walked a fine line between acknowledging that some aspects of the university need to change while also asserting the importance of the school’s academic independence.

No. There is no fine line here. There is no academic freedom in an environment where the school’s Jewish students are prevented by those terrorist supporters from speaking, prevented from getting to class, even physically attacked simply for being Jewish, much less speaking anyway.

Ans this:

If she cedes [sic] to White House demands over campus antisemitism allegations, she risks revolt from faculty fearing a loss of academic freedom.

More excuse-making. Faculty members who revolt over this are simply self-selecting for prompt termination. Getting them out of the way would both reduce the bigotry that so rampantly denies Jewish students their free speech rights and increase academic freedom by removing those who insist that academic freedom means being free to do things their way only.

Armstrong needs to stop waffling. Or she needs to be replaced by someone willing to make the hard decisions necessary to reduce the bigoted attacks on disfavored groups and get rid of the “protestors,” and to enforce those decisions.

Update (compared to when I wrote this): Columbia University has, finally, acceded to many of the government’s demands regarding curbing its antisemitic bigotry and support for terrorists.