Rich Vedder writes that the bell is tolling for woke humanities professors. Here’s his conclusion:
Enrollments have been in decline since 2010 at a large portion of America’s universities, and the 21st-century worldwide aversion to having children suggests that the pool of college-age kids will fall meaningfully in coming years. Financially hard-pressed university presidents will be forced to slash administrative staff supporting the Woke Conspiracy, such as aggressively racist DEI apparatchiks. But they also will find it fiscally necessary and academically appropriate to reduce the number of humanities faculty. Borrowing from John Donne and Ernest Hemingway, the bell is tolling for the woke professors who have done so much to harm the study of the humanities in America.
Bob Graboyes riffs wisely about Émile Zola and Bari Weiss. A slice:
The parallels between the two works and between the environments in which they were delivered should shake any decent person to the core. On January 13, 1898, Zola published a letter of 4,564 words (full text here), ostensibly addressed to the president of France, but intended for the eyes of a nation going blind from an antisemitism that was a mere symptom of more generalized moral rot in France and beyond. On November 10, 2023, Weiss delivered a speech of 4,745 words (full text here), ostensibly addressed to the Federalist Society, but intended for the eyes of a nation going blind from an antisemitism that was a mere symptom of more generalized moral rot in America and beyond.
“The left has always worshipped violence.”
Pierre Lemieux warns of “the dangers of fairness.”
Johan Norberg continues to bust myths about Sweden’s alleged ‘socialism.’ A slice:
When a Swedish economist once told Milton Friedman that there was no poverty in Sweden, Friedman famously replied: “That’s interesting, because among Scandinavians in America we also have no poverty.”
His point was that the millions of descendants of Scandinavian migrants in the US do better than most other Americans, and interestingly, also tend to do better than Scandinavians in Scandinavia.
This is all part of a larger pattern of the Biden administration canceling student debt left and right in ways largely inscrutable to the public and, at least in some cases, almost certainly unconstitutional. Indeed, the same day the Supreme Court declared Biden’s jubilee unconstitutional, the president announced his administration had “finalized” a new, very generous repayment program. No act of Congress—the people’s representatives. Just Biden begetting a repayment plan expected to cost taxpayers $475 billion over ten years. Meanwhile, other repayment‐easing endeavors are working through heavily biased regulatory procedures.
Fiona Harrigan rightly ridicules an instance in Kansas of occupational licensing.
The New York Times‘s Editorial Board writes:
The evidence is now in, and it is startling. The school closures that took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education.
[DBx: What say you, you lockdowners?]
