Harvard Sues For The Right To Discriminate And Still Get Paid

So what is Harvard objecting to exactly>

The letter to Harvard that is conditioning federal funding on the University complying with the demands in the letter can be read here - Letter to Harvard.

Take a moment to read it.

There's really nothing in the demands in the letter that a reasonable person would find objectionable - Harvard needs to end a pattern of discrimination and hire faculty and administration and intake students based on merit alone; end a tolerance for antisemitism and related threats and vilenceeat the University; build up tolerance and viewpoint diversity in higher education; and actually reform and enforce current student disciplinary rules.

Harvard is apparently fighting in order to be allowed to keep on discriminating, not hiring on merit,  and tolerating antisemitism and student disruptions on campus - and to continue to receive Federal funds while doing so.

Quite a noble hill for Harvard to die on, but they can do themselves.

Harvard of course claims it is its first amendment right to make its own rules.  As a private institution it can - and indeed the Federal Government is not saying it cannot.

Instead, it is stating - correctly - that the Federal Government is allowed to condition funds on adherence to federal policy objectives.

For Harvard to be able to claim that the Federal Government cannot condition spending on adoption of certain policies and conditions in return for the funds is ludicrous and  goes against quite established constitutional law.

If Harvard wishes to continue its actions, all it needs to do is forgo Federal funding and then it can be as discriminatory and non-compliant with Federal guidelines as it may wish. 

But instead, Harvard is suing to have its cake and eat it too.

One should note well that Harvard, the Left, and progressives in general didn't make a peep when the Obama administration sent out his "Dear Colleagues" letter to Colleges to change their procedures on Title IX matters -- to reduce the due process due to the accused in such matters -- and "disparate impact on racial groups" in disciplinary actions -- or else.

Harvard's case should be dismissed and Harvard should be required to make the choice everyone else must make when deciding to accept Federal Government funding - accept the strings that come with the dollars, or forgo the dollars.

Perhaps Ingrates Are Not The Best Choices To Show Who Benefits From This Profligate Loan Payoff Giveaway

So as an election year gambit, President Biden has announced he's going to spend between $300-600 billion to forgive $10-$20 thousand of many students current federal student loans. 

This of course rewards his progressive university educated base who lack financial literacy and likely never took a personal finance class with a cool extra ten (to possibly twenty) thousand dollars in their pockets, paid for by everyone else.

Apparently, it's unfortunate that I worked and paid off my loans timely.  Had I waited, I could have gotten $10,000 forgiven - now I and all other taxpayers get to pay for those who chose or otherwise did not do so.

Of course, this is naught but an election year trick and does not fix the problem of the cost of higher education. 

It does nothing to reduce the actual cost of college, which will likely go up by around ten thousand dollars given this incentive.  Nor does it ensure future students student loans are reduced, and it may encourage people to take out even more loans hoping for further political forgiveness stunts.

But even spending $300-$600 billion is not enough for some.

The Detroit News: Who gets student loan forgiveness? Relief prompts joy, angst

Lots of stories of those both happy to get the 10k, but many ingrates claiming its not enough to pay off their debts, debts they freely entered into in return for an education that no one forced them to undertake.

Amazingly, in one case we have a lawyer -- who clearly looks like she never missed a meal in her life -- claiming the $10,000 forgiveness is not enough for people of color like her:

Dallas attorney Adwoa Asante borrowed $147,000 in federal loans to attend Emory University School of Law. She graduated in 2015 and has since paid back about $15,000. With interest, she still owes $162,000 — a debt that she says has limited her career options.

That means she's only paid around $2,200 per year -- less than $200 a month toward her debt.  Of course the debt is not going to go down much when you only pay off 10% of it in seven years.

Did anyone force Ms. Asante to go to law school?  

Anyone force her to take out student loans to go there?   

I highly doubt it.  Ms. Asante you're a lawyer, presumably you understand how a contract works.  You entered into one to borrow money, which you promised to repay, in return for an education.  You got the education so why should someone else pay for it on your behalf?

And, to top Ms. Asante, we have an illegal immigrant featured in the story,  complaining the forgiveness program won't work for her because she's an illegal and lacks a social security number - otherwise if she had a social security number she'd get the 10-20k forgiven at American taxpayer expense.

Giglio, 20, is in the country without legal permission and doesn’t qualify for federal loans because she doesn’t have a Social Security number. She won’t receive any benefit from Biden’s debt cancellation plan.

Giglio, who expects to borrow a total of $150,000 in private loans by the end of her four years studying graphic design at Suffolk University, is already paying nearly $400 a month to pay off the 12% interest on the money she borrowed to finance her first two years of school.

“It’s frustrating. It’s 10 times harder for me to go to school, to earn money," she said. "There’s no help for us.”

She's paying an estimate $150,000 to get a degree in graphic design? Who the heck thinks that's a good deal? And she can't even legally work here?  What exactly was she thinking doing that? Who the heck even gave an illegal a loan to go to university?

You know she had one heckuva an option to save money beyond choosing a cheaper school here - she could go to any other country in the world and get a cheaper education. She darn well could have gone back to Chile or Italy to do so. But for some reason she did not.  

Yep my sympathy for the ingrates complimenting in the article is someone between zero and SFA.

So a quick couple questions:

 1. If you didn't go to college, possibly because you couldn't afford it, or wanted to do something else, or didn't want to take on debt, are you happy that you'll be paying a lawyer's (and the other people in the article's)  student loans for a political stunt?

2. If you paid off your loans for your education and spent years saving and faithfully paying them off, not using the money for more fun things, making do with less and delaying gratification, how do you feel about others getting 10,000 to 20,000 in forgiveness (or about $2,000+ of the taxes you're personally going to pay this year) to try to buy votes for the midterms?

When Even The Washington Post Notices This Year's University Admissions Problem

The Washington Post:  To Get Into the Ivy League, ‘Extraordinary’ Isn’t Always Enough These Days.

In short, between affirmative action with proggy admissions offices deciding on diversity over meritocracy, a flood deferred admission students coming in from last year, and legacy students or connected or those who are "of special interest to the Dean",  the result is that Whites (both females and males but the WAPO focuses on females),  Jews, and Asian students are getting pretty badly screwed.  

Basically, if you're one of these groups and want to get into an Ivy League school, you better have discovered a cure for cancer before you get into college.

Add the elimination of standardized test score requirements and you had the  perfect opportunity for proggies to go on a quest for "equity" over student ability.

It's not just the Ivies either.  University of Michigan's normal acceptance rate is 22% of applicants.  This year it is 8%.

It's a pretty insane year for students. 

Most of the top students in those three groups at Abby's school got shut out of the Ivies (notably some Black students with lower grades and test scores from her school did get into the same Ivies, which is an interesting anecdotal data point) whereas in the prior years a goodly portion went there.

Higher Education Application Crisis

It looks like Covid is seriously affecting college applications this year. 

Students admitted last year deferred their acceptance until now and will be starting this year.  Can't really blame them, as who would want to pay thousands for online learning?

Unfortunately, this among other factors including, I suspect, Universities' progressive focus on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity, is absolutely killing acceptance rates for graduating seniors this year. 

For example Northeastern University, with a normal acceptance rate of 23% has dropped to 7%.  Northwestern University went from a normal acceptance rate 9% to 4%. Other Universities are having a similar drop. It's gone from a shot at winning the lottery to a chance at being struck by lightning to get in.

Let's take, for example, a senior graduating this year with an above 4.0 GPA, high ACT score, and a pending IB diploma in addition to the standard high school diploma from one of the highest ranked and most rigorous high schools in the entire state.  The student has years of volunteer work for a variety of issues; including being the volunteer chief of staff for a County Commissioner (a Democrat, sigh, as is she, on the very progressive wing, but still not a small thing.   The student has state-level wins at forensics, and is named valedictorian. Rather impressive, I daresay.  Oh, and she is getting rejected all over the damn place from top-level schools. She does have acceptances from lower-tier schools (including some very good ones) so fall-backs are in place, so that's something.  But that's not what she's seeking as she wants to be among the best and learn from the best in a STEM field.

Others at the school, with similar stellar resumes or better, are also getting rejected and I suspect in their cases there's some anti-Asian selection bias going on, as some of these kids are seriously super-stars, and no, they don't have "personality" issues. 

Are you a caring progressive at a university concerned about Asians being "over-represented" (which is complete BS) at University because they get good grades and do the work?  Then tell the non-Asian kids to get their shit together and work half as hard as these kids do. Racial discrimination, even for lovely progressive reasons like DIE is still racial discrimination and it's still wrong - races don't go to university, individual students do.

Colleges also seem to be cutting down on their scholarship offerings as there's no need for them to induce students to apply, as there's a major surplus of applicants this year.

It's certainly an atypical year for college applications.

The Lighter Side Of Laughable Land Acknowledgments

I've talked about the stupidity of "Land Acknowledgments" before.

It seems a professor at University of Washington didn't just talk about the stupidity of required Land Acknowledgments, he went ahead and demonstrated the absurdity of such by inserting a true but certainly politically incorrect land acknowledgment statement on his syllabus rather than using the administration's approved message.

The result - perfection:

Yep, pretty much accurate, that. 

Computer science professor Stuart Reges rather delightfully and skillfully mocked the inanity that are these land acknowledgments.

The powers that be at UW were not amused. Really not amused.

Feathers were ruffled, students' fee-fees were offended. Snowflakes were melted.

770KTTH: Rantz: UW admin. goes to war over Seattle professor’s hilarious land acknowledgment joke

We will note for the record that to date neither UW, nor its Director of the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Magdalena Balazinska, have deeded their properties over to the Coast Salish tribes. 

Had they really believed in their own land acknowledgment virtue signalling BS, then it only goes to follow that they should have deeded the University and their properties over to the Salish - immediately - even as that would be rather ahistorical as much as it is woke.

So far, the University is putting a competing section of the class at the same time as Professor Reges' class, and have removed his syllabus from their website. and made a virtue signalling abject apology for it - and asking students to make complaints against him.

The Weekend In Nashville

Drove to Nashville this weekend.

Did an tour (on our own with a "virtual tour guide") of Vanderbilt University, the Harvard of the South.

Abby is applying there so we wanted to show it to her and it was a nice weekend get away.

Weather leaving Michigan frankly sucked. Icy snow and sleet was coming down that morning and it made the roads a treat, and then a cold rain kept up all the way through Ohio. 

We arrived Saturday night rather hungry and checked into our AirBnB.  We then walked to Hattie B's Chicken for some Nashville Hot Chicken.  The place was packed, and the chicken was out of this world outstanding.  Great stuff.

Sunday morning we started touring Vanderbilt.

Nashville was cool in the 50s so sweaters were worn.  Still, it was sunny and beautiful and it was a fine opportunity to wander around the campus.

In short, the campus is gorgeous.

Right in downtown Nashville, but it's very green and feels secluded and away from the city in its own space, yet with tons of things to do but a few minutes walking distance in the city itself.

The campus is heavily treed with many old trees of many types and squirrels about.

 

Including the Squirrel of Judgment, who looked down upon us judgmentally from a tree mere feet away without flinching or being concerned in the least.

In short it's a great campus, has great programs that meet her interests, and Nashville is a thriving city where I'd think she would be very happy to attend college. Pity the acceptance rates this year are in the single digits percentage-wise, which makes getting in any elite school rather tough.  We will see what happens.

After the morning tour of the university, the kids checked out a local mall and Tash and I went to Belle Meade Plantation/Winery/Stud Farm.  Quite an interesting and historic place.

Did you know that every winning horse of the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont from 2000 to 2021 can trace its bloodline back to a Belle Meade stud?  Pretty amazing.

Lots of historic buildings remain, including some of the original slave cabins, a dairy from 1884, and the 1892 carriage house, as well as the mansion itself.

The carriage house contains some rare carriages and a cannon belonging to The Harding Light Artillery, named after the owner of the Belle Meade farm at the time, a unit raised in 1861 in  Nashville.

After we had explored the grounds we headed in for a wine tasting.

The tasting experience was conducted by the Belle Mead's executive sommelier and we were in for a treat.

Learned an absolute ton about wine and food pairings in a fun and educational experience.    Started with learning how to properly open a bottle and it went from there.

All the wines were from Belle Meade's winery.  Starting with sparkling wine, the Lady's Cuvee,  that went well with the aged piece of cheese on the far left of the plate. Tasted great. 

Then tried the same cheese with the next white wine poured, and it tasted absolutely awful.  Then paired that wine with a more appropriate cheese to the immediate right of the first one and all was well again.  Learned a lot about food pairing from that.

Next on to red wine and why it needs to breathe and how to swirl it around in the glass to aerate it.  Tried the Iroquois  Cabernet Sauvignon right out of the bottle and then swirled it per instructions and it tasted completely different and much better as a result.  Then on to the Gentlemen's Blend which is a really big and tasty wine, and we had some great food pairings with it as well.

Then finished with the blackberry wine which is a delightfully sweet dessert wine that cannot be recommended enough.

It was a great experience and really enjoyable.

If you go to Belle Mead, sign up for the wine tasting experience, it is more than worth it.

After that, we wandered the grounds again for an hour as all that wine meant no driving until we had burned it off.

Then, once we were well and truly sober we picked up the kids from the mall, had some BBQ for dinner, and that was our visit to Nashville.

In short, I really hope she gets into Vanderbilt as I think it would be the perfect environment for her with both a top rated school and city.

Expect Biden To Forgive Student Loans

Why?  Because I just paid mine off.

If he does make some blanket forgiveness now, I'm going to be all sorts of annoyed.

It is nice to finally have them done. 

But, we'll be throwing that monthly payment into the kids' college funds so no change to the monthly budget.

This has advantages and disadvantages.

On the one had, it is saving for, and paying for college, so they should theoretically have less debt at the end of it and we're helping pay for their education.

On the other hand, saving for college makes you less eligible for financial aid and actually increases your expected family contribution for college, which increases the cost of going to college.  This means you will be paying more and potentially incur more student debt than if you had gone off and spent the money on frivolities instead of saving.

The higher education system's cost and payment system is almost as opaque and broken as our medical system's, mainly due to the same problem of government intervention in both.   The sticker price in both cases isn't really the sticker price.

For example, and its not quite as straightforward as this, but if your child works before going to college and earns say $6,000 and saves it rather than spending it all before applying, then $3,000 of that becomes part of the EFC raising the cost each year that she's expected to pay by that $3,000.  This is because many if not most universities tend to reduce their tuition and/or cover the cost that exists beyond the EFC amount. So, if she hadn't worked she would not have been expected to provide that and her cost would go down.   Lots of other assets and income from parents get counted as well and its rather hard to tell where you stand and how much college may actually cost.

There's lots of bad incentives against savings in the educational financing system.

University Visit: Johns Hopkins

From Philadelphia we headed to Maryland, stopping overnight in Newark, Delaware.

We then drove into Baltimore and headed to Johns Hopkins.

 

Another reach school with both excellent reputation and wonderfully strong science and research programs where even undergrads get to participate in serious research its definitely one of her top reach pics. 

The main camous grounds are absolutely beautiful.

 

 

 

Downside is that it is in Baltimore. 

University (unarmed) Security was everywhere on the main campus.   I mean everywhere and in multiples.  You don't have that level of security unless you need it.  The main campus even so is however very nice and in a reasonably nice area.  Still that's a factor to be considered.

The medical campus however is in a much more sketchy location.

Overall, it is one of her top choices along with U Penn and CM, but they all have a shockingly low acceptance rate so we will see what happens come application time.

University Visits: Swarthmore

Located in the outskirts of Philadelphia, less than 20 minutes from U Penn,  but in many ways a world apart. Swarthmore College offers a very serene and walkable isolated campus with some stately buildings and naturalist landscaping.

 Lots of nice buildings in a quiet wooded environment that is completely apart from the city itself but close enough to go into town.

The historic Sproul observatory built in 1907 and completed in 1913 when it had the largest telescope on the east coast of the US.  It has since been replaced as an observatory at Swarthmore:

Swarthmore is very big on environmental science and the environment in general.  Every class year plants a tree on the campus.  Here's one from the class of 1875, an Elm that is 146 years old and still growing - 

They have some solid science programs, and it offers a small student body and  a very comfortable and walkable campus and it is definitely under consideration.

University Visit: For U, It De Penn

We spent the night in Bradford PA, and then in the morning headed to Philadelphia, the home of The University of Pennsylvania.

Established in 1740, and founded by Benjamin Franklin,  its first President, it has a lot of history to offer.

 It has some very stately architecture.

It also has some iconic sculptural works around the campus.

As important as all of that, it has a highly regarded and rigorous science and biology research department, which is what the kid is looking to study.

Again, every building was shut tighter than a drum, but we got to see the outside of the buildings and quite a few students were around. The bookstore/spirit store was open, so shopping occurred.  

The area around campus is rather nice with a variety of shops and restaurants, many aimed at the hungry college student so dinning occurred as well.

Overall it's definitely one of her top choices to apply and reach towards.

Next University Visit: To The Home Of The Tartans

We then drove a few more hours and reached Pittsburgh.

If you didn't know, and I hadn't known until we arrived, the Tartans is the team name for Carnegie Mellon.

 

Their mascot is Scotty, a Scottish Terrier, which is always a good sign.

They run with it in all the things, including their social distancing notices. maintaining 6 Scotties distance away from others and you're good.

 

 

Every university we went to had regs for having masks on whether inside or out on campus grounds.

We did manage to see the inside of the Carnegie Mellon Student Athletics center as well as the outer grounds, but again, most buildings were shut tight.

The main campus has some impressive buildings.

 

We then went further into Pittsburgh towards U Pitt and saw the Mellon Institute, which has a rather impressive exterior.

It's a rather big building in beautiful neo-classical style.  Built in 1937 its facades are almost as large as the Parthenon. Its also quite a drop from the base of the columns to the ground so stay away from the edge.  It was also locked up but was nice to look at the outside.

The dark stains are left deliberately uncleaned as markers of Pittsburgh's more polluted past.  Either that, or they wanted to save on the cleaning costs and came up with that as a good excuse.

Carnegie Mellon scores higher marks with the kid for its stronger emphasis on the sciences and she liked the campus and that it was in a city with things to do.

University Visits - Oberlin

Day One We headed out of Michigan and into Ohio.  The roads immediately got better, the drivers worse.

We first stopped at Oberlin College.

Unfortunately with Covid, the buildings were all closed to visitors so it was all an external ride and walk about tour.

Oberlin is in a rather pleasant town.

We also stopped at Gibson's Bakery which is rather famous due to its mistreatment at the hand of Oberlin's administration - as can be seen by viewing the entire story over at Legal Insurrection.

We met one of the Gibson family who was working that day.  Super nice guy. We had a great chat about jiu-jitsu as Abby was wearing her jiu-jitsu sweatshirt and he had been practicing for quite some time and was even involved in the Oberlin Jiu-Jitsu club back when they had one.  

He was not negative about Oberlin College in any way, didn't discuss the dispute, and didn't do anything to dissuade a possible applicant to the college - even with how his family had been badly treated by the college administration.

Oberlin is overall a nice university in a small town setting.

Overall, Oberlin is rather heavily focused on music and the liberal arts, whereas Abby is all about science, so it may not be one of her top picks.  So, on to the next scheduled stop at a University in the next state.

Princeton: Well, That Woke Pronouncement Didn't Go As Expected

Mouthing woke bromides in an official capacity can cause issues.

The President of Princeton was quick to abase himself before the BLM masses and pronounced in an open letter, published on their website no less to state that:

Racism and the damage it does to people of color nevertheless persist at Princeton as in our society, sometimes by conscious intention but more often through unexamined assumptions and stereotypes, ignorance or insensitivity, and the systemic legacy of past decisions and policies. 

Racist assumptions from the past also remain embedded in structures of the University itself.

Yep, the President of Princeton publicly announced that Princeton is a racist institution, embedded with racism.   What could possibly go wrong with such a statement?

Now, he meant it in a wonderfully self-abasing progressive way that all the proper-thinking and feeling would understand, but words do mean things after all.

So the Department of Education decided to take action, and based on the admissions by the President in the letter has decided to launch an investigation into whether Princeton has been violating the Civil Rights act and should continue to receive federal funding, as racist institutions should not be receiving federal dollars: 

Washington Examiner:  EXCLUSIVE: Education Department opens investigation into Princeton University after president deems racism 'embedded' in the school

Oopsies.  Yep, Princeton may just lose federal funding for their president's woke announcement that they are a profoundly racist institution if such racism is actually found to exist if not then the President was lying in his letter.  

Even better, it just opened the door to an investigation to see exactly how racist they in fact are - which could look into their admissions policies regarding Jews and Asians which could be rather embarrassing to Princeton as well as other race-based policies they may have adopted.

Replied The Snake: “You Knew What I Was When You Picked Me Up”.

The UNC Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies sponsored an event about Gaza and well, surprise!

Totally Unexpectedly, multiple acts of Antisemitism occurred, along with biased and counter-factual anti-Israel activism, on the taxpayer dime, no less.

ABC 11 News: Some sponsors want money back after anti-Semitic remarks made at UNC conference

What sponsor was stupid enough to be surprised this was going to happen at such a conference?

Apparently many departments at UNC and the Rotarians, of all people, failed to evaluate the conference based on the very long track record of antisemitism and anti-Israel propaganda at such conferences.

They failed to heed the tale of the Girl and the Snake.

Good luck getting your donations back.

Really, Just Puck That Idea

Michigan's Oakland University has just out a crackerjack idea into action for protecting students in the event of a school mass shooting.

An idea so cunning, it can only come from the ivory towers of academia.

The idea: Arm the faculty with . . . hockey pucks.

The Detroit News: Oakland University to fight shooters with hockey pucks

Yes, faculty and "some" students will be armed with hockey pucks to throw at an active shooter. The American Association of University Professors, the professor's union, chipped in to buy a couple thousand pucks, all adorned with the Union's logo for the bargain price of .49 cents each.

Now OU's mantra is run, hide, throw hockey pucks.

You really can't make this up. At least include some hockey sticks for crying out loud.

Arming them with appropriate defensive weaponry in the case of a mass shooter, like say -- a handgun -- is of course, out of the question. We're talking the hallowed halls of academia here.

If It Weren't For All The Fake Hate Crimes . . .

There may not be any hate crimes at all.

The Detroit Free Press: Eastern Michigan U. racist graffiti: Ex-student charged, did it for 'self-serving' reasons

"It was totally self-serving," Eastern Michigan University Chief of Police Robert Heighes told the media during a quick news conference. "It was not driven by politics. It was not driven by race."

Well, thank goodness for that. A black guy graffiti-ing "KKK" and "Leave N-word" around a campus cant possibly have a political or racial motivation. And if not, it sure as heck was used for both political and racial means.

Especially when his fake hate crime led to a convenient protest complete with blocking of traffic to protest the racist messages and claim systemic racism etc.

The idiot perpetrator Eddie Curlin is now charged with

three counts of malicious destruction of property; four counts of identity theft; and one count of using computers to commit a crime. Malicious destruction of property is a misdemeanor. Identity theft is a felony, as is the charge of using computers to commit a crime. Curlin was returned to the Department of Corrections following his arraignment.

Heighes said the identity thefts came to light as the department investigated the grafitti, but were not directly tied to it.

Let's hope he is prosecuted to the fullest to make other fakers of hate crimes (and perpetrators of actual hate crimes) think again before doing it.

The Thugs' Veto Strikes Again

Daily Nous: “Credible Threats Of Personal Violence” Lead To Retraction of Colonialism Paper

Following a number of complaints, Taylor & Francis conducted a thorough investigation into the peer review process on this article. Whilst this clearly demonstrated the essay had undergone double-blind peer review, in line with the journal’s editorial policy, the journal editor has subsequently received serious and credible threats of personal violence. These threats are linked to the publication of this essay. As the publisher, we must take this seriously. Taylor & Francis has a strong and supportive duty of care to all our academic editorial teams, and this is why we are withdrawing this essay.

So a scholarly article is fast going down the memory hole, not because it was false or lacked academic merit, but because people didn't like it enough to threaten violence over it.

Why did it work? Because people know the Left will in fact do violence when they make these kinds of threats.

The paper itself was pretty darned innocuous, arguing that colonialism had some benefits to the colonized, but of course its now rather hard to find a copy of it extant to argue for or against the author's claims in the paper and to see if its detractors had anything to substantiate their violence-inducing butt-hurt beyond having the word colonialism associated with some positive benefits.

After all, what did the Romans ever do for us?

Of course the thugs' veto, with its threat of violence is being justified by those on the left with the very peculiar theory that "speech is violence". Yes, his detractors actually claim his paper is "violence against their [the colonized] respective communities and cultures." Thus, once the Left has decided that speech, in this case written speech in a scholarly peer-reviewed article no less, is violence, the Left uses this leap of logic to justify threats of violence and actual violence as an appropriate response.

So far, as seen by the cringe-worthy and cowering retraction of the paper, it is working.

This can backfire on the Left rather badly, especially if the Right takes up this "speech is violence" idea and climbs onto the thugs' veto bandwagon.

Just imagine Universities being told:

Look, Communism has killed over 100 million people, Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto is therefore clearly violent speech and violence against "its victims respective communities and cultures", so any professor teaching it is clearly enabling and inspiring mass murder. If you continue to teach this violence at your university . . . . . .

Well, that's a lovely university you got here, too bad if something were to happen to it.

Purdue University or Perdue University?

Tam has a rather brilliant bit about the Purdue University shooting up today, and the need for the complaining students to grow up a bit and put on their big-boy and big-girl pants. Go read it.

After reading it, I think I understand why the students acted as they did, complaining that there was no lock-down when the shooting happened about a mile from their classroom.

It's due to their conceptual framework as to how the world works.

Purdue University is a gun-free zone with no firearms allowed. Indeed their very policy boldly states: "The possession, use, or distribution of any explosives, guns, or other deadly or dangerous materials or weapons reasonably calculated to cause bodily injury is prohibited in University Facilities

As such, the shooting was simply un-possible.

Could not have happened.

But it happened.

Thus a bit like Schrodinger's cat, the students had to face the possibility that the event both had occurred and yet could not have occurred at the same time.

After all, if the iron laws regarding the banning of weapons were disobeyed, the laws of physics very well could be next and the shooter could theoretically be both a mile away doing the shooting and then simultaneously outside their classroom ready to commit mayhem.

No wonder they wanted to go into a dark corner and cry.

MSU Email, We Hardly Knew Ya

My MSU email account, after being happily active all these years, over 15 years post attendance is now going away.

It seems they've finally decided to kick the alumni off the email system.

Originally the University on May 30th in a sent a terse email to the affected alums:

You are receiving this message because you have been identified as someone who has not taken a course at Michigan State University in two or more years. MSU IT Services will be deactivating msu.edu e-mail accounts and AFS (Andrew File System) storage space for those who have not been students in two or more years to maintain university storage efficiencies. Starting on June 26, 2012, your e-mail and AFS accounts are among those scheduled to be deactivated. Between now and June 26, we encourage you to go through your accounts and save or migrate any files you wish to keep.

Less than 30 days to migrate your email account that you've had for years and notify all services and persons that use it to communicate with you, nice.

They then, five hours later on the same day backpedaled on the cutoff date and provided some further information/justification:

Dear Spartan, We have heard from some of you today that we could have done a better job giving you notice about deactivating your MSU e-mail and AFS space. You are right. We apologize for providing less than a month's notice. That's not enough time. We understand that this came suddenly and unexpectedly to some, in part because of confusion over the "Technology Guarantee" provided by Peter McPherson. For that reason, we will provide additional time before deactivating your account. This action will not be taken until Friday, August 31, 2012. To clear up the confusion about the "Technology Guarantee," it's useful to go back to the source, a speech given by Peter McPherson in 1996 in which he stated: "MSU alumni will have affordable lifelong technological access and two post-graduate years of free e-mail access." Technology access included student NetIDs and login to StuInfo or Web Enroll. McPherson's speech is located at http://www.msu.edu/~presofc/guarantee.html. The university needs to take this action for several reasons. Primary among them are freeing up university data storage resources and maximizing services for current students. Few of our peer institutions offer extended access to e-mail and storage accounts for the same reasons. When MSU first made the decision to provide e-mail and storage after graduation, access to these services was limited. Today, low cost or free e-mail and data storage options are abundant. Again, we apologize for the short notice on our part, but we hope you can appreciate that we are taking steps to serve MSU students and to be fiscally responsible. Sincerely, Dave Gift Vice Provost and CIO MSU Libraries and IT Services

But regardless of the tone and apologies for lousy messaging, they are moving ahead and shutting down the accounts. Instead of 2 years post-attendance, I, for one, got 15 years out of it. I wonder if I have a claim to keep it due to adverse possession at this point? Sadly not. But, I think by this point most alumni figured it would stick around and not be deleted as there hadn't been a word about such before.

When you have to reach back to a quote from a 1996 speech you're kinda reaching for a justification I daresay.

Having a permanent email address was quite useful. My MSU account was my one "main" account with most online personal and business transactions run through there (except for the blogging and related stuff) and was quite convenient.

I'm now busy updating all my online accounts such as with Midway, CDNN, Ebay, Paypal, Netflix, NRA, Divers Alert Network, investment accounts and the like to my new email address on a different service.

It's a major pain, especially for those services that only give occasional email updates, and I'm busy trying to remember where other accounts with that email address may lurk.

On the upside, its an opportunity to rotate and upgrade all of the passwords with some upper cases and numerics if they didn't have them before.

It's unfortunate that MSU didn't think outside the box for a bit:

Had they charged each alum $20 or $25 a year that would likely more than cover any real storage costs and the minimal admin overhead maintaining the existing accounts might cost. After all, storage is dirt cheap these days. They likely would have not only opened a new revenue stream but gained a lot of goodwill with their Alumni.

As it now stands, this much in the way of headaches certainly wipes out the potential for such goodwill.

Pity.