That Florida stuff is mind boggling.
Oh hey, and there's an op-ed by Mr. Rufo in the NYT today, I see. Is he a regular contributor now?
Do you have any especially good links about Florida and education?
Heard an interview on NPR where a credulous Inskeep listened respectfully to one of the authors of the Florida standards explaining how inspirational it was that enslaved people acquired useful skills.
Inskeep kept affirming the factuality of what the guy had to say.
Inskeep starts the interview by saying that people are criticizing the Florida standards without actually reading them. Then he does an interview based almost entirely on the acquired skills bit.
Here's the interview, which is only interesting for how badly Inskeep kept geting pwned by the professor emeritus from Michigan State.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pla%C3%A7age
Life expectancy for Caribbean slaves was about three years, sales records much better than vital statistics since money was more important than people.
I can't follow the drama back-and-forth on who did what when in the first Tribune link, partly because it seems to be leaving interpretation to the reader. Is the implication that the president was the conduit for the racist backlash and did the interfering, whereas the department would have continued with the hiring?
The previous article might clarify things a bit more.
Thank you.
Sure shows exactly what they mean when they say "end DEI!"
But within days, the conservative website Texas Scorecard wrote a piece emphasizing McElroy's work at UT-Austin and elsewhere regarding diversity, equity and inclusion and her research on race, labeling her a "DEI proponent."
4.1 Thank you for that link. I hadn't seen that before and it is powerful.
It's very similar to what happened with Nikole Hannah-Jones and the University of North Carolina.
9: Administrators explicitly cited that case to McElroy in "explaining" what could go wrong.
And of course today the NYT publishes Chris Rufo under the headline "DEI Programs are Getting in the way of Liberal Education."
Is the implication that the president was the conduit for the racist backlash and did the interfering, whereas the department would have continued with the hiring?
That's how I read it, but I noticed that the source for that was the head of the department (in a short letter that doesn't contain very much detail and on which he has refused to answer questions) so there may be more to it.
I was a bit baffled about how they could change the terms of a job offer which she had already publicly signed a letter accepting but then got to this :
According to the original offer letter that she signed during the June 13 ceremony, McElroy was hired as a tenured professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism and as the journalism program's director, without an end date to her appointment. Still, the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents, whose members are appointed by the governor, would have to approve her tenure position.
So basically the university made her an offer that included something they didn't have the power to offer. That sounds bad.
So basically the university made her an offer that included something they didn't have the power to offer. That sounds bad.
I think the implication is that while hiring is formally signed off on by those authorities, it is against norms for them to use that opportunity meddle with department decisions, and in practice the department's offer would be the last step requiring any effort.
12: I bet you anything that the hiring committee was tasked by the president or provost with a tt job search and the job advertisements were for a tt job, and that McElroy discussed it being a tt job in the interview process. Then the committee sends its recommendations to the administration to make the actual offer. I guarantee you that nothing but tt was ever on the table until the identity of the candidate was publicized.
In the parochial world of these universities, this could rise to the level of King Charles vetoing a bill.
Ah, fair enough. Just seems odd that she would sign the offer so publicly before it had been approved!
Relevant because education: https://m.timesofindia.com/india/in-modis-gujarat-hitler-is-a-textbook-hero/articleshow/868469.cms
From a while ago, when Modi was just running Gujarat.
It has never actually turned into a problem for me, because I'm very rarely doing anything with any political valence, but working for a state government is funny for making agreements like that. On settlements where we pay out money, the state comptroller has to approve them, but the process is that the comptroller's office won't review them until they're final, signed, and approved by the court.
Which leaves me in the absurd position of saying "I can agree to this deal, but I can't tell you if we're going to actually abide by it or if it will be cancelled a month after the court approves it. In my experience it's always been fine, but I don't have the power to promise that it will be fine, but don't worry about it, but don't rely on me." It ends up working out, but it's ridiculous.
Like, I right now have a settlement that's been filed publicly on a court docket. And it's probably going to go forward, but the Comptroller's office is still deciding whether or not to approve it.
Independent sources of executive power are weird. Like how our county legislature can't tell the sheriff what to do because she's elected, but it is the one that's responsible to set her budget, but they can't use that too adversarially/targetedly (if they wanted to atm) because that would raise Constitutional Issues.
One thing to keep in mind with 12 is that often the board of trustees doesn't even meet to approve the contract until after it starts! Historically trustee approval has always been a rubber stamp, and now it's not and so everything is fucked up.
I know analogies are banned for a reason, but still 15 gets it completely right.
Usually the way this works is that during the trustee meeting they have a unanimous motion "All personnel items approved by committee." This includes all new hires and awards of tenure.
As far as I know our board of trustees has never once failed to approve all new hires and tenure. I expect it'll start happening soon though.
The first big recent controversy in this direction was:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Salaita_hiring_controversy
There Illinois hired someone to a tenured position, he made impolite tweets about Israel, and the trustees refused to approve the hire. The university ended up settling for $875k and the chancellor resigned.
At any rate, escalating from "don't tweet about Israel until after the trustees meet" to "don't be too Black" is a major escalation in norms. Fortunately, in this case McElroy hadn't given up her old position yet. By contrast, Salaita ended up with no job since he'd had to give up his position at Virginia Tech (I'm not sure why, usually when you leave a TT position the university lets you keep your position for a year in case you decided to move back).
If this is the thread for horrifying TAMU decisions, let me add this: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/07/25/texas-a-m-professor-opioids-dan-patrick/
It's awfully depressing how right-wing state governments have now realized they have various points of leverage over state universities and are increasingly aggressive about using them.
24 is just amazing. No one was willing to go on the record anywhere about the actual inflammatory statements that led to a formal censure? She was formally censured for saying unspecified things? At the very end of the article, one person hints at something specific, and remarks from like 15 different people give a vague impression of the kind of innuendo that might have caused offense. I wonder how quickly this will turn into "we don't have to give you a reason" going forward.
26. They don't have to give a reason. What can the censured prof do, sue? Being a whistleblower/adversary is career-ending. Salaita, the tweeting prof in 22, is now a school bus driver. There is rarely an immediate downside to arbitrary exercise of power for anyone in control of a budget.
TBF "Ultimately Texas A&M allowed Alonzo to keep her job after an internal investigation could not confirm any wrongdoing."
There are things that state governments and high-level adminstrators can do by being willing to break long-time norms, and what happened with McElroy is one of them, but there's also plenty of things they can't do and punishing a tenured professor for unspecified statements is high on the list of things they can't actually do.
Right, but the message to anyone untenured is very clear.
Now if the person in question were a *lecturer* then it'd be an entirely different story. They'd just not renew the contract.
They can kill the department (Pharmacy Practice), relocate it to a quonset hut, or split it into new ones, with one descendant having undesirables. They can start by posting plans to do any of those that as a warning.
Maybe? For example, I don't know that the provost can kill the Spanish department, that's a decision for the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. And I doubt it's a decision the Dean is allowed to make entirely on their own. Shared governance is increasingly toothless, but faculty senates do still have some real power.
Alonzo does not have tenure; she's a classic adjunct with a full-time job elsewhere. "The stakes are high for professors who simultaneously work in their fields and teach, many of whom, like Alonzo, do not have tenure."
" he made impolite tweets about Israel"
Zionists: transforming anti-semitism from something horrible into something honorable since 1948.
Ajay, you're giving me a performative-utterance brain freeze. More context? (I know you're quoting Salaita's tweet...)
I had completely forgotten that he was hired to an American Indian Studies department. There goes my afternoon.
The context is just that: that's what Salaita said. It's fairly impolite.
24: Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonprofit legal group focused on protecting free speech on college campuses, said "it would be highly inappropriate for a university to conduct an investigation if a faculty member says something critical of a state leader or a government official.... That is, I think, a misuse of institutional resources, and it's one that will have a chilling effect and that has a chilling effect even if you wind up clearing the professor," Steinbaugh said.
Wow, powerful response from FIRE, really laying down the law about academic freedom in no uncertain terms. (This is because while what FIRE does is advocate for free speech on campus, what they care about is sticking it to the libs. They literally got more mad about students heckling a federal judge than the lieutenant governor trying to get a professor fired for an apparently anodyne but critical comment.)
FIRE is kind of a weird org. They're committed to principle enough to take on legal representation for liberals but otherwise are clearly sympathetic to and part of libertarian and conservative critics if higher ed. Maybe liberal defense work is a loss leader or credibility shield. AFAIK, cases that result in settlements favoring the wronged person rarely mean retaining a job or career. The state or institution loses money but leadership doesn't seem to care much about costs for this sort of thing. It's not like it's money that covers health insurance for grad workers or anything unimportant like that.
21: One time I'm familiar with a Harvard department in FAS voted to give tenure to somebody, but then the President decided not to. There were rumors that some faculty who had publicly voted for the person then went around their back to express concerns to Rudenstine. I can't remember the details, but I think that the candidate was either a woman or a minority.
36: Ah okay. The formatting makes it look like your own words, rather than a quotation, so I thought there was some artifice involved.
It looks like the department that attempted to hire Salaita has had a complete turnover of faculty in the ensuing decade. From 2013, when they were interviewing him; faculty now. One affiliated faculty member is still there, and another is listed as emeritus. Did this episode actually cause it to self-destruct, or is this more normal attrition?
(The particular rabbit hole I'm going down is figuring out the status of "the intellectual project of a critique of the concept of indigeneity, which is ... the core of what has made us an international leader in our field," according to the program director as quoted here.)
I've worked in both elite private and public institutions, and been on the board of a private, and don't think it is quite accurate to say that traditionally tenure decisions are a rubber stamp -- especially for outside hires. There is a reason that boards typically don't delegate authority to presidents for buying property, selling bonds, or granting tenure: all are long-term institutional commitments that will shape the university and constrain the decisions of administrators (and faculty) far into the future. Even when open-session board meetings approve hiring and tenure as part of a seemingly discussion-free public consent agenda (as noted in 21), they have often been discussed in a prior executive session, sometimes with counsel present.
Departments don't have the authority to offer tenure. I was a dean for many years in the University of California, and it would take more than one hand to count the number of department votes to make a tenured outside offer that did not, by the time the university-wide faculty reviews and administrative reviews were finished, result in an actual legal offer. I myself have turned down a tenured offer at very prestigious private research university because I was unwilling to take it on faith the the board would eventually concur. For outside offers, in my experience, the disagreement could come at any level: board, president/provost, or university-wide faculty. For internal promotions to tenure, in contrast, I've only seen disagreements arise in the administration or, rarely, the university-wide faculty -- never the board.
It is always hard from the outside to sort through any particular case, but in at least a few recent cases it seems like departments are using social media to fight what were previously internal battles. And the interests of a single department or school and the university as a whole are not always perfectly aligned.
39: That sounds like a fairly common series of events. I haven't been close to academics in years, but I can think of multiple cases at other institutions where that seems to have happened. Two were tenure denials, one was an offer to an outside hire that got downgraded after the department made its recommendation, but before the candidate saw the offer. In one case, the faculty member sued and won tenure, another case they sued, lost, and became a lawyer, and in the case of the outside hire, the candidate rejected the offer, got tenure elsewhere, and probably is more famous now than anyone involved in the failed attempt to hire.
40: The main thing that jumps out at me about the change is that two of the core faculty are also affiliated with the genomic biology institute, and one of the affiliated faculty is a very prominent researcher in ancient DNA studies. It seems like the department has pivoted to a role as a kind of honest broker between genomic research and Native communities/NAS as a discipline, both of which have been historically wary of it. Interesting.
FIRE is kind of a weird org. They're committed to principle enough to take on legal representation for liberals but otherwise are clearly sympathetic to and part of libertarian and conservative critics if higher ed.
I think there's a bifurcation between their legal staff (some public spirit and evenhanded outlook) and their PR staff (dedicated to spreading fodder for the right).
Speaking of racism, no one believes that little DeSantis staff twerp's story that he didn't know the history, meaning or associations of the Sonnenrad/Black Sun, right?
46: Not even Rod Dreher, who likes Orban better than Uncle Sam.
47: When you've lost the Expatriate Exemplar of Sublimated Sexual Anxiety, you've really gone too Nazi.
41: Just to be clear, of course it's completely routine for campus-wide committees to reject tenure approved by the department, and it's uncommon but totally normal for the president or provost to deny tenure in close cases. I was only talking about rejection *at the board level* of candidates the provost or president had already full signed off on.
While most cancel culture complaints evaporate on inspection, the Hamline thing is pretty egregious. Even CAIR said the conduct was not Islamophobic! Just a few entrepreneurial undergrads kicked up a fuss no one else was able to say boo too, it seems.
49: While I have seen boards reject faculty/presidential requests for tenured hires, usually it is a difference of opinion about investment priorities, not about the qualifications of a particular candidate. Most commonly, a department sees what it considers an exciting opportunity to hire a particular senior person, and the president (most often) or the board (sometimes) says something like "yes, but we only budgeted a junior hire and you can't hire with tenure," or "yes, but that area is not in our strategic plan," or "yes, but we are already planning to hire someone like that in school Y or program Z." Normally these sort of discussions are handled in the annual budget cycle, but then an Opportunity Hire appears off cycle -- which is one reason famous or semi-famous academics are often involved. And sometimes faculty or deans or both have worked really hard to get a famous senior candidate interested in making the move before the president and/or board shoots it down.
I regularly do orientations for new board members, and am careful to explain that they have delegated academic judgment to the faculty, and that revoking that delegation so they can substitute their own academic judgment about qualifications of faculty candidates (or, for that matter, the content of classes or the books to be ordered for the library) would be a grave mistake. I've also learned to insist that my board go on record approving specific tenure-track searches in our budget process, so that six years later when a candidate comes up for tenure I can remind the board that they can't at this late stage decide that we shouldn't have hired, say, a philosopher, since the decision to do so was made by the board....
Yeah, 51.1 makes sense, especially if the president is making the decisiion. But even in that case it seems like it would a controversy if the board to overruled the president after the contracts are signed, rather than discussing strategic priorities with the president before the decision to hire was made.
Long ago, my wife got an offer of a tenure-track position at a state college, subject to approval by the Board, which was supposed ot be a formality. Teh contingent offfer came in April, to start in September. Between May and September, without getting the official appointmentl, she withdrew other pending applications, we bought a house near the new job, moved 500 miles, and I did my own job search limited to the metro area and started work, without her getting the formal approval. When classes were sheduled to start, she wasn't sure if she had a job, but was assured again that the formal appointment wwas just a formality. To our surprise, she was paermitted to start work, and even recevied several paychecks, before the Board got around to approving the appointment in November I think. Happened later with both promotions and tenure: granted in November retroactive to the September school year.
Right, the scenario in 53 is what makes everything particularly bizarre and problematic. If the Board doesn't want to be a rubber stamp then they need to consider the offer in a timely fashion (i.e. within a week of the offer being signed). If they can't or won't give input in a timely fashion then they have to be a rubber stamp. The whole thing is totally unworkable if they want to have an opinion but won't give that opinion in a timely fashion.
I did just look back at my job offer and it looks like it wasn't contingent on the board, only hires with tenure are contingent on the board.
50: Most such complaints evaporate because "cancel culture" as a bumper sticker is only used by bullshit artists. There's plenty of real cancellation on campus -- it's just that it involves canceling DEI or whatever.
My suspicion with the Hamline student is that she got traction with her complaint only partly because of political correctness or whatever. I think there's also a very real ingrained institutional deference to religious fundamentalism.
(And let's remember that the actual outcome here is that the university basically admitted to having screwed up the "Islamophobia" bit.)
Mine was contingent on a background check that took so long to process that we nearly couldn't close on the house.
(And let's remember that the actual outcome here is that the university basically admitted to having screwed up the "Islamophobia" bit.)
Yes, but it got quite far prior to that - forced the adjunct prof. to apologize, then after she did so, failed to renew her contract, sent an email to the whole school condemning her, and said in multiple setting "yes, we let her go because she did something very bad."
This is probably unfair of me, but part of me thinks that the Hamline college situation is what happens when your president comes from the Ed school...
I have to say it is very strange to me to see a schlubby Italian-American man go full Hitler. Like, Mussolini or Putin or Orban, sure. But Hitler? Very odd. Obviously history and facts don't matter to fascists and American neo-Nazis are their own kettle of fish but the Italian and German fascists famously hated each other, and Southern Italians hated Italian fascists on top of that.
Also DeSantis is not going to out "ubermensch" Trump with the base and trying to just makes him look ridiculous.
It's hard to match the physical perfection that is Trump when assholes draw pictures of Trump.
The key to winning the Republican primary is getting into a physical altercation with Trump and winning or getting him to run away. You gotta prove he's a weak old man and you're the dominant one. I would suggest messing up his hair as a good strategy.
DeSantis is too short to make the strategy in 62 work.
True.
Christie seems the person most likely to try this approach.
I am entirely confident that Donald Trump can not take a punch and does not know how to throw one. Tim Scott would stomp his ass into the ground.
I would nickname him "Baby Shark" and run adds about how Trump is afraid of sharks and needed Stormy Daniels to hold his hand during Shark Week because it's so crazy. Then make the "Baby Shark" hands while he's talking during the debates.
That was supposed to say "scary" not "crazy", though it is also so crazy.
DeSantis would throw a fistful of pudding in the eyes of his opponent, lick his fingers, and then dive in.
Very close proximity to College Station drama is this almost too dystopian headline from Houston: HISD to eliminate librarians and convert libraries into disciplinary centers at NES schools
"I am entirely confident that Donald Trump can not take a punch and does not know how to throw one."
He famously decked Dinald Trump Jr for not wearing a tie at university. But that was with a slap, not a punch.
Hitting other people's kids is a problem to, except in Houston, maybe.
62: It's not the same thing, but this reminds me of that strange day or two during the 2016 primaries when Marc Rubio decided to listen to all the sages telling him the thing to do was to give Trump back some of his own medicine and become a crude insult comic. This didn't go well.
The big problem is every Republican has a plan for how to win after Trump is out of the way, but none of those plans work if they are the person who took Trump out of the way.
76: Chris Christie seems to want to be the person who took Trump out of the way. The problem is that it almost certainly won't succeed.
"Though she knows it will never work
She loves the jerk"
74: He didn't stick with it. When Trump gets blowback for his loathsomeness, he leans into it -- to the point of open lawbreaking and insurrection. Rubio couldn't handle any blowback, and backed off immediately.
Rubio's actual execution of this wasn't so bad by traditional political standards -- but it was a little too polished. It was insufficiently crude.
With Trump, you're always wondering when the n-word is going to drop. He creates suspense.
The truth is, nobody is going to beat Trump at his game -- unless it's a jury or cardiovascular disease.
See also 75.
Since Twitter can't be linked anymore:
[2024 GOP debate]
TRUMP: Well I'll tell you something, Rob here has been very weak, he's been weak, he's been weak on crime, weak on drugs, really a weak man
DESANTIS: My name is not Ro--
MODERATOR: It is Mr. Trump's time, Rob
TRUMP: Rob is one of the rudest people I have ever met
The truth is, nobody is going to beat Trump at his game
I think this is the true part of 78 and the rest is equivocation.
A jury or cardiovascular disease might beat Trump, but I wouldn't say they are playing his game.
Elizabeth Warren shows how it's done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QD4csGWPo6o
I can imagine Chris Christie calling Trump a loser, and not being subtle about it in the least. "You lost to Hillary. You lost to Sleepy Joe once already. All the guys you chose for the Senate lost. All the guys you chose for governors lost. You lost and you choose losers. What are ya gonna do, bring us all down again when you lose the third time? Ladies and gentlemen, this is who Donald Trump has been all his life: a loser."