Pillaging

 This summer, I am writing a student reader - an abbreviated textbook replacement - to compensate for a new schedule with fewer class meetings and therefore fewer homework readings. Who cares about learning, when you can follow the trendy herd in school scheduling?

Anyway, I'm condensing six textbook readings on the Gilded Age into three readings (see "who cares about learning" above). As I do so, I find myself including things like posse comitatus or the Wong Kim Ark case that likely wouldn't be in an accelerated text, because they have such relevance today with Trump's plan.

This morning, I was reminded by a better historian than I that one of the primary assaults on the Post-Progressive State that Trump and Project 2025 have launched is on the idea of preserving public lands. The National Park system is something that my wife and I have inordinate fondness for. I doubt we will get to every single park - American Samoa and the Alaska parks around the Arctic Circle are a wee bit remote - but we are going to give it our best effort. In a few weeks, we are headed to Colorado to finally see Black Canyon of the Gunnison. Yeah, sure, sure, we are going to see our kids, but also Black Canyon of the Gunnison. 

Trump's decision to allow mineral exploitation of public lands and his efforts to shrink protected lands is something that isn't a headline in the avalanche of Trump's malfeasance and corrupt governance, though I would wager that bribes changed hands to make this happen. Some of this is corruption; some of this is kowtowing to businesses over the public weal; some of this is ideological hostility to a government that actually does things that people like; some of this is just "pwn the libtards."

What it is, is not good or popular. 

In the midst of our first Gilded Age, there were still enough public spirited people to create the National Park ideal. There were still enough farsighted people to see that preserving nature was both morally and economically proper. Republicans want to return us to the cavalcade of corruption and self-dealing of the first Gilded Age, but that age ended, and Dog willing this one will, too. 

Going Down With The Ship

 Morris has the tale of Trump's truly abysmal approval ratings. He's underwater among almost every demographic except "people who voted for him 2024" and "men over 65." Even "white, non-college" is basically 50-50. Even his voters - and I think over time, people will not admit to voting for him - are at only 84% approval. Even the motivated reasoning of justifying your choice isn't enough.

My general feeling as an historian is that - as Adam Smith said - there's a lot of ruin in a nation. We will come out of this period weakened, fractured, degraded, but over time, we can recover - as long as we put it behind us.

However, our school has been hit roughly every year with an instance of hate speech. It's anonymous, it's racist and/or homophobic and/or sexist. In other words, it's like so much of the vile corners of our internet culture. But more significantly, it has happened every year since 2017. 

Since 2017.

Look, the racism, sexism and homophobia were always there. I'm not naive. What this villain has done is brought that language, that hatred, that bigotry out of the shadows and made it acceptable. I would point to his video that depicted the Obamas as monkeys, as just one of a million examples that - in a moral nation - would be the end of this guy.

I Hate My Job, I Love My Job

 Working at a small independent school has been my life's work. I am not a perfect teacher or coach, but I care deeply - very deeply - about my student's growth.

Increasingly, though, it has become apparent that I no longer work for a small, community-based institution where we all labor, laugh and struggle together. 

I work for a corporation.

This makes believe in the mission of the school so much harder when I am not longer treated as a respected teacher with the independence to act on my own expertise and experience. As if things couldn't get any worse, yesterday we had a consultant firm come in and tell us that we will be instituting a radical new schedule next year. As he himself admitted, this will be very disruptive and we will struggle for at least one year, more likely two, to adapt to this new schedule.

The time we have with our students is precious and all most of us really want is the tools to teach them as well as we can. The Covid year of 2020-21 was so hard not simply because it was hard, but because we couldn't teach well. We knew we weren't teaching well, and it was soul crushing. Now, we are going to voluntarily teach poorly for a year or two to institute a new schedule that the consultant firm basically implements wherever they go. There really is no solid evidence that it's better, but they get paid to "disrupt" the "paradigm."

My wife and I are a few years from being able to retire. I would have liked to make it to 30 years here, but if I had the money, I would retire now. To paraphrase a political expression: I didn't leave the school, the school left me.

Accommodations

 Nowhere is Yglesias' manifest "confident ignorance" more apparent than when he writes about education. In the piece above, he does make some decent points, but he begins by misunderstanding the issue with accommodations. I have seen people who had a diagnosed learning issue who probably don't really have a substantial need for that accommodation, and I have seen students who absolutely need that accommodation to do credible work. The primary accommodations typically revolve around either time, testing environment or being able to use a computer to write an essay. Some students never really use a timed accommodation, whereas others simply can't function without it.

The issue is not that universities are destroying their standards, but that we have a class system where wealthier parents can afford to get their kids tested and accommodations installed. Yglesias does touch on this when he notes the consumer-mentality that schools have to engage in. We do, at times. We jettisoned our AP program, because it "looked bad" in comparison to other "elite" schools. Pedagogically, either having APs or not really isn't a massive difference in rigor, depending on how you replace the AP, but it was a marketing issue.

Similarly, with various accommodations, we are unlikely to deny a student's parents push for some form of accommodation. We have stopped giving 100% extra time, but the reality is that parents will argue - correctly - that we have an obligation to accommodate real learning issues. Are they overprescribed? Sure. Are they inherently bogus? Nope. Dyslexia has largely disappeared as a diagnosis, and been replaced by generic ADHD diagnoses, but dyslexia pretty much does exist. The accommodation of letting someone type their essay and utilize Grammarly allows them to accurately convey what they know that would be hard without being able to type. Woodrow Wilson was dyslexic and the typewriter saved his life. He obviously went on to a Phd, president of Princeton and then the United States. I'd say that accommodating his LD issue was worth it.

There are obvious issues with college education. Whining about accommodations is missing the point.

Debate v Argument

 Josh Marshall takes a run at the centrist sanewashing of Charlie Kirk. The Ezra Klein argument that Kirk "did politics the right way." Marshall points out that Kirk was not a "debater" but a "debate me, bro" guy. The latter are provocateurs who use rhetorical pugilism to entertain. Lots of strawman arguing and so forth. Marshall says debate is good, but debate bros are useless.

I'm circling in on something else that I'm refining for a school talk in January.

Debate, actually, is kind of bad. Debate is a sport. There are tactics - of which people like Kirk and Ben Shapiro are good at - that can "win points" and "win" the debate. It's a zero sum exercise - as much of our politics is.

Instead, I think we need to argue more and debate less. Arguing seems angrier, but I don't think that's the way to look at it. When I would get into arguments in college, it was fun! Even arguments with my dad were engaging. The key thing, though, is not see at argument as a win-lose situation. When you argue, you have to defend your position. To the degree that you attack the other person's position, it should be from the perspective of trying to actually understand what they are saying, rather than creating a strawman to disassemble. 

The best arguments that I have had are ones where I come either better understand their position and better understand my own. It's a process of discovery, not a zero-sum contest. 

Losing that has crippled public discourse. 

Small Rant

 This is about something personal, so I'm sorry to my five readers who were expecting something pithy about the world. 

We have a new Head of School, and he has a mandate to shake some things up, as we have been run mostly the same way for the history of the school, which stretches back to 1890.  Fine, we need that.

One thing that has happened this summer is that we have had a lot of renovations of administrative offices and the transitioning of a couple of classrooms into administrative offices. What we have not had - for many years - is the renovation and upgrading of classroom space. We had a small spasm of doing that over a decade ago, but there are some classrooms that are essentially what they were like either when I returned to teach here in 2000 or when I graduated in 1985. All we've really changed is the addition of a massive screen that allows us to project our laptops. 

It became clear to me many years ago that I was never going to be on the administrative track, so I dedicated myself to being the best teacher I could be. I concede that my definition of "best teacher" does not always gibe with the current pedagogical fads, but I have kids who come back and thank me for their experiences, and that strikes me as the validation for my pedagogy.

The trend since the new guy came here has been to expand the administration of the school, and there's a compelling argument that this was needed. The old Head ran everything out of his office and things got missed as a result.

However, prioritizing administrative spaces over teaching spaces strikes me as an extension of the problems facing higher education. We charge a ridiculous amount of money for a high school, and it's not going to massive pay increases for the teachers. 

Luckily, I'm hopefully about 6-7 years from retirement, but I worry about the long term viability of all this. 

AI And VC

 There's a long piece in the Times about Uber's problem with sexual assault and sexual misconduct. My wife sent it to me, because I was dismayed at how easily she came to getting comfortable in a Waymo on her last trip to California. To me, Waymo represents a terrifying venue for tech companies like Uber to fire their drivers, many of whom depend on driving for Uber or Lyft. Her point is that there are a lot of cases of Uber drivers engaging in everything from creepy behavior to rape. The Times article points out - and the Uber spokesperson argues - that statistically, the number of these incidents is small, but the absolute number of events is large. That is to say, the percentage of Uber rides that end in sexual misconduct is low, but it still happens a lot. What's more important is that the number really needs to be zero.

However, the argument that Waymo will save women from sexual assault or misconduct seems to miss the problem, which is that Uber has tools to dramatically reduce this problem, and they have often avoided implementing them. One tool is to record every trip, but if they do that, then they are admitting that their drivers are employees, and that has been a bright red line for them. They do not want to be responsible for providing health insurance or other benefits for what they term "independent contractors." 

They also had a plan to allow female riders to select only female drivers, but they shelved that when Trump was elected, in case you want to know where the heads are of major corporations today.

There is the problem of sexual assault, which predates Uber obviously. Then there is the problem of how Uber was run - it was a classic tech bro startup under Travis Kalanick. They wanted to grow, grow, grow, and efforts to preserve passenger safety were downplayed in order to grow the company and prepare for the all-important IPO.

That dynamic in some way, shape or form will be present as Waymo scales up. What's more, it will be present as AI scales up. We may already be seeing it.

Here is a chart of browsing searches for OpenAI. It collapses when school gets out. For all the hype and hoopla about what AI can do, it fundamentally is being used - at best - as a shortcut around the rigors of learning. The idea that AI will be able to cure cancer is appealing (especially since RFK is killing cancer research). The reality is that it's a cheating machine, and it is in the best interests of the people running those companies to insure that no restrictions occur when using their machine until it gets profitable.

The logic of Silicon Valley Venture Capitalism is an aggressive form of capitalism that is dedicated to rapidly scaling up a product, issuing an IPO and then cashing out. You can go from rags to riches pretty damned quick, but eventually you get to enshittification and poor customer experiences.

Waymo will cut corners if it means quick profitability. Not the BIG corners, because they have to show that they are viable. The little corners, the one that causes a problem once every 2000 rides. These are the same incentives that Uber faced, and Waymo is not special.

As for AI, it's painful as an educator and a parent to realize that what we think of as learning, the way we have learned for thousands of years, is going to be altered to suit the venture capitalists who want to leverage AI into billion dollar paydays. They could create safeguards - digital watermarks - that lets a teacher know if a student has used AI to generate their answers, but they won't, because they want to crush their IPO.

AI Utopianism is just rhetoric covering for AI Venture Capitalism.

It's Not The Ease Of The Work

 I haven't linked much to Yglesias recently (in part because I now seem to link almost exclusively to Richardson and Krugman). Today, however, he's so deep on his bullshit that I need to.

His argument is that people have devalued the Humanities because they are too easy. Now, there is absolutely grade inflation, and that grade inflation has hit Humanities harder than other disciplines. But nowhere does he offer a shred of evidence that these courses are easier than they used to be.

As a teacher and the parent of college students, I think the answer is far more about how you perceive your job prospects after you graduate. We have turned post-secondary education into a commodity that you develop in return for better job prospects when you graduate. One reason why STEM majors are more respected is not just that they are hard, but you will find a job after graduating and it will pay well.

If we just look at the Ivies (which is an outlier demographic), over a third of students are majoring in Computer Science, Econometrics or Applied Math. Our "adopted" Ukrainian son is at an Ivy and majoring in Applied Mathematics. He was looking at the Humanities BUT THEY WERE TOO HARD. He's ridiculously intelligent, and his intelligence is wired for math in a way that makes the difficulties of math more appealing to him. Roughly 15% of Ivy leaguers are majoring in History, International Relations or Political Science. Ideally, that number would be around 25%, but if you compare that to the 4% that are English majors, that says something, too.

Lets rack focus back to all US universities. Of all degrees awarded, 19% were in Business, 13% in "health professions", 7% in social science and history, 7% in biological and medical science, 6% in psychology and 6% in engineering. The key numbers there are the top two. The reason almost a third of college graduates are getting Business and Health Professions (not pre-med) degrees is that that is where the money is. These majors are not especially rigorous in the way that Engineering is. That doesn't stop kids from signing up.

At no point in Yglesias' argument does he offer evidence. It's all a priori assumptions.

Typical of a philosophy major.

Enshittification And AI

 Paul Krugman has been writing about Cory Doctorow's thesis of "Enshittification." Basically, the model is that tech companies create a platform that creates "network effects" - the more people who use it, the better it is. The early days of Facebook, when it was so awesome to reconnect with people you hadn't seen in years or decades, is a great example of network effects.

Once you get enough users, you "enshittify" by exploiting your captured customer base - higher fees, more ads, more and more ads, worse customer service and experience. The general pissed off-edness of America in 2025 is at least in part a product of people being drawn together and then hating the platforms and experiences that bring them together. This backlash, posits Krugman, has led to the backlash against Big Tech.

Now, I don't think every Big Tech executive has become Elon Musk or Peter Thiel. There's an interesting read by an actual scientist about the delusions of tech billionaires. Basically, the ecosystem of Silicon Valley is geared towards the Start Up, whereby you hype some new platform or tech and get your IPO millions and then coast on to your next project. The problem is, according to Adam Becker, is that most of their ideas (especially Musk's and those like him) are just laughable, derived from adolescent infatuation with science fiction. 

Silicon Valley is not about science, it's about venture capitalism. Elon Musk is not a scientist, inventor or engineer, he's a VC guy with just enough scientific knowledge to create shit like the Cyber Truck.

Which brings me to AI.

AI is a great example of the Silicon Valley hype machine. Becker:

There’s also no particular reason to believe that the kinds of machines that we are building now and calling “AI” are sufficiently similar to the human brain to be able to do what humans do. Calling the systems that we have now “AI” is a kind of marketing tool. You can see that if you think about the deflation in the term that’s occurred just in the last 30 years. When I was a kid, calling something “AI” meant Commander Data from Star Trek, something that can do what humans do. Now, AI is, like, really good autocomplete. 

That’s not to say that it would never be possible to build an artificial machine that does what humans do, but there’s no reason to think that these can and a lot of reason to think that they can’t. And the self-improvement thing is kind of silly, right? It’s like saying, “Oh, you can become an infinitely good brain surgeon by doing brain surgery on the brain surgery part of your brain.” 

As as educator, I find AI deeply troubling. As a high powered search engine...OK. There is something nice about searching for something like "How to grow strawberries" and getting a decent summary of the conventional wisdom about how to make a wee strawberry patch. 

However, AI is pretty much just a hyper-powered predictive text machine. Right now, I could ask it to write an essay on a given prompt - By 1876, who had won the argument about the future of America, Thomas Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton - and I could get a B+ essay.

Sam Altman and other AI acolytes suggest that AI will be far more impactful. As Becker summarizes:

 (Altman)said something like, “Oh, global warming is a really serious problem, but if we have a super-intelligent AI, then we can ask it, ‘Hey, how do you build a lot of renewable energy? And hey, how do you build a lot of carbon capture systems? And hey, how do we build them at scale cheaply and quickly?’ And then it would solve global warming.” What Sam Altman is saying is that his plan for solving global warming is to build a machine that nobody knows how to build and can’t even define and then ask it for three wishes.

You can see the toxic tech positivity at work there. Then you get a combination of Groupthink and financial FOMO, where everyone jumps on the hype-train.

Meanwhile, in the real world, students are using AI to cheat and short circuit their learning and consuming massive amounts of energy to do so.

What will happen, if enshittification continues, is that people will become more and more reliant on AI for basic tasks that might have required them to acquire real-life skills (academic or otherwise) and then once companies have captured people into AI dependency, they will exploit them for profit.

The only reason to believe that is because it's what they have always done before.

The Department Of Miseducation

 I have no response to the current Supreme Court's decision to allow the Executive Branch to unilaterally gut the Department of Education. It's obviously part of the Project 2025 Playbook that was so unpopular when it was leaked a year ago, that Trump disavowed it, only to make it his operating software in January.

The idea that a president can unilaterally fire civil servants with the express intent of ending a cabinet level department that was created and funded by Congress is basically tyranny. It is executive power unconstrained by law. What's more, we know full well that if President Ossoff fires 90% of ICE agents in January of 2029, the Supreme Court will rule that illegal. 

Or - perhaps more likely - the current ruling is a placeholder. They removed the stay, they did not rule the firings were OK. They will let Trump and his minions terrorize the Federal workforce, fire a bunch of people and then rule that he couldn't actually do that in late 2028. At that point, good people intent on public service will have zero desire to sign up to work for a capricious and senile old man intent on, you know, terrorizing the Federal workforce. The Departments that Trump targets will be gutted and hollow shells, but the Court will eventually rule, "Hey, you couldn't actually do that!" once there is the threat of a Democratic president.

To this point, the only institutions offering up even a modicum of resistance to Trump are the lower courts. As servants of the law, these judges - appointed by presidents of both parties - have been aghast at the nihilistic lawlessness of this presidency. As Richardson notes in the piece linked above, two thirds of the lawyers whose job it is to defend the administration have quit, either because what they are being asked to do is illegal, nonsensical or more likely both. 

Trump will increasingly be represented in District and Circuit courts by idiots like Alina Habba and Jeanine Pirro, and the administration will lose on the merits, only to have the Supreme Court stay any remedy until 2028-29.

Whomever assumes power after Trump - and I'm still going to assume that there will be actual elections in the future - is going to have to unwind a LOT of shit. The Supreme Court, however, could be the hardest institution to unfuck. 

Functionally Illiterate

 Tucked into her discussion of Trump's shifting position on war with Iran, Richardson notes that Tulsi Gabbard - whose job seems to be on a death watch - considered delivering the Presidential Daily Briefing as a video, because Trump doesn't read. compare that to Trump's listless, fumbling speech the night of the strikes on Iran. He seemed both half asleep and read as if he had never seen the words before.

Trump is not "illiterate" in the sense that he cannot read. He's illiterate in the sense that he doesn't or won't. Again, this makes him a perfect avatar for so many Americans in the first quarter of the 21st century.

When we saw Obama speak the other night, he made an off the cuff remark about reading that he then circled back to and amplified. Reading, more than any other activity, expands our minds. Reading, he said, requires us to slow down and consider what we are seeing. Reading narratives forces empathy upon us. I'm reading Percival Everett's James, and I have to place myself inside Jim's perspective, hear his voice in my head and feel what he's feeling. The same was true of the last narrative non-fiction books I've read about 18th century mariners. I have to imagine the seas, feel the hunger, taste the awful food.

Reading is dying. Of course, it's been dying. The 1984 film, Ghostbusters, features a throwaway line from Egon: "Print is dead." In the same ways that American education has always been failing, reading has always been on the decline. 

Yet this era feels different. My students don't read for pleasure (except the brightest ones). Sometimes they don't even read for class. Many use various apps to have the text read to them. This passivity simply doesn't work for learning. Combine this with the prevalence of ChatGPT, and students are simply abandoning the foundations of real learning.

Trump, therefore, really IS representative of America in that way. The reality TV star and tabloid feature reflects a country that is slowly watching its critical thinking wither away. Trump is stupid. However, I do think he has a reading based learning disability. That's why he was shipped off to New York Military Academy. That's what rich folks did with kids with learning disabilities back then. Having a reading disability is NOT being stupid. However, if you don't work around your ADHD or dyslexia, then it's like just giving up walking when you can drive. It's like becoming a shut-in. 

Anyway, that guy - who is not bright, has a learning disability, hasn't worked to compensate for that LD issue, has used wealth instead to make sure he never has to work around that LD issue - is now having to make sophisticated and nuanced decisions of national security.

Subtlety and Nuance

 Today we graduated another Senior class, and now my final task is to write end of term comments on my underclassmen. I teach at a very good school and have very good students, but the difference between very good and excellent is usually how well a student can grapple with and convey nuance in their writing. Not a reflexive bothsides, but real nuance and qualification in their arguments. 

On a side note, that's why I hate Debate Club type of academics. They seek not to understand complexity but to "win" their maximalist position. There are important skills involved in debate, but the idea of winning warps an appreciation of how few issues really are black and white.

I was thinking of that, also, while reading Paul Krugman talk about how deindustrialization is not simply a product of globalization and outsourcing. America is the second largest manufacturing country in the world, even if our total number of workers in manufacturing is smaller than it used to be and much smaller as a percentage of the work force. The biggest culprit is automation. 

If you understand deindustrialization as a process whereby many jobs are made much more efficient because of machines and robots, you see a process whereby America does still make things, we just don't employ as many people to do it. 

His argument is actually about AI and what that will do to service and skilled workers. Basic economics says that if AI makes a bunch of jobs obsolete, then we will just create new jobs. I worry more about AI making us even stupider than we already are, but if I'm worried that "this time will be different" I need to remember that rarely is that actually true.

All of which is to say, navigating the modern world successfully requires people who can understand and grapple with those subtleties. Trump and MAGA deal only in certainties. 

Yesterday, Trump "delivered" a rambling incoherent speech at West Point that would have had the press calling for Joe Biden - if he had delivered it - to resign by Monday. At the same time, we have the MAGA war on Harvard, a war designed to impoverish the country of the sort of critical thinkers that the modern world requires.

I'm old enough to remember when Japan was going to eclipse us. It didn't happen, because Japan has too few children and refuses to let immigrants come into their country. Recently, it has been China that was going to eat our lunch, but I felt that they insular, corrupt government and business environment of China would eventually fail. 

What I did not expect was for the US to shut itself off from immigrants and embrace clannish, corrupt politics - importing the worst aspects of Japanese and Chinese weaknesses.

As others have noted: If Donald Trump was a foreign agent intent on destroying America's place in the world, what would he be doing differently?

Actual Lawfare

 I had a couple of interesting conversations yesterday. One was with friends worried about Trump involving the Insurrection Act and turning it on Americans. The other was with our Head of School about the decision of our umbrella organization to cancel it's People of Color Conference. The basic gist of so many conversations these days is: How afraid should I/we be?

With the Insurrection Act, I actually think the risk is pretty low. Yes, he might send the army to the Mexican border, but I'm not sure that holds up to legal scrutiny. If he's claiming an "invasion" then that's not an insurrection. Sending troops to patrol the Arizona deserts is not a huge concern for me, given everything else that's going on. However, my friend was going to Mexico and wondering if they would be let back into the country. 

There are certainly anecdotes about people being harassed at customs, even US citizens. Still - at least as of this writing - citizens have rights. If Trump tries to override two and a half centuries of American rights, the Courts will tell him to fuck off. If he violates the Courts, then we could very well be in an 1859 moment. Maybe the country disintegrates. 

The thing is, you can't live in that constant tremulous fear all the time. What's more, it is that fear that constitutes their greatest weapon. They have almost zero legal standing for what they are doing. They need people to be afraid.

Which brings me to the discussion about how private schools are navigating this moment. The gist of it was that while most schools disagree with the decision to cancel the POCC, they are hoping to avoid a showdown with the limitless resources of the Federal government. Josh Marshall kind of runs through the calculations about how to fight back. It's possible, but the sheer scope of what could be over the horizon is really daunting. If you're the Sierra Club, how much money are you prepared to sink into lawyers to defend yourself against the entire Justice Department?

I get it.

However, as Paul Krugman points out, these people are fucking idiots. They are really pretty incompetent. They obscure their idiocy with violence of action, but it's still idiocy. Take the situations with Harvard. They sent the letter by mistake and then, when Harvard stood up to them, they said, actually we did mean the letter that we didn't mean to send. Elsewhere in Krugman's post, he talks about how Bessant went behind Navarro's back to get the modest reductions in tariffs. 

These people are a clown show, but because they are scary clowns people are backing away.

Universities are both some of the most vulnerable institutions to this illegal set of actions, and also, perhaps well suited to fight back.

But only if they fight back together. 

David Brooks - David Fucking Brooks - gets it.

It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.

This is exactly right (It's Brooks, he goes off the rails a bit at the end). The president is not sovereign; the people are. If there is a coordinated effort across all segments of American society to resist this lawlessness, then we can stop this before the midterm elections that are oh so far away.

One of the things I've been worried about is the generational damage Trump can do to the Federal workforce. The DOGE purges will weaken us as a country for years. However, at this point, I think any lawyer with respect for the rule of law needs to draw a line that they will not cross.

It would be supremely ironic if DOGE is out there crippling the government through illegal layoffs and lawyers at the DOJ crippled MAGA by resigning en masse.

If the greatest cudgel that Trump holds is the possibility of endless lawsuits, he needs a large supply of lawyers. What has become apparent from the jump is that most MAGA lawyers fall into the Alina Habba camp: manifestly incompetent. 

Harvard punching back has shown the cracks that every single bully has. If 1,000 universities band together, how will Trump react? If he order the DOJ to pursue prosecutions in violation of the law, the lawyers should resign. In fact, I'd love to see some of the phalanx of pissed of judges begin disbarment proceedings against some of the lawyers who are operating in contempt of court.

Heather Cox Richardson delivered remarks in celebration of the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere's ride.

Paul Revere didn’t wake up on the morning of April 18, 1775, and decide to change the world. That morning began like many of the other tense days of the past year, and there was little reason to think the next two days would end as they did. Like his neighbors, Revere simply offered what he could to the cause: engraving skills, information, knowledge of a church steeple, longstanding friendships that helped to create a network. And on April 18, he and his friends set out to protect the men who were leading the fight to establish a representative government.

The work of Newman and Pulling to light the lanterns exactly 250 years ago tonight sounds even less heroic. They agreed to cross through town to light two lanterns in a church steeple. It sounds like such a very little thing to do, and yet by doing it, they risked imprisonment or even death. It was such a little thing…but it was everything. And what they did, as with so many of the little steps that lead to profound change, was largely forgotten until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used their story to inspire a later generation to work to stop tyranny in his own time.

What Newman and Pulling did was simply to honor their friendships and their principles and to do the next right thing, even if it risked their lives, even if no one ever knew. And that is all anyone can do as we work to preserve the concept of human self-determination. In that heroic struggle, most of us will be lost to history, but we will, nonetheless, move the story forward, even if just a little bit.

And once in a great while, someone will light a lantern—or even two—that will shine forth for democratic principles that are under siege, and set the world ablaze.

Holidays

 After a grueling couple of weeks, I just finished what I hope is my last work until we return in early January. After a year's sabbatical, it was a rough readjustment to working every damned day (including Sundays, damnit). The school is also going through some transitions under our new Head. Meanwhile, we are about to buy a plot of land to build a retirement home on, while hoping Trump and his assorted idiots don't destroy the country or economy. My wife decided that she wasn't up to a regular Christmas, which she usually pours a lot of work into. So we are all off to Florida to lay in the sun. (We have a house sitter, so don't think you can break in, Wet Bandits.)

Anyway, Happy Holidays. May your days be merry and bright.

This Is A Hard Job To Love

 When it's December and you have coaching, competitions, end of semester rush to grade, make up exams, conduct review sessions, give the exams, grade the exams, write the class comments, write the advisor letters, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Let's Hope December Will Be Better...

 November obviously began...poorly. We have spent the rest of the month careening around Trumpistan and his desire to stock his Cabinet with uniquely unqualified and contemptuous people. As for me, the Thanksgiving was a bit rough for reasons I need not get into, and now we have the three week sprint of wrapping up classes and all the grading that comes with that, giving exams and all the grading that comes with that and then comments, with some longish wrestling days thrown in. Should be a gas!

Pray for me now, a sinner, in the hour of my need.

Algorithms For Fascism

 There's a lot of deserved criticism of how the media has completely and utterly failed the American public over the last nine years when it comes to Donald Trump. Some of it is broken down here by DougJ/Pitchbot and James Fallows.

The great paradox, of course, is that journalists will overwhelmingly vote for Harris and they likely would have done the same for Biden. So why does their coverage suck?

First, there's the fear of allowing that bias of coloring their work. If you generally support Democrats you are going to be very guarded about calling Trump in the grips of fascism and cognitive decline. OK, to a point that's fine. Yes, guard against your biases, but sometimes they are right!

There's an argument that it's all about maintaining access to Republican sources. The thing is, that might explain Maggie Haberman or Olivia Nuzzi, it doesn't explain the Times as a whole.

My feeling is that it all comes back to the media landscape and the difficulty of grabbing readership, market share and ad revenues. Reporting - real reporting - is kind of expensive as it's labor intensive. In order to maintain the staff that the Times has - and that most local newspapers do not - you have to get as many "clicks" as possible. That's how you wind up with headlines that "sanewash" Trump's craziness. 

People's outrage over the Times' abdication of calling Trump what Trump is actually drives some sort of engagement. Even if you cancel your subscription, you might still click through a link on social media and that's the model they rely on.

The fundamental insight of Silicon Valley that outrage drives "engagement" just as much as intellectual interest is going to break our democracy if we aren't careful.

Last Thursday, Jonathan Haidt came to speak to the school about social media and phones and the deleterious impact on children, especially girls. I'm about to turn 58, so I can control somewhat my feeds on social media to people I mostly agree with and Moo Deng. Kids can't filter that way and many other can't either. I probably do spend too much time on Twitter, but I really try not to click on or respond to things that are driven by clickbait. 

The news media used to be about seeking big truths and holding power accountable. Now it seems to be about engaging readers via clickbait headlines that often don't match the text of the article. 

One of the points Haidt made was that when we began the internet age in the '90s and early '00s, there was a lot of hopefulness about the democratization of knowledge. But my students sit in class with a lap top open and I ask a question like "What's the GDP of Canada?" and they stare at me blankly, because that's just not what they use computers for and certainly not what they use their phones for.

I'm not convinced "the Internet was a mistake" but I am convinced social media and the engagement algorithms are.

The Coddling of the American Mind

 Jonathan Haidt is coming to our school next week, and somehow I landed on his piece the Coddling of the American Mind independently of that visit. I'm generally skeptical of the latest pedagogical fad, because I simply am not that impressed with the sort of scholarship that goes on in education programs. It seems an intensely ideological field with few of the sort of "challenge everything" mindsets you see in other disciplines.

Haidt and Greg Lukianoff are not education professors. Haidt is a social psychologist and Lukianoff a lawyer. They attack the principle that students are so delicate in their feelings that things that might upset them should be avoided. Thus, we get mandates about microaggressions. I remember my microaggression workshop. It was largely helpful in the "don't be as asshole" toolbox that we should all seek to enlarge.

However, we are now being told what language we should not use in written comments. "Suzy appears not to care and has demonstrated little work ethic" is now considered loaded language that contains some sort of "trauma" that we need to shield Suzy from. It might even be considered racist if Suzy is non-White. Suzy's actual engagement with the work is secondary to the need to protect her from language that she might find distressing. 

Last year, when I was gone, the school more or less but a kibosh on discussing the Gazan War. The raw feelings and intensely complicated nature of this conflict has created feelings that many students - here and at universities - simply cannot process effectively. Some of the screaming about this comes from Bad Actors simply looking to leverage their outrage for attention. That's a separate issue. The inability of young people to argue passionately and then when it's over walk away with being traumatized has largely disappeared.

What makes Haidt's argument interesting is that he points out that this approach has NOT led to better mental health outcomes. That, ultimately, is why this sort of "coddling" needs to stop. 

How To Teach In Trumpistan

 I'm headed to a three day conference (sort of two days) to learn how to teach in a polarized world. I've done the pre-readings, and they seem inadequate to a world in which one of our two political parties have become an authoritarian cult of personality around a habitual liar.

I'll let you - my imaginary reader - know if I learn anything.

"Progressive"

 I think I may have written on this before, but it keeps needling me and no one reads this shit anyway...

Back in the Bush 43 years, those of us left-of-center were dismayed at how "liberal" had been turned into a slur by people like Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove. So, in a triumph of branding over substance, liberals began calling themselves "progressives" as a way to accent that one form of liberalism is about the faith in human progress. Liberals/progressives believe that reason combined with good evidence can lead to better policy outcomes and harkens back to a similar reform movement in the period before and during World War I.

At some point, "progressive" became a term for the further left reaches of American politics. Some of this is simply because they, too, hate "liberals." 

To back up a bit, there are two flavors of "liberal". There's the one above, where people think that generally speaking, policies can be improved for the greater good. The other is a belief in liberty, which when termed "classical liberalism" refers to restricting the power of the state to increase liberty. Prior to about 1870, at least in the US, the state was considered the greater threat to human liberty. Since then, a new form of liberalism identifies plutocracy as the greater threat. Still, "neoliberalism" was the name of the movement to roll back some of the efforts made by the New Deal and Great Society to address economic inequality. 

It's a confusing term. 

What we have now, is a schism between "progressives" and "liberals" like Biden. Many of these "progressives" are quite young, which...whatever. Still, what's interesting to me in 2024 is that the two flavors of "liberal" are merging, and the self-styled leftist/progressive axis is not part of that merger.

To support the Democratic Party today means to support both the OLD progressive/liberal idea of reasoned, utilitarian policy making AND a defense of freedom of expression. I'm taking a workshop next week that addresses some of these issues in academia where it's becoming more and more of a minority of self-styled "progressives" who exercise a heckler's veto over anything that might discomfort them. 

With a dangerous autocratic demagogue having turned one of our two major parties into a cult of personality, I would hope that there would be common cause between the two forms of liberals, because I'm not sure we can count on the "progressives" of 2024.