Category: Academia

University politics and administrators.

MIT bureaucrats try dialogue with pro-Hamas students

by philg

A follow-up to Talking with a pro-Hamas college student…

The righteous at MIT have been demanding that the university cut any and all research ties with universities inside the Zionist entity. The demand has been backed up with demonstrations, including an encampment. From May 6:

I’m not sure if these translations are accurate, but here’s what the students and friends were saying in Arabic:

(Fortunately, they threatened Zionists with death and did not burn any rainbow flags, a hateful act that would have resulted in a 16-year prison sentence. And why are they wearing masks if they chant “the masks are off”?)

Here’s an email sent today to all MITers from the president:

At my direction, very early this morning, the encampment on Kresge lawn was cleared. The individuals present in the encampment at the time were given four separate warnings, in person, that they should depart or face arrest. The 10 who remained did not resist arrest and were peacefully escorted from the encampment by MIT police officers and taken off campus for booking.

They warned them three times and didn’t follow up and were surprised that the 4th warning was also ignored? Paging the psych department!

The encampment began on Sunday, April 21, in violation of clear Institute guidelines well known to the student organizers. It slowly grew. Though it was peaceful [see AP video, above], its presence generated controversy, including persistent calls from some of you that we shut it down. While we asked the students repeatedly to leave the site, we chose for a time not to interfere, in part out of respect for the Institute’s foundational principles of free expression.

…

On Monday, May 6, judging that we could not sustain the extraordinary level of effort required to keep the encampment and the campus community safe, we directed the encamped students to leave the site voluntarily or face clear disciplinary consequences. Some left. Some stayed inside, while others chose to step just outside the camp and protest. Some chose to invite to the encampment large numbers of individuals from outside MIT, including dozens of minors, who arrived in response to social media posts.

Late that afternoon, aided by people from outside MIT, many of the encampment students breached and forcibly knocked down the safety fencing and demolished most of it, on their way to reestablishing the camp. In that moment, the peaceful nature of the encampment shifted. Disciplinary measures were not sufficient to end it nor to deter students from quickly reestablishing it.

Wednesday, May 8, was marked by a series of escalating provocations. In the morning, pro-Palestinian supporters physically blocked the entrance and exit to the Stata Center garage though they eventually dispersed. Later, after taking down Israeli and American flags that had been hung by counter protestors, some individuals defaced Israeli flags with red handprints, in the presence of Israeli students and faculty. Several pro-Israel supporters then entered the camp to confront and shout at the protestors. Throughout, the opposing groups grew in numbers. With so many opposing individuals in close quarters, tensions ran very high. The day ended with more suspensions – and a rally by the pro-Palestinian students.

Thursday, May 9, pro-Palestinian students again blocked the mouth of the Stata garage, preventing community members from entering and exiting to go about their business, and requiring that Vassar Street be shut down. This time, they refused directions from the police to leave and allow passage of cars. Their action therefore resulted in nine arrests.

Here’s my favorite part:

Sustained effort to reach a resolution through dialogue

We tried every path we could to find a way out through dialogue. In various combinations, senior administrative leaders and faculty officers met with the protesters many times over almost two weeks. This sustained team effort benefited from the involvement of at least a dozen faculty members and alumni who have been supporting and advising the protestors, and, in the final stages, a professional mediator who was meeting with the students.

These academic bureaucrats imagined that their credentials would be effective and that the anti-genocide righteous would change their minds and say “oh, actually genocide is okay.” I wish that we could have hooked up an MRI machine to their brains and received a download of their thought process! Given the facts according to the pro-Hamas folks (the Zionist entity is committing genocide against peaceful Palestinians for no reason) how would they be persuaded by words any more than Gazans themselves would be persuaded by mere words to give up on their goals of liberating Al-Quds, destroying the Zionist entity, and establishing a river-to-the-sea Palestinian state?

How about at University of Florida? A neighbor’s son is just home from his semester there. I asked what he thought about the pro-Palestinian protests on campus. “I haven’t seen any,” he responded. “I think those are at Columbia.”

Related:

  • “FSU police, sprinklers put damper on Pro-Palestinian student protest, occupy Landis plans” (Tallahassee Democrat): [Florida State University] police made the students — members of Tallahassee Students for a Democratic Society — take down a handful of tents that were set up for a mere five minutes on the grassy space predawn due to FSU regulation 2.007, which prohibits camping on university lands, according to a university spokesperson. … During the protest, student speakers also expressed how FSU has not acknowledged Arab-American Heritage Month this April or shared any statement to show support to Arab and Muslim students of the university.
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Talking with a pro-Hamas college student

by philg

All of my attempts at humor fall flat, as a general rule. In January, for example, I jokingly asked a friend who had visited family in Madrid over Christmas if he’d had to navigate around pro-Hamas protests. He took it as a straight question and gave me a detailed straight answer about the various protests and the parts of the city they’d blocked and what he had done to try to get where he was going.

I needed to talk to a friend’s son regarding an unrelated topic. He’s an avid videogamer and an engineering major at a college in a Rust Belt city whose last period of sustained job growth was during the administration of Gerald Ford. It’s not in Michigan or anywhere else where Islam is the primary religion. He lost years of high school and social life to coronapanic (and, despite diligent masking and meek acceptance of lockdowns, of course got COVID several times). One might imagine that he and his cohorts would have other issues on their minds than the suffering of the noble Gazans… and one would be wrong. I jokingly asked how the pro-Hamas encampments have been at his university. It turned out that he was a regularly attendee at said protests/encampments. “It’s got a really good vibe,” he said, “though only about 50 people actually sleep there every night.”

He took issue with my characterization of the demonstrators as “pro-Hamas”. He said that their goal was to “stop the killing of children.” He agreed that the death of bystanders was inevitable in war and said that he did not think Israel should be allowed to pursue any military activities in Gaza due to the risk that additional children would die. Essentially, the IDF would have to withdraw. I asked “Since Hamas is the elected and popular government of Gaza, doesn’t that mean that Hamas would resume their rule over the territory?” He said “yes” but disagreed that demanding an action that would inevitably ensure continued Hamas rule could be considered a “pro-Hamas” position.

The punchline to the above conversation is that the young man is… Jewish! His mother is Israeli, in fact. She’s an elite wealthy multiple passport European-heritage Netanyahu-hating Israeli, but nowhere near ready to surrender to Hamas as her son is. (Netanyahu’s core support comes from the plurality of Israelis whose ancestors were expelled from majority-Muslim countries, such as Iraq, Iran, Yemen, etc., after 1948. The European-heritage Jews who arrived prior to 1948 are generally much richer if for no other reason than they bought real estate in Tel Aviv before the population grew so dramatically.)

I tried to get him to see that his philosophy, if applied equally to all nations, meant that any army that can surround itself with children becomes invulnerable. Russia could conquer Ukraine, for example, if they just brought some children along to ride in their military vehicles. He more or less admitted that, but stuck to his position that “too many” children had been killed in the recent Gaza battles and, therefore, Israel had to accept defeat and withdraw. (Palestinians themselves do not seem to think that whatever has happened recently is bad enough that they would be willing to abandon any of their military goals. One never hears of Palestinians who say “war is too costly so we will have to compromise for peace and recognize Israel within her current borders.” Instead, they say that they are willing to wage war forever if that’s what it takes to liberate Al-Quds, destroy the Zionist entity, and enjoy a river-to-the-sea Hamas-ruled nation. (cue UNRWA to pay for food, health care, education, etc. until this glorious day arrives))

His siblings also went to public schools in an all-Democrat city and he says that they’re fully aligned with him on the Israel/Gaza issue. My text to his parents: “I would have thought with all of his shooter game experience that he’d believe that sometimes a nation does have to use its military to do military stuff.”

That’s my dive into the wisdom of today’s best-educated youth!

Here’s an example Rust Belt encampment (Syracuse, New York):

Related:

  • “The Adults Are Still in Charge at the University of Florida” (WSJ; Ben Sasse, formerly U.S. Senator from Nebraska and current president at UF): Higher education isn’t daycare. … Higher education has for years faced a slow-burning crisis of public trust. Mob rule at some of America’s most prestigious universities in recent weeks has thrown gasoline on the fire. Pro-Hamas agitators have fought police, barricaded themselves in university buildings, shut down classes, forced commencement cancellations, and physically impeded Jewish students from attending lectures. … universities must distinguish between speech and action. Speech is central to education … The heckler gets no veto. The best arguments deserve the best counterarguments. … we draw a hard line at unlawful action. Speech isn’t violence. Silence isn’t violence. Violence is violence. … universities make things worse with halfhearted appeals to abide by existing policies and then immediately negotiating with 20-year-old toddlers. Appeasing mobs emboldens agitators elsewhere. … universities need to recommit themselves to real education. Rather than engage a wide range of ideas with curiosity and intellectual humility, many academic disciplines have capitulated to a dogmatic view of identity politics. Students are taught to divide the world into immutable categories of oppressors and oppressed, and to make sweeping judgements accordingly. With little regard for historical complexity, personal agency or individual dignity, much of what passes for sophisticated thought is quasireligious fanaticism. … Young men and women with little grasp of geography or history—even recent events like the Palestinians’ rejection of President Clinton’s offer of a two-state solution—wade into geopolitics with bumper-sticker slogans they don’t understand.
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Could the elite universities clear their pro-Hamas encampments with Taylor Swift music?

by philg

The U.S. got Manuel Noriega out of the Vatican’s embassy in Panama City by playing Van Halen 24/7. I wonder if administrators at elite universities could clear their “river to the sea” encampments of Hamas/Hezbollah/UNRWA/Palestinian Islamic Jihad supporters via the magic of Taylor Swift. Given that the only thing more expensive, and therefore presumably more sought-after, than a day at an elite university is a day at a Taylor Swift concert (see Long term effects of taking away $5-10,000 from every upper middle class family with a female child?) nobody could complain about a DJ spinning up Ms. Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department on repeat. The schools are mostly shut down so 85 dBA (keep it within OSHA limits) of Taylor Swift 24/7 wouldn’t disturb any classes. Why not just play Taylor Swift until those who are camped out decide that they’d rather listen to something else and, therefore, have to walk away?

Separately, here’s my favorite recent social media post relating to the Ivy league:

This combines the Latinx, Queers, and a drum circle. Who could ask for more?

Lyrics to “Florida!!!”:

You can beat the heat if you beat the charges too
They said I was a cheat, I guess it must be true
And my friends all smell like weed or little babies
And this city reeks of driving myself crazy
Little did you know
Your home’s really only a town you’re just a guest in
So you work your life away
Just to pay for a timeshare down in Destin
Florida is one hell of a drug
Florida, can I use you up?
The hurricane with my name when it came
I got drunk and I dared it to wash me away
Barricaded in the bathroom with a bottle of wine
Well, me and my ghosts, we had a hell of a time
Yes, I’m haunted but I’m feeling just fine
All my girls got their lace and their crimes
And your cheating husband disappeared
Well, no one asks any questions here

(Maybe she is singing about the Redneck Riviera, more properly part of Alabama, than the parts of Florida that most people consider “Florida”? Destin is shown below, straight south from Alabama.)

In case the above is memory-holed as disinformation:

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The nutlergic work to liberate Al-Quds

by philg

The robust young activists of New York City can be felled by a single peanut or almond and yet expect to significantly assist in liberating Al-Quds and destroying the Zionist entity.

In case the above is memory-holed:

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College admissions essays should be written in a proctored environment?

by philg

A friend is relaxing now after writing more than 20 college admissions essays. “For rich families,” he explained. “It’s normally a competition among the professional essay writers who’ve been hired, but we decided to do it ourselves.” (“do it ourselves” means the parents, both Harvard graduates, did most of it)

The question for today is why elite kids are allowed to have this kind of advantage. If a college wants to see how a 17-year-old writes, wouldn’t it make sense to have the 17-year-old sit in a big room set up like the SAT or AP test environment? The prompts would be kept hidden until the morning of the exam so that applicants couldn’t show up with memorized professionally-written responses. This would also solve the ChatGPT problem.

If colleges are sincere about leveling out the disadvantages of coming from a poor family, why haven’t they adopted this obvious approach?

Separately, a report on the continuation of elite schools’ race-based admissions system… “After Affirmative Action Ban, They Rewrote College Essays With a Key Theme: Race” (New York Times):

Astrid Delgado first wrote her college application essay about a death in her family. Then she reshaped it around a Spanish book she read as a way to connect to her Dominican heritage.

The first draft of Jyel Hollingsworth’s essay explored her love for chess. The final focused on the prejudice between her Korean and Black American families and the financial hardships she overcame.

All three students said they decided to rethink their essays to emphasize one key element: their racial identities. And they did so after the Supreme Court last year struck down affirmative action in college admissions, leaving essays the only place for applicants to directly indicate their racial and ethnic backgrounds.

But the ruling also allowed admissions officers to consider race in personal essays, as long as decisions were not based on race, but on the personal qualities that grew out of an applicant’s experience with their race, like grit or courage.

This led many students of color to reframe their essays around their identities, under the advice of college counselors and parents. And several found that the experience of rewriting helped them explore who they are.

Sophie Desmoulins, who is Guatemalan and lives in Sedona, Ariz., wrote her college essay with the court’s ruling in mind. Her personal statement explored, among other things, how her Indigenous features affected her self-esteem and how her experience volunteering with the Kaqchikel Maya people helped her build confidence and embrace her heritage.

The Times features a future physician:

In her initial essay, Triniti Parker, a 16-year-old who aims to be the first doctor in her family, recalled her late grandmother, who was one of the first Black female bus drivers for the Chicago Transit Authority.

But after the Supreme Court’s decision, a college adviser told her to make clear references to her race, saying it should not “get lost in translation.” So Triniti adjusted a description of her and her grandmother’s physical features to allude to the color of their skin.

If this is her BMI at age 16, maybe she will ultimately specialize in prescribing Ozempic?

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Could a white or Asian graduate in Black Studies get a job anywhere that he/she/ze/they applied?

by philg

If we look at a representative Black Studies department at a university, such as the one chaired by Prof. Dr. Dr. Maulana Karenga, Ph.D., Ph.D. at California State University, Long Beach, there is no evidence of any person identifying as “white” or “Asian” among the faculty. Here’s a poster from 2022:

What if a mediocre non-Black person with a Ph.D. in some branch of Comparative Victimhood were to apply to a department with no faculty identifying as non-Black? Would the non-Black person have to be hired in order to satisfy the university’s commitment to DEI? Or could the university say that whites and Asians in engineering and #Science balanced an all-Black Black Studies department?

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Claudine Gay will be paid $50 million to write her next book

by philg

Back in July 2023, I remarked on the Stanford president’s “resignation” in which he would get a paycheck for the rest of his life:

The last part is my favorite. Involvement with academic fraud is intolerable in an administrator, but acceptable for an active researcher and teacher. (Note that CNN implies in the headline that he will be gone (“resigned” from Stanford) when, in fact, he is merely moving offices.)

(Unlike Claudine GPT, Prof. Tessier-Lavigne may not have personally violated any rule. It may have been co-authors who manipulated data (Wikipedia).)

From the folks who broke the proven-untrue-then-banned-by-Facebook-and-Twitter Hunter Biden laptop story… “Harvard’s Claudine Gay set to keep her nearly $900K annual salary despite resigning as university president” (New York Post):

She won’t be leading the Crimson, but green shouldn’t be a problem.

Outgoing Harvard University president Claudine Gay will still likely earn nearly $900,000 a year despite being forced to resign her position as the school’s top administrator.

Political science professor Gay — who stepped down amid a tempest of allegations that she did not do enough to combat antisemitism and academic plagiarism Tuesday — will return to a position on the Cambridge, Mass., school’s faculty.

Prior to being named president just six months ago, Gay earned $879,079 as a faculty of arts and sciences dean in 2021 and $824,068 in 2020, according to records published by the university.

Her new position was not specified Tuesday, but she is expected to receive a salary comparable to what she previously received — if not higher.

Claudine Gay is 53. If we assume that $880,000 in salary translates to $1 million per year including benefits, the Comparative Victimhood scholar could get approximately $50 million before she dies. (No reason to retire since tenure trumps mental infirmity.) Her last book was a popular hit:

O.J. Simpson’s publisher has announced that it will be handling Gay’s next work: If I Did Research.

Let’s check in with Harvard commitment to free speech now that Suppressor-in-Chief Gay is gone. A tweet from before the Gazans’ October 7 raping/killing/kidnapping spree allows anyone to comment. A tweet from December 12 is locked down so that the unrighteous can’t besmirch with comments:

The latest tweet is similarly locked down against vox populi:

Harvard does not have to pay taxes on its $60 billion hoard (it was $50 billion in 2022, so I’m adjusting for inflation). The university doesn’t have to pay sales tax on stuff that it buys, nor real estate taxes on the land that it uses for nominally academic purposes (it does make a voluntary contribution to Cambridge). Harvard receives direct infusions of taxpayer cash via student loan subsidies, tuition grants, and research grants. But the school doesn’t want to hear from the chumps who pay for the federal and state infrastructure in which it sits.

Claudine Gay recently broke her silence to email “Members of the Harvard Community”. She is not resigning because she did anything wrong, but because it will be better for Harvard:

… after consultation with members of the Corporation, it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.

Those who objected to her tight control of speech on campus with the single exception of anti-Jewish/Israel speech were motivated primarily by racism:

Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor—two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am—and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.

Nobody hates hate and plagiarism more than Prof. Gay! Ergo, anyone who is against this scholar and leader is a racist. The board members (“Fellows of Harvard College”) agree. They simultaneously spammed out a message condemning “racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls”.

Speaking of racism, the Affirmative Action/DEI religion says that U.S. society should have quotas for Black Americans whose ancestors lived through slavery and then Jim Crow. Descendants of victims of these pre-Eisenhower systems (it was Eisenhower who engineered the desegregation of schools) are entitled to preference in college admissions, government contracting, executive jobs, etc. Claudine Gay’s parents, however, are from Haiti (Wikipedia). Her retention as Harvard president was supported by Barack Obama, whose father was an elite Kenyan and whose mother was white, yet Obama was able to take advantages of quotas intended for descendants of slaves. Wouldn’t it make more sense for Black Americans to be angry with this pair of quota-stealers than to embrace them as fellow victims of Systemic Everything?

Update from a reader:

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Are there good four-year liberal arts colleges that aren’t liberal?

by philg

A friend’s son is a high school senior. If he were “of color”, his test scores, grades, and athletics would guarantee him admission to any of America’s most elite universities. As a white kid, however, he is likely to be rejected by the usual elite suspects. I told him that he is likely to get a better education from professors whose actual job is teaching undergraduates. In other words, instead of a research university he should look at the four-year liberal arts colleges. Amherst, Swarthmore, and Williams, for example. He doesn’t want to get tangled up in rainbow flags, BLM, and pro-Palestinian demonstrations, though. He has some unacceptable political points of view, e.g., that civilians should be able to own guns as an aspect of self-reliance.

His career interest is software engineering (so actually the most sensible plan would be to get a job as a software developer and do an online bachelor’s in the evenings) and, therefore, his most likely major is computer science (which he will be dismayed to learn has very little to do with software engineering!). On the plus side, nearly every college or university in the U.S. now has a substantial CS department.

I suggested big state universities, such as University of Florida or University of Texas, as places where he could at least be protected by the First Amendment (schools run by a state government can’t limit speech and impose religious orthodoxy the way that private colleges and universities can).

Are there any great or near-great four-year liberal arts colleges that don’t enforce the Democrats’ political dogma? What about the four-year colleges of the Midwest? Oberlin, obviously, can be crossed out. How about Carleton, Kenyon, and Grinnell? Or perhaps conservatives don’t have to stay in the closet at Davidson College in North Carolina? There’s Hillsdale College, of course, but spending four years hiding from elite progressives doesn’t seem like a good idea either. First, the young man will have to learn how to deal with America’s ruling class eventually. Second, if he has Hillsdale College on his resume that will be a black (not Black) mark preventing him from getting a job at enlightened employers such as Apple, Meta, Google, et al.

Let’s check one of my “seek beyond the Northeast” ideas… the Davidson College (NC) home page:

and scrolling down a bit…

We are informed by the DEI experts that an insurmountable obstacle to success is being in an environment where “nobody looks like me”. If the home page is anything to go by, therefore, Davidson College is not a place where a white man can experience “belonging”.

The page links to a “Smith Lecture: Black Worlds at the Edge of Space-Time”:

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, theoretical cosmologist and particle physicist, will deliver the 2023-2024 Smith Lecture. She will describe the way that Black worldmaking practices overlap with questions of cosmic significance, all the while journeying to and from space-time’s edge.

Maybe the home page isn’t representative? Let’s check broader numbers. “At Davidson College – a top-ranked elite N.C. school – only six percent of professors are Republican” (The College Fix, 2016):

Davidson College, an elite private university in North Carolina, has zero registered Republicans teaching in its political science department, and what’s more, only six percent of the professors campuswide are registered Republican, according to educators’ publicly registered party affiliations…

The school held a “Teach-In on Gaza”:

Open to faculty, staff, students and the public. Mini Sessions on: A Visual Representation of Israeli Occupation, A Brief History of Anti-Zionist Solidarities, Western Responses to the Crisis, Palestinian Resistance as Abolitionist Struggle and Navigating Social Media Algorithms on Israel/Patestine [sic].

Perhaps this is further proof of the general theory that “All of Philip’s ideas are bad”?

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Getting into an elite college via fencing

by philg

I was recently sentenced to being a spectator at the USA Fencing October North American Cup, held in Orlando’s convention center (America’s 2nd largest, after Chicago’s). In épée, one scores a point by touching one’s opponent anywhere. The tip of the sword responds to pressure. You could score a point by touching the ground or your own foot, for example. Each competitor’s épée is attached to a retractable wire tether. The competitors go back and forth on a conductive mat. If the sword tip is touched to the mat, that does not register a point (but touching just to the side of the mat, unless the ref notices, will score a point). If you think that your friend has just scored a point, having advanced dramatically with sword pointed at the opponent’s body, almost surely he/she/ze/they has just lost a point.

My friend refuses to accept the limitations of age and was mixing it up with college students. He was thus eliminated after a few hours. His main reason for traveling to Orlando, however, was for the kids, both in high school. The event was packed with Chinese- and Indian-American families anxious to get their cherished offspring into elite universities. What are their chances? “A boy needs to be ranked in the top 20 nationally to get into a decent college,” my friend said, “while a girl can get in by being anywhere in the top 40.” Why the difference? “A lot of colleges have women’s fencing programs, but not men’s. This is so that they can keep their Title IX balance when they have a football team, for example, for which only men are good enough.” He cited Tufts, Brown, and Cornell as examples of schools with no men’s fencing (a larger list). Here’s an excerpt of a federal form:

(Note the gender binarism on parade! Athletes count only if they identify as either “men” or “women”.)

Reflecting the sport’s center of gravity being in the Northeast, USA Fencing went all-in on forced masking and forced vaccination. They formerly required proof of Covid-19 vaccination and then proof of booster shots for the fit teenagers who were competing (at a time when the injections were not FDA-approved, but only emergency use authorized) and also for the middle aged parents who wanted to enter the venue as spectators. Everyone within the venue had to wear a basic mask and competitors had to wear masks under their fencing masks. Coronapanic was great for my friend’s kids. While their competitors lost a year due to fencing clubs being shut down, they were being trained in their 3-car garage by their dad, a world-class fencer in his youth. (Coronapanic also helped their relative academic ranking. Their education continued uninterrupted while comparatively poor kids in big Democrat-run cities lost 12-18 months.)

Despite masks now being optional, I was able to find an example of dressing to defend oneself against a virus armed with a sword:

Note that #Science told this fencer to wear a full beard in addition to the (now-voluntary) mask.

Although everyone at the competition whom I met resided in the U.S., those who were immigrants from foreign countries would usually have a country affiliation other than “USA” on their back, e.g., “MAR” for Morocco (Maroc). Players from The Country That Shall Not Be Named were required to sign papers denouncing Vladimir Putin and the Russian military in order to compete. They would then appear without a country affiliation on their backs.

Circling back to the college admissions angle, think about the parental investment required for this gambit: years of driving to a local fencing club several times per week and weekends devoted to competitions multiple states away. All in hopes that one’s son can reach the Top 20 or that one’s daughter can reach the Top 40. Note that a non-Asian athlete will usually have an advantage over an equally-ranked Asian fencer. Coaches have found that a lot of the pushed-hard-through-high-school Asian kids quit fencing early in their college careers, saying “my parents want me to focus on getting into medical school.” The non-Asians have been more likely to stick with the sport.

How about getting your flu and Covid-19 vaccines at the event? Nothing could have been easier. The event had been going for about 16 hours when I stopped to check. Given a crowd of people with a track record of doing absolutely anything that the government tells them to do, the pair below had injected… two people (one every 8 hours).

What else was happening? I stopped on the way up at Bok Tower Gardens, a truly magnificent

We were staying at the Hilton next to the convention center, so I took my friend, pumped full of Advil, to SeaWorld across the street as a cultural experience.

You can celebrate Pride together with Shamu:

SeaWorld reminds visitors that immigrant lionfish are “disruptive” and the term “non-native” is used in a pejorative manner.

(I’m not sure that it can be blamed on the mass immigration of lionfish, but Interstate 4 between Disney World and Orlando was subject to traffic jams at all hours of the day and night (e.g., at 10 pm). Congested as the roads are with 2.7 million people in the metro area, the population is expected to grow by 75 percent between now and 2060.)

I also took my fencing friend to Disney Springs. The M&M store:

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Diversity at Harvard

by philg

A friend is an alumni interviewer for Harvard. He sent me the Interviewer Guidebook for 2028.

Let’s keep in mind that Harvard was so passionate about the critical need for diversity that they fought all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to do what was ultimately found unconstitutional, i.e., select people by skin color. Here’s the team that the diversity experts assembled…

Could a Harvard graduate who questioned school closures, lockdowns, mask orders, and vaccine papers checks be an interviewer? No:

[you must disclose and will be rejected if] Your internet presence might be considered inappropriate, problematic or if other considerations might affect the perception of Harvard’s integrity. Many applicants Google their alumni interviewer in preparation for the interview.

[Advocating the liberation of Palestine by whatever means are necessary, on the other hand, is the kind of “free expression” that Harvard officially supports and, perhaps, the only freedom of expression that is tolerated at Harvard.]

Thoughtcrime on the Internet (why can’t these huge-brained Ivy League geniuses capitalize the public “Internet”?) is as bad as “You have been convicted of a felony”.

If your criminal record is thin and your Internet presence is righteous, you might be selected. You’re then reminded that “Harvard prides itself on being welcoming and inclusive” and to “Avoid making assumptions about applicants’ pronouns.” Also, that some of the 17-year-old applicants might be afraid of COVID-19 and therefore might want a virtual interview, but also that “Some applicants may not have a computer or smartphone”.

How’s the new skin-color-blind Harvard doing? Here are example reports from an alumni interviewer back to the mother ship:

Olivia spoke at length about her experience being the only student of color in gifted classes in elementary school, and one of only a few now in high school.

Sarah is a very accomplished young woman. She shared that her affiliation with the Klikitat nation, a North Pacific Tribe, is central to her identity… The majority of her time is spent serving elderly and disabled community members at a tribal nursing home.

Xavier’s most rewarding high school experiences have been his social justice work. He is the president of his school’s Black Student Union and has collaborated with his local NAACP chapter, youth council, and local elementary and middle schools. He shared that there is not a large African American nor Latinx community local to him…

What if an interviewer hasn’t been to reeducation camp lately?

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