As usual they have a top group of presenters. They’re also offering a Zoom option if you can’t make it in person: 2023 Northwestern Main and Advanced Causal Inference Workshops [please recirculate to others who might be interested] We are excited to be holding our 12th annual workshop on Research Design for Causal Inference at Northwestern Law School in Chicago, IL. We invite...
Americans are losing faith in higher ed
More than half think a college degree isn’t worth it: Looks like more than 60% of 18-34 year-olds feel that way as well: Paulo Eskitch, a 47-year-old violinist who lives in Tulsa, Okla., is less emphatic about whether his daughter, now 7 years old, should enroll in college when the time comes. Mr. Eskitch has a master’s degree in music and earns about $30,000 a year playing in several...
Steve Bergstrom claims we can’t win in Wake County!
At the Raleigh North GOP precinct meeting last week, Steve Bergstrom claimed that we cannot win county-wide seats: We’re not going to win here next year in Raleigh in all these races. Right, how do we go about winning? Well…I’m sorry, does anybody think that we are actually going to win those? You think we are going to win countywide? If you think we are going to win countywide races, you...
NC Board of Governors strikes a blow for campus free speech
Yesterday the Board of Governors for the University of North Carolina System approved changes to the Policy Manual that regulates all public universities in the state: The University shall neither solicit nor require an employee or applicant for academic admission or employment to affirmatively ascribe to or opine about beliefs, affiliations, ideals, or principles regarding matters of...
23 Baltimore schools have zero students proficient in math!
Any charter school showing these kinds of results would be shut down immediately. But traditional public schools can churn out generations of illiterate and innumerate graduates and nothing happens. The Maryland State Department of Education recently released the 2022 state test results known as MCAP, Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program. Baltimore City’s math scores were the lowest in the...
Woke Joke Part 6: Appeal of the motion to dismiss
The Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit recently heard oral arguments for my appeal of the lower court’s decision on the motion to dismiss. (Our appeal; NCSU response; our response. FIRE and the Pacific Legal Foundation filed amicus briefs). Comments from the judges were mixed; one seemed sympathetic, while another said something along the lines of “He still has tenure and a salary...
Is North Carolina turning red? An analysis of voter registration data from the past decade
While the Republican wave didn’t materialize nationally, it certainly did in North Carolina: Ted Budd won the Senate race, we now have a supermajority in the state Senate and gained in the state House, and we took control of the state Supreme Court. We also managed to elect two conservative candidates to the Wake County School Board, pretty amazing given how blue Wake is. You may have seen...
Why university diversity statements may violate the Constitution
From Eugene Volokh: ".... However, I think Prof Volokh's thought experiment absolutely devastated DEI statements." So let me quickly summarize that thought experiment, which I gave in my part of the conversation (which begins at 16:45): We get involved in another war. Much of the country, including some university system (whether Prof. Soucek's and my University California or, say, the University...
Hitler’s views on gun control
Anti-Soviet formations had sprung up in the Baltic States to hasten and harass the Soviet retreat as soon as Operation Barbarossa had been launched. But on 17 July 1941 Hitler declared: "It must always be a cast-iron principle that none but Germans shall be allowed to bear arms. Even when ... it might seem expedient to summon foreign peoples to arm, it would be folly to do so. One day it would be...
Transactivism: The road not taken
All this is to say that the current conflict over trans rights wasn’t inevitable. In fact, it was entirely avoidable. It is not difficult to imagine a trans movement focused on providing accommodations for people who struggle with gender dysphoria, or even those who hold extraordinary beliefs about the nature of “gender identity.” Let’s call this the reasonable accommodations route. Now we can...