Nov
21
2024

Much Like the Fall of the Roman Empire

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

There's a current imbroglio going on between the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). We won't go into the history, but you can dig it out from this article by Greg Lukianoff, head of FIRE: The fall of the AAUP.

It is long and (to my mind) devastating. He provides "a non-exhaustive list of how the AAUP have become a threat to academic freedom and free speech" and "direct responses to the false claims" made in the recent debate. We will skip to the bottom line:

The truth is that the AAUP relied on free speech and the First Amendment for its entire existence. But once their leaders got confident that enough “right-thinking people” would be in charge forever, they turned on it. They said nothing as tuition prices and bureaucratization skyrocketed while viewpoint diversity among professors plunged. They stopped defending professors whose speech was unpopular with the kinds of scholars who thought the search for truth was over (and that, as luck would have it, they’re the ones who found it!).

When professors were targeted at an unprecedented rate and a culture of — what might you call it? — cancellation hit academia, causing public trust in higher education to collapse, the AAUP sneered at the idea that Cancel Culture even existed. They failed to protect their colleagues, particularly when they were threatened by fellow academics or students. Indeed, they doubled down and came out in favor of political litmus tests as long as they liked the politics being tested for. They gave in to members who wanted to use academic boycotts to serve political ends even if it torpedoed the search for truth. They supported a new exception to academic freedom that basically meant it was nothing more than what their favored members wished it to be.

They then tripled down, claiming that the plunging respect for academia was just due to some outside right-wing plot rather than contempt for a trillion-dollar industry that wanted to wish all criticisms of itself away. Somehow, they couldn’t understand that this would make them even less respected and trustworthy to the public. Instead, they sidelined truth and helped plunge academia into crisis.

But, of course, it was everyone else’s fault.

[Consumer note: Our Eye Candy du Jour is described at Amazon as an "George Orwell Quote". It is not. The actual quotee has an amusing article at American Thinker: George Orwell is stealing my work.]

Also of note:

  • Trump pays attention to warnings, right? Well, my advice to him would be to pay attention to Charles C.W. Cooke anyway: Biden’s Fate Is a Warning to Trump (gifted link!).

    It is common at present to hear that the president-elect has a “mandate.” If Trump is smart, he will remove that word from his vocabulary. Instead of a “mandate,” he ought to have goals, and those goals ought to line up with those that are shared by the public. Economic growth is a shared goal; ramming Matt Gaetz into the attorney general’s office is not. Renewing his signature tax cuts while avoiding inflationary pressure is a shared goal; treating the other party as if it were filled with traitors and the Constitution as if it were optional is not. Securing the border is a shared goal; indulging the worst whims of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not. International peace is a shared goal; feuding with other Republicans in pursuit of “loyalty” is not. Joe Biden won in 2020 on the back of a promise to restore normalcy. Once in office, he threw all that out. Joe Biden is a warning. Donald Trump would do well to heed it.

    This is not to say that, as president, Trump should feel obliged to discard every one of his foibles. The man is an eccentric, and his eccentricity is a crucial part of his enduring appeal. Nevertheless, he should understand that the public will tolerate idiosyncrasies from a politician it believes is doing a good job far more readily than from a politician it considers to be feckless, selfish, or distracted from the bread-and-butter of his post. Simply put, Donald Trump’s quirks do not enable his accomplishments; his accomplishments enable his quirks. Latitude is earned, not given. Had the economy been roaring and the world been calm, the Democratic Party might have been able to make “Dark Brandon” happen. Harsh reality put paid to that dream.

    To say, again, the thing I've been saying too much: We will see how that turns out.

  • The only problem with Jacob Sullum's headline is its tense: We Are Going To Learn More About Matt Gaetz's Sex Life Than We Wanted.

    Specifically, its future tense. I'm pretty sure I already learned more than I wanted about that. But anyway:

    The fact that former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz lacks relevant legal experience should be enough to kill his nomination as attorney general. The poor judgment he has repeatedly demonstrated, including pointless stunts and intraparty squabbles that irritated his Republican colleagues, only lengthens the odds of his confirmation. But the clincher may end up being the salacious details of a House Ethics Committee report that Gaetz would like to keep under wraps.

    The committee reportedly looked into several possible ethical violations by Gaetz, including allegations that he had sex with an underage girl, used illegal drugs, accepted prohibited gifts, misappropriated campaign funds, and shared sexually explicit videos with his colleagues on the House floor. The New York Times describes the resulting report as "highly critical."

    But, as you may have heard, that report has leaked. Hence, as Bette Davis said in All About Eve: "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!"

    Here's a cheap shot I took on Twitter:

  • What is the opposite of the Golden Rule? Byron York, I think, spies it in the sermon provided by about-to-be Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer:

    So this week, Schumer went to the well of the Senate and addressed some remarks to his Republican colleagues. "Another closely contested election now comes to an end," he said. "To my Republican colleagues, I offer a word of caution in good faith: Take care not to misread the will of the people, and do not abandon the need for bipartisanship. After winning an election, the temptation may be to go to the extreme. We've seen that happen over the decades, and it has consistently backfired on the party in power. So, instead of going to the extremes, I remind my colleagues that this body is most effective when it's bipartisan. If we want the next four years in the Senate to be as productive as the last four, the only way that will happen is through bipartisan cooperation."

    The short version of that is: Please don't do to us what we were going to do to you. Schumer is obviously concerned that Republicans might embrace a scheme to eliminate the filibuster and pass all sorts of consequential legislation with no Democratic input at all. That wouldn't be bipartisan! Fortunately for Schumer, Republicans have been more principled than Democrats when it comes to the legislative filibuster, and to the filibuster in general. Republicans realize that even though they will have the majority for the next two years, they might be back in the minority at any time after that. So Schumer will not get it good and hard the way he planned to give it to Republicans.

    It will be interesting to see how Schumer's plea for bipartisanship will translate into votes on Trump's cabinet picks.

  • Good news for Amtrak, amirite? The AntiPlanner notes: Amtrak Ridership Up in September. Ah, but there's a catch! Actually, a bunch of catches. Excerpt:

    Amtrak earned $2.5 billion in ticket revenues and food & beverage sales in F.Y. 2024. That works out to about 38.4¢ per passenger-mile. For comparison, commercial airline fares averaged 20.1¢ per passenger-mile in 2023.

    Amtrak also collected $314 million from the states to subsidize passenger trains. It calls these state subsidies “passenger related revenues,” but they are really just subsidies in the same way that dollars provided by the federal government are subsidies.

    Amtrak says that its 2024 operating costs were $4.3 billion or an average of 66.1¢ per passenger-mile. However, this does not count depreciation, which it says was $966 million or 14.8¢ per passenger-mile. Some of its operating costs were covered by state subsidies; some by federal subsidies. The depreciation wasn’t covered at all, which is why Amtrak’s infrastructure is in such poor shape.

    The reason why railroads and other companies measure depreciation is so they can show investors that they are earning enough revenue to replace their infrastructure when it wears out. Amtrak can’t so it pretends depreciation doesn’t count and then demands government bailouts when its infrastructure is falling apart.

    In case you missed it when we linked to it a few days ago: Jason Russell's brief argument at Reason as to why we should Abolish Amtrak.

  • And while we're at it… Katherine Mangu-Ward says we should Abolish FEMA.

    … FEMA has given Americans every reason to believe it is highly politicized, a poor steward of federal resources, bad at establishing priorities, and often unable to communicate clearly to people in distress.

    Since it was created in an act of bureaucratic centralization in 1979, FEMA has done little to earn Americans' trust and much to earn their suspicion and scorn. The agency's track record over the last 20 years is a case study in bureaucratic mismanagement, with repeated highly public failures.

    "Other than that, though, it's fine."