President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

I seem to recall reading that Weiss isn't technically a special counsel (vis a vis "the rules") because he isn't from outside the government.

 

That's an objection that has been raised, but it'd have to be litigated, and in the event, DOJ is never going to release information to Congress on an ongoing criminal investigation. They would litigate that all the way to the Supremes, and likely win. In any event, it'd be like 2027 before that issue was ironed out.

 

Politicians don't run universities. University leaders do. And they haven't done a very good job of it over the last 20 years.

Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College. Whose Fault Is That?

 

When you look at the polling trends on higher education over the past few decades, you notice one other striking development. A decade ago, there was not much difference between members of the two political parties when it came to their opinions about higher education. Then around 2015, that consensus shattered, and Republican sentiments suddenly nose-dived. In an ongoing Pew survey, the portion of Republicans (and those who lean Republican) saying colleges and universities had a negative effect on the country rose to 58 percent from 37 percent in just two years, between 2015 and 2017, while the responses of Democrats (and those who lean Democrat) held steady. The Republican decline persisted: In a 2023 Gallup poll, only 19 percent of Republicans said they had a lot of confidence in higher education, down from 56 percent in 2015.

When pollsters ask Republicans to expand on why they’ve turned against college, the answer generally has to do with ideology. In a Pew survey published in 2019, 79 percent of Republicans said a major problem in higher education was professors’ bringing their political and social views into the classroom. Only 17 percent of Democrats agreed. In a 2017 Gallup poll, the No. 1 reason Republicans gave for their declining faith in higher ed was that colleges had become “too liberal/political.”


Politicians certainly create a lot of those talking points. And all that federal loan money flooding education for the last three decades and burdening these college kids with a lifetime of debt came from politicians.

 

Here's the next graf in the story:

The question of how liberal is too liberal is obviously a subjective one, but there is some objective data to substantiate the leftward lean of American college campuses. The Higher Education Research Institute at U.C.L.A., which regularly surveys students, found last year that three times as many American college freshmen identified as liberal or far left as said they were conservative or far right. Among college faculty, the ratio is even more pronounced, and it has been growing more unbalanced over time, shifting from a 2-to-1 left-right ratio in the mid-1990s to a roughly 5-to-1 ratio in the early 2010s. Then there are the administrators. A separate poll from 2018 found that among student-facing university administrators, 12 times as many defined themselves as liberal as defined themselves as conservative.

3-1. 5-1. 12-1. And the last ratio is fairly amazing.

I do think politicians have politicized it. I also think public universities want to hire who they want, teach what they want and emphasize what they want. Sometimes, who and what they want conflicts with the elected leaders who make budget decisions.

Why should the immediate assumption be that the elected leaders are wrong?

 

I feel you on that one. I was filling up at a service station in a small VA town the morning after. This dude getting gas across from me was looking at me -- not staring -- but clearly wanting to get my attention. I was filled with pride and said something to the effect of, "We got him." Dude says, "I don't believe it, where's the body? I wouldn't put anything past Obama." I didn't engage further, but felt a tinge of emptiness inside.

 

Update.

So SAG/AFTRA says she's in the clear based on the network contract/waiver mentioned here. https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/dr...sters-audience-members-kicked-out-1235719924/

Still crossed the WGA picket line to go to work.

So, still a scab.

 

I think the tangle between state universities and state politics and state money is pretty hard to unknot.

I also think in these cases the definitions of 'liberal' - or 'too liberal' or 'illiberal' etc., etc. - are so broad and emotions-based as to be useless.

After all, they're literally called the "liberal arts."

And saying a faculty is liberal is the same as saying the press is liberal. It's self-fulfilling. Those are the kind of people attracted to those (often very low-paying) jobs.

 

Maybe because they and anyone with critical thinking skills knows their bullshit argument and bigoted, backward views don't stand up to intellectual scrutiny, so they instead try to prevent intellectual scrutiny from harming them at the ballot box by making sure that the children of their ignorant, backward, bigoted voters aren't exposed to new ideas that broaden their horizons and give them a view of the fucking world beyond the holler they came from.

Make sense?

 

You shrug at data inconvenient to your worldview. When it’s left to right, great clarity, unique impact. When it’s right to left or even center to left, it’s muddled and “ever thus.”