Whether Amy Bishop or Matthew Harris or Bryan Kohberger, seriously disturbed and disturbing people on campus present schools with a serious dilemma, as in: What the hell to do? Psycho killer Bishop was a well-known and scary presence among her colleagues (and they didn’t even know that she had murdered her brother!), but they thought if they stayed real quiet and denied her tenure she’d go away. Harris, a minority, got promoted from woke campus to woke campus until someone woke up and started screaming about him. Mass murderer Kohberger turns out to have been a well-known nutcase at his school (see my headline), but they acted slowly and feebly in trying to neutralize him.

It’s easy after the explosion to say how could they have etc etc. But universities are civilized, deliberative, tolerant places, ill-equipped to deal with the not yet fully-flowered criminally insane. And of course we want universities to value oddness, to act slowly against even problematic people.

UD‘s thing is that the new insane proliferation of guns in America makes this otherwise creditable hesitation impossible. It’s now simply irresponsible to wait and see, or to sanction a bit, people who seem threatening. At the very least they should be made aware that the school is aware something’s wrong; they should be made aware that campus security is keeping an eye on them.

“The policy at Wesleyan is that our [country’s] president shouldn’t say stupid shit.” 

Those who follow TSU know that the jailing, for eight years, of one of its law school deans, was hardly the thievery of one set of hands. The school’s always been pretty filthy, top to bottom.

Now in its [seventy-eighth] year, it has hardly known a time when its fiscal affairs were not in chaos, when its board of regents was not dysfunctional, when its graduation rate was not shockingly low…

The theft of scholarship money by a dean does in fact reflect the culture of TSU, a corrupt and dysfunctional school that should not exist.

Liberal administrators couldn’t or wouldn’t curb the illiberalism in their midst. By failing to discipline protesters who transgressed university rules, they signaled that disrupting classrooms carried no price. By tolerating professors who bullied students who disagreed with them, they signaled that incivility and even harassment were acceptable forms of discourse…

In the name of rescuing the Jews of Columbia, the Trump administration cut off $400 million in federal contracts and grants to the university…

In some deep sense, the university [has] lost the capacity to reassert control, let alone confront the root causes of the chaos…

In this atmosphere, Columbia seems unlikely to reckon with the deeper causes of anti-Jewish abuse on its campus. 

This blog has for years followed universities dragging their feet about revoking honorary degrees awarded to people who turned out to be so dishonorable you could plotz. But having watched the Sean Combs tape we all watched, Howard gathered its trustees and right away not only revoked the degree; they returned his million dollar donation, and they shut down a scholarship program with his name on it. For good measure they issued a public statement… Something to the effect that men who routinely beat the shit out of women don’t get Howard honors.

… 33 people – some students, some not – are arrested after a long and disruptive protest.

… Blue Ridge mountains, Shenandoah River…

West Virginia University is gradually reducing itself to nothing – no foreign languages, a lot fewer professors, no grad program in math, fewer undergrad programs.

Shit, place ain’t got no money, and customers are voting with their feet.

Lotsa boohoo about all this from the liberal elites, but hold on jest a minute! Hang on jest one sec! UD ain’t crying, and she’ll tell you why.

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As you know, UD sees no reason why a country (Hungary) or a state (New Mexico, Nevada, West Virginia, Florida) that wants to reduce itself to an intellectual desert should be kept from doing so.

The American system is already correcting for this. Notice, for instance, how Hampshire College has stepped up to offer an easy transfer to New College students who can’t take it anymore. Nevada has always done beautifully on the dumbshit tourist trade and doesn’t need fancy theories to run casinos. Its wretched state university system should call it a day; smart young Nevadans can go to California. Same deal for other pro-ignorance states – this is a big country with oodles of good (and some supremely great) universities.

As for West Virginia. Feast your eyes on UD‘s coverage, over many years, of WVU – a hopelessly drunk and disorderly party school in a hopeless state from which those who can flee are fleeing. Morgantown runs with squalid bars in which frat boys try to kill pledges via drink. The kids riot after purty near every football game. The football and basketball coaches continue to be paid like princes. It’s a world, to be sure; a party school world which is about what a state like WV can manage if you tell it to establish a university. But you’re never gonna get the yahoos in the legislature to smarten the place up, and fact is most of its students are fine with the way things are. Those who aren’t will find good schools in driving distance: FIVE states border WV, and three of them have good schools.

[M]ost professors, even conservative ones, will avoid institutions they know are restricting academic freedom. They know that in such places, because of whom it might upset, they may not be able to engage in the research they wish to explore and cover topics relevant to their academic discipline.

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UD calls Florida Little Hungary: Like that country, it’s shutting down its best schools (Hungary hounded out Central European University) to make the world safe for professors like John Eastman.

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Texas is the other state you don’t want to be in if you’re a self-respecting academic. Look how the state’s lieutenant governor started blubbering when one of Texas A&M’s most impressive professors said something negative about him.

OTOH: Take a trip down memory lane here at UD about the filthy jockshop which is A&M, and recall that ganging up on professors while kissing the ass of characters like Johnny Manziel is Job One at that school.

… and you too might pen a No Thanks letter to a university in one of America’s LGBTQ (Lawless Glocksucker Barbarian Tenureless Quisling) states.

UT-Austin tried to hire a game theorist for its new free-enterprise think tank. He turned down the job because of fights over tenure.

‘I must admit I have been closely following the activities of the Texas Legislature for the past couple of weeks, which has highlighted to me some potential risks that were not in the front of my mind at the outset of this process… If I moved from my current job, which is a decent job, to UT, what kind of intellectual community can I build there? … When you go somewhere as a senior faculty member, you’re thinking about, OK … how am I going to build that department? If I go there and I have tenure, but they don’t have tenure — and what I want to do is build a group in my field — that sounds very difficult because junior faculty wouldn’t want to come.’ …

Daniel Brinks, chair of the government department at UT-Austin, told lawmakers at a public hearing earlier this month that he made six job offers to fill two positions this spring and was turned down every time.

“People turn down jobs for lots of reasons, but from what these candidates told me, the uncertainty around tenure was a big factor in our failure to hire this year,” he told the House Higher Education Committee.

Might could be them real big guns yall got hangin off everybody too.

And baby when I say LAWLESS …

Eva Kaili seems to have been associated in some way with artificial intelligence at Stanford; but she has been made to disappear.

Background here.

Oberlin College packs up its legal baggage and moves on from the Ohio Supreme Court to – I don’t know – the United States Supreme Court …? The European Court of Human Rights …? in a pointless, expensive quest to evade an already-crushing penalty for having bullied a venerable, much-loved local bakery practically out of business. The Ohio Supreme Court rejected Oberlin’s appeal without comment because nu? You did the deed; you never even attempted an apology; you hired the airhead apparatchik dean who made the magic happen. Own it, babe.

The numbers are out. As you’d expect, many prospective college students seem likely to avoid Ensouled Zygote states.

OTOH: If you’re a teenage girl for whom rape, drunkenness, berserk athletes/frat boys, gun and gang violence, self-righteous Christian/sexist administrations, and absolutely no abortion in the state, sounds like the ideal higher ed environment, UD (who has followed these schools for years) recommends the following:

Baylor University

Florida State University

Jackson State University

Louisiana State Baton Rouge

As with all lists, not all of these schools will feature all of your desiderata, though Baylor comes closest to ticking off all the elements you’re looking for.

They’re the only southern universities in the top twenty USNW rankings, and already some high school seniors (UD just listened to an interview on NPR this morning with several of them) are saying no way. Tennessee and Texas are absolutely looking like no-go sites for modern women, and North Carolina will almost certainly, in not too long a time, head back to the 1950s as well. Why risk signing up for four years at Duke?

These schools, marooned in too bad your father raped you, you poor thirteen year old land, can expect some portion of their faculty to try to get the hell out too. For years now, universities in that yall and shut ma mouth land have lost faculty because of the yall bring all your guns to campus, ya hear? laws in their university’s state; vicious anti-women legislation will draw yet more of them away.

But the good news is that these schools will not have to worry about diversity.

‘The Duke community represents the entire gamut of opinion from a network of spies should expose abortion seekers to the authorities to women who have ordered abortifacients should be incarcerated to a woman who aborts is an abomination in the sight of the lord and death in forced childbirth is what she deserves. C’mon down!’

… tops that one by denying tenure to a scholar whose qualifications outshine almost everyone on the Chapel Hill faculty.

Not at all surprisingly, Nikole Hannah-Jones, having ultimately dragged tenure out of these dummies, immediately dumped the place for another institution. That was exactly the right thing to do: Make your point, embarrass UNC, and leave its sports-mad ickiness behind you in a cloud of dust.

Not that Howard, where Hannah-Jones has accepted a position, is a paragon. I’ve followed Howard University on this blog for years, and it’s got a pile of problems. But at least it’s trying to solve them.

Chicago State University is arguably America’s worst university; Yale is arguably the best. Yet in Orwellian times, Yale and Chicago State meet in the Stasi space, where students denounce students, professors denounce professors, and students denounce professors, all in a context of terrified anonymity. “Students regularly attack their professors, and one another, for their scholarship, professional choices and perceived political views. In a place awash in rumor and anonymous accusations, almost no one would speak on the record.”

One might have thought Yale shot its wad when Naomi Wolf (current Wolf news here) attacked Harold Bloom twenty years after the whatever. But that was just one local accusation. We now have a world.

In the latest instance, involving a naughty law professor, a text-message “dossier” reveals …

“Evidence of what?” one (Yale professor) asked. Another called it “tattletale espionage.”

“Where are we — in Moscow in 1953, when children were urged to report on their parents and siblings?” the professor said.

Secret recordings, anonymous denunciations, a massive “whisper network” – Yale, meet Chicago State.