Why Evolution is True Feed

UPDATE AND CORRECTION:  Jon Haidt has commented below (comment #19) and notes that the UnHerd characterization of his talk is incorrect; in particular he doesn’t oppose students chanting “Intifada” and  “From the River to the Sea,”  but (like me) deplores the hypocrisy of punishing some speech and not other speech. He also recommends that readers watch his video (here), and notes two time stamps for when he talks about telos and identitarianism.  I should have listened to his talk, but I couldn’t find it and I assumed that the UnHerd talk was correct. My apologies to Jon.

I should add that while discussing this correction, Jon noted that he does feel that a university should have policies against calling directly for violence, even if it those calls are protected by the First Amendment.  Here we differ, as I think calls for violence should be permissible except under the stipulations of the courts: they become impermissible if they are not likely to incite imminent lawless violence. If they aren’t likely to do this, I’d say to allow them; Jon would apparently disagree.

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A lot of academics who haven’t previously gone after DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives are coming out of the woodwork to criticize the philosophy and actions of DEI.  New critics include Steve Pinker, who, in his Boston Globe article on how to fix the problems of Harvard, included “Disempowering DEI” as one of the five things that needed attention. To wit:

Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them.

An infamous example is the freshman training sessions that terrify students with warnings of all the ways they can be racist (such as asking, “Where are you from?”). Another is the mandatory diversity statements for job applicants, which purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar. And since overt bigotry is in fact rare in elite universities, bureaucrats whose job depends on rooting out instances of it are incentivized to hone their Rorschach skills to discern ever-more-subtle forms of “systemic” or “implicit” bias.

Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.

I’ve always opposed DEI because, though its proponents may be well meaning, the acronym has now become synonymous with compelled speech, attacks on freedom of speech (via “hate speech”), authoritarianism, policing of speech, censorship, and racism. By the latter I don’t just mean racism against “majority” groups, but, recently, the anti-Semitism growing on college campuses. I’m convinced that hatred of Jews is somewhat egged on by DEIers, who, with their view that Jews are “privileged” and “white adjacent”, while their opponents are oppressed people of color, have promoted antisemitism on campus.  And schools like my own are reluctant to punish those who demonstrate against Israel even when those protestors violate college regulations. It doesn’t looks good to sanction people who demonstrate on behalf of “the oppressed.”

Now social psychologist Jon Haidt, who cofounded Heterodox Academy, has come out against DEI as well. Previously he kept pretty quiet on the issue, though he often spoke out favoring the pursuit of truth over the pursuit of social justice as the mission of a university (see his famous talk at Duke here). But now he’s at bat against DEI in the UnHerd article below (click to read). Note the strong title: abolishing DEI will “save academia.” It’s a short piece, based on a talk at UNC, which I haven’t found.

Here are two excerpts, which are, in effect, most of the piece:

Abolishing DEI may be the only way out of the Leftist ideological capture of American campuses, Jonathan Haidt told an audience at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill, on Wednesday.

Those words mark a dramatic departure for Haidt, who has been known as a restrained, moderate voice on the subject of cancel culture, identity politics and what he calls the obsession with “safetyism” that has gripped Gen Z in the past decade. Haidt, a professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is the author of “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure,” and founder of the Heterodox Academy, an academic organisation committed to the ideals of viewpoint diversity and academic freedom.

On Wednesday the professor said that he no longer has confidence that universities can reform themselves. The reason for his volte-face: the unwillingness of university administrators who diligently police speech codes and pronoun usage to stop students and professors from chanting genocidal slogans against Jews. Indeed, the antisemitic eruptions on campus, and subsequent Congressional testimony of three elite university presidents who waffled on genocide, was “probably the most important turning point in the history of American higher education,” Haidt stated.

. . . He said he used to think that some parts of DEI might make sense, but now it’s clear that DEI does not work, and often makes things worse by exacerbating racial hostilities. He continued:

Privileged people have power. Power is evil. They use their power to oppress the good people. What a sick thing to teach 18-year-olds coming into college in a multi-ethnic democracy. But that’s what we’ve been doing, especially at elite college campuses since 2014-2015, since the DEI revolution… The inevitable outcome in terms of antisemitism is Jews are white, Jews are oppressors, it’s okay to kill Jews because that’s just resistance.

Haidt argued that things have gotten so bad they are beyond repair and need to be jettisoned. Since many universities are not likely to take those steps on their own, they may have to be pressured to do so. Haidt even suggested that Republican legislatures should intervene in running public US universities as a means of “counter-pressure” against universities.

“I think we’ve dug ourselves in a hole, especially with the studies departments, where there is no way to reform them [but] from the outside,” Haidt said.

There’s no doubt DEI is divisive, and I’ve often thought that the “D” really stood for “divisiveness” and the “E” for “exclusion”, for DEI encourages racial and gender animosity. It does not bring people together, but rather encourages people to not only see their gender or race as the most important part of their character but, importantly, sets up a hierarchy of oppression, which is inherently divisive.

It’s intriguing that Haidt’s mind seem to have been changed largely by “the unwillingness of university administrators who diligently police speech codes and pronoun usage to stop students and professors from chanting genocidal slogans against Jews.” In saying that, he’s also saying that universities shouldn’t have complete free speech—at least the kind that allows genocidal slogans against the Jews. (These would be chants like “Globalize the intifada” or “From the river to the sea, yadda, yadda.”) If he’s really saying that some kinds of speech are intolerable on campus, I wish he’d be clearer about what kind of speech he means, and who would police it.  After all, if Haidt really favors “Truth University” over “Social Justice University,” he must then feel that some kinds of speech are incompatible with seeking truth. My own view is that speech should be free, but the university has a right to set the times, places of speech, and to regulate rules of when speech violations university regulations by acting to actually harm the dissemination of knowledge. Finally universities must stipulate that permitted speakers can’t be deplatformed or shouted down.

But there remain good reasons to abolish DEI beyond the fact that it may encourage hatred of Jews (and the use of specified pronouns, which isn’t comparable at all).  Pinker gives some of them above.  If we want to get rid of illegal prejudice and bullying on campus, there can be an apparatus for doing that. But that’s not the same thing as DEI.

Given how deeply DEI has sunk its hooks into American universities, though, having huge budgets and armies of bureaucrats, fulfilling Pinker and Haidt’s call won’t be easy.

As for Republican legislatures helping run American universities, I know where Haidt’s coming from, but I’m not on board with that, either.

For some reason there’s been a spate of recent articles on why some cats fetch (I had one that did it, too). Click on the headlines below to read. I’ll give a short anser for each one.

From The Atlantic (link goes to archived version):

Their “byproduct” hypothesis:

Evolutionarily speaking, that sort of checks out. Fetching is just a sequence of four behaviors: looking, chasing, grab-biting, and returning. Versions of the first three are already built into predators’ classic hunting repertoire, says Kathryn Lord, an evolutionary biologist at the Broad Institute, who’s had her own fetching cat. Returning is perhaps the wild card. Christopher Dickman, an ecologist at the University of Sydney, told me that, as solitary creatures, cats have little natural incentive to share what they catch. He hasn’t spotted much retrieval behavior in the feline species he’s studied in nature—or in the half dozen house cats he’s had throughout his life

 

But cats already have some of the behavioral ingredients for carrying fetched cargo. As Sarah Ellis, the head of cat mental wellbeing and behavior at International Cat Care, points out, feline mothers bring live prey back to their kittens to teach them how to hunt, and cats of both sexes have been known to move their food to safer spots before chowing down. (Ellis has had multiple fetching cats.) Maybe, Dickman told me, as cats were repeatedly invited into human homes and praised for eliminating pests, some of their retrieval-esque behaviors were rewarded—and possibly amplified. House cats with access to the outdoors are sadly infamous for hauling home wild birds, rodents, amphibians, and reptiles. And for indoor-only cats, chasing a furry object, gnawing on it, and bringing it to a secure spot may playfully scratch a predatory itch that might otherwise go unsated.

From What Your Cat Wants:

They don’t know! But they also include a video of a fetching cat. Mine was like this: he never brought the fetched object all the way back to me.

So why do cats fetch? We don’t know! It is likely this behavior is part of the predatory sequence of behaviors. There are two parts to this behavior – the pursuit of the object when it is tossed, and the retrieval. Some cats seem to do both (the true fetchers), most cats will pursue moving objects (likely predatory behavior), and some cats will carry objects to home or their owner (including cats who like to bring home things like clothing and toys). As previously mentioned, bringing objects home could be related to bringing killed prey home for a safer place to consume it. However, in the case of fetching behavior, the retrieval seems more likely to be a “request” for the human to engage in more toy tossing! So perhaps this is a truly social play behavior rather than strictly predatory.

A pretty good fetch:

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From the BBC:

The research was first published in the science journal Scientific Reports.

Many cats instinctively like to play, the report says, and owners are being urged to think more about the types of activities they could do to keep their pets happy and active.

It found cats generally prefer to be in control of the game and do not require training to play.

Jemma Forman, a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex School of Psychology, said: “Cats who initiated their fetching sessions played more enthusiastically with more retrievals and more fetching sessions per month.

“This perceived sense of control from the cat’s perspective may be beneficial for the cat’s welfare and the cat-owner relationship.

“I’d encourage owners to be receptive to the needs of their cat by responding to their preferences for play – not all cats will want to play fetch, but if they do, it’s likely that they will have their own particular way of doing so.”

The survey gathered information from 924 owners of 1,154 cats (994 mixed-breed and 160 purebred) that play fetch to better understand the behaviour.

The vast majority of cats (94.4%) showed an instinctive ability to play fetch from a young age, whether it was retrieving toys or common household items.

From Scientific American:

The fun hypothesis:

 In some instances, owners described a scenario in which they dropped or accidentally launched an object, and their cat spontaneously fetched it. In other accounts, domestic felines simply brought their owners a cat toy or other random item, which the human then tossed aside—and a throw-and-retrieve cycle began. “We had an overwhelming number of people say their cat was not trained to do this behavior,” says Jemma Forman, lead study researcher and a Ph.D. student at the University of Sussex in England. “We even had some people say that their cats had trained them to play fetch.”

As a caveat, Serpell says humans are likely giving cats unconscious reinforcement by engaging with them in throwing an object in the first place, providing interaction and social reward. Contrary to popular sentiment, domestic cats are, in fact, very much attuned to their humans.

A good fetch of a tinfoil ball by a hairless cat (from the article above):

For your delectation, the Nature “Science Reports” story is here, and it’s also been covered by The Guardian, too.

Reader Jon Losos sent a photo of his own cat, Nelson, fetching a toy:

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This is bizarre but also funny. Someone had a cake made that looks just like their cat. Then they cut into its head in front of the moggy. . . . . .

Look at the cat’s expression!

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We met Felix, the Huddersfield Station Cat, in 2016. a moggy so famous that she has her own Wikipedia section along with another station cat, Bolt.   Here’s the short bit from Wikipedia:

The first station cat, Felix, joined the staff as a nine-week-old kitten in 2011. Since then she has patrolled the station to keep it free from rodents, and even has her own cat-flap to bypass the ticket barriers.  In 2016 Felix was promoted to Senior Pest Controller and local artist Rob Martin painted a portrait of her which now hangs in the station. In 2019 Transpennine Express named a Class 68 locomotive (68031) after Felix.

Felix was probably the most famous cat in Britain, and you can read the details about her in the sad article below announcing his death early last December:

A train station cat which became famous across the world has died.

Felix has been a pest controller at Huddersfield Station since 2011, but it was today confirmed that “she peacefully went to sleep” in the company of the station’s staff.

The moggy shot to fame after a Facebook page dedicated to her life was created by a commuter in 2015 and quickly attracted more than 170,000 followers.

She made several television appearances including on Good Morning Britain and her first biography for charity, Felix The Railway Cat, was a Sunday Times bestseller.

Here’s the announcement of her death:

It is with heavy hearts that we announce the passing of our beloved Felix.

On Sunday, she peacefully went to sleep, in the loving comfort of Angie Hunte (Station Manager) and Jacqui Cox (Station Team Leader).

We will miss her dearly pic.twitter.com/5ThAk5fzyW

— Felix and Bolt (@FelixhuddsCat) December 5, 2023

Here’s a video of the pre-mortem Felix:

You can find the Facebook page of Felix and Bolt here.

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Lagniappe: Reader Reese sent two photos of his cat Rocky:

Rocky likes to bathe while I fill the birdbath.

From Doc Bill: “Here’s a photo of Kink the Cat fetching “Mousie. 2007.”

h/t: Jon, Ginger K., Reeese, Pyers

Today we have some mountain photos (and a flower) by reader Jim Blilie. His narrative and captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here’s another set of my landscape photos for your consideration.

These are another set from Washington State, where I have lived most of my adult life. I moved here in 1984 to enjoy the outdoors and spent my 20s and 30s mountaineering, sea- and whitewater-kayaking, and back-country 3-pin skiing.  We still enjoy hiking; but my climbing and skiing days are long in the past. I have tried to make sure that none of these are repeats; but it’s possible one or two slipped through my review.

First, a summit shot, looking south, from Whitehorse Mountain, which is prominently visible from the northern Puget Sound area and looms above Darrington, Washington.  We made a winter ascent in February 1986.

Next is a shot of Mount Rainier from near Tacoma, Washington, taken in January 1990:

Also taken in January 1990, a shot of Lake Washington at sunset:

Climbers on the Easton Glacier on Mount Baker.  March 1990:

Aerial view of the crater of Mount Saint Helens, taken from a Cessna 72 (the old fashioned way), March 1990:

View of the rising moon and some islands from the top of Mount Constitution on Orcas Island, July 1990; Pentax A 400mm f/5.6 lens with matched 2X teleconverter:

View of the summit crest of Mount Rainier, taken on a climb in February 1988:

A view of Mount Adams, out current neighbor, from the north from the Goat Rocks Wilderness, October 1986:

Climbers on Desperation Peak in the eastern Olympic Mountains, July 1989:

Grass Widow flowers (Olsynium douglasii), taken on Mount Erie, near Anacortes, Washington, 1990:

Misty mountain ridges in the central Cascades, September 1990:

Finally, a ringer.  Me on the summit of Dome Peak, August 1986.  I did the Ptarmigan Traverse that month with a group of climbing friends, climbing seven peaks along the route:

All images are scanned Kodachrome 64 with minor global adjustments in Lightroom, except for the photo of Mount Rainier which is scanned Fujichrome.

Equipment:  Pentax ME Super and K-1000 camerasPentax M 20mm f/4 lens
Tokina ATX 80-200mm f/2.8 lens (this was a superb after-market lens)
Pentax A 400mm f/5.6 lens with matched 2X teleconverter
Pentax A 35-105mm f/3.5 lens
Could be one or two other Pentax M series lenses, not 100% sure

Here’s a new one-hour interview of Steve Pinker by John Tomasi, inaugural president of the Heterodox Academy.

Here are the YouTube notes:

Are our higher education institutions still nurturing true intellectual diversity? Our guest today is Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, and today, we’ll be exploring the growing concerns within higher ed that institutions are turning into echo chambers, stifling dissent and censoring certain perspectives.

In this thought-provoking episode, we’ll be discovering the challenges to academic freedom in the era of cancel culture. We’ll explore how questioning a consensus can now come at a cost, impacting the pursuit of truth within academic institutions. We’ll also uncover the story of the Council for Academic Freedom at Harvard, which was formed to combat these challenges.

Join us as we delve into policies protecting free speech, and the vital role of civil discourse in the academic community. Together, we’ll navigate the complex landscape of universities, grappling with the delicate balance between common knowledge and the suppression of dissenting opinions.

The audio isn’t great, but you should be able to hear what’s said.

As background, you might first read Steve’s Boston Globe op-ed, “Steven Pinker’s five-point plan to save Harvard from itself,” which is now free online (my take on it is here).  This was published before Claudine Gay was fired as President, and perhaps Harvard will now enact some of Pinker’s suggestions.  These include adopting institutional neutrality and disempowering DEI.

I won’t summarize the video, as there’s a lot of stuff discussed here, and if you have a spare hour you can listen for yourself. In general, it deals with “cancel culture” and also goes through Pinker’s “Fivefold Way” and why he suggests a panoply of specific reforms.

h/t: Daniel

If you’re not familiar with American colleges, the “dean’s list” is usually a list of all the students who get a high grade-point average during a year or a semester, an average above some cutoff that varies from school to school. You can tout “being on the Dean’s list” as an index of your academic merit, and it usually appears on your college transcript, something that you can show potential employers or graduate schools as a sign of your achievement.

But the creation of deans lists is waning for two reasons. First, with grade inflation, in many places the average grade is so high that nearly all students can get on the dean’s list. The average grade at Yale is an A, with the grade-point average being 3.7 out of 4. It’s 3.8 at Harvard—nearly everyone gets straight As.

The second reason is that ranking students in this way, by academic merit, is deemed to violate equity, as minority students (except for Asians) tend to get lower grades. The solution? Eliminate the rankings entirely, so that students who don’t do as well aren’t “stigmatized.” This is what just happened at Cornell, according to the student newspaper The Daily Sun. And the University explicitly gives “equity” as the rationale:

Click to read:

From the paper:

Starting Fall 2023, incoming Cornellians, including the Class of 2027, became ineligible to receive the Dean’s List distinction on their transcript.

The move away from the Dean’s List came after discussion within the Faculty Senate regarding equity concerns.

The Faculty Senate’s Resolution 182: Regarding the Award of Honors and Distinctions to Cornell’s Undergraduate Students, passed in May 2022, sought to create a more fair and equitable learning environment for students.

“[The proposal] is aimed at creating consistency across the undergraduate colleges and schools in the award of academic honors and distinctions and balancing recognition of high-achieving students against amelioration of an unhealthy level of competition at Cornell,” the Faculty Senate wrote in the resolution.

Cornell will officially stop listing the honor on student transcripts by Spring 2026, thereby leaving only two Ivy League universities — the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University — maintaining the tradition.

. . .Cornell’s seven undergraduate colleges each have their own set of requirements for students to earn a place on the Dean’s List, including different credit and GPA requirements. For example, The College of Architecture, Art and Planning requires a minimum GPA of 3.8, while the Nolan School of Hotel Administration requires only a 3.3. In the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, there are different GPA requirements for each class year, with first-year students needing a lower GPA than other students in the college.

When asked about the reasoning behind the Dean’s List requirements at each individual undergraduate college, Cornell and individual college administrations each declined to comment.

Note that the paper don’t mention grade inflation, nor does the University’s resolution to get rid of the dean’s list.

Oh, and there’s one more thing they’re eliminating, which I always thought was a good practice: listing the median grade (the grade that divides the students into two groups of equal size) on the transcript. This also helps graduate schools and potential employers deal with grade inflation, as they can see if a college is giving really high grades to everyone.

The removal of the Dean’s List comes in conjunction with Cornell’s decision to remove median grades from student transcripts, a similar measure previously used to show how well students performed in comparison with fellow students in each class.

“There’s a lot of pressure already on students, so this is just one less thing to worry about,” Tawfik said. “There are more important things to be focusing on.”

I can understand eliminating dean’s lists when they’re meaningless, as when grade inflation entitles every student to be on them (“all must have prizes”), but in general Cornell’s elimination simply reflects the trend in society to favor equity above meritocracy.  While I favor efforts to provide everyone with equal opportunity (a VERY hard task), the elimination of indices of merit will eventually trickle down to us all, making us unable to judge the qualifications of people whom we interact with: doctors, pilots, and so on.

Andrew Sullivan’s statement, “We are all on campus now” has become pretty famous, and it’s proven true for wokeness, DEI, and other stuff that first shows up at universities and then spreads to other institutions and people.  The latest on-campus phenomenon, though it’s already appearing other places, is antisemitism. And antisemitism is how I interpret this latest bit of college news published by Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe (and reprinted on his website.  Jacoby’s take on the latest happening (at Columbia University, of course) is mirrored in a piece by free-expression lawyer Popehat (Ken White).

Click below to read Jacoby’s piece:

Jacoby’s piece begins with Marie-Alice Legrand, a Columbia law student “of French Caribbean descent.”  I don’t think she’s Jewish, as the piece doesn’t mention that.  But she grew up with Jews and with  knowledge about pogroms and the Holocaust, and so when she got to Columbia she decided, in the face of campus antisemitism, to found a group to counter Jew hatred. The rest is is the story:

Legrand was shocked when the Columbia campus erupted in “blatant antisemitism and hate,” as she wrote on LinkedIn. Anti-Israel throngs publicly cheered the Hamas atrocities and marched behind banners bearing Palestinian flags and the words “By Any Means Necessary.” A tenured Columbia professor waxed ecstatic over the murders, rapes, and abductions of Israelis, which he called “astounding,” “awesome,” and “victories of the resistance.” More than 140 other faculty members signed a letter defending the barbaric assault as a legitimate “military action” against the Jewish state.

The callousness of what she was seeing scandalized Legrand. She knew students at Columbia who had lost friends or relatives in the Oct. 7 pogrom, she told me, but “there was not one ounce of sympathy or compassion extended to my Jewish and Israeli friends.” She reached out on social media. “You are not alone,” she posted. “I unequivocally support and stand with you.”

She decided to offer more than comfort. Over the next few months, Legrand assembled a group of students, Jews and non-Jews alike, to create a new campus club, Law Students Against Antisemitism. They drafted a charter laying out their objectives: to raise awareness of historical and contemporary antisemitism, to foster dialogue, and to provide support for students targeted by antisemitism.

Student groups are ubiquitous at Columbia — the university boasts that there are more than 500 clubs and organizations, at least 85 in the law school alone. Given the surge of venomous anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bigotry, especially among young Americans and in academia, the need for groups like Law Students Against Antisemitism is self-evident.

On Jan. 23, Legrand and the group’s other officers appeared before the law school student senate to request official recognition for their club. Such recognition, which is needed to reserve space on campus and be assigned a Columbia email address, is normally a routine formality. Eight other clubs requested approval last month; all eight were rubber-stamped in a few minutes.

But not Law Students Against Antisemitism.

Before the vote was held, a delegation of progressive students showed up to demand that Legrand’s group be rejected on the grounds that it would “silence pro-Palestine activists on campus and brand their political speech as antisemitic.” It would do so, they claimed, by adopting the standard definition of antisemitism drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance [IHRA]. The accusation was ridiculous on multiple grounds. First and most obviously, no voluntary student group has the power to silence anyone, on campus or off. Second, as recent months have made plain, there has been no shortage of pro-Palestine expression on Columbia’s campus.

What is that definition? Here it is from the IHRA, which also gives some examples:

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”  

The Globe story continues:

Above all, it is beyond surreal to denounce an organization opposed to antisemitism for adopting the most widely used definition of the term. The IHRA formulation has been accepted by 42 countries — including the United States — and by well over 1,000 states, provinces, cities, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations. In fact, it is the definition relied on by the federal government in its enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

Read the definition again. Wouldn’t you write something similar if you were trying to define hatred of blacks?  And is using that definition of antisemitism likely to “silence pro-Palestinian activists”?  You’d have to be insane to think that; the activists are already out there, very loud and aggressive.  No, the vote of the Law School’s student senate reflects only one thing: an attempt to make Jews and their allies shut up, while approving of groups, like pro-Palestinian ones, giving them all the benefits that come with official approval.  The senate vote was also anonymous, as Popehat reports.

Popehat begins his article with a criticism of those who themselves go after students for generally being censorious and “politically correct”.  Popehat thinks that there is far more danger from government leaders who think “that dissent is illegitimate and un-American” (he uses the GOP and Florida in particular as examples).  And he’s probably right. But you fight fires where you can. So although Popehat’s not one of those who take a dim view of “woke” students, he nevertheless decries what the Columbia law-student senate did.  Click to read his site.

An excerpt:

Now, Columbia Law’s students are perfectly right to be vigilant about attempts to suppress criticism of Israel. Plenty of people of bad faith have been trying to disguise suppression of anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian thought as concern about antisemitism. Colleges have been complicit and sometimes students are the ones advocating suppression.

But Columbia Law’s Student Senate is being fuzzy-headed at best, and acting at bad faith at worst, to say that a student group shouldn’t be approved if its values and viewpoints could lead to censorship if widely accepted, or that its definition of racism is wrong. A newly formed Law Students Against Antisemitism would only be able to add one additional voice — a student voice — into the incendiary debate about Israel. Their definition of antisemitism is subject to critique, like everybody else’s. They would have no official power to enforce it, only the power to associate with each other and speak their views. Their power to argue that some criticism of Israel is antisemitic is no more powerful — and no less a legitimate part of the debate — than Students for Justice In Palestine saying that it isn’t.

I also question whether the supposed logic is sincere. Would the Columbia Law Student Senate deny recognition to, say, the Black Law Students Association, on the basis that students from that group have sometimes called for the punishment of speech they perceive as bigoted? Somehow I think not; nor should they.

So does the Columbia Law Student Senate think that it’s necessary to stop speech to save it? Possibly. It’s the sort of philosophical fatuity that students have always eructed. Realistically, though, it’s more likely that these particular students think that when they don’t agree with speech, it’s legitimate to suppress that speech by any means at their disposal, including official and quasi-official means. It’s more likely that they think they have some kind of right not to be exposed to speech they hate. They see no value in the utterance of things unless they agree with those things, and don’t share the value that they should respond to speech rather than preventing it. I feel no obligation whatsoever to respect that sentiment or the students who hold it, as I’ve made clear before. And I am perfectly capable of regarding them as censorial dipshits while recognizing that they are also mostly insignificant censorial dipshits, compared to our nation’s leaders.

The fact that Columbia Law is private, and not bound by the First Amendment, does not change this analysis. Columbia advertises itself as a haven for free expression. If Columbia law wants to be free for expression that its Student Senate agrees with, maybe it should say that on the package. The belief “there is only one correct way to view the conflict in Gaza and we will not recognize student organizations who disagree” is loathsome and un-American whether or not it violates the First Amendment.

I think the students could do better. In fact I expect it of them. I expect students at one of America’s best law schools to say “I think your definition of antisemitism is overbroad and wrong, but you get to advocate it just like other groups do.” I hope that age and experience will rub the censorial dipshittery off of them. But all of this may mark me as naive. Has the America of this century provided a good example of the value of liberty? Have these students’ local and national leaders modeled a mature and civically responsible approach to encountering speech they don’t like? Likely no.

It’s not only ridiculous to assume that Legrand’s group would silence students in pro-Palestinian groups, but even more ridiculous to reject her group because it espouses a definition of antisemitism that is accepted by the U.S. government and used as a standard to enforce Title VI violations (see page 13 of the Biden-Harris initiative to counter antisemitism). Read the definition again.  Do you think a group formed to fight antisemitism should be rejected because it uses the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism? And does the precise definition even matter so long as it captures the sense of Jew hatred?

Fortunately, Ms. Legrand has guts (from the Globe):

Legrand knows only too well how tenacious antisemitism can be. She said she was “heartbroken” by the student senate vote and by the moral perversity of those who would mobilize to kill an organization like hers. But she is not giving up. She hasn’t forgotten the view from her childhood bedroom window. And she knows that in the fight against antisemitism, surrender can be fatal.

We’re all on campus now, and the antisemitism spreading among colleges will simply infect the wider population—or hearten hidden antisemites to come into the open. For now there appears to be little penalty for hating Jews.

Robert Lang, physicist, origami master, and reader, took a trip to Antarctica on a very small boat, and sent a seven-part series of photos, which I’ll put up over time.  Here’s batch 1; Robert’s captions and narrative are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. (I suggest enlargement!)

Antarctica, Part 1: Water, Ice, and Rock

Over the Christmas holidays, I had the opportunity to visit Antarctica, as one of six passengers on a 65-foot ketch-rigged sailboat that spent 14 days traveling along the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Our trip began on King George Island, in the South Shetlands, an island chain 60 km off the coast; Elephant Island, where most of Shackleton’s men waited to be rescued, is at the northern end of this chain.

The entire trip was spectacular, with some incredible wildlife sightings, which I will duly share in subsequent installments of this contribution to RWP. But let me start with a few landscapes, just to convey the beauty and harshness of this stunning land.

To begin, this is the boat we traveled on, the Ocean Tramp (photo taken on about the 3rd day of the trip). Channeling my inner Frank Hurley, I’ve converted the photo to black-and-white.

Hurley was the photographer on Shackleton’s Endurance, which met its fate a bit farther south than we reached and was on the other (eastern) side of the Antarctic Peninsula, in the Weddell Sea, which, due to a gyre in the prevailing currents, is covered in sea ice year-round. It being mid-summer for us, we never experienced anything thicker than brash ice (broken-up bits), but they still made for some wonderful vistas.

I had envisioned the Antarctic being all flat, featureless ice plain, but of course that’s on the ice shelves and the main continental plateau. The Antarctic Peninsula is basically an extension of the Andes, and it and its islands are incredibly rugged, with rime-covered peaks, snow-filled couloirs, and ice cliffs that plunge a hundred feet or more straight into the water. Places where one could actually access the shore are few and far between.

One place where a landing is possible is a cove called Yankee Harbor, on Greenwich Island, still in the South Shetlands. There’s a long gravel spit that extends into the harbor which is home to many penguins and seals (photos to come); the mountains of Livingston Island are in the distance.

There are many islands along the peninsula, which provide some protection from ocean swells coming from the west; some are low and rounded, others high and jagged. Many of the channels between them are narrow with soaring walls and spires to either side. One of the more famous is the Lemaire Channel, between Booth Island and the mainland, and one of the famous landmarks at the entrance of “The Lemaire” is Una Peaks, also called “Una’s Peaks”, or Una’s (something a bit more anatomical), named for the same reason the Grand Tetons in Wyoming got their name.

Passage through the Lemaire is never guaranteed, depending on the ice conditions. This time it was a calm day and nothing worse than a bit of brash ice to push through.

The Argentine Islands are a low archipelago of islands on the western side of the Peninsula. Because they are surrounded by relatively shallow water, the waters to their west collect icebergs that run aground as they drift by, creating some spectacular combinations of sky and water. You can see here the Ocean Tramp, with the “graveyard of icebergs” stretching off into the distance.

The icebergs provided an endless variety of shapes and shades of white and blue. This one, taken in another iceberg graveyard near the stacks of Spert Island, seemed to call for the name “The Fickle Finger of Fate.”

Scale is hard to ascertain in the Antarctic. To give a sense of the scale of this iceberg, note the zodiac near the cave. We dared not enter the cave or even get too close, as icebergs have a habit of rolling over when one least expects or desires.

The ice and mountains tended to lie on a monochromatic palette of whites and blues, but it being midsummer, the sun barely set. Sunsets were long and low, which created glorious golds and pinks—if you were up and out at 11:30 pm, and if the weather was clear. The Peninsula is famous for long stretches of dreary overcast, but we had some gorgeous clear days and the occasional clear sunset.

OK, enough with the inanimate matter. Coming next: Penguins!

There’s a Harvard University “wiki” (whatever that is) that gives “Memorial Minutes” for various deceased members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.  Just two days ago they published the memorial for my own thesis advisor, Richard Lewontin, known to all of us as “Dick” or “The Boss.”  You can find it by clicking on the headline below, which takes you directly to the memoriam.

The minutes begin with a summary of Dick’s accomplishments, and you can read those in his Wikipedia bio. But the only things Wikipedia says about Dick as a person is this, given under “personal life“:

As of mid-2015, Lewontin and his wife Mary Jane (Christianson) lived on a farm in Brattleboro, Vermont. They had four sons. He was an atheist.

Lewontin died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts on July 4, 2021, at the age of 92.

This is substantially wrong. Dick and Mary Jane had a second home in Brattleboro, and they would often go there on the weekends and for long periods during the summer (but not in winter). They never “lived” there for a long time. Also, the Brattleboro place, which I visited, was not a farm, but a “log castle” as we called it: a fancy log cabin that Dick helped build himself.  There was no farming done.

Further, Dick didn’t die at his home in Cambridge, which he’d sold when he and Mary Jane moved into an assisted living facility, where they died within three days of each other. (This was a mercy, as they were always very close and I couldn’t imagine either living without the other.)

Click below to read the full thousand-word “minute”; I’ve excerpted just the last two paragraphs that talk about Dick as a person:

The last two paragraphs:

Lewontin was a superb counterexample to the assertion that brilliant scientists tend to disappoint in the classroom. His teaching career was as distinguished as his research one, and he inspired generations of students with his courses in evolution, population genetics, and biostatistics. His many honors included being elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1968. (He resigned in 1971 because of the Academy’s support of secret military research.) In 1994, he won the Sewall Wright Award from the American Society of Naturalists; in 2015, the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences (shared with theoretical geneticist Tomoko Ohta); and, in 2017, the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal from the Genetics Society of America. Dick Lewontin was one of those people who demand attention. Complex, deeply opinionated, and often loudly outspoken, he inevitably provoked strong feelings in others. Those who had been through his lab were typically loyal devotees but others bridled at his penchant for perhaps overly acerbic criticism and at his insistence that politics and science could not (and should not) be disentangled. Acid criticism and hardball politics were on full display when he and Stephen Jay Gould—who famously described Lewontin as “the most brilliant scientist I know” —launched a relentless and bitter campaign against their departmental colleague Edward O. Wilson, condemning the genetic determinism implicit in Wilson’s 1975 book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Wilson’s conclusions were, they claimed, overly simplistic and liable to misuse in rationalizing racism, sexism, and other injustices. For Dick Lewontin, social justice and science were intertwined and inseparable. Respectfully submitted, Andrew Berry Hopi Hoekstra John Wakeley Daniel L. Hartl, Chair

A few comments. Yes, Dick was a terrific teacher. I remember when I was his t.a. in “Population Genetics” and he’d finished all his planned lectures one period before the course ended. When he came to the last class, he asked the students what they’d like to hear about for the final session. One student said, “Linkage disequilibrium,” and, to my amazement, Dick delivered, without notes or planning, a perfectly structured lecture on the topic (the association of different forms of genes with different forms of other genes). The lecture ended exactly after an hour and 20 minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Also, there was a pretty strict division between Dick’s graduate students and Dick’s politics.  He never discussed politics with us unless we asked for it, that was reserved for his conversations with Dick Levins and his students, or with Gould. And most of us had little interest in his Marxism, but we were all immersed in the battle royale between Wilson (and Trivers) on the one hand and Lewontin and Steve Gould on the other. After all, Wilson’s lab was only one floor above ours, and their politically based battle about biology affected us all. It turns out that although Dick was a political ally of Gould in the “sociobiology wars”, in reality Dick couldn’t abide Gould as a person. I found this out when I interviewed Dick for a few hours some years before he died. I did this at the behest of the journal Current Biology, but the interview became so long that it couldn’t be published.  (I had many, many questions!) And Dick revealed a lot of stuff for the record, including the animosity that he held for Gould.

But it’s all water under the bridge now. When we worked in Dick’s lab—and he was only about 44 when I arrived there—it was inconceivable that his imposing presence would one day be gone. But of course no man is immortal, not even The Boss. Still, all of us who worked in his lab remember him as if he were still here. As the old Jewish saying goes, “Let his memory be a blessing.”  It is.

Here’s a picture of Dick and I at the assisted living facility, taken in 2017 by Andrew Berry. I am paying him proper homage.

Here’s a picture taken by Andrew Berry on the same day, with the information below (“Cadbury Commons” is the assisted living facility):

Here’s a photo I took (at Cadbury Commons) Oct 2017 He’s reading a letter from Sally Otto, then president of the Society for the Study of Evolution, announcing the establishment of a graduate student fellowship in his name.

My own obituary for Dick on this site is here, and I’ve put up several posts about other folks’ remembrances of Dick. But there are three central websites, sent to me by Andrew, that have collated information and photos about and remembrances by others:

General website https://sites.google.com/view/celebrating-dick-lewontin/home

Recollections: https://sites.google.com/view/celebrating-dick-lewontin/home/stories-thoughts-memories

 

Photos: https://sites.google.com/view/celebrating-dick-lewontin/home/photos-of-rcl

Reader Smoked Paprika called our attention to this live-feed YouTube “video”; it lets you listen to the Supreme Court’s hearing of Trump’s appeal of the Colorado decision keeping him off the ballot. This is a big deal.

Yesterday I got an email from a factotum of young-Earth biblical creationist and ex-con Kent Hovind, a man apparently desperate to debate evolutionists. (He spent eight years in the can for tax evasion, despite the fact that he complains in the video below that evolution erodes morality!) Here’s what I got:

Dr. Coyne,

I’m writing to ask if you’d like to Debate Dr. Kent Hovind? He is willing to travel to your University or you can come down to his Theme park where we’ll put you up in a Cabin and provide meals, even pick you up from the airport if need be. Or it can be done over zoom if that would be better for you. If your interested call PHONE # REDACTED for Dr Hovind or ext 4 for tech support to schedule you in. Check out the video NAME OF FACTOTUM REDACTED I replied simply, “No, thank you.” Note the superfluous question mark after the first sentence and the absence of the apostrophe in “your”.

I’ve debated a creationist exactly once, and it went fine (it was before the meeting of the Alaska Bar Association!). But since then I decided not to debate them any more, as such engagements give their views a scientific credibility it doesn’t deserve. It’s like debating a flat-earther.  At any rate, the video is below.

In this 51-minute comedy video, Hovind gives a running commentary on a filmed discussion about evolution I had with Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor for their “Freethought Matters” series at the Freedom from Religion Foundation.  Hovind’s main point is that a). evolution is a religion, not science, and b). there’s no evidence for evolution.  I find the video vastly amusing, because Hovind keeps saying the same thing over and over again, including invoking young-earth creationism—including the existence of Noah’s flood. And only Ceiling Cat knows how many times he asserts his claim that evolution is a religion. Well, it surely isn’t in the sense of religion involving the supernatural, but I suppose he means that, to those of his ilk, evolution (like Hovind’s Christianity) is based not on evidence, but pure faith. Yet he doesn’t explain why evolutionists are so keen to accept a scientific fact that’s buttressed by no evidence at all. Are we all in some sort of anti-religious cabal?

Hovind’s mind dump includes claims like these:

The fossil record doesn’t exist, there are “just fossils.” Hovind advances the long-refuted claim that evolutionary change as seen in the fossil record is bogus because the fossils are dated by the sedimentary layers they’re in, and the layers are dated by the fossils they contain; ergo the fossil evidence for evolution begs the question. Apparently Hovind hasn’t heard about radiometric dating! In contrast, he believes that the fossil record itself constitute evidence for the Great Flood.  But, of course, the order that organisms appear in the fossil record isn’t consonant with their simultaneous extirpation by God’s Flood. (Why are fish some of the earliest vertebrates to be found? Shouldn’t they be up at the top, left as the waters recede?  And why are fish way lower down than whales? And so on.)

The evidence for evolution from embryology somehow “justifies abortion”.

Evolution can’t be true because “nobody’s ever seen a cow produce a non-cow.”  In other words, he thinks that evolutionists accept an instantaneous form of massive evolutionary change—a “macromutational” or “saltational” event. Nope, not true.

At points in Hovind’s tirade, he actually admits that evolution could have happened. For example, at about 15:38, he admits that all butterflies may have had a single common ancestor. Well, that’s an admission that all butterflies not only evolved from that ancestor, but that different species of butterflies evolved.  So evolutionary change as well as speciation happened, but of course Hovind would say that all the descendants of that common ancestor are “still butterflies”. In other words, he admits there is evolution, but that it has limits: one “kind” can’t evolve into another “kind.”  But no creationist has ever advanced a good reason what these limits are; there’s a whole sub-field of creationism (“baraminology“) that repeatedly tries and fails to discern the created “kinds.”

Hovind also admits that there is evolutionary change in bacteria as they become resistant to antibiotics, but dismisses that as  not real evolution because it represents a loss of information; and of course a resistant bacterium is still a bacterium. But Hovind is full of it: some antibiotic resistance involves appearance of new “pumps” that get rid of the antibiotic before it harms the bacterium, the appearance of new enzymes, and the ‘horizontal’ acquisition of genes for resistance from other bacteria or viruses. To claim that the evolution of bacterial resistance involves the inactivation of some enzyme or feature is to espouse ignorance.

Finally, he notes that by teaching evolution, I’ve destroyed the faith of “who knows how many students.” I doubt it, but if learning scientific truths dispels faith, that’s not the fault of science. Nor is dispelling faith my aim in teaching evolution.

I know that this post is giving Hovind the attention he so desperately craves, but it’s salutary for us to occasionally see the kind of willful ignorance that pervades the young-creationist movement.

But what’s truly scary is not Hovind, who’s amusing, but something I mention in my FFRF discussion: 40% of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form in the last 10,000 years, and another 33% think that humans evolved, but God guided the process. That makes 73% of Americans—nearly three out of four—accepting some form of divine intervention in the development of life.  Sadly, only 22% of Americans believe that “humans evolved but God had no part in the process.”

The results of the 2019 Gallup poll are shown below the video. Note that the question asked was only about humans, and some exceptionalists may think that while all other creatures evolved in a naturalistic way, humans were the one species created by God. Even granting that, it’s clear that the genus Homo is way, way older than 10,000 years!

From a 2019 Gallup poll:

 

I vowed, after I retired, to travel more, and to relatively exotic places.  I’ve managed to take a few good trips in the last few years, which I’ve documented here (Antarctica, the Galápagos, etc.), but Covid largely put the kibosh on travel.  Now I’m ramping up again, and would like to crowdsource some travel destinations.  Here’s my travel schedule for the time being, but two of the three trips are work-related:

May: Amsterdam and environs to give a talk and a separate interview/discussion. (one week)

August: South Africa to visit Capetown and then Kruger to see the animals (one month)

October: CSICon Conference in Las Vegas to give a talk (four days).

Two of these trips are work-related, but I take work trips only to nice places or alluring meetings, and it would be a pleasure for me to visit Amsterdam again as well as to go to the CSICon conference, the Skeptical Inquirer meeting.   However, this still omits the longer and purely recreational trips I’d planned to take. Therefore here I’m asking readers to suggest destinations for me.

Here’s what I’m looking for:

• A trip of several weeks to a month
• A destination that’s not a place I’ve been before (yes, I’m sure nobody knows all the places I’ve seen, but many know of some)
• Some place that’s fairly exotic and not a classic tourist destination (i.e., Thailand compared to Italy).  Examples:  a few places I’ve contemplated include southeast Asia, the Yucatan, Argentina, and Australia (the last one seems to me to require a trip of several months, so I’ve shied away from Oz although it attracts me greatly). But that’s a very small sample.
• A place where I can travel independently as opposed to in a group. (Cruises are an exception if it’s to a place like Antarctica or the Arctic where you more or less need to travel in a group on a ship.)
• Ideally, it should have good (local) cuisine

I don’t require luxury as I travel not too differently from how I did when I was younger and penurious.

I’m no spring chicken, and so want to go to the “harder” destinations when I’m still relatively healthy. I’ve always feared that my greatest regret on my deathbed would be not to have experienced the diversity and glories of this planet, which is so varied, beautiful, and fascinating.

If you give suggestions, any other ancillary information (reasons why I should go, things to see, etc.) would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Source

The University of Chicago is well known for adopting the principle of “institutional neutrality”—the dictum that our university should take no official position on ideological, political, or moral matters except in the rare situation that such matters directly affect the workings of the school. This principle is embodied in our “Kalven Report.” We see this as a way to avoid chilling the speech of people who fear professional punishment for speaking out against what they see as “official positions.” We also regard this as an important part of our Freedom of Expression policy, which includes not only Kalven but the “Chicago Principles” that guarantee free speech itself.

Although over 100 schools have adopted the Chicago Principles, the number adopting institutional neutrality—the Kalven Principle—remains stuck at just three: the University of Chicago, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Vanderbilt University.  Another school—Columbia University—may be about to adopt a Kalven-ish stand, but still, that’s only four schools out of about 4,000 degree-granting institutions in America.

Why the difference between the willingness of schools to adopt free speech but not institutional neutrality? It has to be that schools feel that they must weigh in on issues of the day—that if they don’t, and  an issue is seen as important and calling for a “right” response, they’ll be seen as bad actors if they keep their yap shut instead of affirming that they’re on the right side of history.  This view is shortsighted (“right” views, of course, change over time) and also inimical to freedom of speech.

At any rate, three important organizations, the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), the Heterodox Academy (HA), and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) have now joined to endorse institutional neutrality. They’ve produced a short open letter about the issue, which you can read by clicking on the headline below:

The gist of the open letter, which is longer:

It is time for those entrusted with ultimate oversight authority for your institutions to restore truth-seeking as the primary mission of higher education by adopting a policy of institutional neutrality on social and political issues that do not concern core academic matters or institutional operations.

In recent years, colleges and universities have increasingly weighed in on social and political issues. This has led our institutions of higher education to become politicized and has created an untenable situation whereby they are expected to weigh in on all social and political issues.

Most critically, these stances risk establishing an orthodox view on campus, threatening the pursuit of knowledge for which higher education exists.

As the University of Chicago’s famous Kalven Report of 1967 states, a policy of institutional neutrality is premised on the defining mission of the university: to pursue truth through “the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge.” And to accomplish this mission, “a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.”

Furthermore, the report recognizes, “There is no mechanism by which [the university] can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives.” In short, individual faculty members and students are the “instrument of dissent and criticism.” The university, on the other hand, “is the home and sponsor of critics.”

Where to draw the line between institutional neutrality and position-taking is a matter of careful prudential judgment. But, as the Kalven Report notes, there should be “a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day.” Smart observers will recognize good faith efforts to apply this principle.

Agreed. Nobody says that Kalven is perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than having no policy so that that universities or departments can issue official endorsements or condemnations of political and ideological views. That is precisely what got the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn in trouble when they testified before a House committee: on some issues there were official departmental statements, while on others there were not. It was largely this inconsistency that led to the fracas around their Presidents’ testimony in Congress—and to the resignation of Penn President Liz Magill.  The University of Chicago wouldn’t even be considered for such an inquiry.

To me, the unity of these organization on the Kalven issue means that colleges have to have a good reason for NOT adopting institutional neutrality. I’m hoping that my constant harping on this issue may inspire some administrators or faculty to get neutrality considered by their schools.

FIRE also issued a press release (click below) with quotes from the leaders of all three organizations.

Here are statements endorsing neutrality from the heads of HA, FIRE, and AFA:

“A top-down, father-knows-best mentality is absolutely no way to support the next generation of free thinkers. Students and faculty deserve the freedom to experiment with different perspectives and explore entirely new ways of thinking without the college claiming to have done all the thinking for them.”

— Greg Lukianoff, FIRE President and CEO

“American colleges and universities need to keep the pursuit of knowledge their principal mission. A public pledge by the overseers of colleges and universities that their schools will take no stance on the controversies of the day will also go a long way to restoring public confidence in the integrity of higher education.”

— Lucas Morel, Chair of the Academic Committee of the AFA

“Colleges and universities should be extraordinary places for the pursuit of knowledge. By adopting neutrality, university leaders empower students and professors to debate tough questions for themselves, allowing them to express heterodox opinions and consider unsettling data, without fear of being silenced or punished.”

— John Tomasi, President of Heterodox Academy

About this issue I’ll just say one more thing: “If not now, when?”

No real “short lists” for Nobel Prizes are announced by the awrding group, but apparently, according to this Jerusalem Post article, one man, Norwegian political scientist and peace scholar Henrik Urdal,  announces his own shortlist for the Peace Prize, a list that is said to be “widely regarded.” Well, his list this year includes actors as bad as previous recipients Yasser Arafat and Henry Kissinger. It actually includes UNRWA, the acronym for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Although there’s one UN organization to handle refugees from throughout the world (UNHCR), UNRWA is the only UN group to handle refugees from a specific area, Palestine. And it doesn’t promote peace, but hatred and terrorism.But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The background:

Director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) Henrik Urdal has published a short list for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee is the organization responsible for selecting the Nobel Peace Prize laureates. However, nominations may be submitted by any persons who are qualified to nominate.

Each year, PRIO’s Director presents his own shortlist for the Nobel Peace Prize. The PRIO Director’s view on potential and worthy Nobel Peace Prize laureates is widely recognized and has been offered since 2002. Urdal presents his seventh list since he began his position of director in 2017.

And some on the “short list”. I don’t know if these are actual nominees that Urdal somehow got hold of (unlikely, but there are leaks), or his own guesses about who will will—and perhaps who he thinks will win:

At the top of the list is the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, followed by the International Court of Justice, UNRWA and Philippe Lazzarini, Article 36 and the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, and UNESCO and the Council of Europe.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee is the organization responsible for selecting the Nobel Peace Prize laureates. However, nominations may be submitted by any persons who are qualified to nominate.

. . .Urdal said regarding his top choice, “Democracy is on the ballot this year as more than half the world’s population live in a country heading to the polls, albeit not exclusively in democracies. Research shows that democratic states are more peaceful and stable. As elections are a cornerstone of democracy, election observers play a pivotal role in shaping perceptions about the legitimacy of electoral processes. A Nobel Peace Prize awarded to election observers sends a strong message about the importance of free and fair elections and their role in peace and stability.”

The ICJ was chosen for the second spot because of its ability to promote peace through international law and because of the importance of multilateral collaboration for peaceful relations from Urdel’s perspective, according to the organization’s website. PRIO mentions the Court’s decision to order Israel to “take action to prevent acts of genocide in the Gaza Strip.” It also mentions its role in March 2022 by ordering Russia to suspend military operations in Ukraine immediately.

. . . . UNRWA and its Commissioner-General, Philippe Lazzarini, were nominated due to UNRWA’s “fundamental” effort to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Urdal argues that a Nobel Prize to the agency would “send a strong message about its role in supporting the lives of millions of Palestinian women, men, and children.” This is in spite of the allegations that UNRWA staff participated in the October 7 attacks as members of Hamas.

Now the International Court of Justice, which has little power to enforce its decisions, nevertheless has made some decent ones, like issuing an arrest warrant for Putin for kidnapping Ukrainian children and ordering Russia to stop military actions in Ukraine. However, should an organization to get plaudits for decisions that will never be implemented? I would think that the Nobel Peace Prize would be given to people who who actually create peace, like Nelson Mandela (co-recipient with F. W. De Clerk) and Malala Yousafzai.

But that’s not how it works. Apparently the committee often awards this prestigious prize to people for “game tries to make peace”, accounting for Prizes that went to terrorist Yasser Arafat’s prize (co-awarded to Itzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres) and Henry Kissinger (co-awarded to Lê Đức Thọ).  As for why Barak Obama got a Peace Nobel, well, your guess is as good as mine. What did he even do to make peace? While Nobel Prizes in the sciences and economics have a mixed record (I know of several Medicine and Physiology prizes awarded for false discoveries), it’s not nearly as bad as the record of Peace Prizes.

At any rate, journalist and, really, anyone interested to look at the record knows that UNRWA has been complicit with Palestinian terrorism for years, allowing Hamas to put rockets on its school grounds and build tunnels under schools, teaching Palestinian children in UNRWA schools to hate Jews and glorify martyrdom, and actually employing members of Hamas as UNRWA employees. UNRWA fired several of its employees for actually participating in the October 7 massacre in Israel (they were filmed), and there are pretty good estimates that 10% or more of the 13,000 UNRWA employees actually belonged to Hamas. (The schoolbook issue is absolutely documented!).  The UN is taking these allegations seriously and is conducting a thorough investigation of UNRWA, though that’s a bit like having  Hamas investigate whether it actually committed terrorism. And of course in my view the actions of the International Court of Justice towards Israel—not even slapping Hamas on the wrist—are not particularly laudable.

Now is not the time to award either the Court or, especially UNRWA, a Nobel Peace Prize. I suspect Urdal’s views reflect his own sympathies rather than an assessment of reality, but who knows? At any rate, perhaps in some years they simply shouldn’t award the Nobel Peace Prize at all, as the list of Laureates is very mixed. After all, in biology you don’t get a Prize for simply thinking up a good experiment. You get it for doing experiments that advance our understanding of science. Likewise, shouldn’t Peace Prizes be awarded for people who actually bring about peace? It’s okay to wait a while to see if a group or person actually accomplishes something. After all, science prizes are often awarded years after a discovery is made—this being done to see if the discovery turned out to be both real and important.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “dizzy 2,” is labeled “a resurrection today from 15 years ago.”  And it’s a good example of the real use of “begging the question,” often misunderstood to mean “raising the question.”

 

I recently finished Douglas Murray’s The War on the West, and thought it pretty good.  Its thesis is that the Woke, and extreme Leftists in general, are espousing an activism of destroying all of Western culture, which, including music, literature, capitalism, politics, food, and so on, is seen as uniformly deplorable as it’s largely the produce of white European men. (The chapter on “cultural appropriation” is particularly good.) You’ll especially appreciate it if you like examples of stupid wokeness.

Now I’m not 100% in agreement with Murray that Western culture is superior in nearly every way, but neither am I sure that he really believes that. I know he’s more xenophobic than I, thinking that anti-British immigrants should be expelled from the UK, but I can live with some disagreement. But I do like his approbation for Israel in the current war, an approbation expressed quite eloquently. At any rate, I think you should read the book, ideally after having finished his earlier The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity.

Speaking of those who hate America, I think this is instantiated in a pro-Palestinian rally that just took place in Dearborn, Michigan. There are videos at the link for verification, and you can go to the site by clicking on the Middle East Media Research Institute headline below (MEMRI is reliable, and it’s run by my friend Yigal Carmon):

A summary (note that Linda Sarsour showed up):

On November 29, 2023, the New Generation for Palestine, founded by Michigan comedian Amer Zahr, held a rally marking the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People in Dearborn, Michigan, which was streamed live on the organization’s Facebook page. Abdullah Hammoud, mayor of Dearborn, spoke at the event, he said that Dearborn is a “city of resistance.” He said that the question is not whether his community will vote for Biden or Trump in the 24 presidential elections, but whether Biden listens to them, or to constituents who stuff his pockets with money. Master of ceremonies, Adam Abusalah, a former congressional aide to Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) and campaigner for Biden in the 2020 elections, addressed President Biden and said: “You are a cancer in our country.” Later in the event he led the crowd in the chant: “Genocide Joe!” Osama Siblani, editor and publisher of the Arab American News, said that a new generation has emerged, who will “clean” the U.S. Congress and White House of the bloodthirsty killers. He said: “We are on the road to a great victory here in D.C. and there in Palestine.” Siblani pledged: “No vote for Biden and no vote for Trump!” Political activist Linda Sarsour said that there will be a “permanent ceasefire” between Hamas and Israel, because Israel has lost the war. Co-master of ceremonies, Lexis Zeidan, concluded the rally, saying: “It doesn’t end with a ceasefire, that is the bare minimum, it ends with the dismantling of the terrorist racist State of Israel.”

As Malgorzata said, “I’m horrified: these are people who hold public office in America and yet hate America.” Indeed. these people seem to be Islamists. Indeed, if you read the Qur’an, a good Muslim must also be an Islamist. Note that there’s a call to dismantle Israel. Yes, that’s what they mean by “From the river to the sea. . . “. These people are not ignorant of the meaning of that phrase, even if some college students are.

Douglas Murray would say that these people should be expelled from America given that their aim seems to be to destroy the country and recast it in an Islamic mole. I can’t go so far as to call for deportations, but, like Malgorzata, I’m horrified. Genocide Joe, indeed!

This morning I received an email from a colleague that said this about the New York Times‘s article on King Charles’s cancer diagnosis:

In the NY Times report there is one sentence mentioning that he is using homeopathy as part of his suite of treatments.

UPDATE: My colleague, who is reliable, swears he saw this in the NYT yesterday, and is baffled that the sentence is gone today.  Readers with a bent for sleuthing might try finding the original article at an archived site.

Well, I can’t find that sentence in the NYT article this morning, nor in the archived version posted right after midnight. Yet we know the King is an advocate of homeopathy. The Guardian of December 17 last year noted that the King had appointed an advocated of woo, including homeopathy, as head of the “royal medical household”:

Yet last week we heard that the head of the royal medical household is an advocate of homeopathy. Dr Michael Dixon has championed such things as “thought field therapy”, “Christian healing” and an Indian herbal cure “ultra-diluted” with alcohol, which claims to kill breast cancer cells. Methods like these might be “unfashionable”, he once wrote in an article submitted to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, but they should not be ignored.

The link above goes to an earlier Guardian article, noting that the head of the royal medical household is not the same thing as thje king’s doctor:

Dr Michael Dixon, who has championed faith healing and herbalism in his work as a GP, has quietly held the senior position for the last year, the Sunday Times reported.

While Dixon, 71, is head of the royal medical household, for the first time the role is not combined with being the monarch’s physician. Duties include having overall responsibility for the health of the king and the wider royal family – and even representing them in talks with government.

There are a lot of people online who are somewhat gleeful about this diagnosis, saying that they’re hoping that King Charles puts the rubber to the road and uses alternative therapies, like homeopathy, but the Daily Fail and other sites note that even Dixon doesn’t think that homeopathy can cure cancer:

[Dixon]  thrown his support behind offering treatments such as aromatherapy and reflexology on the NHS.

In one paper he authored, he referenced an experiment suggesting Indian herbal remedies which had been ‘ultra-diluted’ with alcohol might be able to cure cancer, although Buckingham Palace has staunchly denied Dr Dixon himself believes this can work.

A statement from the palace at the time of his appointment read: ‘Dr Dixon does not believe homeopathy can cure cancer.

‘His position is that complementary therapies can sit alongside conventional treatments, provided they are safe, appropriate and evidence based.’

Dr Dixon, who has reportedly prescribed plants to patients such as devil’s claw and horny goat weed, has also written papers suggesting Christian healers may be able to help people who are chronically ill.

He has a kindred spirit and staunch supporter in the shape of King Charles, who has himself been outspoken on how he believes alternative medicine can help people with illnesses, and was appointed patron of the Faculty of Homeopathy in 2017.

As for me, I have no beef with King Charles, and my first thought when I heard he had cancer was that it was a shame, as he’d waited so long to become King and if he died from this, it would have been a long wait for a short reign. I hope he gets well. What kind of person would want the King to die because he advocates medical woo?

But he should never have promoted that woo, and I’m sure he won’t be using it in his new course of treatment.

Mark Sturtevant has contributed another batch of insect photos today. I’ve indented his captions and IDs, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here are more arthropod pictures, and this should complete the set from two summers ago. I am always behind in sharing these to various online sites since I go out a lot to the woods and fields of Michigan, where I live.

One of our larger Caddisflies is the Northern Caddisfly (Pycnopsyche sp.). Caddisflies are related to butterflies and moths, and they can look a lot like moths, but there are differences such as having hairs on their wings rather than scales. Caddisfly larvae are sort of like caterpillars, but they are aquatic and most species carry around a protective case made from either plant matter or pebbles, woven together with silk. Larvae from this genus mainly fasten together a bundle of twigs to use as a portable home.

Here is a short video about the larvae, showing that they can be quite artful in making their cases, and that their use of sticky silk under water is actually very remarkable.

Next up is a Locust Borer (Megacyllene robiniae). These wasp-mimicking beetles are common visitors on goldenrods in late summer, and their larvae tunnel into black locust trees. Since we have both in the yard, I always see these around.

Next is a European Praying Mantis (Mantis religiosa), photographed from a stage on our dining room table. Nothing too special here, but this was done for the purpose of photographing a nerdy detail about Mantids. Unfortunately, the Mantid that I found was a male, and that meant he would be a complete pain in the a** because males constantly want to move around to hunt for lady Mantids. This one frequently flew off from the dining room table, and I’d have to go chase it down. Nevertheless, the nerdy detail was eventually photographed.

Here is that detail – a specialized patch of bristles on the inside of their front femur. Mantids regularly groom themselves, and they even have a special structure on their front legs just for cleaning their large compound eyes. This has been an item of considerable discussion on one of the macrophotography web sites, and the subject has even led to a couple Facebook memes. The internet is weird that way.

Here is a video of a grooming mantis. The moment it uses its eye brush starts at 35 seconds in. It’s not that dramatic, but I geek out on it.

Moving on, here is a large Nursery Web Spider (Pisaurina mira), so-named because females build a web nursery at the tops of plants for their young. I was trying to photograph the spider with my wide-angle macro lens, but at that moment it decided to surprise me by suddenly clambering up onto the camera. I like the result.

As this set was done very late in the season, with fall moving in, there are now other late-season subjects to share. Around the yard at that time there will always be several Very Gravid Orbweavers in their webs. A couple different species are possible, but I think this one is the Shamrock Orbweaver (Araneus trifolium). I also took this one indoors to do a manual focus stack portrait by using the amazing Venus 2.5-5x super macro lens.

Here are Yellow Jackets on wind-fallen apples in the backyard– another sign that the season was ending (*sniff*). On the left is an Eastern Yellowjacket (Vespula maculifrons), and on the right is a German Yellowjacket (Vespula germanica). As is pretty common, the two species soon begin to fight over the same apple, even though there are dozens of the damn fruits on the ground that I will have to pick up later. These contests look rather dramatic, but their stingers never come out.

And finally, here is a focus stacked wide angle macro picture of autumn trees. The perspective shot is done by leaning against a tree and shooting straight up while nudging the focus a little each time. The set of pictures — maybe 8 or so, are then merged with software to give this deep focus picture.”

As you know, many colleges have dropped the mandatory SAT, a standardized test that has two parts: verbal comprehension and mathematics. Each part is scored from 200-800, so the lowest possible score is 400 and the highest 1600.

At many colleges, submitting SAT test scores for admissions has been eliminated or made optional—often during the pandemic—under the assumption that giving scores would disadvantage racial minorities, who don’t test as well as do white or Asian applicants. This was a way to achieve diversity—a way to enact “holistic admissions.”  Even though SAT scores were good predictors not only of college achievement, and of later-life success, measures of potential achievement were considered less important than indices of diversity.

The University of California commissioned a study to test this, and, sure enough, SAT scores were found to be better predictors of “success” than were high-school grades. Nevertheless, the whole UC system eliminated standardized test scores and still won’t consider them.

Now the highly-rated Dartmouth College in New Hampshire has done a similar study, found the same correlative predication as did  the UC system, and has reinstated the requirement for SATs, something it made optional during the pandemic.  Not only will that facilitate the admission of students who will do well, but they found that making tests option had actually reduced diversity, because lower-income and disadvantaged students withheld scores that would have helped them get in.

Click screenshot below to access, or, if it’s paywalled, I found the article archived here.

Some excerpts:

Last summer, Sian Beilock — a cognitive scientist who had previously run Barnard College in New York — became the president of Dartmouth. After arriving, she asked a few Dartmouth professors to do an internal study on standardized tests. Like many other colleges during the Covid pandemic, Dartmouth dropped its requirement that applicants submit an SAT or ACT score. [JAC: Four-part ACTs are alternatives to SATs.] With the pandemic over and students again able to take the tests, Dartmouth’s admissions team was thinking about reinstating the requirement. Beilock wanted to know what the evidence showed.

“Our business is looking at data and research and understanding the implications it has,” she told me.

Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades — or student essays and teacher recommendations — of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing, as I explained in a recent Times article.

A second finding was more surprising. During the pandemic, Dartmouth switched to a test-optional policy, in which applicants could choose whether to submit their SAT and ACT scores. And this policy was harming lower-income applicants in a specific way.

Why?

The researchers were able to analyze the test scores even of students who had not submitted them to Dartmouth. (Colleges can see the scores after the admissions process is finished.) Many lower-income students, it turned out, had made a strategic mistake.

They withheld test scores that would have helped them get into Dartmouth. They wrongly believed that their scores were too low, when in truth the admissions office would have judged the scores to be a sign that students had overcome a difficult environment and could thrive at Dartmouth.

As the four professors — Elizabeth Cascio, Bruce Sacerdote, Doug Staiger and Michele Tine — wrote in a memo, referring to the SAT’s 1,600-point scale, “There are hundreds of less-advantaged applicants with scores in the 1,400 range who should be submitting scores to identify themselves to admissions, but do not under test-optional policies.” Some of these applicants were rejected because the admissions office could not be confident about their academic qualifications. The students would have probably been accepted had they submitted their test scores, Lee Coffin, Dartmouth’s dean of admissions, told me.

The article gives the range of test scores between 1300 and about 1550 (remember, 1600 is the highest), and the chances of students getting into Dartmouth that have a given score; this is divided into “advantaged” students and “disadvantaged” students, not really defined but implied as having come from “poor neighborhoods or troubled high schools.”  Those are surely correlated with race, but “disadvantaged” is not equated to “black or brown”.  The data aren’t biased because, after an admission offer is made or not made, colleges are entitled to look at the SATs of all students who took them, as they’re a matter of record in this way.  Below is the graph that the NYT gives:

One thing that strikes me about this is how damn selective Dartmouth is. I did pretty well on my SATs taken in 1965 (a total of 1512: 800 in math and 712 in English), but that would put me in the “advantaged” class having only about an 8% chance of being admitted. However, with scores in the 1400 range, disadvantaged students would have doubled their chances of being admitted.  Apparently disadvantaged students didn’t know that, and so withheld those scores, which are still in the upper 5% of students taking the SAT!

Dartmouth’s results also dispelled two common criticisms of the SATs:

For instance, many critics on the political left argue the tests are racially or economically biased, but Beilock said the evidence didn’t support those claims. “The research suggests this tool is helpful in finding students we might otherwise miss,” she said.

I also asked whether she was worried that conservative critics of affirmative action might use test scores to accuse Dartmouth of violating the recent Supreme Court ruling barring race-conscious admissions. She was not. Dartmouth can legally admit a diverse class while using test scores as one part of its holistic admissions process, she said. I’ve heard similar sentiments from leaders at other colleges that have reinstated the test requirement, including Georgetown and M.I.T.

Note that they’re not using race to increase students’ chances of admission, but “disadvantage,” and that is legal, even if race is associated with “disadvantage”. The evidence is, however, that had scores been mandatory, and the gap above maintained, Dartmouth would have increased its diversity.

In the end, a school has three choices: not use SAT scores or consider them for admission; make their submission optional so that they are considered as one factor for admission; or make them mandatory, and they’re considered for admission. The first choice eliminates a very important predictor of college success; the second, which was what Dartmouth used until now, partly eliminates the predictors but also may reduce diversity itself, since students don’t know what the graphs like the one above look like, ergo how their scores could affect their admissions; and the third is what Dartmouth decided to do.

I think they made the right choice.  I have no beef with separating “disadvantaged” from “advantaged” students, so long as “disadvantaged” means truly disadvantaged (I’m not sure that “first generation students whose parents didn’t go to college” can be seen as a “disadvantaged” class). “Disadvantaged” should not be automatically assigned to racial minorities, though.

Dartmouth is a rigorous and highly regarded institution, so I suspect other schools who eliminated SAT requirements or made them optional may reconsider their decisions.

 

h/t: Greg

Nineteen undergraduates at Brown University are fasting to help Palestine, but, as noted in the tweet below, the school’s President, Christina Paxson, refuses to meet their demands. (The tweet includes an inevitable chant, but it’s a new one). Because the students say their hunger strike is “indefinite,” and because the President won’t pass on their demands to the relevant investing body, this looks to me like a standoff, ergo a “fast unto death.”

The difference between this fast and the famous fasts of Gandhi is that these students will not come close to death (I’ll make anybody a bet), and in that way are different from Gandhi’s hunger strikes, which laid him low (he once fasted for 21 days) and often worked when the British saw that Gandhi was (pardon the pun) dead serious, and they’d better give in lest India riot. However, even Gandhi’s fasts failed more often than they succeeded.

And here we have a President with a spine, who’s simply not going to give in to the student demands, which of course require that she abandon institutional neutrality in favor of a political position.

UPDATE: Brown President Christina Paxson has informed the hunger strikers that she will not meet their demands.

At the end of her email to the students, she “highlighted University mental health and well-being resources.” https://t.co/XewA9Tf0aQ pic.twitter.com/d0B7CilAEU

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) February 3, 2024

An earlier report from the Brown Daily Herald, the student newspaper, gives the reason for the hunger strike, which involves 19 students:

The Students announced the hunger strike during a Friday afternoon “rally for divestment” organized by the Palestine Solidarity Caucus and Jews for Ceasefire Now on the Main Green, at which approximately 350 were in attendance. Rally attendees flooded the campus center shortly after the announcement. Protestors also called on Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.) to support a ceasefire in Gaza.

The divestment resolution, the strikers say, should mirror the 2020 report released by the University’s Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Practices that recommended divestment from “companies which profit from human rights abuses in Palestine.” The committee has since been renamed the Advisory Committee on University Resources Management.

. . .The hunger strike — led by “students from several allied affinity and organizing (campus) groups” — is set to be the United States’ largest since Oct. 7, according to the strikers. Upon review of previous hunger strikes related to the Israel-Palestine war, The Herald corroborated this claim.

Students are also calling for the University to promote an “immediate ceasefire in Gaza” and fully divest its endowment “from specified companies enabling and profiting from Israel’s genocide.” But they will only refuse to accept food until the Corporation hears their resolution.

And from the latest Daily Herald, (click to read):

The President’s refusal:

On Sunday, 19 student protestors entered the third day of their hunger strike, despite the refusal of President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 to meet their demand that the Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, “hears and considers a divestment resolution,” during its meetings that begin this week.

The protestors demand that any divestment resolution be consistent with the 2020 report compiled by the Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies, which recommended the University divest its endowment from “companies which profit from human rights abuses in Palestine.”

This advisory committee comprised faculty, staff, alumni, and both undergraduate and graduate students.

Paxson previously refused to adhere to the report, saying that “the recommendation did not adequately address the requirements for rigorous analysis and research as laid out in ACCRIP’s charge, nor was there the requisite level of specificity in regard to divestment.”

In her recent letter to the protestors, Paxson wrote that the first step toward requesting divestment “is not a Corporation resolution, but rather to submit a proposal to the Advisory Committee on University Resource Management” — the successor to ACCRIP.

Paxson also wrote that she will “not commit to bring a resolution to the February 2024 Corporation meeting or any future meeting of the Corporation.”

This the corportation will not hear the students’ demands, ergo they have to keep fasting. But it’s weird, because they could submit a proposal but refuse to do so. It’s confusing, but perhaps the protestors are demanding not just that the proposal be seen but be voted on.

The strikers have not submitted a proposal to ACURM, nor do they plan to do so, according to strike spokesperson Sam Stewart ’24.

The protesting students also wrote that they “will continue (the) hunger strike as long as President Paxson refuses to engage with our demands.”

In response to the students’ continuation of the strike, University Spokesperson Brian Clark reiterated that the 2020 proposal will not be brought forward for a vote, but that student protesters can submit a divestment proposal through ACURM.

One issue is if the students really continue fasting until their lives are in danger, the university, to avoid liability, will disenroll them (see my bolding below), or perhaps arrest them. This has happened before:

In a December sit-in, Paxson refused to revisit her decision not to adhere to a 2020 report compiled by ACCRIP. During this demonstration, 41 students demanded full divestment from “Israeli military occupation” and were subsequently arrested on trespassing charges and referred to ACURM.

In Friday’s letter, Paxson encouraged the protestors to look after their mental and physical well-being throughout the duration of the strike and shared University health resources available to students. She added that “protest is also unacceptable if it creates a substantial threat to personal safety of any member of the community.”

The University previously disenrolled four students participating in a hunger strike protesting the University’s partial divestment policy of South African apartheid in the 1980s. The then-administration cited health and liability concerns for the disenrollment, according to a 1986 article by The Herald.

I suspect nobody died in this one.

Two questions. First, does the University really invest in companies that “profit from human rights abuses in Palestine”?  That itself is a slippery notion; does it mean any Israeli companies? The article says this:

The University is not directly invested in any weapons manufacturing companies, but a substantial portion of its endowment is invested through manager portfolios, The Herald previously reported. The University is contractually obligated not to disclose the companies in these portfolios, but told students that none have a focus in the defense industry.

“We are confident that our external managers have the highest level of ethics and share the values of the Brown community,” Clark wrote in a Sunday email to The Herald, “including the rejection of violence.”

The University of Chicago wouldn’t even go that far, but would simply say that the contents of its portfolio are confidential.  I’m not sure whether the statement above will satisfy the students, but it apparently has not, for it’s not specific enough for the students.

Second, are the students really determined to fast unto death? I doubt it, for they’d be disenrolled (and that would be soon), and that would go on their record. Also, do they really want to die on this hill? Readers can speculate how long they’ll go without food before they give up.

At any rate, it’s good news that the Brown President will not accede to the students’ demands. If she did, there would be no limit to what students could demand in the future.

h/t: Luana

Today we have the second part of a two-part post on Australian trees, the eucalypts, contributed by Reader Dean Graetz. (Part 1 is here.) Dean’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

The Trees that identify Australia

Australia is one of many countries that include plants as part of their identity.  The national floral emblem is the Golden Wattle (Acacia pycnantha), one of more than 1000 Acacia species found on the continent.  The two colours of the plant represent the essence of the continent.  The golden flowers represent its beaches, mineral wealth, grain, and wool harvests.  The green of the (leathery) leaves imitates the continent’s forests and productive landscapes.

Sparsely located in the arid heart of the continent is this visually striking tree.  Commonly known as the Ghost Gum, it was recently renamed with an appropriate Aboriginal Australian species word (Corymbia aparrerinja).  A much more impressive image is here.

Similarly, sparsely located in the drier areas of the continent is this tree.  Evocatively named Bloodwood (Corymbia opaca), there appears no external colouring which supports that name.\

However, if you manage to find a seeping wound, then the reason for its name will be obvious, the colour of the exuding sap (Kino) is a vivid.

When sedentary farmers and graziers were added to Australia’s population, substantial areas of eucalypt woodland, about 13% of the continent, were transformed.  Trees were either clear-felled and burnt for cropping, or just thinned for pastures.  This satellite image shows a large area of mallee, a eucalypt woodland type (dark), cleared in part for growing (wheat) on the bright sandy soil.  The sharp boundary on the LHS is a state border.  Multiple millions of eucalypt trees have been removed here and elsewhere for the reality of it is ‘Either Them or Us’.

Snow Gum woodlands lie on the snow line and are episodically burnt by lightning-induced bushfires, as here.  The many tall stems of each tree have been killed and have bleached white in the high UV environment.  However, the trees are not dead.  Each tree had developed a lignotuber, and from this a ring of new shoots have sprouted and will replace the tree’s burned canopy in about 5 years, or so.  Even so, the sea of bone white, dead stems is eye catching.

An ephemeral dry-country watercourse with three tall River Red Gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis), the most wide spread Eucalypt, from lining the banks of permanent rivers to tapping the subsurface water of this small dry creek.  Never visually elegant or symmetrical, these trees, with their scrabbling roots and scarred stems, suggest one word: Survivor.

As does this extraordinarily large River Red Gum, possibly the largest and oldest known.  Residing in a cleared paddock, it is still healthily growing and supporting a large canopy.  Eucalypts do not annual ring, so its age cannot be measured, just guessed at 300+ years.  The gap in the trunk was likely generated centuries ago by a small fire lit close to it sheltering from the wind.  Repeated often enough to burn through the sapwood and into the heartwood, thereafter the weather and dry rot eventually hollowed the stem but left the sapwood continuing to thrive today.

All Eucalypts produce very hard, dense wood, which when dried after death, is difficult to saw or cut.  A few species are known ‘branch droppers’: large living branches just drop off, for no obvious reason.  Such species are also known as ‘Widow Makers’ for the fatalities of sleepers and sitters under the canopy.  The River Red Gum – see above – is well-known Widow Maker’.  However, branch shedding usually leaves large openings into the stem to be eventually hollowed out and occupied by parrots, such as this Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo (Cacatua galerita).  Because all Australian parrot species are hollow nesters, dead and holed Eucalypts are much sought after trees.

For an Australian away from the built environment, the visual presence of familiar gum trees reinforces your identity: you are home.  There is another personal experience that builds on this.  And that is the smell of burning gum leaves.  In the past, and still today, whenever a small fire was lit ‘to boil the billy’, the fragrance of the fire was associated with friendship, convivial tea-drinking, and conversation.  Dried gum leaves were the perfect one-match fire starter.  The smell of burning gum leaves is pleasant, readily recognised, and soon becomes a deeply held memory.

“The families back home heard and understood this and sent gum leaves with their letters to those at the front.  Nurses wore gum leaves pinned to their capes.  Soldiers sometimes burned the leaves in small piles at the front line so the smell would drift along the trenches and others could be reminded of their country’s distinctive smell.

The smell of Eucalyptus is the smell of home.”