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What is the correct percentage of immigrants that a country should allow across its border each year? For fun, I put the question to Grok—one of the best available LLMs (large language models)—and received this response:

There isn’t a universally agreed-upon “ideal” percentage of immigrants to allow into a country each year; it’s a complex issue with varying perspectives and depends on a country’s specific circumstances and goals. Here’s a breakdown of factors to consider:

• Economic Needs: Some countries may prioritize immigration to address labor shortages or boost economic growth, while others may focus on social or humanitarian factors. 
• Demographic Trends: A country’s values, traditions, and capacity to integrate immigrants can influence its immigration policies. 
• International Relations: A country’s relationships with other nations and its commitment to international law and humanitarian obligations can also play a role. 
• Political Factors: Immigration policies are often subject to political debate and public opinion, which can lead to changes in immigration levels and regulations. 
• Quota Systems: Some countries, like the United States, have established annual quotas for immigrants, allocating visas based on various factors such as family ties, skills, or diversity. 
• Skill-Based Systems: Other countries, like Canada, prioritize immigrants with specific skills and qualifications to address labor shortages and boost economic competitiveness. 
• Family Based Systems: Many countries allow family members of citizens or residents to immigrate, creating a pathway for family reunification. 
• Refugee and Asylum Policies: Countries also have policies in place to provide protection and support to people fleeing persecution or violence in their home countries. 
• Integration and Social Cohesion: Ensuring that immigrants can successfully integrate into society and contribute positively to their new communities is crucial. 
• Economic Impact: Immigration can have both positive and negative economic impacts, depending on various factors, such as the skills and qualifications of immigrants, the size of the immigrant population, and the overall economic climate. 
• Social Services: Immigration can place a strain on social services, such as education, healthcare, and housing, requiring careful planning and resource allocation. 
• Public Opinion: Public opinion on immigration can be highly variable and can influence immigration policies and public discourse.President Trump reviews border wall prototypes in Otay Mesa, California, with Homeland Security and Border Patrol officials (March 2018).

Although “political science” and “economic science” are, technically speaking, sciences as the word is commonly used (theories, data, and testable hypotheses abound), compared to the physical and biological sciences, there is something different about these fields of study. Namely they have direct implication for policy, and therein arises numerous qualifications for the search for any answers. For example, what is the right percentage for the upper income tax bracket? Once again, Grok reveals how dependent the answer is on subjective goals of a nation:

There’s no single “right” percentage for the upper income tax bracket—it depends on what you’re trying to achieve and who you ask. Economists, policymakers, and regular people have been arguing about this forever, and the answer hinges on trade-offs between revenue, fairness, and economic growth. Historically, top marginal tax rates in the U.S. have swung wildly. In the 1950s, they hit 91% for the highest earners under Eisenhower, though loopholes meant few actually paid that. Revenue maxed out at around 7–9% of GDP back then, similar to today’s levels, despite rates now topping out at 37% federally (plus state taxes in some places). Practically, it’s a mess of priorities. Want more social programs? Crank it up to 50–60%, like some European countries (France is at 45%, Denmark effectively higher with add-ons). Worried about brain drain or stifling entrepreneurs? Keep it closer to 35–40%.“Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything … lives or dies by politics.” —Charles Krauthamme

In politics and economics, most of us think of them as determining “truth” by vote (in politics) or by fiat policy (in economics), as in the above examples of immigration and tax rates. We cannot determine the right answer in some absolute sense because it depends on the goals of a nation and the political party in power (liberals want immigration and taxes higher, conservatives want them lower). The “correct” answer is determined through the vox populi system of democratic elections (at least, in principle), which is always open to change with the next election, referendum, or Electoral College vote.

Nevertheless, such qualified truths must be sought, for as the late Charles Krauthammer wrote in his 2013 book Things That Matter:

Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything—high and low and, most especially, high— lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away.1

In the search for political and economic truths, we must begin with an understanding of the nature of human nature. The founding fathers of the United States understood this, as when James Madison argued in Federalist Paper No. 51:

But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.2

I was thinking about Madison’s famous overview of the problem in designing a new government during an online exchange I had with Elon Musk (in his pre-DOGE days), after I asked the SpaceX CEO what documents he would recommend being consulted in setting up a colony on Mars. The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights? The Humanist Manifesto? “Direct democracy by the people,” Musk responded. “Laws must be short, as there is trickery in length. Automatic expiration of rules to prevent death by bureaucracy. Any rule can be removed by 40 percent of people to overcome inertia. Freedom.”

Direct democracy sounds good in theory, but in practice such a system can easily slide into a tyranny of the majority—AKA mob rule—which is why they are historically rare. Switzerland is an exception, although it is a hybrid, or semidirect democracy, with Federalism-like vertical separation of powers mixed in. In recent centuries we have learned that some sort of representational system appears to be necessary to obviate the inherent flaws with direct democracies. The representational democracy of the sort practiced in the U.S. constitutional republic works fairly well, although as is all too apparent, representatives can be heavily influenced by special interest groups and corporations. Perhaps a variation of delegative democracy might be tried, in which voters have an option to delegate their vote to others, although that could quickly degenerate into trading or selling votes. These experiments in democracy give us a database of what works and what doesn’t, and this process may provide evidence for truer or less true forms of political and economic systems. (Nondemocratic nations have had different criteria for “what works,” such as Lenin, for whom all government was simply a question of “whose ox is being gored” and Mao’s belief that all political answers come “from the barrel of a gun.”)

Direct democracy sounds good in theory, but in practice such a system can easily slide into a tyranny of the majority—AKA mob rule—which is why they are historically rare.

If we think about political and economic truths as determined by social experiment tried in different places, we can use the comparative method of the historical sciences to draw conclusions. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1804, “No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth.” From this experimental method, Jefferson concluded that whatever changes in politics and economics are implemented, it should be done carefully and incrementally:

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.3

There are, as well, a variety of social experiments in setting up new societies that differ from nations and states, that nevertheless may inform an analysis of what works and what doesn’t in the political and economic realm. These include unintentional communities, such as shipwrecked sailors stranded on an island, intentional communities, such as the communes established in America in the 19th century and Kibbutzim founded in Israel in the 20th century, and artificial communities, such as online communities developed in the 21st century. These natural experiments in living are deeply explored by the evolutionary sociologist Nicholas Christakis in his 2019 book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.4 Let’s look at a few examples from unintentional communities and see what light might be shone on the problem, starting with Yale University sociologist (and, interestingly, physician) Christakis’s list of eight social characteristics at the core of all good societies:

1. The capacity to have and recognize individual identity.
2. Love for partners and offspring.
3. Friendship.
4. Social networks.
5. Cooperation.
6. Preference for one’s own group (that is, a mild “in-group bias”).
7. Mild hierarchy (that is, relative egalitarianism).
8. Social learning and teaching.

Whatever the right balance of these characteristics for any given society, the overall balance to be sought is between individualism and group living—individual autonomy balanced against the interests of the community.

Unintentional communities are natural experiments that have struggled to find this balance, a type of “forbidden experiment” that would never get the approval of a research university’s Institutional Review Board. Being stranded in a remote place is one such natural experiment, and—believe it or not—there’s a database of such forbidden experiments in the form of shipwrecks with survivors, or in the subtitle of an 1813 work in this genre, “A Collection of Interesting Accounts of Naval Disasters with Many Particulars of the Extraordinary Adventures and Sufferings of the Crews of Vessels Wrecked at Sea, and of Their Treatment on Distant Shores.”

Christakis includes a table of 24 such small-scale shipwreck societies over a 400-year span from 1500 to 1900, with initial survival colony populations ranging from 4 to 500 (with a mean of 119), but with much smaller numbers of rescued survivors, ranging from 3 to 289 (with a mean of 59), reflecting their success or failure in striking the right balance. The duration of these unplanned societies ranged from 2 months to 15 years, with a mean of 20 months.

Some of the survivors killed and ate each other (murder and cannibalism), while others survived, flourished, and were eventually rescued. What made the difference? “The groups that typically fared best were those that had good leadership in the form of mild hierarchy (without any brutality), friendships among the survivors, and evidence of cooperation and altruism,” Christakis elaborates. The successful shipwreck societies shared food equitably, took care of the sick and injured survivors, and worked together digging wells, burying the dead, building fires, and building escape boats. There was little hierarchy—for example, while on board, their ship’s officers and enlisted men were separated, but on land, successful castaways integrated everyone in a cooperative, egalitarian, and more horizontal structure, putting aside prior hierarchical class differences in the interest of survival. Camaraderie emerged and friendships across such barriers were formed.

The closest thing to a controlled experiment in this category was when two ships (the Invercauld and the Grafton) wrecked on the same island (Auckland) at the same time in 1864. The island is 26 miles long and 16 miles wide and lies 290 miles south of New Zealand—truly isolated. The two surviving groups were unaware of one another, and their outcomes were starkly different. For the Invercauld, 19 out of 25 crew members made it to the island, but only 3 survived when rescued a year later, whereas all five of the Grafton crew made it to land and all 5 were rescued two years later. “The differential survival of the two groups may be ascribed to differences in initial salvage and differences in leadership, but it was also due to differences in social arrangements,” Christakis explains. “Among the Invercauld crews, there was an ‘every man for himself’ attitude, whereas the men of the Grafton were cooperators. They shared food equitably, worked together toward common goals (like repairing the dinghy), voted democratically for a leader who could be replaced by a new vote, dedicated themselves to their mutual survival, and treated one another as equals.”

Is there a political system that more or less follows these criteria for what makes a good society? There is, and it is termed classical liberalism. Its founders are a veritable Who’s Who of political and economic thought, honored—perhaps more in the breach than the observance—by liberals and conservatives alike: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Paine, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, and many others. It has been variously described as the system that cherishes individual liberty and autonomy, personal agency and responsibility, natural and civil rights, civil and economic liberties, religious liberty and church-state separation, free speech, free press, and free trade, private property and the rule of law, and other such principles. (In the 19th century this political and economic philosophy became known as “liberalism”, but the morphing of that word in the 20th century toward the left end of the political spectrum now requires use of the modifier “classical.”5) Surely most of us on both the Left and the Right today can agree—in principle if not always in practice—that these are values we share. To be more specific in articulating what classical liberalism represents, in the final chapter of The Moral Arc I enumerated a number of these principles as the “Freedom and Justice Dozen,” noting that they are necessary “to quell our inner demons and to inspire our better angels.”6

1. A liberal democracy in which the franchise is granted to all adult citizens.
2. The rule of law defined by a constitution that is subject to change only under extraordinary circumstances and by judicial proceedings.
3. A viable legislative system for establishing fair and just laws applied equally and fairly to all citizens regardless of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.
4. An independent judicial system for the equitable enforcement of those fair and just laws that employs both retributive and restorative justice.
5. Protection of civil rights and civil liberties for all citizens regardless of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.
6. A potent police force for protection of our liberties from attacks by people within the state.
7. A robust military for protection of our liberties from attacks by other states.
8. Property rights and the freedom to trade with other citizens and companies both domestic and foreign.
9. Economic stability through a secure and trustworthy banking and monetary system.
10. A reliable infrastructure and the freedom to travel and move.
11. Freedom of speech, the press, and association.
12. Mass education, critical thinking, scientific reasoning, and knowledge available and accessible for all.

And for a Baker’s Dozen, let’s add one more that has developed over the past century:

13. Social spending to help those in need to survive and flourish, such as the homeless, mentally ill, physically handicapped, unemployed, elderly, and children, with such necessities as shelter and housing, childcare, food, energy, education, job training, and medical care.

A word on this last point: Those on the Left feel we do not do enough to support citizens in need, while those on the Right argue that too much social spending is enabling those who should be helping themselves. There are elements of truth in both of these responses, but the fact is that today the strongest and fastest growing economies in the world allocate anywhere from 20 to 30 percent of their GDP to social expenditures, including (in order), France (31.2%), Belgium (28.9%), Finland (28.7%), Italy (28.2%), Denmark (28%), Austria (26.6%), Sweden (26.1%), Germany (25.1%), Norway (25%), Spain (23.7%), and Greece (23.5%), with the United Kingdom at 20.6%, the United States at 18.7%, and Canada at 17.3%.7 When social spending made through employers instead of government (such as healthcare, retirement, and disability) is factored into the equation, the U.S. rises from 21st place to 2nd in overall social expenditures.

Classical liberals emphasize the freedom and autonomy of individuals and the rights of persons, not collectives.

Germany is a model country that has balanced highly competitive free market economics—it is by far the strongest economy in the EU and the third largest economy in the world after the United States and China—with a social welfare system that provides cradle-to-grave security. My wife Jennifer is from Köln, Germany, and she is constantly amazed at what the U.S. fails to provide those in need (or even the basics we all need, such as universal health care), that her country supplies without apparent harm to its robust economy. Tellingly, a 2015 study on world human development between 1870 and 2007, conducted by the economist Leandro Prados de la Escosura, reported a positive correlation between the percentage of GDP that an OECD nation allocated to social spending and its score on a composite measure of prosperity, health, and education.8 (Although it is reasonable to ask if this is because those nations are rich enough to be able to afford such “generosity.”)

So, it is not only moral to help those who cannot help themselves, it pays fiscal dividends to have a strong social safety net within the umbrella of a competitive free market economy. Social spending may seem like the weather—everyone complains about it (there’s too much or too little) but no one does anything about it—but in fact it has become an integral part of all advanced nations and must be counted as a form of progress on the long arc of the moral universe. It is, perhaps, the grand bargain of classical liberalism that both conservatives and liberals might agree on a figure somewhere within that band of 20 to 30 percent of GDP, the details left to jigger depending who is in power and what, specifically, voters want funded more or less.

The central dogma both liberals and conservatives today embrace that veers from the ideals of classical liberalism is in their emphasis on the group over the individual. Under the guise of “identity politics,” liberals tend to treat individuals as members of an oppressed or oppressing group, as defined by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and political party. Under the pretense of “faith and flag,” conservatives tend to sort people into such collectivities as nation, state, tribe, family, religion, and political party. The resulting Us versus Them tribalism results in such illiberal policies as speech censorship and destructive moralizing on the left and political populism and economic nationalism on the right. The populist politics of the Hard-Right is simply the mirror image of the identity politics of the Hard-Left.

Classical liberals believe that it is individuals who are entitled to rights—not races, genders, ethnicities, religions, or nations—because it is individuals who perceive, emote, respond, love, feel, and suffer. Classical liberals emphasize the freedom and autonomy of individuals and the rights of persons, not collectives. Individuals vote, not genders. Individuals want to be treated equally under the law, not races. Many of our constitutional rights, in fact, were designed to protect individuals from being discriminated against as members of a group, such as by race, gender, and sexual orientation.

It is when individuals are subsumed into and sacrificed for the good of the group that abuses of freedom have been most widespread and body counts have skyrocketed.

To be sure, we are a social species, so we enjoy and even need the company of others, such as families, friends, and faiths. And we are a political species, so we revel in sorting ourselves into like-minded ideological tribes. However, such consortiums should not be confused with or negate the value of the individual as the primary moral agent of our ethical concern, the axiomatic inheritor of our legal rights, the principal participant in our democracy, and the ultimate subject under our laws. The unique individual is to politics what the atom is to physics and the organism is to biology—a fundamental unit of nature. Therefore our moral starting point ought to be the survival and flourishing of individual sentient beings.9

It is when individuals are subsumed into and sacrificed for the good of the group that abuses of freedom have been most widespread and body counts have skyrocketed. It is when people are judged not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin—or by their gender constitution, or by with whom they choose to share a bed, or which accent they speak with, or by which political or religious affiliation they identify with—that freedom falls and liberty is lost.

On that point, the historical record is clear.

Do you really need to pay quite so much attention to which foods you eat, and which you avoid?

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Summertime. And the living is easy. Janice Joplin has to be the best singer. Ever. There may be those in the comments who disagree, but remember, within the context of the blog, what I write is canon. Which is not the same as being true. Canon. Any-who. I spend summer on the front porch and rarely venture inside. Outside has had the […]

The post Infection Control/Infection Prevention first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Shortly after astronomers detected asteroid 2024 YR4 on December 27th, 2024, they realized it posed no threat to Earth. But it still might impact the Moon in 2032. The impact debris could threaten satellites and trigger an extraordinarily stunning meteor shower.

Very massive stars (VMSs), which typically has masses about 100 times that of our own Sun, are critical components in our understanding of the formation of important astronomical structures like black holes and supernovae. However, there are some observed characteristics of VMSs that don’t fit the expected behavior based on the best models we have of them. In particular, they hover around a relatively limited band of temperatures, which are hard to replicate with typical stellar evolution models. A new paper from Kendall Shepherd and their co-authors at the Institute for Advanced Study (SISSA) in Italy describes a series of new models based on updated solar winds that better fit the observations of VMSs in their natural environment, and might aid in our understanding of the development of some of the most fascinating objects in the Universe.

LUNAA Journeys (St. LUcia National Astronomy Association) is looking to address an all too common problem in the global astronomical community. Too often, participation in astronomy is seen as cost prohibitive, the sole pursuit of large universities or organizations that can afford to build a large modern observatory, or launch the Hubble Space Telescope. This is unfortunate, as there’s never been an era of more readily accessible information, out there in terms of astronomy and skywatching.

During its commissioning phase, NASA's [*Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere*](https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/punch/) (PUNCH) mission captured high-resolution images of a [Coronal Mass Ejection](https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena/coronal-mass-ejections) (CME) in greater detail than was previously possible.

A gaggle of companies are searching the US Midwest for underground hydrogen fuel produced by a billion-year-old split in the continent – New Scientist visited one of the first to start drilling

Using machine learning to analyse data from the Event Horizon Telescope, researchers found the black hole at the centre of our galaxy is spinning almost as fast as possible

There are new hints that the fabric of space-time may be made of "memory cells" that record the whole history of the universe. If true, it could explain the nature of dark matter and much more

The Proba-3 mission, consisting of two spacecraft that fly in close formation to study the sun, has returned images of the first ever artificial solar eclipse

Researchers have created a revolutionary robotic skin that brings machines closer to human-like touch. Made from a flexible, low-cost gel material, this skin transforms the entire surface of a robotic hand into a sensitive, intelligent sensor. Unlike traditional robotic skins that rely on a patchwork of different sensors, this material can detect pressure, temperature, pain, and even distinguish multiple contact points all at once.

When Apollo astronauts stumbled across shimmering orange beads on the moon, they had no idea they were gazing at ancient relics of violent volcanic activity. These glass spheres, tiny yet mesmerizing, formed billions of years ago during fiery eruptions that launched molten droplets skyward, instantly freezing in space. Now, using advanced instruments that didn't exist in the 1970s, scientists have examined the beads in unprecedented detail. The result is a remarkable window into the moon s dynamic geological history, revealing how eruption styles evolved and how lunar conditions once mirrored explosive events we see on Earth today.

For the first time in history, we re seeing the Sun from an angle no one ever has: from above and below its poles. Thanks to the European Space Agency s Solar Orbiter and its tilted orbit, scientists have captured groundbreaking images and data that are unlocking mysteries about the Sun s magnetic field, its puzzling 11-year cycle, and the powerful solar wind. Instruments aboard the spacecraft are already revealing strange, chaotic magnetic behavior near the Sun s south pole and tracking solar particles like never before. As the Orbiter climbs to even steeper viewing angles over the next few years, the secrets of our star may finally be within reach.

...because the CDC schedule is about to start shedding vaccines the way antivaxxers on ACIP think that those vaccinated against COVID-19 shed spike protein. Ground zero for RFK Jr.'s extinction-level event with respect to public health is vaccines.

The post RFK Jr.’s ACIP bloodbath: I hope you’re all up-to-date on your vaccines… first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Oy, how the ducklings have grown! Remember, today has been only 40 days since they hatched on May 6.  In all respects save their inability to fly, they are slightly small adults, though they still hang together as the Brood of Six. Here are some photos and videos taken over the last two weeks.

The pictures and videos below are presented chronologically, and were taken on four days: June 1, 5, 7, and 11. You can see the change in the ducklings over a period of only ten days: they’ve lost most of their fuzz and are mostly feathered, and their wings are getting larger.

Mother Esther, June 1:

More “babies”, if they can be called that. Esther stands on a plant pot and watches her offspring:

On June 1 the ducklings were growing feathers, most notably on their wings.

A video of ducklings leaving the water on June 1 for a postprandial grooming session and then a nap. They are able to leave the water and jump on the pond edge very easily now.

More preening on the same day:

And, after preening, they often form a clump o’ ducklings, keeping warm and together. Esther, as you see, is always nearby.  They’re also nibbling at the grass:

A single duckling giving itself a thorough cleaning.

By June 6, the ducklings had developed more extensive feathering, especially on their breasts. They look to me like little dinosaurs, which of course they are:

And they look quite plump after feeding, often with their craws hanging over the edge of the pond. We call these “Dali ducks”. But they are not fat.

The babies dunking themselves on June 6:

Father Mordecai, who hasn’t been around for a few days:

After dining, swimming, diving, and preening, the ducklings plop themselves down for a nap. I love the plopping:

On June 7 we had a bout of postprandial zooming:

Esther the Queen:

Esther always does thorough ablutions, for as mom, she has to be in good condition. (Soon she’ll molt and gradually lose her feathers, replacing them with shiny new ones. This process is gradual so she is not of course bald!)

Meanwhile, Mordecai, when he was there, would drive other ducks out of the pond. Here he subtly but insistently forces Haman the Evil Duck out of the pond:

By June 11 the ducklings had gotten almost all of their feathers, but their wing feathers are small and they can’t yet fly. They’re also a bit smaller than Esther, but not by very much. Here’s one sunning on a rock:

Duckling ablutions:

Dabbling. They seem to get some food from the pond, and I’ve seen them slurping down algae.  Here they all seem to have homed in one one area:

Homing as Esther watches:

A big-time case of the zoomies:

A duckling. It’s now hard to tell them from mother, and at a distance you have to concentrate on color (Esther is lighter) rather than on size. There’s just a bit of fuzz near the tail, but otherwise they are fully feathered. I predict they’ll be flying in two weeks.

As a reminder, here are two of them the day they hit the water: May 7:

Here I am hand-feeding a stray hen, who we call “Hoover” because she comes right up to us when we’re sitting and cleans up all the duck food spilled on the ground at feeding time. I felt sorry for her and gave her a handful of food, which she quickly grabbed, one pellet at a time. I don’t really want to feed her, but when a duck looks straight at you  with their beautiful faces and liquid eyes, it’s hard to resist. I am not feeding these stray ducks much at all, and they are often gone (eating elsewhere, I hope). Photo by Elsie Holzwarth:

Like the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center, the once-venerable American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has by and large abandoned its primary values and mission. In the case of the AAUP, celebrating its 110th anniversary this year, that mission was the protection of academic freedom as well as “to define fundamental professional values and standards for higher education, and to ensure higher education’s contribution to the common good.”

How has this happened? First, in a post in 2025 (see other critiques of mine here), I summarized the ways the AAUP has gone to ground:

The three changes the AAUP has made to this end include these (there are a few other and more minor ones included in the piece):

a.) Abandoned its opposition to academic boycotts

b.) Approved of the use of diversity statements, finding them “compatible with academic freedom”

c.) Averring that institutional neutrality, as embodied in Chicago’s Kalven Report, need not impact academic freedom one way or the other, so one need not adhere to the Kalven principle that the university or parts of it cannot issue ideological, political, or moral statements unless those statements bear directly on the mission of the University.

In a new article, the Chronicle of Higher Education (click headlines below of find it archived here), Matthew Finkin, once head of the committee that criticized academic boycotts and DEI criteria for promotion (“Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure”), explains the 180º turn the AAUP took on these positions. Finkin finds, as the title below shows, that the newer reversed positions are incompatible with the organization’s original mission. As he says:

Recent actions have departed from these standards — and radically. The AAUP, acting through its Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, has, first, abandoned its prior position that systematic participation in the boycott of Israeli universities could threaten academic freedom and, second, declared that adherence to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) dictates as a condition of faculty retention can be consistent with academic freedom. These actions reveal a body now driven by considerations other than fidelity to principle. As a result, the deep well of communal respect has been drained dry; the AAUP’s credibility has been destroyed.

Let’s summarize the source of the reversals by topic.

Academic boycotts. 

As recently as 2005, when the British Association of University Teachers called for its members not to engage academically with two Israeli universities, the AAUP opposed this move strongly, issuing this statement:

Since its founding in 1915, the AAUP has been committed to preserving and advancing the free exchange of ideas among academics and irrespective of governmental policies and however unpalatable those policies may be viewed. We reject proposals that curtail the freedom of teachers and researchers to engage in work with academic colleagues, and we reaffirm the paramount importance of the freest-possible international movement of scholars and ideas.

A subsequent subcommittee report opposed organized academic boycotts by groups (including both departments and universities), though of course considerations of academic freedom allow individuals to cooperate or collaborate with whomever they want.

Then came October 7, 2023 and the subsequent demonization of Israel by many liberals—liberals who, by and large, make up most university faculties. The AAUP then did that 180 and, in 2024, decided that boycotts of universities (read: Israeli universities) was okay after all.  And it allowed this because, the AAUP proclaimed, banning boycotts actually compromised academic freedom. The striking thing was that the AAUP gave not a single example of how boycotts actually had compromised academic freedom:

There matters stood until the summer of 2024, when Committee A approved a statement that expressly “supersedes” the position adopted nearly two decades before. The new Statement on Academic Boycotts explained its raison d’être: The 2006 position was “controversial, contested, and used to compromise academic freedom. We therefore believe that this position deserves reconsideration and clarification.” Unfortunately, the reasons given for this reconsideration are threadbare, at best. The result is a tangle of inconsistencies and begged questions — without any reference to, let alone inquiry into, the role played by freedom of research and teaching on which the committee’s position rested a generation before.

The assertion that because the 2006 position has been “used to compromise academic freedom” it should be reconsidered could provide a valid reason for revision. But the report makes no mention of any instance, in press accounts or complaints brought to the staff, of any faculty member having been disciplined or threatened with discipline simply for advocating for a boycott. So “compromise” must mean something other than violation or abridgment, but the 2024 statement breathes no hint of what.

The AAUP. whose Committee A chair, Rana Jaleel, is apparently pro-Palestibnian, favoring the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement, decided that academic boycotts were fine because opposing them would chill the speech and actions of those who favor boycotts. Note, though, that the AAUP is not a university, and so is not subject to academic neutrality provisions of universities. Further, this argument, as Finkin notes, is nonsensical:

This argument is logically flawed and empirically unsupported. By its logic, were the state to accede to the demands of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement and divest university investments in companies that do business in Israel, those faculty members who oppose the boycott and wish to say so would have had their own academic freedom “compromised.” The only way that would not be the case would be to maintain that advocacy for BDS is protected by academic freedom, but advocacy against it is not.

Nor is there any factual basis for the claim that such legislation has actually “been used to compromise” academic freedom in that chilling sense. Illinois law, for example, directs its public-university retirement system to decline to invest in companies that observe the anti-Israel boycott and to divest in those that do. Yet at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the BDS movement shows no sign of abatement.

According to the AAUP’s new argument,  organized academic boycotts or prohibition of them would both infringe on academic freedom. The only rational solution is to impugn organized boycotts (but not individual ones), because such organized movements impinge on scholarly interchange between institutions, which is essential for academic freeedom. The AAUP blew this one.

DEI (Diversity, equity and inclusion) statements

Here we’re talking about the use of DEI statements as prerequisites for hiring, promotion, and tenure, something prohibited by the University of Chicago. Although our university favors at least the DI parts of DEI, it also considers ideological statements of this sort to violate our 1970 Shils Report, which bases hiring and promotion on meritocracy. DEI statements are compelled speech, as those who are forced to write them must adhere to the going norms of DEI, norms that sneer at statements like “I have treated and will treat all students the same, regardless of their immutable characteristics like race or religion.” Modern DEI statements are expressly ideological, hewing to “progressive” Leftist politics.

Finkin notes the slipshod way that the AAUP went about giving its imprimatur to DEI statements:

Had Committee A taken up DEI in keeping with its customary process of policy consideration in such a weighty matter, it would have assembled the data on what these policies actually provided, how widespread they were, and how they were being administered; engaged with the arguments on the relationship of DEI to academic freedom in the literature and in the deliberations of faculties, including those that refused to use them; and provided a clear, dispassionate analysis of how DEI stacked up against the 1940 statement’s commitment to freedom of research, teaching, and political engagement. It did nothing of the kind. Instead, it launched an aggressive defense of DEI accompanied by a strident attack on its critics, in all of six paragraphs and three conclusory recommendations. Each bears brief synopsis before the substance of the statement is addressed.

I won’t go through these arguments except to say that they seem to boil down to this:  if DEI statements are approved by a faculty as essential for professional advancement, then opposing them is violating academic freedom. Apparently academic freedom, says the AAUP, is what a faculty consensus says it is.  Finkin points out the problems with this view:

It is worth noting that a number of faculty members subject to the anti-Communist loyalty oath supported it, and a larger number were indifferent. The AAUP did not consider the depth of faculty support for the loyalty oath to have any bearing on its consequences for academic freedom. The reason is that the abridgment of academic freedom is a matter of fact irrespective of the status or motive of those effecting or acquiescing in it. The way Committee A has cast it, a DEI policy identical in every word would or would not abridge academic freedom depending only on the ideological or political proclivities of a majority of a bare quorum of “an appropriate larger group.” Faculty liberties cannot be made to hang by so precarious a thread. It should be enough to say of the right to exercise academic freedom what the Supreme Court said of the right to exercise freedom of thought and speech: It depends on no majority; it hinges on the outcome of no vote.

And, in fact, as I’ve said, required DEI statements, by okaying compelled speech, violate the Constitution and are therefore illegal, at least at public universities that must adhere to the First Amendment. The only reason they’re still compulsory in some public universitie—I believe the University of California is one—is because nobody so far has had the moxie to challenge the statements in courts, for that would require having “standing”, which would endanger all your academic prospects. As Finkin explains:

It seems inevitable that sometime, somewhere, one or more instructors will not be reappointed for no reason other than the failure to satisfy a DEI requirement. It seems equally inevitable that at least one housed in a public university will contest the decision on constitutional grounds; and, in that event, that the AAUP will appear before the court as amicus curiae. In that case, it would be expected that the AAUP will address the court much along this line:

We appear before this court as the repository of a century’s thoughtful engagement with the meaning and significance of academic freedom, to bring our considered judgment, expressed in the Statement on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Criteria for Faculty Evaluation, to the court’s attention and to argue in support of it.

To which the only frank response a court could make is: “You are the successor in title, but no longer in principle, spirit, or scrupulous care.”

I’ll finish by noting that the real defender of academic freedom these days, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), is opposed to both academic boycotts and DEI statements.  The AAUP is now an opponent rather than a guarantor of academic freedom, and FIRE is its true successor.

h/t Wayne

Having finished off birds, damselflies, and dragonflies, John Avise has a new topic for us this Sunday: whales. John’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Whale-watching Trips, Part 1.  The World’s Largest Animal.

Coastal Southern California promotes itself as one of the whale-watching capitals of the world, and indeed many whale-watching boats operate out of this area, taking tourists on off-shore excursions to view cetaceans and other sea-life.  I‘ve been on quite a few of these several-hour trips, and they’ve nearly always provided wildlife treats that will be the subjects of this photographic series.  Today we begin with photos of a whale species that passes through this area during the winter months on its migratory travels.   An adult Blue Whale also happens to be the largest animal that has ever inhabited our planet.

Blue Whale, Baleanoptera musculus:

Blue Whale closer up:

Blue Whale fluke:

Blue Whale spout:

Blue Whale, blowhole close-up:

Blue Whale, dorsal fin:

Blue Whale, longitudinal view:

At the heart of our galaxy lies a cosmic puzzle: although the Galactic Center is packed with star-making material, massive stars form there surprisingly slowly. Using NASA's retired SOFIA observatory, scientists captured rare high-resolution infrared views that revealed dozens of new stars being born, but not in the numbers or sizes one might expect.

Solar sails are space's ultimate free ride, they get their propulsion from the Sun, so they don't need to carry propellant, but they come with their own challenges. A sail has a large surface area but a low mass, which creates a huge moment of inertia and makes it difficult to control, especially with reaction wheels. A team of engineers have cracked it though with "smart mirrors" that can instantly switch their reflectivity on command, transforming sunlight from an unruly force into a precision steering tool.