30 November 2007 @ 1:55AM >> Vincent Carroll in the Rocky Mountain News:

“The U.S.A. spends more on higher education, as a percentage of gross domestic product, than any other industrialized country, according to the Education Department.” —USA Today

Bet you didn’t know that. On the other hand, you very likely did know - because it’s mentioned repeatedly - that this country spends more on health care, as a percentage of gross domestic product, than every other advanced country.

Why is spending so much on health care considered a national scandal by many commentators but the outsized spending on higher education is not?

Could part of the answer be that the health-care system is studied, analyzed and dissected by a scholarly community that simply isn’t willing to apply the same critical perspective toward the institutions that sign its checks?

To the contrary: The self-interested consensus among academics is that this country needs to spend far more on higher education.

29 November 2007 @ 8:34PM >> Last week, I linked to a Denver Post story detailing the ordeal of Don and Susie Kirlin, a Boulder couple who’ve been living in the city for 27 years. The Kirlins recently had a substantial chunk of their land taken away from them by the legal maneuverings of their well-connected politician neighbors, Richard McLean and wife Edith Stevens. You see, McLean and Stevens wanted that land for themselves. And thanks to a friendly judge and an obscure legal doctrine called “adverse possession,” they were able to seize the land from the Kirlins.

A reader wrote in with a little more background about this case:

Evan,

Just some notes I found while poking around on the internet about this case. I don’t know anyone involved, everything I know came from Google searches. It just infuriates me that someone could do this.

1) The Kirlins claim that they have satellite photos proving that the paths that McLean “developed” didn’t exist until a year ago.

2) Edith Stevens is a former Chairwoman of the Boulder Democratic Party and is still active in local politics. In fact, one of the claims that she uses to justify the land grab is that she used the land to stage political fundraisers. I’d be interested to find out which politicians benefited from her land grab.

[Link]

Edith Stevens has resigned as campaign treasurer for State House Representative Claire Levy (Democrat).

[Link]

3) Levy appears to be yet another trial lawyer turned politician. From her website:

[Link]

“I also worked with legislators on bills related to local government land use authority. Our goal was to retain flexibility for local governments to address their unique problems during a time when the state legislature wanted to take tools away from local government in favor of developers.”

Presumably Don and Susie Kirlin, in this case, are the developers. They’re a family trying to build their dream home. “Local government” in this case are the courts and politicians. This isn’t eminent domain or overzealous land use regulation, but it’s all part of the same picture— usurping property rights in the name of “public good”. After all, where would we hold our democratic fundraisers if Don and Susie build their house?

4) Two points seem to be getting lost in the comment threads on the sites I’m reading. First, this is NOT an open and shut case. Apparently, the Kirlins claim to have convincing evidence that key facts were misrepresented (that is, aerial photography disputing when the footpaths were created). Second, over and above the legal question is the ethical question. The Kirlins aren’t 17th century English barons, fencing off the commons and evicting the commoners. They’re neighbors. McLean and Stevens might win in the courts—in fact with their political clout it seems likely they will—but that doesn’t make taking what isn’t theirs morally right.

Rob in Atlanta

26 November 2007 @ 11:21PM >> “The dogma of multiculturalism holds that all cultures are equal, except Western culture, which (unlike every other society on the planet) has a history of oppression and war is therefore worse. All religions are equal, except Christianity, which informed the beliefs of the capitalist bloodsuckers who founded America and is therefore worse. All races are equal, except Caucasians, who long ago went into business with black slave traders in Africa, and therefore they are worse. The genders, too, are equal, except for those paternalistic males, who with their testosterone and aggression have made this planet a polluted living hell, and therefore they are worse.” More >>

22 November 2007 @ 12:04PM >> ...to some selfless Americans who deserve it.

21 November 2007 @ 8:37PM >> An example:

[Don and Susie Kirlin] moved to the city in 1980. A few years later, the Kirlins purchased a plot of land near their residence, hoping to someday build a “dream home.”

“We took advantage of the market in the early ’80s,” says Susie Kirlin, almost apologetic for making a smart investment.

Children interfered slightly with the master plan - three of them in the next few years - postponing any development of the property.

As the children began to make their own way in life, the couple decided it was time to finally develop the property in late 2006.

By then, it was too late.

Despite owning the land, despite living only 200 yards from the property, despite hiking past it every week with their three dogs, despite spraying for weeds and fixing fences, despite paying homeowner association dues and property taxes each year, someone else had taken a shine to it. Someone powerful.

Former Boulder District Judge, Boulder Mayor, RTD board member - among other elected positions - Richard McLean and his wife, attorney Edith Stevens, used an arcane common law called “adverse possession” to claim the land for their own.

All McLean needed was to develop an “attachment” to it.

Undoubtedly, his city connections couldn’t have hurt, either.

In the court papers, McLean and his family admit to regularly trespassing on the Kirlins’ property.

They created paths. They said they put on a political fundraiser and parties on it (though not a single photograph of these events surfaced in court documents).

This habit of trespassing developed into an affection.

If we take McLean at his word, he should have been treated appropriately: like a common criminal. Instead, the former judge demanded a chunk of the land for himself - and implausibly he got it.

[...]

When the couple began building a fence on the land - which is within Boulder city limits, not out in the wilderness - McLean was able, according to the Kirlins, to obtain a restraining order in an exceptionally speedy 2 1/2 hours.

Boulder District Judge Morris Sandstead, who served with McLean, issued the restraining order quite swiftly.

Serendipity, I guess.

All of this adds up to District Judge James Klein ordering the Kirlins to sign over about 34 percent of their 4,750-square-foot lot to McLean and his wife last month.

“Now the lot is just about worthless,” explains Don Kirlin. “We estimate the land was worth about $800,000 to a million dollars. Now, we can’t build anything on it.”

Update: A reader wrote in with some additional background about this case.

20 November 2007 @ 10:56PM >> The New York Post reports on the educational ramifications of being born to parents from out-of-favor ethnic categories. Apparently, it is the official position of the City of New York to sort citizens into different visual groupings and dole out the government spoils accordingly:

Three Chinese parents in Brooklyn are expected to file a federal lawsuit today challenging a popular city-run tutoring program on the grounds it discriminates against Asians, The Post has learned.

The Specialized High School Institute preps gifted but “underrepresented” minorities to ace the competitive exam to get into top city high schools like Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech.

But the parents say it is unfair - and illegal - for the Department of Education to limit eligibility to blacks and Latinos.

“The program only selects certain kinds of minorities and unfortunately my daughter didn’t fall into that category,” said Peggy Foo-Ching, 47, a mom from Bensonhurst who said her 12-year-old daughter’s application last year was ignored.

[...]

A Department of Education internal memo obtained by lawyers trying the case indicated that eligibility criteria excludes whites and Asians.

“What this memo reveals is blatant and categorical discrimination by race. If you are white or Asian, you’re not supposed to get an application,” said Christopher Hajec, an attorney with the Center for Individual Rights, a conservative advocacy group.

“It’s not the business of the government of New York City to be counting up the Asians or whites in, say, Stuyvesant High School and concluding there are too many of them.”

[...]

The father who initiated the suit, Stanley Ng, said he understood how controversial his challenge may be viewed.

“It’s not something that I take lightly,” he said. “There are many Asian and white kids in this district who can’t pay for tutoring. What is their recourse?”

19 November 2007 @ 9:17AM >> On a recent airing of CNN’s The Situation Room, host Wolf Blitzer attempts to explain why good news out of Iraq—such as the sharp decreases in violence seen over the last few months—goes unreported:

[TERRY] JEFFREY[, CYBERCAST NEWS SERVICE]: You know, there’s sort of a catch-22. As the war starts to succeed, as the surge is working, violence is going down, U.S. casualties are going down in Iraq, it’s not news.

When Americans aren’t killed there, it’s not on the front pages of the newspaper. It’s not heavily in the cable news coverage. And people start to forget about it. They don’t realize necessarily that things are going well.

But to the degree that it’s not an issue, it’s good politically for Republicans.

[WOLF] BLITZER[, CNN CORRESPONDENT]: You know, I’m — I’m always reluctant to say things are going well. I hope they are going well in Iraq. Always reluctant to even say it, because I’m afraid of a jinx, because, the next morning...

[DONNA] BRAZILE[, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST]: Absolutely.

BLITZER: ... you could wake up and there could be a horrible, horrible disaster over there.

(Emphasis added.)

Blitzer’s admission came up in a discussion of poll numbers, which he kicked off by asking, “How are things going for the U.S. in Iraq? Thirty-four percent say it’s going well. Sixty-five percent say it’s going badly.”

The polls largely reflect the media’s reporting, so if positive trends go unreported—and by Blitzer’s own admission, they do—then those positive trends will not be reflected in the polls.

It’s really laughable that good news goes unreported because it might jinx the war effort. If that were the case, one would expect the media to hold back on bad news, too; after all, bad news has the effect of driving down public support for the war, which also damages the war effort.

But, of course, the media’s newfound reporting restraint only seems to apply when discussing positive developments out of Iraq.

18 November 2007 @ 12:26PM >> Jared Lapidus, who got his start in professional filmmaking shooting footage for Indoctrinate U, has just released a short film he directed called The Libel Tourist.

The film covers the abuses of exceedingly loose, plantiff-friendly libel laws in Britain, where American authors can now be sued for books never published there.

As long as a single after-market copy of a book is sold in Britain—such as on eBay or Amazon’s used books section—British courts can claim jurisdiction and rule against authors for things that would be protected First Amendment speech here in the U.S.

The Libel Tourist covers an issue that’s going to become increasingly important in a world where it’s next to impossible to contain the written word within a single country’s borders.

15 November 2007 @ 10:00AM >> “Ho, ho, ho” from Santa Claus is no longer politically correct, at least according to one company in Australia. Depending on which excuse you believe, it’s either because the fragile children can’t handle loud bellows from Santa, or because the term “ho” is offensive to women:

THERE’LL be no ho, ho, ho this Christmas. Aspiring Santas have been told not to use the term “ho” because it could be seen as derogatory to women.

Thirty trainees at a Santa course in Adelaide last month, held by recruitment company Westaff, were urged to replace the traditional festive greeting with “ha, ha, ha”.

A Santa veteran of 11 years who attended the course told the Sunday Mail the trainer was very clear in spelling out no to “ho”.

Two Santa hopefuls reportedly left the course after the trainer’s edict.

The term “ho” is also American slang for a prostitute. “We were told it (ho) was a derogatory term for females and can upset people,” said the Santa, who did not want to be identified publicly.

[...]

Westaff national operations manager Glen Jansz said the company’s Santas had been urged to “tone down” their use of the “ho, ho, ho” phrase - but he said it wasn’t for fear of offending women.

“The reason behind that is we find that in some cases the little kids can get a little bit scared of the deep ho, ho, hos and we ask them to be mindful of keeping their voices to a lower level,” he said.

“And kids are probably more inclined to understand ‘ha, ha, ha’, than ‘ho, ho, ho’.”

Whatever the excuse, it still seems lame.

14 November 2007 @ 7:43AM >> Proposed speech regulation in Great Britain:

The right to crack jokes or be rude about homosexuals could fall victim to new government laws to stamp out “homophobic” behaviour, Rowan Atkinson, the Blackadder star warned yesterday.

Atkinson, who mounted a successful campaign in 2004 to water down legislation aimed at criminalising expressions of religious hatred, has returned to the fray to defend the art of gay leg-pulling.

His concern is that Labour ministers are so obsessed with creating laws to stop people being rude about each other that they are putting in danger the right to free speech and, equally dear to his heart, the comedian’s craft.

In a letter to a newspaper he accused ministers of filling their legislative programme with measures that have “serious implications for freedom of speech, humour and creative expression”.

[...]

Atkinson added: “The devil, as always, will be in the detail but the casual ease which some people move from finding something offensive to wishing to declare it criminal - and are then able to find factions within government to aid their ambitions - is truly depressing.”

The problem with regulating speech is, an awful lot of power is placed in the hands of the people charged with deciding what is and is not within bounds. Given how speech codes have been abused to punish political speech on college campuses, it’s even more chilling to think of government, with all of its various powers, trying to make these distinctions.

Do you trust that the right decision—as opposed to the politically expedient decision—would always be made in these cases?

If so, you have a hell of a lot more confidence in government than I do.

12 November 2007 @ 10:04AM >> Due to a threatened lawsuit from a major taxpayer-funded university, the Indoctrinate U homepage has been taken down temporarily. On The Fence Films LLC is deciding how best to proceed, and we will not be commenting on anything until after our final response has been executed.

Don’t worry, though, this will not derail the film.

Indoctrinate U will be back.

---

Update: The site is now back online, along with an explanation of why it was taken offline temporarily.

9 November 2007 @ 2:24PM >> The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education announces another victory:

[A] federal judge has ordered San Francisco State University (SFSU) and the California State University System (CSU) to stop enforcing several unconstitutional speech codes. The codes were challenged in a lawsuit filed by attorneys from the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) in cooperation with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

“This decision is a vital step in the fight against unconstitutional campus speech codes,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “The court’s decision frees hundreds of thousands of students throughout the CSU System from unlawful restrictions on their expression.”

The lawsuit—brought by the SFSU College Republicans and two of the group’s members—came after the SFSU College Republicans were put on trial by a campus tribunal for stepping on makeshift Hamas and Hezbollah flags as part of an anti-terrorism rally they held in October 2006. Despite having the power to dismiss the charges at any time, SFSU dragged the plaintiffs through a five-month investigation and hearing before ultimately clearing the group of baseless “harassment” charges. The plaintiffs’ lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, asks the court to hold SFSU accountable for unlawfully mistreating the plaintiffs on the basis of their constitutionally protected expression and to strike down several unconstitutional speech codes at SFSU and in the CSU System.

Burning the American flag is protected First Amendment speech, on the grounds that actions intended to convey a political message should be treated no differently than actual speech. The Supreme Court made that decision in the 1980s. So it’s good to know that, decades later, stepping on the flags of two terrorist organizations is also protected speech.

But it’s troubling that administrators at a taxpayer-funded university—an entity legally prohibited from punishing students for protected political expression—are so ignorant of the basic parameters of their students’ rights that the school needed to be brought to court in the first place.

You shouldn’t need to hire a lawyer in order to exercise rights enumerated in the Constitution.

6 November 2007 @ 1:56PM >> Glenn Reynolds has an essay at TCSDaily that highlights the growing numeric disparity between male and female students in academia. He cites a USA Today article stating, “135 women receive bachelor’s degrees for every 100 men. That gender imbalance will widen in the coming years, according to a new report by the U.S. Department of Education.”

Reynolds writes:

[I]t seems to me that there are three possible ways of looking at the growing higher-education gender imbalance.

One would be to treat it the way we treat other “underrepresentation” issues in higher education: By wondering what universities are doing wrong. There seems little doubt that universities have become less male-friendly in recent decades, to the point of being downright unfriendly in many cases. The kind of statements that are routinely made about males and masculinity in classrooms and hallways would get professors fired if they were made about blacks, gays, or many other groups. Sexual-harassment policies start with the presumption that men are guilty, and inherently depraved. And colleges now come at the tail-end of an educational system that is (compared to previous decades) anti-male from kindergarten on, meaning many males probably just want to get out as soon as they can.

The remedy, in this view: Affirmative action for male candidates, re-education for faculty, campus “men’s centers” to match the womens’ centers that were created when women were an underrepresented group on campus (and which still remain today almost everywhere), and efforts to make curricula, dormitories, and recruiting more male-friendly. (Right now, though we see lots of courses on literature by and about women, courses on literature by and about men are regarded as too narrow.”) There seems little doubt that if any other group were suffering similar declines in college attendance, this is precisely the approach we’d be seeing, and some schools have already been trying this to some degree.

The second approach would be to shrug the problem off. Men aren’t going to college as much? Big deal. Maybe it’s because women are smarter, or better suited to such things.

Harvard President Larry Summers got his head handed to him when he raised similar factors as an explanation for why women are underrepresented in the hard sciences. But genetic explanations of gender differences are always socially acceptable so long as they posit male inferiority, so I suspect we’ll see somewhat more people offering this sort of explanation — though it may prove awkward when people point out the contradictions.

In one scene from Indoctrinate U, I noted this gender imbalance and wondered: given the fact that men were now in the minority, would they be rewarded with the spoils that identity politics practitioners typically bestow upon underrepresented groups?

To find out, I went searching for the Men’s Resource Centers and Men’s Studies Departments at various schools around the country. Needless to say, I didn’t find them, but I had a few laughs along the way.

5 November 2007 @ 10:04AM >> Cigarettes, trans-fats, aluminum baseball bats, and now bottled water. Is this the latest frontier in political correctness? Drink up now while you still can...it won’t be long before Michael Bloomberg tries to outlaw it.

2 November 2007 @ 8:35AM >> Indoctrinate U will be screened in Cleveland, Ohio at the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque for one show only: Sunday, November 18th at 4:00pm.

The Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque is located at 11141 East Boulevard in University Circle. Free parking is available in the Institute lot. Tickets are $8 and may be purchased at the box office just before showtime, or earlier by calling (216) 421-7450 for advance ticket sales.