Hans Bader is a senior attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
People’s vocabularies are shrinking at a time when more and more people have college degrees. As Zach Goldberg notes, people’s mastery of hard words has been falling for well over 20 years, and their mastery of easier words has been falling for over 15 years. Meanwhile, a higher proportion of Americans have college degrees than […]
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Two students wore blackface at the University of Tennessee in a Snapchat image with a racist caption. The University is responding by putting tens of thousands of students, faculty, and staff through sensitivity training. It may even require the 186,000 minors participating in the state’s 4-H program to attend sensitivity training. It will also require students […]
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In a pointless act of censorship, CNN removed the episodes of the TV show “Parts Unknown” that featured actress Asia Argento. It did so because it learned that she had settled an unrelated lawsuit against her by actor Jimmy Bennett, who claimed she had sex with him when he was 17. This news had no […]
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Progressive journalists have a message for you: Free expression is for them, not for you — and not for conservative bloggers and academics. Left-leaning journalists like Margaret Carlson are angry that the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in favor of a conservative professor whose academic freedom rights were violated by Marquette University. It effectively fired him for a blog post that […]
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Betsy DeVos, who was nominated to be the Education Secretary, has been attacked because she and her husband made donations to a civil-liberties group, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. FIRE is “a nonpartisan organization that defends free speech, religious liberty, and due process on college campuses.” The DeVos family donations drew criticism from […]
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Politically-correct college administrators in Madison, Wisconsin asked the police to investigate speech mocking campus Clinton supporters. The police reportedly did so, even though that could lead to a violation of the First Amendment. This occurred at Edgewood College. Reason Magazine reports that an investigation at Edgewood has begun over a “Suck it up, pussies” Post-it note […]
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The Obama administration has repeatedly violated civil liberties on campus. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has been the chief culprit, but the Department of Justice has played a role too. They have attacked free speech, demanding that school officials censor politically-incorrect speech. They have also pressured colleges to stack the deck against […]
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Writing in the California Law Review, Harvard Law School professors Jeannie Suk and Jacob Gersen note, “Today we have an elaborate and growing federal bureaucratic structure that in effect regulates sex.” This is largely the result of pressure from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, where I used to work. It has told colleges […]
Read More The federal government happily subsidizes inferior state colleges that graduate few if any of their students. That includes Chicago State University, which has a 12.8 percent six-year graduation rate. The Obama administration has rewritten federal student loan rules in a way that encourages colleges to raise tuition and effectively subsidizes the worst colleges the most. The Federal Reserve Bank of […]
Read More Twenty-two Senators have asked the Appropriations Committee to increase the budget of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) by almost 30%. All of those Senators are Democrats except for Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada. OCR has pressured colleges and high schools to adopt unconstitutional speech codes. It also has pressured school districts to […]
Read More Progressive faculty justify the absence of moderate and conservative voices on campus by saying that conservatives are stupid. As a result, moderate Republicans with Ivy League degrees and genius level IQs sometimes can’t find a job in academia. My former boss had a degree from the highest-ranked law school (Yale) and had published scholarly articles, but […]
Read More Last Wednesday, 72 left-wing groups, including the Feminist Majority Foundation, American Association of University Women, and Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, asked federal civil-rights officials to crack down on anonymous politically-incorrect speech on campus, which they claim violates federal civil-rights laws such as Title IX. They claim they are concerned about “harassment” on anonymous […]
Read More On October 15, The New York Times published a balanced news story that inadvertently revealed the stupidity of “Yes Means Yes” policies. Those policies redefine a great deal of consensual sex and touching as “sexual assault,” and effectively require college students to engage in “state-mandated dirty talk” during sexual encounters (as one supporter of “Yes Means Yes” policies gloated). That potentially violates the Constitution, and such policies have […]
Read More The College Fix published an interesting article, “Department of Education shredded for lawless overreach in Senate hearing.” It was about Congress getting annoyed with the Education Department for illegally imposing mandates on colleges and schools out of thin air, without even going through rulemaking or the notice and comment required by the Administrative Procedure Act […]
Read More The Education Department, where I used to work, is becoming more and more extreme in how it misinterprets and misapplies federal law. For example, the Education Department has thumbed its nose at federal court rulings by wrongly creating entitlements for people who make false discrimination and harassment complaints—even though such baseless complaints can make life […]
Read More The federal government is now admitting that its own financial aid is partly to blame for rising tuition, reports Blake Neff in The Daily Caller: A new report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has found that the massive investment in grants and student loans by the federal government is a major contributor […]
Read More CEI Recently, I wrote about a report to the Senate by a task force of college presidents, on how the Education Department is illegally dumping an avalanche of new rules and regulations on America’s schools, without even complying with the Administrative Procedure Act’s notice-and-comment requirements. Yet another example of such mischief is the 2014 sexual […]
Read More CEI A task force of college presidents has chronicled massive regulatory overreaching by the U.S. Department of Education, which, on a daily basis, floods the nation’s schools with new, uncodified agency requirements that have never even been vetted through the formal rule-making process. “The Report of the Task Force on Federal Regulation of Higher Education: […]
Read More CEI Bad things can happen when an agency (like the Education Department) throws caution to the wind and regulates based on slanted media coverage from National Public Radio, rather than facts and evidence. Checks and balances exist for a reason. When agencies impose new obligations on the institutions they regulate, they are supposed to first […]
Read More Brian Ferguson, a 20-year-old autistic student, has been suspended from special-needs classes at Navarro College in Texas for mistakenly hugging a woman he did not know and kissing her on the top of her head, according to the student’s mother, Staci Martin. She said, “And then they labeled it ‘sexual assault’ because of the kissing,” […]
Read More At Ohio State University, to avoid being guilty of “sexual assault” or “sexual violence,” you and your partner now apparently have to agree on the reason WHY you are making out or having sex. It’s not enough to agree to DO it, you have to agree on WHY: there has to be agreement “regarding the […]
Read More Examiner Scheming politicians, opportunists, and grifters have latched onto the recent panic over a supposed “rape culture” on college campuses to clamp down on activities having nothing to do with rape. In some cases, they have imposed regulations that take away student opportunities and harm small businesses. Never mind that, as Wikipedia recently noted, there has been a […]
Read More Liberty Unyielding It is a conflict of interest — and sometimes a violation of the Constitution — for a fine to go to the very unit of government that employs the judge or official who imposed the fine. That gives the official an incentive to find the accused guilty in order to enrich the official’s […]
Read More It’s not just the Obama administration VAWA Office that thinks all sexual contact or behavior without “explicit consent” is sexual assault. So does Senator McCaskill (D-MO). Later this summer, McCaskill is going to propose legislation that would further undermine due process on campus. According to Senator McCaskill’s spokeswoman, she thinks that people (including, presumably, her […]
Read More Cross-posted from Open MarketJustice Brandeis once observed that “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.” However well-meaning they may be, the Obama administration’s guidance and task force recommendations yesterday on campus sexual harassment and rape contain an insidious attack on cross-examination (as KC […]
Read More Cross-posted from Open Market Earlier, we wrote about a Wisconsin town whose ordinance holds parents liable for bullying by their children, including certain speech. We and law professor Eugene Volokh noted that this raised serious First Amendment issues. Now, a New Jersey judge has done the same thing by judicial construction, by allowing New Jersey school districts to drag […]
Read More Cross-posted from Open Market “The Wandering Dago food truck wants to park and sell food at various events on New York State property. The state says no, because the name is offensive. Does that violate the First Amendment?” The answer is probably yes, says UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh at this link. He recently discussed […]
Read More Cross-posted from Open Market Crime rates are not the same for different racial groups, and student misconduct rates aren’t, either. The Supreme Court ruled many years ago that such racial disparities don’t prove racism or unconstitutional discrimination. But in guidance issued last week by the Justice and Education Departments, the Obama Administration signaled that it will hold school districts […]
Read More (Cross-posted from Open Market) Earlier, we wrote about the Obama administration’s attempt to inject a race-conscious “disparate impact” provision into colorblind anti-discrimination laws like the Fair Housing Act, and how that could lead to risky, race-conscious lending, bad loans, and future bank failures, mortgage meltdowns, and financial crises. Now, Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder highlights an […]
Read More Recently, two male students sued colleges that expelled or suspended them over allegedly false claims of sexual misconduct. Citing school officials’ repeated violation of rules contained in student handbooks and college regulations, they argue that Vassar College and Saint Joseph’s University violated their contractual rights, Title IX (which bans sex discrimination), and anti-fraud laws.Their legal claims seem plausible to […]
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