FRIDAY short TAKES.

Higher education, destroying its value proposition.  "Elite universities pander to a small minority of progressive students at the expense of the students who simply want to enjoy a normal college experience, which involves things like frat parties, university traditions, and joy."

I keep warning you what happens when you deny coherent beliefs.  "There is much educators can and should do to restore objective truths, and in turn, our country. Right now, powerful intellectuals are doing the opposite."  We're noticing.  "It looks like an American seriousness crisis in slow motion. If our elite schools aren't producing industrious people with critical thinking skills, what good are they exactly?"  Not much.  "If there's a meaningful, practical difference between destruction and deconstruction, I've yet to hear it."  But they persist.  "Progressive hothouse plants assume their supposed moral superiority exempts them from living by the rules in the manner of others. But sometimes it is not just the police who anger them, but the very Frankensteinian monsters they created who do not cooperate with their degreed and elected enablers."  That's when the fun begins.  "No one is well disposed toward fatuous busy bodies that think themselves superior to mere mortals."

Where were these Capital District faculty thirty years ago?

George Washington University, and indeed universities across the DMV and the United States as a whole, will fail in their most basic promises and commitments if they continue to repress, arrest, suspend, and stifle the free speech and political activity of their students. We condemn any move by GW to shut down student gatherings and restrict access rather than open spaces.

We will not tolerate the weaponization of unfounded presumptions of bigotry to intimidate, punish, and silence students who are not engaging in anything of the sort. As educators, we will not stand for the criminalization of peaceful protests on our campuses.

The Columbia faculty, same question.

Fohlin's arrest—after which she was detained for 11 hours and then charged with "battery of a police officer"—came a week after Columbia University suspended more than 100 students for setting up an encampment in solidarity with Gaza, where more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed by the U.S.-backed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) since October, and allowed police to arrest them. The mass arrests only served to galvanize students and faculty at Columbia and at dozens of other schools more than 400 people being detained so far.

The American Association of University Professors called the arrest "antithetical to the mission of higher education."

"Our institutions exist to foster robust exchanges of ideas and open dialogue in service of knowledge and understanding," said the group. "Sometimes that includes open dissent. Peaceful campus protests should never be met with violence."

Study history.  "The antiwar movement was mostly counterproductive and did little to end the Vietnam War."  Someone delivered.

Reality always wins in the end.  Every. Single. Time.  'It's FINALS. I want to GO HOME.'  People aren't interested in playing nice.

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

1.  Institutions are civilization.  "It’s valuable to have rules of conduct that apply universally."

2.  Woke, broke?  "Lefties could not shut down Chick-fil-A but Americans shut down Bud Light, didn’t they?"

3.  We call it the fatal conceit for a reason.  "There's a whole lot of things 'liberal politicians and economists don't seem to recognize'."

4.  The conceit is inevitably fatal to the man of system.  "If you think you are smart enough to know the answer, you don't like the constraint of working incrementally. If you think you are smart enough to have the right course of action figured out, you are not going to want someone telling you to take baby steps. If you have a grand vision for reshaping all that is wrong with the world and all you need is for the policy people and the funding people and those ignorant masses known as voters to wise up and support it, you're not going to be a big fan of the Strong Towns approach."

5.  No One Can Make Government Work.

6.  Joe Biden has been a failure.  Dazed and confused.  "This is not an elderly man with a poor memory. This is a man whose physical and mental decline can no longer be denied."

7.  Failure has consequences.  "Trump remained popular with Republican voters."

8.  More propaganda from the lefties.  "It was a police response reminiscent of the repression that met protesters in the 2020 George Floyd uprisings. Nearly four years ago, police also responded with extraordinary violence to a mass protest. Then, the alleged provocation involved crucial acts of militant resistance, including low-level but widespread property damage, scattered looting, and the burning of several empty police vehicles.  Tuesday was different. In recent days on the campuses in Manhattan and across the country, massive police operations came in response to peaceful student encampments. Students gathered to share food, maintaining space to hold teach-ins and rallies, and demand their universities divest from Israel."

9.  What would we ever do without experts?  "Jailing former president could spark ‘mass protests,’ experts say."  Presumably Intercept types would not quail at those being put down.

10.  Spandex-clad, and insufferable.  "There is a significant percentage of safe streets activists whose motivation seems dominated by a hatred of automobiles, a derision that often crosses over into a hatred of drivers. They do want to make driving miserable — make life miserable — for the vast majority of Americans."  With predictable results.  "Jokes about running over cyclists are not funny when that cyclist is a fellow human being, but those jokes become comical for many when the cyclist is thought of as a self-righteous, whiny elitist who wants to make your life miserable so they can feel superior to you."

11.  Democracy.  "There’s no need to break the rules when you can change them."

12.  Your job is to say no and uphold standards.  "My favorite professors have always been the no-nonsense ones."

13.  Mixing metaphors in the Yogi Berra style.  "This is a locomotive where the engine is wheezing, the hydraulics are leaking and the wheels are rickety but here they are, with the third-best record in baseball (17-8) entering Saturday, better than the Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees and Philadelphia Phillies."  Earlier today, the Brewers rallied to beat the Cubs in Chicago.