IT'S STILL SURRENDERING WITH A SHRUG.

Here I have long stood.

For a long time, Cold Spring Shops has called attention to the folly of admitting unprepared students and calling it access.  "[S]tate institutions that were separate but not equal during Jim Crow remain less than equal today.  And thus, does access beget assessment and remediation and fretting about retention."  We've always been clear-eyed about where that leads.  "When you admit unprepared students and call it access, what do you have to do to boost retention?"

Apparently, you retain by accommodating the unpreparedness.  “Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates.”

PATRIOTISM, THE LAST REFUGE OF SCOUNDRELS.

In September of 2023, the Walworth County Democrats were touting that Hope and Change.

In October, Hamas did what comes naturally to jihadis.  The following spring, Dementia Joe challenged frontrunner Donald Trump to a debate, taunting "I hear you're free on Wednesdays."  Dementia Joe's brain failed in prime time, and the party replaced him as nominee.  That was not an improvement.

Earlier this summer, the party primary barely rejected a Madison nutcase in favor of a Milwaukee ward-heeler to stand for governor.

Rather than call attention to their embrace of the crazy, this year's tent at the Walworth County Fair went all in on the Red, White, and Blue.

The absence of crowds might say nothing about how the general election will turn out.  The best thing to do with political displays at county fairs is not to engage, whether it's a major party, a minor party,  or those advocates for an Article V convention or some similar single issue.  Orwell's weirdos hang out with Democrats, no matter how much red, white, and blue they display.

HIGHER EDUCATION IS LIKELY DOOMED.

In American Greatness, Stephen Soukup uses the cautionary tale of Syracuse University, once a pretty good private university with solid sports programs, as a metaphor for higher education's more general breach of what once was a social contract with the public.

The distinction between hard-science discovery and social-science discovery is, as I said, endemic to the structure of the contemporary university, but the manifestation of that difference as social-science fatuousness/indoctrination wasn’t necessarily inevitable and, in any case, didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow, steady process of infiltration and degradation that featured many players, some of whom believed that their efforts were genuinely directed at educational improvement, and others who manipulated the structure of academia in pursuit of personal and ideological power. The members of the Frankfurt School, especially its most enduring American representative, Herbert Marcuse, fall into this latter category, while educational “reformers” like John Dewey comprise the former. Dwight Waldo, a public administration theorist and the godfather of the “New Public Administration” movement, also falls into the former category, although one can hardly imagine that his legacy could possibly have been more destructive than it is had he been a power-mad ideologue. Unlike the Cultural Marxists, Waldo didn’t see his mission as one in which he was preparing the ground for the eventual revolution. Rather, like Dewey, he believed he was helping to foster a better, more productive interpretation of his field of expertise but in so doing undermined any pretensions his adherents might have to objectivity or adherence to neutral evidence.

In 1948, Waldo wrote a book called The Administrative State, which challenged the standard interpretation of public administration, attacking the longstanding expectation that administrators should be “value neutral.” In essence, he argued that administrators should be advocates of policies that aligned with their personal beliefs. He more or less told them to let their freak flags fly.

There might be no such thing as "value neutral," in the same way that there might be few or no eternal truths.

I've been calling attention (at length) for years.

Dear reader, it's straightforward enough: think of "the humanities" as "those disciplines that deconstruct reality as a hobby" and you won't go far wrong.  That reality has a say in what gets deconstructed never ceases to catch the academy by surprise.

They could have listened.  People with platforms bigger than mine have been calling attention for thirty plus years.  The late Jason Arday is simply the most egregious recent example of virtue signalling at the expense of education.  Let that hard rain fall.

TRUST, ONCE LOST, IS HARD TO REGAIN.

That recovery is particularly difficult when it is people entrusted with making decisions on the basis of their wisdom or their probity betray it in an egregious way.  In The (Not Detroit) Free Press, Erick Erickson notes, "The same government that used pandemic powers to shutter churches and businesses now wants surveillance cameras on street corners and data centers in backyards. You can’t blame people for saying no."

It's not that the warning signs haven't been with us for some time.  Cold Spring Shops posts have used variations on "governance by wise experts" since the fall of 2009, generally in a skeptical way.

That People in Authority dismissed the observations of — wait for it — medical doctors noticing masked people's glasses fogging up in grocery stories and suggesting the mask mandates and six foot circles and the rest were theater, not policy, probably resurrected the notion of a credibility gap.  Yes, dear reader, my life from adolescence onward has been structured by credibility gaps: thus another one emerging during the Jarrett regency's corona tyranny didn't come as a shock.

DENY THERE'S A PROBLEM, CHANGE THE SUBJECT, AND QUESTION THE CRITIC'S MOTIVES.

That's the standard politician playbook for avoiding doing the necessary work, and two contributors to the house organ for all wokeness, all the time in higher education adopt the formula in their "Enough With the Performative Apologia."

YOU AND WHOSE NAVY?

"Iran threatens 45 tankers with fines, confiscation in Hormuz escalation."  Regime dead-enders think they've identified the ships participating in the shuttle operation transloading Gulf Arabian product to ships sheltering well away from the mullahs' putative blockade.

LET THAT HARD RAIN FALL.

In the early years of Cold Spring Shops, I devoted a lot of attention to the ways in which universities were failing at their mission.  Twelve years into retirement, I don't have to bother as much with such things, although perhaps conditions have gotten sufficiently bad that people on the inside, or with establishmentarian platforms, can no longer ignore them.

CONSPICUOUSNESS TRUMPS COMPETENCE.

In The Daily Economy, Surse Pierpoint asks, "If the economic argument was already lost by 1917, and the Soviet revolution supplied prestige rather than proof, what explains the durability of Marxist categories in Western universities, long after the calculation debate was settled and the planned economies it inspired had produced the most devastating body counts of the twentieth century?"

I've reduced his argument to a clickbaity headline.  Take a long march through the institutions, dear reader, and it might make sense.

What is not in dispute is the strategy itself and its adoption across the postwar academic left: if the economic argument could not be won, the institutions that credential, publish, and platform could be occupied instead.

This is where a discipline should ask an empirical question rather than an ideological one. Occupying an institution is not the same as running it well, and a strategy built around capturing credentialing bodies produces a specific, predictable personnel problem. Peter Turchin’s structural-demographic theory, developed across Ages of Discord and subsequent work, describes what happens when a society produces far more credentialed aspirants to elite status than there are elite positions to hold them: law graduates, doctorate holders, activist-class professionals, all competing for a fixed and often shrinking number of visible slots.

I'm not sure "better to be outrageous and wrong than extraordinarily good" works as a get-hired strategy, but there it is.  "Extremity is a cheap, reliable signal in a market where everyone already has the degree."

The author's focus is on the popularity of potted Marxism in domestic politics these days.  A variant of it might be at work in academic hiring, although perhaps it helps to be conspicuously controversial and to belong to one or another of the personnel office's set of preferred hires.

SPONSORED RESEARCH IS RISK-AVERSE AND UNIMAGINATIVE.

An earlier post with that title opened,

I've come close to, but never explicitly said, that the use of the national institutes and national endowments to support academic research is censorship per se.  The closest I have come is to suggest that creativity that might otherwise be unbridled and more enthusiastic gets diverted into chasing whatever it is the institutes, endowments, and charitable foundations are funding.  "Whether the work so funded is better than the work professors develop on their own initiative remains to be seen."  It might be worse than that.  "Even if it's not that bad, the sponsored research imperative diverts thoughtful people from playing with whatever ideas appeal to them (yes, many of them might turn out to be bad or trivial, but that's how emergence works) in order to follow what appears to be a Hot Topic (the tragedy being that by the time those grants and working papers hit the conference and journal circuits, the discipline's stars are on to other things) or to make some money."

Put bluntly, it's money wasted.

The James G. Martin Center's Edward Archer characterizes grantsmanship as fostering "The Intellectual and Moral Decline in Academic Research."  In particular, "My experiences at four research universities and as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) research fellow taught me that the relentless pursuit of taxpayer funding has eliminated curiosity, basic competence, and scientific integrity in many fields."

That second post landed in January, 2020, shortly before the relentless pursuit of taxpayer funding involved furrin cleavages.

Alas, for all Our President's efforts at swamp-draining, or swapping out one set of rent-seekers for another, it will still be business as usual, argues J. Scott Turner, in academic science.  "For 75 years, Washington has preached that science needs more government. The White House still believes it."

REPUTATIONALLY BANKRUPT.

Reap what you sow, higher education.  Count Jonathan Turley as among the disgruntled.

As I have previously written, this generation of administrators and faculty has destroyed not just public trust in our institutions but their financial viability. Colleges are closing at an alarming rate as both tuition and revenue fall. Yet, faculty members would prefer to lose their jobs than their bias in hiring and teaching.

According to Gallup, roughly a third of polled individuals cited partisan bias or indoctrination on college campuses. Bias was the leading reason for given for the lack of trust, ahead of tuition costs. That is a large chunk of potential applicants and their families. Worse yet, they are not wrong.

Our campuses have been ideological echo chambers where collective orthodoxy is more prominent than academic inquiry. This group think has created an overtly hostile environment for more than half of this country that consider themselves conservatives or libertarians. As schools struggle to maintain financial stability, they are literally cutting away half of their potential applicant pool.

Currently, only 37% of Americans report having “some” confidence in the institution. In any other industry or area, that record of alienation and mistrust would prompt massive changes in management. In higher education, however, colleges and universities remain captive to administrators and faculty members who replicate their views and values to the exclusion of many others.

The result is evident in multiple surveys which reveal widespread self-censorship among students, particularly conservative students.

The pool of young people to recruit future matriculants from is smaller, the job market for symbolic analysts isn't what it once was, and the conversion of critical theories from potentially interesting ways to play with ideas into epistemically closed tight priors take their toll, don't they?  I'm not sure that looking for Republican-leaning faculty is necessarily the right way to identify epistemic closure: the relationship between the academy and the public policy complex probably strongly skews toward Applied Welfare Economics Paradigm.

THERE'S NO CORRUPTION LIKE OLD CORRUPTION.

Volokh conspirator Ilya Somin sees the bright side of previous rents generated and dissipated.

I have long been critical of the Olympics and the World Cup for a variety of abuses, such as massive stadium subsidies that victimize taxpayers, forcible displacement of people in order to build stadiums, and providing a propaganda showcase for repressive authoritarian regimes, such as Russia and Qatar (hosts of the last two World Cups). Fortunately, this year's World Cup - co-hosted by Canada, the US, and Mexico - has mostly avoided these problems, at least when it comes to the United States. Though not quite entirely, as we shall see.  The key factors are that the US host cities used existing stadiums, and that strong protections for freedom of speech largely foreclosed the censorship and repression common in authoritarian host states.

Those existing stadiums, which do not include either Chicago's Soldier Field, or the new stadium yet to be built either in Arlington Heights or Hammond or Kenosha, are a return on previous manifestations of corporate welfare that traffic under the rubric of stadium subsidies.

[H]ost cities have used existing stadiums, obviating the need to build new ones. This eliminates by far the biggest cause of the World Cup's exploitation of taxpayers. There have still been some public expenditures on things like traffic management and security. But protecting people against crime and terrorism, and managing public infrastructure are basic functions of government that the state provides for events of all kinds. There is no good reason to exclude major sporting events. Anarchists (including libertarian ones) can consistently condemn such spending. But that goes to philosophical issues that go far beyond sports events.

How fortunate that you can fit a footie pitch inside the dimensions of a professional football field, and that led to a missed opportunity when Argentina eliminated Switzerland, as the player who scored a breakaway goal late could have done a Lambeau Leap, had he known of such things.

REMAIN CALM, ALL IS WELL.

According to the infelicitously named Chad M. Topaz of Williams College at the house organ for all wokeness, all the time in higher education, "The journals are fine. Everything is fine."

BEYOND "YOU DIDN'T BUILD THAT!"

The assertion is artless campaign rhetoric from the likes of former president Barack Obama and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth "Fauxahontas" Warren, who like to argue that any fortune relies in part on public spending on schools or highways  or perhaps the institutions that enforce contract and property rights.

OH, THE HUMANITIES!

Joanne Jacobs notes, "You can major in Taylor Swift and minor in K-pop -- but shouldn't."  That's in endorsing a recent lament for the kind of work students get away with to earn degrees.

In its early years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered courses covering Virgil, Cicero, Livy, logic, calculus, ethics, chemistry, constitutional law and other touchstones of a classical education.

In the year of our Lord 2026, students can stroll past Lincoln’s statue looming atop Bascom Hill on that very same campus to study video games through feminist, queer and ecocritical lenses.

Culture warriors are busy bludgeoning universities for their ideological monocultures: founding civics institutes, prohibiting diversity, equity and inclusion statements in hiring and cutting federal funding to questionable research — but mediocrity is arguably as large a problem as ideological capture.

Maybe the humanities disciplines should have stuck to close reading and creative writing.  It's not as if nobody's noticing.  "Dear reader, it's straightforward enough: think of 'the humanities' as 'those disciplines that deconstruct reality as a hobby' and you won't go far wrong.  That reality has a say in what gets deconstructed never ceases to catch the academy by surprise."

TRUTH IS NOT A TEAM SPORT.

Radiologist Scott Atlas suggests the future of higher education might not be so bright, in part because "consensus" and "collegiality" have crowded out scholarly inquiry.

Why, at this moment in history, is it particularly important to consider how America’s institutions—here, colleges and universities—should be reformed, or whether they can even be reformed?

After all, for decades we have been aware that our institutions were failing: editorialized, dishonest journalism; wasteful, corrupt government; and colleges and universities increasingly abandoning their essential purpose of fostering the free exchange of ideas and critical thinking in favor of agenda-driven social advocacy, particularly advocacy unbalanced toward the left.

It's not that nobody noticed.

NICE NEWS-STAND YA GOT THERE, MATE. BE A PITY IF SOMETHING HAPPENED TO IT.

Australia's prohibitive taxation of cigarettes is having the same effect liquor prohibition did, a century ago in these United States.

In 2025, an estimated 80 percent of the tobacco consumed in Australia was illegal, up from 12 percent in 2017, according to new analysis from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The study, which is the first attempt by the Australian government to estimate the size of the black market, found that "prices for legal tobacco products have almost tripled since December 2016 driven by annual tobacco excise increases, while estimated prices of illicit tobacco products have remained relatively constant." Since 2020, household spending on legal cigarettes and tobacco has almost halved, but between 2017 and 2025, the amount of nicotine consumed in Australia has risen by almost 40 percent.

You don't expect a prohibitive tax to be a revenue tax, but in Australia the tax is stimulating sales of pinstriped suits and violin cases, or something.

Australia's collapsing legal tobacco market has come with a far darker consequence: a severe wave of gang violence, including firebombings and shootings. Since 2023, organized crime groups linked to Australia's illicit tobacco and vape market have been tied to "more than 200 firebombings," "at least 3 homicides," and "multiple other non-fatal violent attacks," according to the Australian Intelligence Commission.

"It's hard to see how it could get any worse," Rohan Pike, a former Australian Federal Police detective and Border Force member, tells Reason. Pike, who created and led Australia's Illicit Tobacco Strike Team, says the violence is now an "old-fashioned turf war" and that criminal gangs, attracted by the profits, are fighting to control distribution.

Pike says criminal groups are opening pop-up convenience stores, intimidating legitimate retailers into selling their products, and backing up those threats with "firebombings and other types of violence." Organized crime syndicates have destroyed hundreds of tobacconists, convenience stores, and hospitality venues, forcing legitimate businesses out. "Every part of the tobacco control policy is uncontrolled at the moment," says Pike.

Apparently, the bootleggers hope to stay in business even if the taxes go away. "It will be far more difficult to move customers out of the thriving black market that the taxes have created than it would have been in the first place."

So much for those rules and permissions.

A REQUIEM FOR THE FATAL CONCEIT.

In the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education, Brian Rosenberg laments a brief moment of common sense at Yale.  "Narrowing the mission of the university is an unfortunate choice."

THE TIME FOR HECTORING IS PAST.

Red State's Brad Slager is on to the con.  "Hint: anytime a Democrat wants a 'conversation,' they intend to deliver a lecture, and you need to zip up your donut vacuum and listen."  Well, yes, and it's grown tiresome.

That's where Our President having none of the usual drive-by narrative is so refreshing.

"If I was a king would I be talking to you."  Classic.

WILL GOING THROUGH BE THE ONLY WAY OUT?

Over the years, Kurt Schlichter has maintained that leftists, and their willing accomplices in the liberal establishment, want those annoying Normals dead.  In the wake of a Democrat loyalist attempting to go kinetic at the weekend's nerd prom, he's repeating that message.

We are getting uncomfortably close to how the Spanish Civil War was started. That war was started because the communists started losing their power. We need to realize what time it is and the threats that we face. The only reason why the Left calls Trump "Hitler" and Republicans fascists is to give others permission to take him and us out. The fight against evil will continue, and I'm not sure it will end well.

His colleague Ward Clark is thinking along similar lines, although he might be thinking about a general strike of some sort, repeating "They need us. We don't need them."  That's interesting, as May Day is coming up, and the communists are organizing their own version of a general strike for that day, although it will probably be mostly kids in the schools that produce the next generation of welfare recipients reinterpreting truancy as some sort of political action participating.  He also echoes John Galt in suggesting that perhaps scorning the productive give their detractors what they want, by going away.  But rather than holing up in Galt's Gulch, he might have something more kinetic in mind.  "If the left wants to normalize political violence, and if they succeed, they aren't going to like how that works out. In any conflict sparked by such a move, the left will lose, suddenly and catastrophically, within a matter of days — maybe hours. Why? Because when it comes to a scrap, as with almost anything else, we are just simply better at it than they are."

A former Bernie Sanders booster called Batya Ungar-Sargon, suggests that the chap who disrupted nerd prom was simply acting on what his Intellectual Betters were saying.

Democrats have blamed gun violence for the rise in political violence, which is of course ridiculous, given that conservatives are much more likely to own guns, yet much less likely to engage in and justify political violence.

It’s time for the Left to take responsibility for the violence it is fomenting, justifying, and carrying out. Cole Allen’s manifesto justifying his attempted murder of the President doesn’t read like the ravings of a lunatic. It sounds like the kind of rhetoric you hear every single day from Democrats and their media. They are radicalizing their side every single day, and refusing to take down the temperature.

There are similar assertions circulating elsewhere in the right-populist internet environment these days.  She concludes, "You can’t unite around a lie."  The lie, though, might be that the usual forms of government are working as they should.  Outside the Beltway's James Joyner, who knows a few things about conflict, develops that argument.

We have increasingly cast our politics as existential. Every presidential election in my lifetime has been “the most important presidential election in our lifetimes.” And, as the parties have polarized and sorted, the stakes have certainly increased: every election is a referendum on the future of race relations, gay rights, trans rights, abortion rights, gun rights, etc.

At the same time, the safety valve that deligitimates violence in a democracy—elections—have become increasingly meaningless. Gerrymandered House seats mean few of the 435 districts are truly in play; the winner of the dominant party’s primary is all but assured of election. This is true for the Senate and Electoral College in all but a handful of states. So, for all practical purposes, most Americans have no real say come Election Day.

And that’s to say nothing of the counter-democratic, if not outright undemocratic, features that have been bolted onto the system. Voter suppression efforts by state legislatures to further skew outcomes. The routine use of the filibuster has made it almost impossible to pass legislation. A Supreme Court with an extreme partisan skew that tends to strike down policies enacted by Democrats at a much higher rate than those enacted by Republicans.

Violence is a tool of the powerless. And more and more people feel powerless.

Pay attention, though, to where the power is accreting.  Presidential elections.  Federal policies.  National legislation.  Perhaps, in place of widespread defiance of Our Political Masters, or gunplay replacing wordplay, a restoration of those enumerated, separated, and limited powers matters.  Perhaps, instead of asking "who is John Galt?," dear reader, ask "who is running for school board or mayor" and "what is she proposing?"

CHERNOBYL WAS A COMMUNIST DISASTER.

Reason's Ron Bailey recalls the corner-cutting that led to the failed emergency test that destroyed a nuclear reactor.

The world's worst nuclear disaster began 40 years ago at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, when Unit 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power generation facility experienced an explosion and meltdown. Ironically, the explosion was caused by a botched safety test.

The point of the test had been to see what would happen if the power plant lost its main electrical supply: Could spinning turbines generate enough power to run the coolant pumps until emergency backup diesel generators could kick in? The experiment had failed three times previously, but never as catastrophically as it did that night.

Before the meltdown, Soviet officials had bragged regularly about the safety of their nuclear power plants and disparaged those in the West.

Oops.  It transpires, dear reader, that the only thing more destructive than capitalist cost-cutting, which presented a few years earlier in the form of exploding Pintos, was communist cost-cutting.

The Soviet system put economic decisions in the hands of planners far removed from both the data people need to make decisions and the immediate consequences of their actions. Gosplan, the economic planning bureau, initially determined that nuclear power was unnecessary because the country had more than enough fossil fuels to produce electricity. When it became clear in the late 1960s that they had miscalculated, the energy planners rushed the development of nuclear power. In the process, they neglected to include the containment buildings used in the West, which are designed to prevent the escape of radioactive materials even during severe accidents.

Containment, you see, would have increased the costs of the plants by 25 percent to 30 percent. The "leaders of the Soviet energy sector faced a choice between disrupting the Party's five-year development plan if they built expensive nuclear facilities or abandoning the project altogether," a group of Russian researchers noted in 2025 (originally in Russian). "Priority was given to the solution that was safe for the officials, but which subsequently created a threat to people's lives." After the disaster, an IAEA engineer told the Los Angeles Times that if the Chernobyl reactor had been housed within a standard Western-style containment structure, "it probably would have made a huge difference." Even if an explosion breached a containment structure, most of the radioactive particles would nevertheless have been trapped.

The Soviet nuclear power industry was plagued by shoddy workmanship, bureaucratic infighting, and a shortage of trained personnel.

"Close enough for government work."  Unfortunately, clean nuclear power was collateral damage to the demonstration of the follies of communism.