Welcome to Thursday, April 16, 2026 and Save the Elephant Day. Here’s a group of elephants (don’t know the formal term) digging for water in a lake bed in Kruger National Park (photographed in August of 2024). The cute thing was that the mother would dig a hole and then let the babies drink first.
It’s also Day of the Mushroom, International Pizza Cake Day (yes, it’s a cake that looks like a pizza), National Ask An Atheist Day (the answer is “no”), National Eggs Benedict Day, National Librarian Day, and National Orchid Day.
The bunnies (Eastern Cottontails) are out! On my way to work I passed by two furry lumps standing like statues only about ten feet away from me. They were bunnies! I silently moved away from them to allow them to forage. An iPhone photo:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 16 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*At It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal describes the talks between Lebanon (not Hezbollah) and Israel as a “resounding success”:
The highest-level direct talks between Israel and Lebanon in history have concluded with neither side getting what they wanted. Regardless, the summit was a resounding success.
Lebanon entered the negotiations hoping to achieve an immediate ceasefire, reportedly threatening to walk away from future talks unless this condition was met. Israel, meanwhile, came to the table demanding a concrete commitment and a clear timeline for the disarmament of Hezbollah north of the Litani River. While neither delegation walked away with their demands fulfilled, further talks are already confirmed. As U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted after the meetings, this will take time; the talks “are a process, not an event.”
In statecraft, as in life, you cannot expect others to treat you with respect if you do not first respect yourself. For the first time in decades, Lebanon’s government is asserting itself as a sovereign entity, and for the first time in decades, Washington is officially recognizing it as such. Prior to yesterday, whenever Washington needed something done in Beirut, it dialed Damascus, Tehran, Doha or Riyadh.
The question is whether the government is actually in charge.
The mere fact that the Lebanese government chose to engage in the negotiations is a good sign. Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem explicitly warned against the summit, labeling it “futile” and declaring it a “stab in the back to the resistance.” Had Hassan Nasrallah issued a similar warning in 2021, his word would have been an insurmountable veto. But two years of relentless Israeli military pressure, coupled with the succession of the significantly less imposing Qassem, has considerably defanged the organization.
Still, breaking the psychological hold Hezbollah maintains over the country requires the Lebanese government to treat it like the paper tiger it has become, rather than the actual tiger it once was.
Israeli Ambassador to the United States Yechiel Leiter addressed the media following the meeting, claiming that the officials on both sides discovered they are actually on the “same side of the equation” and are “united in liberating Lebanon.” Most intriguingly, Leiter suggested that once the security situation is resolved, the two nations “can embark on a harmonious relationship” akin to the Abraham Accords countries.
The penultimate paragraph is the important one. The Lebanese government is largely under the sway of Hezbollah, but the Lebanese people are sick of the terrorist organization. Still, don’t see a ceasefire or disarming of Hezbollah, any more than I see a disarming of Hamas. But it’s a start.
*Michael B. Horn at the Free Press tells us “Your local college is running out of cash.” This is true even at the University of Chicago, where strict budgetary restrictions have been imposed.
It’s no secret that higher education is reeling. The litany of challenges is long. Among them: struggles over free speech, antisemitism, and ideological uniformity; President Donald Trump’s many attacks on the sector;, a replicability and peer review crisis in research, and declining public confidence in colleges.
Then there’s also student debt, a declining percentage of high school graduates enrolling in college, low graduation rates, increasing questions around a college education’s return on investment, and a free-for-all in college athletics.
I could go on. But there’s one piece of the puzzle that’s received relatively less attention, however: the fiscal health of many colleges themselves. To put it simply, a tremendous number of colleges and universities are on the fast path to insolvency, which stands to quickly transform not only America’s higher-education landscape but also the many communities built around these institutions.
In 2013, the late Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen and I wrote a piece in The New York Times predicting that within 15 years, 25 percent of colleges would close or merge. The claim rested on patterns observed in other industries where rising expenditures, declining demand, and structural change eventually forced institutions to consolidate or declare bankruptcy and restructure.
Since then, over 15 percent of the 4,724 degree-granting colleges or universities that existed at the time we made the prediction have shut their doors.
Yet college leaders seem not to grasp the scale of the problem and, in public, dismiss the danger to their institutions. Yes, enrollments might soften. Yes, some institutions might struggle. But higher education is resilient. We’ve heard rumors of insolvency before, they would say as they dismissed our claims.
But the math is about to get a lot worse for many schools.
The number of traditional college-age students in the United States is projected to decline for at least the next two decades as the smaller birth cohorts following the Great Recession move through the education pipeline. For an industry built around steady enrollment growth, that demographic shift alone guarantees increasing financial pressure.
But demographics alone won’t determine which institutions survive. The more immediate threat is simpler: cash.
And a recent study says this:
. . . Even assuming enrollments remain steady—an optimistic scenario given the coming demographic decline—more than one-third of the colleges studied have less than five years before becoming fiscally insolvent without significant changes. That means they will have less money coming in annually than they are spending, and will need to start drawing down their unrestricted endowments, or borrowing—if they can—to keep operating. On average, those schools have less than a year before their financial position falls into that territory.
. . .In most industries, leaders would immediately recognize this situation as a liquidity crisis. In higher education, it is often treated as a temporary dip that strategic plans or enrollment initiatives will eventually solve.
That optimism is difficult to reconcile with demographic reality.
The “elite” colleges will fix the problem by belt-tightening, but most schools are not “elite”. Horn offers a number of solutions, including deep-sixing under-enrolled majors or even merging colleges with other colleges. Our own school is going the former route, plus ratcheting back on hiring. No matter what: we are going to see a revolution in higher education, including the inimical effects of AI on all subjects, especially the humanities.
*I’ve always found Bret Stephens’s take on recent wars, be they in Gaza or Iran, quite sensible. His latest NYT column tells us “How Trump can wrap up the war” (column archived here). Stephens offers four suggestions. Excerpts:
First, Trump should put Iran’s regime to a fundamental choice: It can have an economy. Or the regime can attempt to have a nuclear program while trying to control the Strait of Hormuz. But it can’t have both.
“Iran’s central bank has warned President Masoud Pezeshkian that rebuilding the country’s war-damaged economy could take more than a decade,” reports Iran International, an Iranian opposition news site based in London. The bank anticipates up to two million additional people left jobless by the war, along with inflation as high as 180 percent. An inflation rate of over 40 percent was what sparked January’s mass protests. As for the effects of the blockade, the site reports, it would wipe out “an estimated $435 million in daily economic activity,” and force “oil field shutdowns within weeks.”
. . .Second, Trump must bear in mind what precipitated the current crisis with Iran — not its nuclear programs, but the murder ofthousands of Iranian protesters in January. What Iran’s leaders fear more than economic collapse is the wrath of their own people.
Administration policy should be geared to exploit that wrath. That begins by breaking the information blockade the regime has sought to impose through an internet blackout. Fully restoring funding to Radio Farda, the Persian-language service of Radio Free Europe that the Trump administration slashed last year during the tenure of the incompetent Kari Lake would be one place to start. Flooding Iran with additional Starlink terminals — too many for the regime to stop — would be the next. What would not help, by contrast, is to target civilian infrastructure, particularly power plants, whose destruction could only bring misery to ordinary Iranians.
The most important step Trump could take would be to warn the regime publicly — and in a way that gets communicated to Iran’s people — that it will intervene militarily if it again attempts a bloody crackdown on public protests. The United States cannot bring about regime change in Iran. But it can do what it can to tilt the scales in favor of the millions of disaffected Iranians who can.
This is my own main goal of the war: freeing the Iranian people, who want to be modern, from the oppressive theocracy. Two more:
Third, if the regime wants to link the current cease-fire with an end to Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon, then it must itself desist from arming and financing the terrorist group.
The principle is simple: Israel will get out of Lebanon the moment Iran gets out of Lebanon. Failing that, the United States should give Israel a green light to continue degrading Hezbollah’s capabilities until it can no longer initiate wars against Israel, as the group did in 2006, 2023 and again this year. If other states, particularly France as Lebanon’s former colonial power, object to this, they can always volunteer to send their own troops to enforce the U.N. Security Council resolution that Hezbollah has been violating for nearly 20 years.
There may already be French troops among the thousands of UN troops supposedly enforcing the resolution. But they’re doing bupkes. Finally,
Finally, Trump can offer the regime a grand bargain: what I’ve long called “normalization for normalization.”
Iran could get an end to both war and blockade, full relief from international sanctions, the resumption of diplomatic and commercial relations with the United States and every other benefit that Tehran used to enjoy before the Islamic revolution of 1979. In return, all that would be asked of Iran is to behave like a normal country: no efforts to support armed militias throughout the region, or harbor Qaeda leaders, or send hit squads to kill or kidnap enemies abroad, or declare “death to Israel” and “death to America” as foundational principles of the regime while trying to build nuclear weapons.
Does any of that sound outrageous? Of course not. The outrage is that the regime’s current leaders would almost certainly dismiss the proposal out of hand because ideological militancy, rather than fidelity to the interests of the Iranian people, is what has defined them for the past 47 years.
Aye: there’s the rub. We are dealing with a hard-line Islamic theocracy, and only regime change can bring about Stephens’s goals. As usual these days, I see no solution, though these suggestions are good. But they require the administration to stick to goals other than its own popularity.
*At his Substack site Reality’s Last Stand,” Colin Wright tells us that “The war on biology is far from over.” The war, of course, involves pushback against the (true) binary nature of sex in animals and plants. The article is free, but subscribe if you have the dosh.
The war against biology has not slowed down. Despite the chatter on X that woke ideology is dead or at least in retreat, a brief internet search reveals that activists are still flooding the zone with sex pseudoscience.
Just in the last few weeks, we’ve seen several examples. Princeton anthropologist Agustín Fuentes published a piece in Science Politics arguing that government efforts to define sex as a biological binary are based on “falsehoods and erroneous assertions.” IFLScience ran an article claiming there is “no clean definition” of biological sex. The Trans Advocacy & Complaints Collective published a piece insisting that “sex does not fit neatly in boxes.” And now a peer-reviewed paper in BioScience claims that teaching students what the authors call “the diversity of biological sex” makes LGBTQIA+ students feel more included and enjoy biology more.
That last example is particularly concerning, because peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals carry more weight than newspaper think pieces or activist blog posts. They influence how biology is taught, how future teachers are trained, and regularly serve as the basis for public policy.
The BioScience paper presents itself as offering a more “accurate” way to teach about biological sex, but what it actually offers is the same sex pseudoscience activists have been pushing for years. It promotes confusion about what sex is, arbitrariness in how it is defined, and a conflation of exceptions and variations with the category itself.
In reality, the concept of sex (i.e., what defines an individual as male or female) is not complicated. In species that reproduce sexually through anisogamy—that is, by fusing gametes of two different sizes—males are the sex with the biological function of producing small gametes (sperm), and females are the sex with the biological function of producing large gametes (ova). That is what the sexes are. Chromosomes, hormones, genital morphology, and secondary sex traits are all related to sex, but they are not included in the definition of sex. Rather, they are either upstream developmental determinants of sex or the downstream expression of it.
This is the central point the BioScience paper obscures.
. . .But the definitions of the sexes has long been established, with no serious alternative definition of sex in biology that is logically coherent or explanatorily useful. Scientists can debate all kinds of things about sex determination, sexual development, or unusual disorders of development, but the meaning of male and female is not some open-ended philosophical question. Male and female are grounded in reproductive function. The only people who question this or claim the definition isn’t “settled” are those trying to distort biology to fit their radical political agendas. But as I stated in a recent scholarly article, “while biology can and should inform policy, policy preferences should never be used to dictate biology.”
The paper also confuses the definition of sex with the mechanisms that determine sex.
. . . But a manufactured consensus is impossible to maintain forever, because the truth doesn’t just go away. Activists are now increasingly being forced into the kind of direct engagement they have long tried to avoid, because while fashionable sex pseudoscience can sound persuasive on its own, it quickly disintegrates on contact with informed opposition.
I’ve read all these papers myself and yes, they’re sorely misleading. But it’s ideology, Jake! Another area in which politics has pushed science aside is the efficacy and benefits of transgender hormone therapy and surgery. I wrote about that yesterday, and even the AMA can’t decide whether to go with the science (i.e., results as of yet unclear) versus ideology (rah, rah, go transition!).
*On March 18, the Williams Record, the student newspaper of Williams College (where Luana teaches) published an op-ed (“Gender gap in economics department persists despite faculty interventions”) showing that, compared to the sex ratio of student enrollment at the school (52% female) the proportion of women majoring in economics has historically been lower (35% in 2022). Here’s the graph they give:
The tenor of the article is that this “inequity” must be corrected as it reflects a problem that needs correction, implicitly bias against women and explicitly (and patronizingly) ignorance among females about economics. Two quotes from the op-ed:
Professor of Economics Sarah Jacobson told the Record that she has been working to even out enrollment between female and male students in the major since arriving at the College in 2010. “It is difficult to not notice that when you walk into an economics classroom, certain identities are strongly underrepresented … professors notice it, and students notice it,” she said. “While many other STEM fields have gotten more diverse on both race and gender over the last couple of decades, economics has really lagged behind.”
. . . “The idea [in the UWE study] was to try to find out why women were not concentrating or majoring in economics as much as men were,” [Nobel-winning economist Claudia] Goldin said in an interview with the Record. “We discovered it was generally that women thought that economics was mainly about finance and not about people. They didn’t understand what it was really about.”
Well, we know the problem of jumping from inequities to concluding both bias and the existence of a problem that needs to be fixed. The “progressive” view is that, given a “blank slate” view, inequities must be fixed so all groups should be represented in proportion to their existence in a population. The “people verus finance” trope might, indeed, reflect differential interests.
Luana has pushed back on that with the most obvious response for differences between sexes: they could reflect interest, not bigotry. She wrote a response to this op-ed called, “Why sex-ratios in majors might be more than just bias.” An excerpt:
Humans are not blank slates, and many studies show that males and females have, on average, different preferences and behaviors which can affect their choice of major and profession. While some of these differences are influenced by societal norms, others have been molded by a billion years of the evolutionary process of sexual selection. True fairness in representation lies not in achieving parity, but in respecting individual preferences.
The persistent underrepresentation of women in economics (36 percent in the department’s 2023 internal report) is real. But the sources in the article try to explain this “imbalance” by lack of access, lack of incentives, or outright discrimination against women. A more evidence-based explanation should include the awareness that sex differences in educational and vocational preferences have been documented across decades of psychological research.
It is undeniable that society’s incentives and prohibitions guide what is a permissible career path for each sex. However, as someone who studies evolutionary biology, I also note that millions of years of sexual selection have produced average differences in behavior and preferences between the sexes — differences that appear early, are cross-cultural, and persist even in the most egalitarian societies today. Past sexual selection produced not only different body sizes and strengths, but also different behaviors. In mammals, females bear the far higher reproductive costs — pregnancy, lactation, and extended parental investment — while male investment in most species is limited to a brief copulation and sperm delivery. Over millions of years, this asymmetry has favored greater male risk-taking, aggression, and drive for resources — all things that could enhance chances of acquiring a mate.
. . . . Society accepts — without outrage — majors and professions that are heavily female-dominated. Today psychology and biology routinely exceed 60 to 80 percent female nationally, and fields such as nursing and several medical specialties are also overwhelmingly female. We also do not lose sleep over male-dominated professions like policing or trucking. So, why single out economics (and, similarly, political science) for criticism when in fact the overall distribution of majors must balance out to result in an overall 50 percent of women in the College?
There is danger in assuming every inequality reflects bigotry rather than choice.
There should be a name for this fallacy. At any rate, Luana’s fighting it in the trenches.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s scrutinizing the garden:
Hili: These tulips were a different color last year.
Andrzej: We live in a world of illusions.
In Polish:
Hili: Te tulipany miały w zeszłym roku inny kolor.
Ja: Żyjemy w świecie złudzeń.
*******************
An AI photo made by Mark Richardson with the details (remember Sinead O’Connor tearing up the Pope’s picture on Saturday Night Live? You can see it here.):
Your AI rendition of Trump as Satan on Hili this morning was serendipitous. Plus funny! Last night, while musing about Trump’s battle with the pope, I was reminded of the time in ’92 when Sinead O’Connor ripped a photo of pope John Paul II live on SNL. I watched as it happened, and even though I was an atheist back then and had no truck with religion, I still remember being shocked.So (mostly to make my wife laugh) I went to ChatGPT’s photo renderer and asked: have Trump rip a photo of the pope like Sinead O’Connor did on Saturday Night Live.Attached is the photo. Not bad eh? I know the context is off since O’Connor was protesting the Catholic pedophile cover-up and Trump’s protest is just narcissism run amuck, but it was worth the 30 seconds it took to render.
From CinEmma:
From Meow, Incorporated.:
From The Dodo Pet:
From Masih, who calls out Iranian government official Masoumeh Ebtekarv to Anerson Cooper:
Live on CNN, where you, @ebtekarm_ir, gave multiple interviews to promote the Islamic Republic and called out millions of Iranian women simply for removing their hijab, you once laughed at me when I exposed your hypocrisy, now, I couldn’t hold back my grin as I watched you… https://t.co/JZ82lwhCnm pic.twitter.com/vQUr3pAyRs
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 15, 2026
From Simon; a good one, referring to when Lydon B. Johnson “lost America” because Walter Cronkite said the U.S. was mired in a stalemate. Simon titles this, “When you lose Sarah Palin.” Indeed!
— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) April 14, 2026
From Luana; click on the screenshot to go to the most unhinged AI video ever (it can’t be embedded here):
From Malcolm; the amazing reaction time of cats:
Cats are highly skilled predators with a strong instinct to hunt, even if they are well-fed domestic cats.
They have exceptionally fast reaction times, ranging from approximately 20 to 70 ms, significantly faster than humans (around 250 ms).pic.twitter.com/Ykj7cSBhc9
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) March 30, 2026
One from my feed:
“Bunch of fucking amateurs” pic.twitter.com/yGGlHCXsDZ
— Paul Bronks (@SlenderSherbet) April 15, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This German Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was eleven years old. https://t.co/bgXOawP3pt
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 16, 2026
Two from Dr. Cobb, soon off to Italy and Chile. First, a 1948 cat photo (Bluesky was down this a.m., so you might not see these):
📸 Édouard Boubat. Réunion des chats1948. Paris Cats
— 2️⃣0k 😊 Paris FB (@parispaname.bsky.social) 2026-04-11T15:57:50.146Z
The problem is that RFK, Jr. is not a zoologist:
OK, there are lots of reasons to dislike RFK, but I've worked with plenty of zoologists who would consider this to be perfectly normal behaviour.
— Markus Eichhorn (@markuseichhorn.bsky.social) 2026-04-15T10:07:56.546Z
The impression I have is that colleges are top-heavy with administrators, which is a fairly recent development. The obvious solution would be to cut the payroll there (especially since the growth of adminstration seem to correlate negatively to outcomes). It would probably hurt universities’ graduate employment numbers, since these jobs seem to be make work for the over-educated, but everything in life is a trade-off.
Thirty-six percent representation in a program doesn’t strike me as rampant discrimination.
Maybe Trump’s spat with the Pope will lead him to do something that should have been done years ago: Remove recognition of the Vatican as a country.
Vatican City is a sovereign entity (under the Lateran treaty of 1929). As such, the US should recognize it and send diplomats. This does not imply agreeing with the policies of the Vatican. For the record, I am not Catholic but have been to the Vatican (I liked it, but did not like St. Peter’s).
Agree – the Vatican is terrific, even for an atheist Jew. St. Peter’s was OK.
I have a “thing” for geographical oddities, even went to San Marino once!
D.A.
NYC 🗽
“San Marino”? That’s impressive. I have never been there. A. Lincoln spoke highly of San Marino. As mentioned earlier, I liked the Vatican, but not St. Peter’s. St. Peter’s was just too massive and heavy for me.
I contemplate whether the Southern Baptist Convention or any other Protestant sect considers itself no less entitled to be a sovereign entity. Also the Orthodox Church.
Yes, France contributes troops to that useless organization called UNIFIL.
I am not surprised that RFK cut off the penis of a dead raccoon. Nor would I be in the least surprise to learn that he ate it. That boy is crazier than a pack of Wal-Mart shoppers at opening time on Black Friday.
Well, the penis will have a baculum (penis bone), and I for one find that interesting.
Maybe he just needed a hillbilly toothpick 🤷♂
The AI short w/ Neil de Grass Tyson is excellent and as ALWAYS… they blast NYC to bits! Love it. They’re getting so skilled at these.
Bret Stephens is correct on Lebanon. For the record, the UN base in Sth Lebanon that does a lot of shawarma eating and not much disarming Hezb, probably has almost no French soldiers: the base is mainly Bangladeshis and Africans like a lot of UN “peacekeeping”. The French are stung by their own irrelevancy in many domains, including Lebanon – as sad as a once beautiful starlet insisting these are –still– her glory days. Mais non, madame.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
Lebanon was once quite important in the region. Not anymore. In another era, my cousin was a stewardess for El Al. She spoke fluent French and was quite sophisticated (compared to me). I was very impressed. Lebanon does have one thing going for it. Natural gas has been found offshore. The gas fields are shared with Israel and Cyprus.
Yes Frank. It was impressive how, even not in the same room and mediated by US diplomats, Lebanon and Israel could agree on the gas deal.
I was in Lebanon in 2006 – when the war was on. I love the place and – as I’ve posted here – many Lebanese are rooting for Israel to beat the Hezbs (and Pals) who have wrecked their lovely country.
Props to your cousin, what a great career at the best time to do that job. You’re correct Lebanon’s time has passed, its financial and political role has been taken by the UAE now.
keep well,
D.A.
NYC 🗽
Actually, at the time, Netanyahu attacked the gas deal. It was done by the Bennett/Lapid government, and Bibi’s party called them cowards and traitors for doing it. Netanyahu didn’t believe that (he has no principles) but it was politically expedient, and satisfied some of his RW allies.
And now, some of those allies in his government are criticizing Bibi in the same way. Luckily, he can blame Trump for the idea. Later this year in the general election, he can do the same, if the negotiations fail. If they succeed, he will take credit and call himself a peacemaker.
Such is our prime minister.
“I’m still big, it’s the pictures that got small!” – Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.
Sarah Palin does Woke politics that advances the Left through dialectic.
This is the function of Woke Right agitators.
Public universities like mine have suffered from a loss of being underwritten by the state. There was broad recognition of the value of having an educated population and keeping the cost of a higher education low for an individual. States essentially subsidized a cheap education. When I came to my university in 1999, 50% of the cost of running the university was paid by the state. As the then-sane GOP turned into the Tea Party and then the MAGA crowd in the state legislature, budgets shrank, there were budget cuts, and the current state support for my institution is about 20%. It doesn’t help that many legislators view universities as a liberal indoctrination centers or want to impose a corporate mentality on how a university is run.
Universities then hire more administrators for recruiting. Overall we’ve lost faculty but gained a number of administrators. Then tuition is raised to cover expenses and the folks running things wonder why enrollment declines. Faculty are told to write more grants so the university can get more overhead dollars but every institution is fighting for smaller slices of the same pie. Some of my students have a full load of classes and work two jobs. I’m not sure what the solution is.
Part of the solution…which is not mentioned in your description…is to become more efficient.
Universities , public and private, definitely need to increase efficiency. In the past couple of decades, efficiency has been lowered by increasing the ratio of administrators to faculty. The purposes of universities are teaching and research, and it is the faculty that performs both tasks. Administration contributes less than nothing: much of the increase has been in DEI positions, and those folks harm research and teaching by increasing the bureaucratic burden on the faculty.
To paraphrase a common university joke:
What is the difference between a university administrator and a catfish?
One is a scum-sucking bottom feeder.
The other is a fish.
Sad to hear that IFLScience has drunk the Koolaid.
Negotiations between Israel and Lebanon are a good thing. The two countries share the goal of getting rid of Hezbollah. Negotiating with the Lebanese government sends the strong message that the Lebanese government, not Hezbollah, is in charge. The talks strengthen the Lebanese government. It’s not at all a surprise that Hezbollah is condemning the talks. That’s good, too. Normalization of relations between Israel and Lebanon is a possibility.
France seems to be annoyed that they are not included in the negotiations. Too damn bad. Do they still think that Lebanon is a colony of France?
Thank you Luana! Of course it’s either stupid or purposely misleading (= dishonest) to claim that differential representation in one or another major, or profession, or avocation, is ipso facto proof of bias or bigotry rather than choice.
A problem with any deal with Israel is the assassin’s veto for any Arab head of state signing it.
This is also true for MBS in Saudi Arabia (whose uncle King Fahd was assassinated by a nephew, albeit for other reasons, in the 70s).
I call it the Sadat Effect.
best to you Norman,
D.A.
NYC 🗽
Bret Stephens’ suggestions for ending the war are spot on. Unfortunately Trump doesn’t like advice.
Agree that attempts to “fix” sex ratios in fields of study is a fool’s errand. But it will keep up anyway, I’m afraid.
The straightforward way to correct the sex imbalance among economists is to compel high school girls to major in economics when they go on to university instead of nursing, teaching, or veterinary medicine. I’m surprised no one has proposed this as the obvious solution to what is apparently a pressing social problem of injustice. After all, we already tell men that they can’t do jobs they’d like to do that have too many men in them. Telling women they must do them is only a short step.
The only catch (for women) is that white straight women are no longer considered an equity-seeking group according to a position paper that was floating around the Canadian civil service. She has to tick another oppression box, and being a trans woman is the choicest box of all.
“There should be a name for this fallacy.”
There is, it’s called “woke”. 😎
“There should be a name for this fallacy.”
I propose, depending on context:
“Discrimination Attribution Fallacy” or the “Fundamental Fallacy of DEI.”
Given the current financial trajectory, many colleges in existence since the 19th and early 20th centuries will close. Yet those same institutions thrived when the population was a fraction of today’s, the four-year college-to-population density was higher, and the percentage of college-bound students from the traditional age cohort was in the low single digits.
Certainly, those colleges were leaner in staff, curriculum, and amenities. But they also could not have envisioned the exploding costs of pensions, healthcare, and construction. The surge in liability and insurance premiums. The tax system. The explosive growth of the scientific enterprise. The cost of regulatory compliance on virtually every facet of university operations—and on those with whom they do business.
None of that is to argue whether individual components of our administrative state and modern economy are “good or bad.” But these pose financial realities with which early institutions did not have to cope. Sure, we can cut administrators and staff. Ditch the climbing walls and fancy cafeterias. Shift back to a core curriculum from our expansive smorgasbord of consumer-choice courses. But consolidations and closures are inevitable—no matter what else administrators do.