It's a sociopolitical DDOS attack.

Absolutely.

"These people are stealing your tax money, robbing you of services you paid for to enrich themselves. I will stop that."

That's a pretty simple and effective message.

To reason backward from the ultimate conclusion to the interim relief in that way, you have to be really sure of the ultimate conclusion.

That's where it helps if you live in an epistemic bubble where everyone agrees with you about the ultimate conclusion. You simply don't encounter other views.

It brings to mind Bush v. Gore, in which a bare majority of the Court argued, more or less: Bush (who is obviously going to end up president) is experiencing great harm as we keep recounting ballots because all this recounting s making his victory seem less clear and legitimate. So: end the recount.

I would characterize this as an instance of the selective concern that arises when you live in a bubble where everyone is on your side.

Inside that bubble, it feels like the ultimate answer to the case is foreordained—everyone's saying it—so the question becomes, why not enter relief right now?

I agree with @jamellebouie.net and @jamalgreene.bsky.social that what is ultimately the most striking here is the majority's highly selective concern for the ability of a party to govern: it gets enormous weight when one party is in power, and not even a mention when the other party is in power.

It is only by living in a bubble where everyone agrees with you that it can make perfect sense to see *none* of the equities on the other side of a case like this. As if the clean power plan had no real purpose.

Full briefing & oral argument would at least force you to hear some opposing arguments.

The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court

it is, among other things, incredibly striking to see that roberts was so solicitous of the burden the clean power plan might put on fossil fuel executives, when, a decade later, he is indifferent to the way trump’s moves have thrown hundreds of thousands of lives into turmoil.

Most striking to me about these memos is the radically different assessment of the harm imposed by the president not being able to pursue his initiatives. Over the last 15 mos., that harm has in numerous cases been treated as almost per se serious and irreparable. Here, it gets no analysis at all.

It’s an important story that really illustrates well how the effects of the information bubble in which Roberts (and other justices) live are greatly exacerbated by the decision to do big things on the shadow docket—and by highly flexible tools of judicial activism like the Major Questions Doctrine.

The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court

The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court (Gift link)

This is one of the more impressive pieces of reporting to come out of the NYT’s larger and stronger Supreme Court reporting team. Joan Biskupic may have the best inside source, but this team somehow has the paper trail.

To which the answer seems to be: "Ok, how about the Hoover Institution but spread throughout the university and integrated into its departments? It'll be a fundraising juggernaut!"

Yikes.

As if the question was not how to resist the present assault but how to monetize it...

kina hora!

Harvard Asks Donors to Endow $10 Million Professorships for ‘Viewpoint Diversity’ Initiative | News | The Harvard Crimson Harvard is quietly asking donors for $10 million gifts to establish new endowed professorships in a sweeping bid to reshape its faculty under the banner of “viewpoint diversity,” according to two peop...

To see how this same energy, if not channeled well, can go awry, Yale need merely look over at its chief rival, which seems to be answering a different question: "hey, what if our response to the present assault on higher ed ran through the development office?"

Instead, I think we should read the report as a political document: an attempt to channel the anxiety and fear that has resulted from the present political assault on higher education in a productive direction, to improve Yale and other universities rather than undermine their foundations.

In other words: do not mistake this report, learned as it is, for an academic study of the question of how and why trust in American higher ed has lately declined. That's not what it is.

I choose, for now, to be an optimist about this.

Maybe they simply preferred the headline "Yale has some solutions to fix higher ed (and btw they're good ones!)" over the headline "Yale enters culture wars with report blaming Trump and Chris Rufo for why Republicans hate Yale these days."

Viewing the report in its worst light, the glaring omission of the present political assault suggests the barbarians are already inside the gates: the internal politics of the university (or the committee) includes enough people who AGREE with the conservative assault that one must tread lightly.

Viewing the report in its best light, perhaps its real goal was: "what can we (Yale & similar schools) *do* about the problem that a lot of Americans—especially Republicans—distrust and dislike us?"

The answer to that question is different from the answer to "what actually caused this distrust?"

Great thread

More of the report's recommendations apply directly to my very different public university context than I would've expected. I'm especially eager to discuss recommendations 7-14 & 17-19 w/ my colleagues when I'm back home from my year away, but I invite a free-for-all conversation here

So it's odd: the "recommendations" section consists primarily of excellent reforms that I hope Yale and other "leading" universities implement.

Some of the recommendations would even strengthen Yale's defenses against future political assault.

But the report steadfastly will not say that.

Enhancing "shared governance"—that is, the role of faculty in governing the university—(recommendations 16 and 18) would be amazing and would help protect Yale from future assaults in which—as at Penn, Columbia, etc—trustees to the right of their institutions undermine the school from the top down.

If Yale can somehow use this crisis to actually build stronger and more explicit protections for academic freedom, that would also be great—and would be an interesting turn of events, as destroying academic freedom is a major goal of the present assault on higher ed that the report will not name.

I can imagine reasons why this commission might have chosen to write the report the way they did. The simplest is "never let a crisis go to waste."

The #1 audience for this report is Yale itself. If Yale wants to attack grade inflation and make tuition pricing more transparent, great!

It has been awhile since I was a Yale undergraduate but I am very confident that many excellent Yale professors—such as David Bromwich, who's on the 10-member commission that wrote the report—in fact do teach their students about "conservative intellectual traditions."

That's not the real critique.

What the report does not say—but that people like Rufo say very openly—is that the current American right wing aims to use its power in the political sphere to conquer the rest of the seven mountains, of which higher education is one.

That's the story—not Yale forgot to teach Edmund Burke.

7. Politics and Intellectual Pluralism While concerns about free speech and self-censorship are widely shared, conservatives have long offered a more particular critique of higher education: that the nation’s leading universities, including Yale, tend to exclude conservative intellectual traditions. Some point to the partisan composition of the faculty, noting that professors overwhelmingly identify with the Democratic party. Others focus on the curriculum, or on the suggestion that liberal professors indoctrinate their students. Taken together, these critiques frame universities as intellectual and ideological echo chambers, out of touch with the American nation and out of step with its political currents.

The report then puts on the table what it correctly describes as a conservative "critique" of higher education, framing this critique in its most flattering light, as if the claim is that "leading universities" like Yale "tend to exclude conservative intellectual traditions."

The report also devotes space in the free speech section to discussing some controversies—the halloween costume thing at Yale in 2015, the free speech issues around Gaza-related protests lately—that have been fuel for the current round of political attacks on universities by conservatives. (p.14-16)

This is the move you would make if you were determined to avoid speaking about the most recent decade of assaults on American higher education.

No discussion of the present round of such attacks (Trump/Rufo); nor the anti-"political correctness" wave of attacks of the 1990s. Even that's too recent!

Throughout this history, higher education encountered many critics. As the historian Richard Hofstadter noted, anti-intellectualism and suspicion of expertise have a long lineage in the United States.13 The early 20th century also saw growing tensions over the relationship between elite universities and the egalitarian impulses of a modern democracy. Events at home and abroad fueled these tensions. During the 1920s, amid a wave of nativist and antisemitic sentiment, Yale, like other Ivy League institutions, sought to exclude the growing numbers of qualified Jewish applicants. The result was an admissions review that included assessments of an applicant’s “personality and character”—subjective criteria through which the number of Jewish students 10 Colony of Connecticut General Court, “Act for Liberty to Erect a Collegiate School (1701),” in The Yale Corporation: Charter and Legislation. Printed for the President and Fellows (Yale University, 1976). 11 American Association of University Professors (AAUP), “General Report of the Committee on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure,” Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors 1, no. 1 (December 31, 1915): 32. 12 AAUP, “General report,” 34. 13 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Knopf Doubleday, 1963).

Obviously, the smart people Maurie McInnis put on this commission—such as historian Beverly Gage, one of the co-chairs—are completely aware of this.

The report even contextualizes it, citing the "long lineage" of American "anti-intellectualism," sourcing that to Hofstadter's book from 1963.