Conservative: DEI Is Death for Academia’s Ideals
What’s pushed as “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” is “toxic,” yet “DEI initiatives have proliferated in higher education,” fumes Matthew Spalding in The Wall Street Journal. “It divides us by social identity groups, ranks those groups on privilege and power, and excludes those who fail to honor the new orthodoxy.” And “it deadens the academic mind” as college administrations push this agenda “through curriculum and pedagogy” and “through admissions, campus culture, institutional structures, policies, hiring, promotions and employee training. In short, everything.” It shuts out “divergent voices,” forces “chilling self-censorship” and mandates “ostracization and exclusion” for those who defy its “pieties and homilies” — making it utterly “Orwellian.”
SCOTUS watch: Right Justices No Monolith
Trump appointments pushed the Supreme Court to the right, but “none of his three appointments are nearly as conservative — nor as consistently conservative — as Justices Thomas and Alito,” explain David Lat & Zachary B. Shemtob at The New York Times. They can’t “be easily characterized as either hard-core originalists or blanket partisans.” They don’t even “march in lockstep with one another,” as “Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh disagreed more with each other in their first term together than any other pairing of justices appointed by the same president since the Kennedy administration.” And: “One area where the Trump appointees have agreed with one another, interestingly enough, is in ruling against Mr. Trump.” Indeed, “interesting and important differences of opinion among the conservative justices” is “critical, especially for lawyers and legal organizations on the left.”
From the right: Biden’s Billionaire-Tax Bomb
The billionaire tax President Biden reintroduced may be “creative,” but that doesn’t “necessarily translate to sound,” snark Erica York & Alex Muresianu at Reason. The prez would zap “unrealized gains — the increase in an asset’s value, even before it’s sold.” Yet “by raising the effective tax rate on capital gains, the proposal would reduce U.S. saving, discourage entrepreneurship, and decrease economic output.” “Investing in startups and new technologies that may provide huge returns” would be discouraged. “The tax burden would rise for domestic savers” but not foreign ones, “giving them a relative advantage.” And it would be “conspicuously complex” to administer — which may be why every country “taxes capital gains only when they are realized.”
Foreign desk: Joe’s Deadly Delay
President Biden’s State of the Union “included only a fleeting mention of the ongoing war in Ukraine” and “discussed the conflict in the most generic terms possible,” observes National Review’s Jim Geraghty. “Russia may not be on pace to conquer Ukraine, but it will slaughter as many Ukrainians as possible and reduce their cities to rubble.” In other words, “Ukrainians are bleeding now, but Biden and his team have plans for a lot of help to arrive” — “in 2024 and 2025.” It turns out “it could take two years for those Abrams tanks” to arrive in Ukraine. “What, are they getting there by flying Southwest Airlines?” Ukraine requested “the tanks in September,” and “from the beginning of September to the end of January, 1,123 Ukrainian civilians have been killed and 3,368 have been injured.” Russia is “committing all manner of war crimes,” but Biden thinks doing more to help the victims “would be an ‘escalation!’”
School beat: The Victims of Lax Discipline
“While most discussion about student behavior understandably focuses on its impact on students,” Fordham Institute’s Daniel Buck laments that “too often the effects on teachers are simply overlooked.” To Buck’s dismay, the policy most responsible for classroom “disorder is the eradication of punitive discipline like suspensions.” While many teachers “see value in restorative justice, they believe that suspensions remain a necessary part of any behavioral structure.” Besides the administrative burden and strain on teachers, the most damaging effect is “the lost learning, academic mediocrity, and emotional harm that chaotic environments inflict upon students.” For politicians and others wanting to support teachers, “keeping student behavior in check is an important, too often overlooked place to begin.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
Source link: https://nypost.com/2023/02/12/dei-is-death-for-academias-ideals-conservative-justices-no-monolith-and-other-commentary/