There are questions that can’t be asked on a job application, such as what is your race.* There are questions that can.

Regardless of personal demographic characteristics, UC San Diego has a strong interest in ensuring that all candidates hired for faculty appointments share our commitment to excellence, access, and Principles of Community.

All candidates applying for faculty appointments at UC San Diego are required to submit a personal statement on their contributions to diversity. The purpose of the statement is to identify candidates who have the professional skills, experience, and/or willingness to engage in activities that will advance our campus diversity and equity goals.

The question isn’t whether you support the “campus diversity and equity goals,” but rather more specific. Continue reading →

I’ve been pretty harsh on the ACLU here. There were clues that I should have seen, but didn’t. An upcoming article in The Nation, however, has enlightened me, and now I realize the error of my criticism.

People Power emerged out of the ACLU’s sudden, explosive growth in the wake of Trump’s election. In Arizona, statewide membership jumped from 5,500 to more than 22,000; nationwide, it soared from 450,000 to 1.84 million. Followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram quadrupled. Donations skyrocketed, from less than $5 million annually in online contributions in recent years to $86 million in the year after the 2016 elections. Meanwhile, the ACLU went on a hiring spree—116 new positions at national offices around the country. Many new staffers are supporting People Power, which now has 250,000 members in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

People Power. It’s not just a cute slogan to suck in donations, but an entirely new direction. Continue reading →

Dahlia Lithwick tries to draw a straight line from Michelle Wolf’s comedy at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, which every president attends except this one, to the Supreme Court.

And at the Supreme Court, during last week’s oral arguments in the travel ban case, Trump v. Hawaii, we were transported to a bizarre world in which this president was discussed as if he were a normal head of state.

At stake here is the presumption of regularity, the presumption that the president is acting in good faith. Lithwick, and many others in the media, have decided that this president is unworthy of the presumption. Continue reading →

Appellate Squawk can say more with a pic than I can in a thousand words.

Comes now New York’s highest court with the holding that an accuser’s trial testimony constitutes clear and convincing evidence of the truth of her accusations, even though the jury found her not credible and acquitted the defendant of those charges. 

This is the sort of sophistry that only a lawyer can fathom, like “acquitted conduct” in federal sentencing. Continue reading →

A bill has passed the Colorado house addressing the process for handling Title IX sexual misconduct allegations, one aspect of which is to require colleges to provide an advisor to the accused. Good news? Maybe not so much.

HB 18-1391, “Sexual Misconduct in Higher Education” aims to require higher education institutions to set clear policies for sexual assault reporting and investigating, and to establish minimum standards for those policies.

The bill would limit the involvement of legal counsel in proceedings. The accuser and the accused would have “the same opportunities to have an advisor or other person present during any part of the proceeding; except that the advisor or other person is not allowed to speak on behalf of the complainant or responding party during the course of the proceedings.”

Oddly, the text of the bill says nothing of the sort. Continue reading →

Conor Friedersdorf is exceptionally smart and invariably polite. Both of these qualities are reflected in his reply to Noah Smith’s cartoon characterization of the intellectuals of the right and left. Conor provided a well-conceived argument on behalf of conservative intellectuals.

I admire Conor’s restraint. I do not, however, share it. First, Smith’s contention.

“On the left, the drive to purge racism, sexism, etc. from American society is very strong,” he tweeted, “and most discourse concerns this drive––either decrying examples of racism/sexism, discussing institutions that maintain these -isms, or discussing how to effect change.”

That may well be a fair characterization of the end game, the goals of the progressives. To the extent it suggests that anyone other than the left doesn’t support ending “racism, sexism, etc.,*” however, it’s bullshit. But more importantly, Smith uses the word “purge.” Does that mean that they will do anything, anything at all to eradicate “racism, sexism, etc.”? Continue reading →

It was hard, very hard, to get past the opening words of this Pomona College story in The Student Life.

Renowned feminist scholar Roxane Gay spoke alongside two others to an overflowing crowd of nearly 300 students at Rose Hills Theater Tuesday, and engaged in a contentious debate about the #MeToo movement.

Wait, that Roxane Gay? The Roxane Gay who has yet to deny killing puppies? Were they misinformed? Continue reading →

Chicago cop Jason Van Dyke is on trial for the first-degree murder of Laquan McDonald. Try as he might, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s post-Obama-White-House clout wasn’t enough to keep the video of the killing under wraps, although it was sufficient for Rahm to escape unscathed in the aftermath of recreated history of everything pre-Trump being wonderful.

Van Dyke still faces trial, but he’s got a defense. Despite the video showing that he murdered McDonald like a dog in the street, it appears that Illinois law will permit him a fantasy defense.

At the closed-door hearing, Van Dyke’s defense team is expected to call witnesses who are slated to testify at trial about McDonald’s allegedly violent history and character. In January, Gaughan agreed to let as many as nine witnesses testify on the issue, but he plans to decide at the hearing next week on how much of their testimony he will allow at trial.

Continue reading →

The only thing clear about Fordham philosophy prof William Jaworski is that some people didn’t like what he had to say. Had he done something, as in sexually molest a student, it would be understandable that he was a target of student outrage. But there isn’t a whisper of anything of the sort.

“Right now it’s unsubstantiated allegation,” [Associate Dean of the School of Professional & Continuing Studies Cira] Vernazza said. “The key is to substantiate or not. Right? So that’s the procedure. That’s the investigative procedure. So try to be fair about it. We don’t know because we don’t know. If you have firsthand experience, you should come forward.”

Firsthand experience of what? There isn’t the slightest clue given. But that didn’t stop two seniors from deciding to rise up to save others from . . . something. Continue reading →

The jury returned its verdict in the retrial of Bill Cosby. Guilty, guilty, guilty. And much as honor an acquittal for sustaining our presumption of innocence, a guilty verdict brings that presumption to an end. Cosby is guilty. Guilty defendants can become unguilty if a subsequent court reverses the conviction, but until that happens, guilty he is. That’s just the way the system works.

But the retrial, unlike the first trial, was a very different beast. An expert to tell the jury the right way to think. Five witnesses who witnessed nothing of the conduct between the defendant and the one accuser, but got to tell their stories anyway. And between the first and second trials, there was the #MeToo movement, which changed the paradigm from facts to feels when it came to women’s sexual complaints.

The conviction of Bill Cosby for conduct committed in 2004 may be the first #MeToo conviction. At least, that’s how some are trying to spin it. Continue reading →