"Curriculum transparency bills are just thinly veiled attempts at chilling teachers and students from learning and talking about race and gender in schools."

The ACLU tweets, quoted in "The ACLU Suddenly Reverses Its Support For Transparency/The long-time civil liberties organization continues its partisan transformation" (Inquire).

The ACLU tweet links to this NBC News article, "They fought critical race theory. Now they’re focusing on ‘curriculum transparency.' Conservative activists want schools to post lesson plans online, but free speech advocates warn such policies could lead to more censorship in K-12 schools." From that article: 

[T]eachers, their unions and free speech advocates say the proposals would excessively scrutinize daily classwork and would lead teachers to pre-emptively pull potentially contentious materials to avoid drawing criticism....

“It’s important we call this out,” said Jon Friedman, the director of free expression and education at PEN America, a nonprofit group that promotes free speech. “It’s a shift toward more neutral-sounding language, but it’s something that is potentially just as censorious.”

"Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause... but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism."

"The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.... Incidentally... I think this should remind you of something that is happening. And we see what is happening in the Western countries. It is with puzzlement that we see the practices Russia used to have and that we left behind."

Said Vladimir Putin, making the news last October (in the Boston Herald), but I'm thinking about them this morning because yesterday — prompted by YouTube's algorithm — we watched this new Jordan Peterson video:

He gets so emotional that you might feel that he's raving, losing control, but he is reading something that was already published — here — so the emotion is some combination of performance and a real-time reaction to his own words. The words are locked in by the pre-existing text. Excerpt:

"It is now indisputable, and almost undisputed, that the year and a quarter of virtual school imposed devastating consequences on the students who endured it."

"Studies have found that virtual school left students nearly half a year behind pace, on average, with the learning loss falling disproportionately on low-income, Latino, and Black students. Perhaps a million students functionally dropped out of school altogether. The social isolation imposed on kids caused a mental health 'state of emergency,' according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. The damage to a generation of children’s social development and educational attainment, and particularly to the social mobility prospects of its most marginalized members, will be irrecoverable. It is nearly as clear that these measures did little to contain the pandemic... Progressives were carried along by two predominant impulses. One was a zero-COVID policy that refused to weigh the trade-off of any measure that could even plausibly claim to suppress the pandemic. The other was deference to teachers unions, who were organizing to keep schools closed. Those strands combined into a refusal to acknowledge the scale or importance of losing in-person learning with a moralistic insistence that anybody who disagreed was callous about death or motivated by greed.... 'Parents who advocated for school reopening were repeatedly demonized on social media as racist and mischaracterized as Trump supporters.'...  Most progressives [now]... just want to quietly move on without anybody admitting anybody did anything wrong."

Writes Jonathan Chait in "School Closures Were a Catastrophic Error. Progressives Still Haven’t Reckoned With It. Sometimes you need to own up to an error so it’s not repeated" (NY Magazine).

"'Hispanics' are underrepresented as attorneys, but are such subgroups as Cuban, Argentine, or Spanish Americans underrepresented?"

"'African Americans' are underrepresented, but is that true of, say, Nigerian Americans, who have among the highest incomes of all American groups? 'Asian Americans' overall do very well in educational achievement, but that's primarily because of the success of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and Korean Americans. Are Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong, Bangladeshi, Pakistani Americans well represented in the American legal profession? I doubt it. In the white category, how many Appalachians wind up as attorneys are legal faculty? Cajuns? Yemeni, Iraqi, and Egyptian Americans (contrary to popular belief, all Arabs are counted as white)? If the ABA is truly concerned about underrepresented ethnic groups, is there a sound reason why someone of Argentine or Spanish descent should be of special interest to law schools because they (justifiably) check the Hispanic box, but not someone of Hmong or Yemini descent?"

From "The American Bar Association's Problematic Proposed 'Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion' Rules for Law Schools" by David Bernstein (The Volokh Conspiracy).

"With the slogan 'Silence is Violence' being used at the law school, there will be enormous pressure for student groups to go along. Not to do so would be deemed an act of 'violence.'"

Writes Professor William Jacobson about an effort by some students at Cornell Law School to get student groups to sign a letter that seems — I don't have access to the letter — to be accusing Jacobson of racism and urging students to boycott his classes.

This is an attempt not just to scare students away from my course, but to scare students away from speaking their minds, and to create a faculty and student purity test.

I have received numerous emails from students telling me I have a lot of “quiet” support at the law school, but that students are afraid to speak out for fear of career-ending false accusations of racism....

This toxic atmosphere didn’t need to take place. At a time when the law school desperately needs an adult in the room, so to speak, we have faculty and a Dean who denounce me.

"Jonathan Turley rips Cornell Law faculty letter against me: 'It is the antipathy of the intellectual foundations for higher education.'"

A new post by William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection, linking to "Cornell Professors Declare 'Informed Commentary' Criticizing The Protests As Racism" by Jonathan Turley.

An excerpt from Turley: "What is most striking for me is the inclusion of Professors Mark H. Jackson and Cortelyou Kenney, who teach in the Cornell First Amendment Clinic. They are in fact the Director and Associate Director of the First Amendment Clinic, which is presumably committed to the value of free speech even at private institutions. So these professors teach free speech and just signed a letter that people who question the BLM movement or denounce the looting are per se or at least presumptive racists. It is reflection of how free speech is being redefined to exclude protections with those who hold opposing views."

From Jacobson: "The law school, as an institution, picked sides and declared in a Dean’s Statement that my writings 'do not reflect the values of Cornell Law School ….' I vigorously disagree with that, but was not given a chance to be heard on it, much less some process to contest it.... [T]he Dean’s statement on behalf of the institution... should have been something along the lines of: 'Though I vigorously disagree with Professor Jacobson’s views, those views are protected by academic freedom and no disciplinary action will be taken.' Period."

ADDED: "'It is the antipathy..." — Doesn't he mean "It is the antithesis..."?

In context:

Not a word about academic freedom or free of speech [sic]; not a suggestion that critics of these protests could have anything other than racist motivations. It is the antipathy of the intellectual foundations for higher education. Rather than address the merits of arguments, you attack those with opposing views personally and viciously. That has become a standard approach to critics on our campuses. Unless you agree with the actions of the movement, you are per se racist. It is a mantra that is all too familiar historically: if you are not part of the resistance, you are reactionary.

"Ever since I started Legal Insurrection in October 2008, it’s been an awkward relationship given the overwhelmingly liberal faculty and atmosphere."

"Living as a conservative on a liberal campus is like being the mouse waiting for the cat to pounce. For over 12 years, the Cornell cat did not pounce. Though there were frequent and aggressive attempts by outsiders to get me fired, including threats and harassment, it always came from off campus.... Not until now, to the best of my knowledge, has there been an effort from inside the Cornell community to get me fired. The impetus for the effort was two posts I wrote at Legal Insurrection regarding the history and tactics of the Black Lives Matter Movement: The impetus for the effort was two posts I wrote at Legal Insurrection regarding the history and tactics of the Black Lives Matter Movement: 'Reminder: “Hands up, don’t shoot” is a fabricated narrative from the Michael Brown case ,"  "The Bloodletting and Wilding Is Part of An Agenda To Tear Down The Country."... My clinical faculty colleagues, apparently in consultation with the Black Law Students Association, drafted and then published in the Cornell Sun on June 9 a letter [with] absurd name-calling, distorting and even misquoting my writings, to the extent it purports to be about me.... None of the 21 signatories, some of whom I’d worked closely with for over a decade and who I considered friends, had the common decency to approach me with any concerns.... We are living in extraordinarily dangerous times, reminiscent of the Chinese Communist Cultural Revolution, in which professors guilty of wrongthink were publicy denounced and fired at the behest of students who insisted on absolute ideological orthodoxy. It’s a way of instilling terror in other students, faculty, staff, and society, so that others shut up and don’t voice dissenting views."

From "There’s an effort to get me fired at Cornell for criticizing the Black Lives Matter Movement" by William Jacobson (at Legal Insurrection).