You have probably heard of Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, and oft-quoted [liberal] expert on politics. I recently saw a piece he wrote about changing the electoral system and will quote him here not for his political expertise, but for his thought process as a liberal:

More than two centuries later, despite the many storms that have engulfed presidential elections, the Twelfth Amendment still marks the most significant change to the Electoral College in all of American history--a fact that alone suggests that some rethinking may be in order.

In other words, we should change the Constitution not because it is creating unforeseen problems, or because it has demonstrably failed. No - regardless of the Constitution's merits, we should change it for the sole reason that it's old.

I'm not taking a position on the issue tackled in his article here. Regardless of one's position on that issue, it should be considered asinine to reject the Constitution simply for its age. But I suppose it's no wonder the [liberal] media loves to quote him.

You may have read the Inside Higher Ed article I linked to a few days ago, about how the American Bar Association's pressure on George Mason Law to accept more black students resulted in unbelievably high failures rates among those accepted at lower standards.

Inside Higher Ed has another excellent piece out, discussing how universities obsessed with an image of physical diversity are putting out viewbooks with pictures that are much more diverse than the schools' actual demographics. In some cases, they are even doctoring photos of white students to add minorities in them.

I wrote a column on this issue more than a year ago. Excerpt:

I decided to track the website of Cornell University, my alma mater... On one of my visits to the site, the pictures showed a total of eight students, all minorities, with seven of them being women. For reference purposes, Cornell is split down the middle gender-wise, with blacks making up five percent of the student population.

This quote from the Inside Higher Ed article says it all: “Sometimes you see the same black kid in every picture."

In keeping with my higher academia theme of the last couple of days, here is a long article from the New York Times discussing how some of the paper's best ideological allies, meaning university professors whose formation years were in the nutty 1960s, are finally getting to that age where they are retiring from the institutions they should have never gotten hired to in the first place.

We can only hope that the next generation of professors doesn't teach students to chain themselves to trees and to embrace socialism, as some of my 1960s Cornell professors did (check out my latest column for the details on that).

With the Berkeley tree-sitting fiasco coming back to light in recent weeks, and considering its parallels with similar events in recent years at Cornell, my alma mater, I wrote a column on the subject. Enjoy!

Berkeley protesters have spent 18 months at the top of trees to "protect" an oak grove from planned construction work.

"They're very well-trained tree climbers. They're very experienced, and I have trust in them that they're going to keep themselves safe and they're going to keep defending the grove," said a ground supporter who would give her name only as Citizyn.

Wait, you train for these things? Oh Citizyn, did you not make it out of tree-climbing boot camp yourself? It's ok, I bet you're the best bra-burner out there.

The situation is quite ridiculous generally, but in the past couple of weeks, it has gotten quite, err, gross:

Protesters howled, flung excrement and shook tree branches as campus-hired arborists cut supply lines and removed gear.

But by late this week, campus police were conducting delicate negotiations with tree-sitters, offering to provide food and water if protesters would lower their waste on a daily basis in the interest of hygiene.

Campus officials ended up giving up the water without concessions; protesters declined to yield their urine.

Ok, whatever, they're animals. What I don't get is, why is the administration negotiating with them? It should do one of two things: Have the police get them down, or leave them up there starved and climbing in their own poop.

These monkeys might have gotten their inspiration from an incident a few years back at Cornell, where I went to college. The university was planning to make a much-needed parking lot out of a hideous collection of brush and bushes severely mislabeled as "Redbud Woods." The "Redbuddies," from students to professors, chained themselves to the woods and climbed up trees in order to stop the construction work. Of course, instead of getting them for trespassing, the university administration set up a tent in the woods, and had the university president sit under that tent next to a young, smelly tree-climber to sign an "agreement" whereby the school made several concessions in exchange for the Redbuddies leaving the woods. It was a very classy sight, worthy of an Ivy League institution.

Today, the Redbud Woods have become the Redbud parking lot. I understand that a memorial to the woods has been set up there, but for some reason I have become immune to being surprised by idiocy. A year after the protests, my friend Jamie Weinstein wrote a nice piece reminiscing about the events. Excerpt:

It is difficult to imagine anything could be that magnificently beautiful and serene. I write this having just come from lying down in a parking lot. Not just any parking lot. Redbud Parking Lot.

As my skin touched the dark black asphalt of the Redbud Parking Lot, I was filled with a happy spirit... 

Of course, the Redbuddies only monkeyed around for a few weeks, and were far outdone by the professionally trained Berkeley tree-climbers.  Here's how the CNN article puts it:

Since [the protest began], Democrats have chosen their first black presidential candidate, the housing market has taken a dive, and gasoline prices have boomed.

I would say that since the protest began, Democrats have chosen yet another white male presidential candidate, we have won Iraq back from Al Qaeda and other terrorists,  and the Supreme Court finally confirmed that Americans have an individual right to own guns.

You may have read this piece a couple of months ago in the Wall Street Journal detailing how the American Bar Association has pressured the George Mason University School of Law to accept more minorities at lower standards, even threatening to revoke the school's accreditation.

Well, GMU Law had no other choice but to begin to comply, and the results, as we see in other affirmative action programs, were not so hot. My friend Andy Guess over at Inside Higher Ed wrote a very good (yet sad!) article about what happened to GMU Law upon being forced to accept less than qualified minorities. Excerpt (emphasis mine):

The “mismatch” theory, as it’s been called, posits that some African-American students have struggled and at times dropped out of highly competitive law schools even though they might have thrived at lower-ranked or less rigorous institutions, and gone on to pass the bar exam. The article concluded that without affirmative action, black students would be better “matched” with institutions that meet their qualifications, and that disparities in failure rates would disappear.

Now, an organization that opposes race-conscious admissions policies asserts that it has found data from one particular institution illustrating the sort of dynamic the study would predict. According to data obtained through a public records request, from 2003 to 2005 some 45 percent of African-American students at George Mason University School of Law, outside of Washington, had grade-point averages below 2.15, defined as “academic failure.” For the rest of the student body, however, the figure was 4 percent.

Insane, isn't it?

Gail Herot, author of the WSJ piece I linked above, adds in her blog:

The pity is that, as Richard Sander's research suggests, some of these who failed at GMU might have succeeded at less competitive schools and had a greater chance of ultimately passing the bar.  Because somebody at the ABA thought that it was more important for George Mason's student body to look like America, a number of students have now wasted a year of their lives and saddled themselves with debt with little or no chance of ever practicing law.

A pity indeed.

Congratulations to all those of us who love and cherish the Second Amendment! Yesterday, the Supreme Court confirmed that the Second Amendment does indeed protect individuals' right to own guns.

I would like to congratulate everyone who worked so hard on both this case and this cause, particularly the fine people at my law school, the George Mason University School of Law, who helped like no other legal academics and students ever would.

I haven't yet had the time to read Scalia's decision in is entirety, but I found this amusing piece in a news article:

Scalia noted that the handgun is Americans' preferred weapon of self-defense in part because "it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police."

Remember the black Columbia Professor who, during the Jena 6 episode, "found" a noose on her office door?

Well, she, Madonna Constantine, has been fired for plagiarism. You can draw any conclusions you want from that.

P.J. O'Rourke has written the best commencement speech of this graduation season. He expresses some of the same points  I continually try to get across in my writings. Some highlights:

I'm not going to "pass the wisdom of one generation down to the next." I'm a member of the 1960s generation. We didn't have any wisdom.

... 

Here we are living in the world's most prosperous country, surrounded by all the comforts, conveniences and security that money can provide. Yet no American political, intellectual or cultural leader ever says to young people, "Go out and make a bunch of money."

...

I am here to advocate for unfairness. I've got a 10-year-old at home. She's always saying, "That's not fair." When she says this, I say, "Honey, you're cute. That's not fair. Your family is pretty well off. That's not fair. You were born in America. That's not fair. Darling, you had better pray to God that things don't start getting fair for you." What we need is more income, even if it means a bigger income disparity gap.

...

Observe the Tenth Commandment... think about how important this commandment is to a community, to a nation, to a democracy. If you want a mule, if you want a pot roast, if you want a cleaning lady, don't whine about what the people across the street have. Get rich and get your own.

Check out this picture from the George Mason Fairfax campus. It brings tears of joy to my eyes.

John Olin was an alumnus of Cornell University (my alma mater), when in 1969, dozens of thugs initiated an armed takeover of the student union at Cornell. Worst of all, instead of being punished, the thugs were actually rewarded by the administration.

So he began to pour millions of dollars into a charitable foundation that promoted intellectual diversity in U.S. colleges. One of the positions bearing his name is the John M. Olin professorship at George Mason (also my school), occupied by the fine economist Walter Williams.

Now, following John Olin's death, his foundation also says an unfortunate goodbye. It will be missed.

Wait, it's not 4/20 anymore, yes it is, no, really???? WEEEeeeeeeeeeee

Apparently police issued a grand total of 0 tickets.

A demon passing for a woman.

The fact that this behavior is allowed in this country utterly disgusts me.

An informal survey of 109 historians has shown that 98% of them believe the Bush presidency has been a failure, and 61% rate it as the worst in history.

The reasons? "Invading Iraq, 'tax breaks for the rich,' and alienating many nations around the world."

Well, considering that Iraq is on the verge of being a functioning democratic power in the Middle East, that the tax cuts have demonstrably given us an era of prosperity, that the Bush administration has effectuated a number of free trade agreements that have brought us closer to nations around the world, and that people around the world have been electing leaders who are friendlier to America, I would have to say these are extremely positive aspects of the Bush presidency.

Then, why would historians rank President Bush as the worst for reasons that are highly arbitrary, and thus appear merely partisan in nature?

Back when I was a student at Cornell University and a member of The Cornell Review, I took it upon myself to investigate the political affiliation of professors in various departments. I found that in the History Department, two professors were registered Republicans, while 26 were registered Democrats or Greens.

Nuff said. 

Jordan Fabian, the co-Editor-in-Chief of the Cornell Review, my old college paper, has informed me that the Review is back online after a couple-year hiatus. It's at http://www.thecornellreview.com.

Welcome back, guys.