Poll: Anti-Education Politics Risks Brain Drain from Southern Schools and Universities

Sixty percent of southern academics "could not recommend their state as a desirable place to work"

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Nature Magazine: A survey of faculty members working in US southern states shows that a significant majority frequently witness or experience political interference that affects morale and is causing many to look for positions in other regions or to leave academia altogether.

The survey, which ran in August 2024, was distributed mostly by the southern regional chapters of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and garnered responses from 2,924 self-selected participants. Of these, 51% identified as female, 17% identified as non-white and more than 60% held tenured positions. The survey found that nearly 60% of respondents could not recommend their state as a desirable place to work. Nearly 50% said that politics and policy changes had reduced the numbers of job applicants to their institutions.

“This is an issue that faculty members are worried about, and that’s going to become a bigger problem for state institutions in large parts of the country,” says Amy Reid, who until August led New College of Florida’s gender-studies programme in Sarasota.

House MAGAs Kill Musk-Trump Spending Bill – Gov’t Shutdown Looms

38 Republican House members give voters a taste of chaos to come

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AP: The House of Representatives has rejected President-elect Donald Trump’s new plan to fund federal operations and suspend the debt ceiling a day before a government shutdown.

Almost three dozen Republicans joined Democrats to vote against Trump’s sudden demands and the quick fix cobbled together by GOP leaders. The bill fell 174-235, failing to earn even a majority of votes.

Time Magazine Fact-Checks Its ‘Person of the Year,’ Donald Trump

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The Associated Press published a piece about its fact0-check of the lengthy interview it conducted with Donald Trump for its “Person of the Year” issue:

Time magazine gave Donald Trump something it has never done for a Person of the Year designee: a lengthy fact-check of claims he made in an accompanying interview.

The fact-check accompanies a transcript of what the president-elect told the newsmagazine’s journalists. Described as a “12 minute read,” it calls into question 15 separate statements that Trump made.

It was the second time Trump earned the Time accolade; he also won in 2016, the first year he was elected president. Time editors said it wasn’t a particularly hard choice over other finalists Kamala Harris, Elon Musk, Benjamin Netanyahu and Kate Middleton.

Time said Friday that no other Person of the Year has been fact-checked in the near-century that the magazine has annually written about the figure that has had the greatest impact on the news. But it has done the same for past interviews with the likes of Joe Biden, Netanyahu and Trump.

A Song for Our Times: ‘There Ain’t No You in United Health’

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There’s No You in United Health

There’s an office in a building and a person in a chair
And you paid for it all though you may be unaware
You paid for the paper, you paid for the phone
You paid for everything they need to deny you what you’re owed

There ain’t no you in United Health
There ain’t no me in the company
There ain’t no us in the private trust
There’s hardly humans in humanity
[…]

Christopher Wray Sticks It to Donald Trump

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By resigning as FBI director prior to the end of his 10-year tenure, Christopher Wray has thwarted Donald Trump’s plans to install the odious Kash Patel as FBI chief.

New York Times: “By stepping down now, as the conservative writer Erick Erickson observed, Wray has created a ‘legal obstacle to Trump trying to bypass the Senate confirmation process.’”

“Here’s why. According to the Vacancies Reform Act, if a vacancy occurs in a Senate-confirmed position, the president can temporarily replace that appointee (such as the F.B.I. director) only with a person who has already received Senate confirmation or with a person who’s served in a senior capacity in the agency (at the GS-15 pay scale) for at least 90 days in the year before the resignation.”

“Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s chosen successor at the F.B.I., meets neither of these criteria. He’s not in a Senate-confirmed position, and he’s not been a senior federal employee in the Department of Justice in the last year. That means he can’t walk into the job on Day 1.”