Sam Ulmschneider

My local small, high-quality private liberal arts uni, which uses its private resources to fund enormous broad financial aid, is being sued by the admin for having two scholarships with minority-priority and one with women-priority. That's how we're spending our natn'l civil rights law resources.

I haven't been an optimist abt SCOTUS for a long time, but I was at least an institutionalist of a cautious 'imperfect mutually workable institutions are better than shredded ones' variety. The most recent spate of concurrences, especially for this one, is rapid-firing nails into the coffin of that.

I’ve been thinking about this and it’s like four degrees of difference from us just pulling a Lusitania. 1) Germany never claimed US was a terrorist regime 2) scale/numbers 3) drugs aren’t arms to an opponent in a declared war 4) no published warnings of changes in use of force policy in Venezuela.

Quote-repost with no further explanation or context from a recent image on the device I happen to be using as ordered!

Listened to a bit of Trump rally and watched the backing footage, was really struck by a bunch of very young (16-25) supporters who were deliberately placed in the immediate frame clapping at a joke about Alfred E. Neumann and James Talarico. I have a VERY hard time imagining they knew the joke.

One of the better museum exhibits I've been to recently was the Bill Maudlin temporary exhibit, WW2 museum in New Orleans. A v effective piece of work discussing indirectly the role of the free press, a person's own character development, how war shapes societies, and more. Wish I could teach w it.

Fantastic piece of investigative reporting here. While there are many important roles for private education to fill in the K-12 ecosystem, the current mechanisms around it in many states are....well, dangerously threadbare.

One of the most depressing days in my AP Government class is the day we teach campaign finance, bc the curriculum requires me to teach the non-coordination requirement reasoning in Citizens United/Speechnow with a straight face instead of talking about the death of non-coordination since 2015-18.

one of the the interesting bit of the Trump approval rating collapse is that though the Iran war has damaged him, it wasn't some kind of decisive event. He was sitting in the low 40s before the war started, now he's sitting in the mid-to-low 30s. He went from 45-ish to 40-ish (similar drop) Jun-Jan.

Increasingly, students enter universities with AP/DE credits & will never take a university provided course in non-major areas. That means having HS teachers w graduate credentials, active scholarly engagement are important for student exposure to a discipline, but we do nothing to encourage that.

does any band do better at surfacing & effectively portraying edginess, paranoia, anxiety, the emotional currents of hypermodernity than the Talking Heads? Remain In Light is an older album than I am on this earth, but I just listened to it all the way through and it's a pretty resonant experience.

Yeah, there are structural problems and a lot of consumer-facing discomfort in the economy right now, but they are nothing like an actual recession-near-depression in terms of the urgency and severity of the damage being done to people's lives and economic future. That doesn't mean things are great!

every once in a while I have a stupid, wild idea like "what if I play the soundtrack for Conan the Barbarian during the next major test my students take to see if powerful background music can help/calm/inspire their raw nervousness"? I'll never do it but these things hover in the background.