From Deadbeat Grad Students to . . . Deadbeat States?
Stories you're not likely to see, including the 10 best and worst states for elections, and how conservative law school students are - surprise! - self-censoring. Corporate campuses, too
Here are a few stories you won’t find in the mainstream media this week.
From economist Stephen Moore’s “Unleash Prosperity” newsletter:
Dead Beat Blue States
Since Biden is in the game of bailing out loans to his voters and financial supporters, we predict the next multi-billion-dollar federal bailout will be state unemployment insurance funds. Our CTUP ace economic researcher, E.J. Antoni (also of the Heritage Foundation) notes that six states have outstanding balances with the Treasury’s UI trust fund.
Guess what. Every one of them is a deep blue state. And everyone provided many months of extra Covid unemployment benefits last year.
California still owes over $17 billion to the Treasury and is still borrowing each month, although it is also sporadically making repayments. It is amazing that even with unemployment rates so low even in these blue states, four of them still borrowed from the Treasury this month to pay UI claims.
So the red states paid back their loans, the big blue states haven’t. What to do? Does any of this sound familiar?
The Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal:
Hawaii may be paradise for vacation spots, but the Aloha State comes in last place in a ranking of all 50 states based on the strength of their election laws.
Going into the midterm elections Nov. 8, the nominal battleground state of Nevada comes in second to last in laws promoting clean and honest elections, while California—the largest state in the nation—is third from the bottom, according to The Heritage Foundation Election Integrity Scorecard. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)
Heritage’s scorecard ranks the states and the District of Columbia based on factors such as voter ID implementation; accuracy of vote registration lists; absentee ballot management; restrictions on ballot trafficking, also known as ballot harvesting; access for election observers; vote-counting practices; and restrictions on private funding for election administration.
Rounding out the 10 worst states are Oregon at 48, Vermont, Washington and New Jersey in a tie, and Massachusetts, New York, and Nebraska at 42.
The District of Columbia came in at No. 25.
Nebraska scored 0 out of 20 in the category of voter ID, but scored well in other categories, Nebraska Secretary of State Robert Evnen, a Republican, said.
“If Nebraska had voter ID, we’d be in the top 15,” Evnen told The Daily Signal. “There is a voter ID initiative petition that would put it on the ballot in November. If it goes on the ballot, we believe that it would be overwhelmingly adopted.”
Nebraska has an overall score of 47 out of 100. It scored well, 19 out of 30 points, on accuracy of voter registration lists, and 14 out of 21 on absentee ballot management. But the state also scored 0 out of 4 points on ballot-trafficking restrictions and 0 out of 4 on citizenship verification.
Nebraskans will cast ballots for governor, among other offices, in November.
“I have several other legislative initiatives, for example, restricting drop boxes and making ballot harvesting a felony, some of which passed, and others didn’t,” Evnen said. “If my initiatives had all passed, Nebraska would be about No. 10 in the rankings.”
The Daily Signal sought comment from the offices of chief state election officials or state election boards for each state in the bottom 10 of Heritage’s Election Integrity Scorecard. Only Evnen responded by publication time.
The top four states in the Election Integrity Scorecard—Tennessee, followed by Georgia, Alabama, and Missouri—all have overall scores of 80 or higher. The remaining states in the top 10—South Carolina, then Arkansas, Florida, Texas, and, in a tie, Louisiana and Wisconsin—scored 75 or higher.
George Washington University Law School Professor Dr. Jonathan Turley:
With the start of classes at George Washington Law School, I have already had visits to my office of conservative and libertarian students asking if I thought they could speak freely in other classes without being penalized by professors. Despite teaching for decades, it is a question that I never heard from students until the last few years. It is now routine. It is the widespread fear of conservative students who have faced faculties with overwhelmingly liberal viewpoints and growing intolerance on virtually every campus as undergraduate students. Now a new study at North Carolina confirms how conservative students routinely “self-censor” and do not feel comfortable sharing their views in classes. Not surprisingly given the heavy liberal makeup of faculties, liberal students feel little such fear over retaliation.
Polls have shown that sixty-five (65) percent agreed that people on campus today are prevented from speaking freely and an earlier poll at the University of North Carolina found that conservative students are 300 times more likely to self-censor themselves due to the intolerance of opposing views on our campuses.
This study was conducted under a grant from the university by political scientists Timothy Ryan and Andrew Engelhardt of the University of North Carolina, political scientist Jennifer Larson of Vanderbilt, and business scholar Mark McNeilly. The UNC surveyed students from eight UNC institutions and found the same sharp contrast.
Only seven percent of liberal students were concerned about how their professor’s ideology would affect their grades while that rate is 6 times higher for conservatives at 42 percent. Sixty-eight percent of conservatives were worried about sharing their views with other students (as opposed to 31 percent among liberal students).
The authors also concluded that a “significant number of students have concerns about stating their sincere political views in class and have self-censored because they were concerned about the potential reactions.”
Universities have failed to push for greater ideological diversity on faculties as hiring committees continue to replicate their own viewpoints and bias. It is not just students but faculty who face this pressure to self-censure. Faculty members risk cancel campaigns that threaten publications, conference invitations, and even their employment if they voice dissenting views.
It is heartbreaking to meet with students who feel, even in law school, that they must remain silent in class to avoid the ire or retaliation from faculty. Most faculties have a small and diminishing number of conservative or libertarian members. I discuss that long trend in my recent publication in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. The article is entitled “Harm and Hegemony: The Decline of Free Speech in the United States.”