Founded 1983: Liberal Mindset; Conservative Morality

April 3, 2026

The Quiet Throat-Cutting of the American University

Syracuse University announced the other day that it will phase out 93 of its approximately 460 academic programs. The administration framed the decision as strategic alignment, calling it a portfolio review driven by student demand and institutional focus. Provost Lois Agnew insisted the move was “not a cost-cutting exercise.” Taken at face value, some of these cuts are routine catalog maintenance. Fifty-five of the ninety-three programs had zero students enrolled. Twenty-eight were advanced certificate supplements to graduate degrees. The provost herself noted that Syracuse offered more than double the roughly 200 programs typical of peer institutions, and a university trimming a bloated catalog to concentrate faculty resources is doing ordinary academic management. Reasonable people can call that housekeeping.

Continue reading → The Quiet Throat-Cutting of the American University

August 22, 2011August 19, 2018

When Police Officers Give Up on Cases

A crime is committed. The police are called in on it or discover it in some other way. They are going to pursue it until they discover the person or people behind the crime — or so would have been my understanding of how the police works. I knew that the police abandoned certain cases that were just impossible to solve for whatever reason — perhaps the criminal involved covered their traces too well. What I was not aware of was exactly the extent to which the police simply give up on cases. In the UK that number is shockingly high — and even higher in London — as many as half of the cases, according to an article in the Daily Mail:

Continue reading → When Police Officers Give Up on Cases

April 15, 2011

How to Kill Foreign Languages

There’s an easy way to encourage xenophobia — remove fruitful access to the acquisition and temptation of a language. You kill the meme by removing it from memory. Another way to discourage the foreign is to poke it with a stick or, more simply, use a budget axe to cleave the learning from the cleansed mind.