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The Claudine Gay affair, in which the President of Harvard was basically fired after only a few months on the job, with her cardinal sin being plagiarism, has got to be the most dramatic and portentous academic event of 2023/2024.  I say “portentous” because although Gay was fired for stealing other people’s prose, her exit also has led many to see this as the beginning of the decline of DEI in universities.  After all, Gay had made her name, in both her academic work and as an administrator, largely by pushing DEI, and her hiring was, without a doubt, a nod to the philosophy of DEI.  In his op-ed in the Boston Globe about what Harvard needs to do to repair itself, Steve Pinker proposed five propositions (his “Fivefold Way”) that included this as one suggestion:

Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Harvard will do this, but I don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that it will.  DEI is too entrenched at Harvard, and where will they put all the bureaucrats who buttress it?

At any rate, John McWhorter and Glenn Loury, whose biweekly discussion on the Glenn Show I follow regularly (despite my disdain for podcasts), have a 25-minute discussion of Gay’s departure, and I’ve put it below. As you can see from the title and the picture, they’re not going easy on her. Here’s the intro, and I’ve put my own comments and summary (flush left) below it. I suspect that on Loury’s Substack site, where the video also resides, there’s a written transcript.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume all of that is correct, and Gay was ousted over matters of identity rather than academic integrity. That still does not explain why she plagiarized in the first place, nor does it excuse the offense. Whether or not one agrees with the motivations of Gay’s opponents, there is no excuse for a professional scholar to do what she did. None of the possible explanations—underhandedness, sloppiness, a belief that small acts of plagiarism don’t matter—could exonerate Gay, because they all betray a similarly cavalier attitude toward the integrity of the scholarly endeavor. Safeguarding that endeavor and ensuring Harvard’s continuing preeminence was a major part of Gay’s job, and she was not up to the task. Anyone who looked at her paper-thin CV could have guessed as much, and now the evidence is in.

It’s no small irony that a DEI ideologue who likely views “merit” as a suspect concept was brought down by her own demonstrable lack of same. Claudine Gay is the victim of her own debased principles. Harvard’s faculty and students deserve a leader who reflects the ideals of the institution, not a functionary with people skills. I don’t know who will be next in line for the job, but if they’re more of the same—another mediocre scholar with the “correct” politics—I’d advise them to rent a place in Cambridge rather than buying.

Brief summary: Both guys largely blame DEI for getting Gay into office in the first place, and both, like Pinker, see DEI as a villain that can destroy academia.

John McWhorter says he doesn’t think that one needs a good academic record to be a good college President, but his beef about Gay is that she lack both that and the business and fundraising skills necessary to run Harvard.  As he says about DEI, McWhorter says that Gay “was raised in that culture” and “was never asked to be excellent”, so she had no motivation to be that way.

He also makes no bones about why he thinks Gay was hired:  “The reason they chose her was because of the color of her skin”  As he notes, what she brought to the office of President was simply her “blackness . . . and her commitment to DEI.”  Both McWhorter and Loury emphasize that affirmative action was instrumental in her choice; as McWhorter says, “Her blackness was not just one factor, it was not just a thumb on the scale—it was decisive. She’s a token. . . ”

He adds “Affirmative action in universities is about lowering standards.” not just a thumb on the scale. I presume that what he means by a “thumb on the scale” is that when people are roughly equally qualified, it’s okay to choose a minority person, but the problem is that people are not equally qualified: the standards must be substantially lowered for black people like Gay.  This is a debatable issue, for if you don’t lower standards somewhat, you have no chance of getting anywhere near equity, for there’s a huge gap in academic qualifications between minorities, with Asians and top, followed by whites and then by Hispanics and African-Americans.

Glenn Loury is more exercised, and see’s the choisc of Gay as a “corruption of the meritocratic order underlying our most precious institutions of human achievement”. He also feels–and I agree with him–that yes, business executives can run a university, but they but can’t lead one. I prefer to have an academic who has had some administrative experience become president of a university. To appreciate and promote a good university’s mission, you have to be more than just a businessman or fundraiser.

Loury is really exercised about the corruption he sees in the choice of Gay. As he says, “What we’re seeing with Gay is the culmination of a process that is corrupt to its core”. His assessment of her academic qualifications, which he sees as important, is that they are very thin; he’s read her papers and finds “no really original ideas.” Like McWhorter, he blames DEI:  “DEI people put a mediocre person into the position of intellectual–of presiding over the precious jewel in the crown of American academia” By “corruption,” Loury apparently means that because of DEI, unqualified people get jobs and prevent qualified people from getting them, that politicians encourage identity politics and victimology, and that universities aren’t “developing black talent.”

Although a friend of mine judged the discussion as “a bit too harsh,” I think the guy are just being honest and speaking their minds. Claudine Gay wouldn’t like hearing it, but it’s not aimed at her. It’s aimed at us and at “progressive” Democrats.

The story of Nicholas Winton (1909-2015) is about as heartwarming as it gets, but also has, as I’ll claim, a double overtone of sadness. Born in London in 1909 to Jewish parents who had immigrated from Germany, Winton was a broker and stockbroker, but in 1938 moved to Prague to work with the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia. (The country was at that time already occupied by the Nazis).  And he became a man on a mission: to save Jewish children from falling into the hands of the Nazis.  It was tough, and he had to get the kids through the Netherlands, where they could board a ship to England.

In the end Winton saved 669 children, nearly all of them Jewish, though, sadly, their parents remained in Europe because only children younger than 17 could be rescued. Nearly all their parents later died in the camps or ghettos.  Here’s the account from Wikipedia.

Alongside the Czechoslovak Refugee Committee, the British and Canadian volunteers such as Winton, Trevor Chadwick, and Beatrice Wellington worked in organising to aid children from Jewish families at risk from the Nazis.Many of them set up their office at a dining room table in a hotel in Wenceslas Square. Altogether, Winton spent one month in Prague and left in January 1939, six weeks before the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. Other foreign volunteers remained, such as Chadwick, Warriner and Wellington. In November 1938, following Kristallnacht in Nazi-ruled Germany, the House of Commons approved a measure to allow the entry into Britain of refugees younger than 17, provided they had a place to stay and a warranty of £50 (equivalent to £3,397 in 2021) was deposited per person for their eventual return to their own country.

Netherlands

An important obstacle was getting official permission to cross into the Netherlands, as the children were to embark on the ferry at Hook of Holland. Following Kristallnacht in November 1938, the Dutch government officially closed its borders to any Jewish refugees. The Royal Netherlands Marechaussee searched for them and returned any found to Germany, despite the horrors of Kristallnacht being well known

Winton succeeded, thanks to the guarantees he had obtained from Britain. Following the first train, the process of crossing the Netherlands went smoothly. Winton ultimately found homes in Britain for 669 children, many of whose parents perished in the Auschwitz concentration camp. His mother worked with him to place the children in homes and later hostels.Throughout the summer of 1939, he placed photographs of the children in Picture Post seeking families to accept them. By coincidence, the names of the London and North Eastern Railway steamers which operated the Harwich to Hook of Holland route included the Prague and the Vienna; the former can be seen in a 1938 Pathé Newsreel.

Back in Britain, Winton lived to the ripe old age of 106, and the children he saved had become middle-aged.  Many of them, unknown to him, were in the audience during a 1988 episode of the BBC show “That’s Life”. At that time Winton was 79.  He knew the show was celebrating his life, but had no idea that the audience consisted not only of the children he saved (now grown up) but of their own children and grandchildren. When they stood up to identify themselves, seen in the clip below, the magnitude of what he’d done became clear, and he wept.  I always do, too, when I see this video. I challenge you not to mist up when you watch this!:

Winton was modest and didn’t flaunt his achievements. In fact, they were unknown to his wife, who discovered them only when she found a scrapbook in their attic with the names of the children and of their parents.  She gave the scrapbook to a Holocaust researcher, who tracked down many of the children, finding 80 of them in Britain.  Many of them are in the video above. The rest is history.

Winton eventually accrued the honors he deserved, and got a knighthood in 2003 for “services to humanity, in saving Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia”.

As the old Jewish proverb goes, attributed to Hillel the Elder, “Whosoever destroys one soul, it is as though he had destroyed the entire world. And whosoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved the entire world.”  I interpret this to mean that “the entire world” refers to the world apprehended by the person who lives or dies. (I often think of this when saving ducklings.) Well, Winton saved 669 entire worlds, and that’s something to marvel at.

Recently the BBC made a movie about Winton, using the title “One Life” taken from the proverb above. It stars Anthony Hopkins as Winton—an excellent choice—and has been critically acclaimed,  garnering a 89% critics’ rating and a 96% public rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Well worth seeing, I’d think. (It also features Helena Bonham Carter and Lena Olin.)

But watch this 2-minute trailer, which includes a version of the scene above. But you may notice that one thing is missing: the trailer doesn’t use the words “Jew” or “Jewish.” They say “the children” and refer to them several times, but you’d have no idea from this trailer that they were Jewish children. The only sign of what’s happening is one scene in which there are a few Nazi flags.

Is this omission an accident?  I tried to convince myself that it was, but after seeing the video and reading the articles below, I decided that it was no accident. They left “Jewish” out because they thought it might turn off the prospective audience. (Of course, once the audience has their butts in the theater, the movie can use the word more often.) But I’m not sure how often they use it. Can you imagine “Schindler’s List” having a trailer that doesn’t use the word “Jew”? It is, after all, about another man who saved Jews. (Winton is often called “The British Schindler”). And sure enough, it does: it mentions the word several times and shows lots of people wearing yellow stars, a Jewish wedding, and other tropes.  What’s going on is very clear. Things sure have changed in the last thirty years (“Schindler’s List was released in 1993.)

Now, what about “One Life?” Here’s “Israeli filmmaker, director, and activist Yuval David [speaking] about the antisemitic environment in Hollywood and the purging of Jewish references in marketing of ‘One Life.’” David, who knows what he’s talking about, has absolutely no doubt that the omission was deliberate, engineered by the progressive ideology that pervades Hollywood (I’m starting to wonder if “Jew” or “Jewish” even appears in the film!). Have a look:

And below is an article from the popular entertainment magazine Variety that discusses how, in the movie’s promotion, they omitted mentioning the religion of the children who were saved, which of course is why they had to be saved.  Click the headline to read.  And here’s an excerpt from that piece about how they erased “Jewish” from the marketing materials, using instead the words “Central European.” That is shameful:

The marketing materials for Anthony Hopkins latest feature film, a Holocaust biopic titled “One Life,” are set to be amended after controversy ensued over the lack of reference to Jews.

“One Life” tells the story of Nicholas Winton (played by Hopkins), better known as the British Oscar Schindler. Winton helped save the lives of over 600 children – the majority of them Jewish – from the Nazis during World War II.

But there has been disquiet over marketing for the movie after it was claimed Jews had been erased from the synopsis.

The furore started after British media retailer HMV tweeted about the film and referred to the children saved by Winton as “Central European” rather than Jewish. A number of independent cinemas also used the term “Central European” instead of “Jewish” while describing the film on their websites. [JAC: This makes no sense: children who were “Central European” but not Jewish weren’t usually endangered.]

See-Saw Films, who produced “One Life,” and Warner Bros. Pictures., who are distributing it in the U.K., subsequently also came under fire for omitting the word “Jewish” from their marketing materials when describing the children saved by Winton, although they did not use “Central European.”

Warner Bros. in the U.K. declined to comment but Variety understands that following the criticism all Warner’s official marketing for the film will be amended to describe the children as “predominantly Jewish,” which reflects the fact that while most of the 600+ Czechoslovakian children were Jewish, a handful of them were non-Jewish political refugees.

Click:

At least they fixed the materials, but it’s clear that they left Judaism out of the materials on purpose. It’s the progressive Zeitgeist: Jews aren’t exactly the world’s most popular group.

The BBC itself, however, continues to omit any mention of Jews in its article below (click to read). There is not a single mention that the children were Jewish, which of course drives the whole movie. In case the BBC has a social-media promoted “change of heart,” you can find the original BBC article archived here.

Click to read:

I’ve put the entire text of this article below the fold, and you can do a search for “Jew” or “Jewish”. You won’t find it.  That has to be a deliberate omission, for the reason the kids were saved simply must be part of the story. 

Finally, there was a series of tweets about whether the BBC used the word “Jewish” in stores about the Holocaust. Their score: 50% (2 out of 4). Given the history of the BBC’s antisemitism, I call the omission deliberate, especially for the Winton movie. And, as you saw, I’m not alone,

Here are the tweets. Reader Jez says this about the first Tweeter:

Cath Leng, whose tweet alerted me to it, is a former BBC employee herself. She just posted a piece about how the BBC broadcast an unbalanced piece about the man who won a recent women’s pool competition – the woman he was going to face in the final politely declined to take part, forfeiting the prize. The BBC didn’t even interview her, and just focused on the man’s feelings.

This one does https://t.co/AZXqMjWnyN

— Cath Leng (@leng_cath) January 9, 2024

It’s in here

Surprised to see those words absent from any Holocaust story https://t.co/VmQUSNPGcm

— Cath Leng (@leng_cath) January 9, 2024

As Vonnegut said, so it goes.

h/t: Jez, Malgorzata

Click “continue reading” to see the BBC story:

Sir Nicholas Winton: Holocaust saviour ‘did not think he was a hero’ 5th January 2024, 06:09 UTC By Caroline Gall & Matt HutchinsonBBC News, West Midlands The family of Sir Nicholas Winton, who organised the rescue of more than 600 children from the Nazis, say he refused to think of himself as a hero. The philanthropist is now the subject of a film which tells the story of him bringing them from German-occupied Czechoslovakia to the UK in 1939. His grandson Laurence, who lives in Herefordshire, said the making of the film had been an emotional process. It also had a pertinent message about refugees today, he added. Sir Nicholas, known as Nicky to his friends and family, saved 669 young children in the nine months leading up to the outbreak of World War Two. But his actions only really became widely known in 1988, when he was celebrated on the BBC’s That’s Life programme when the children, then adults, were in the show’s audience. Sir Anthony Hopkins plays Sir Nicholas Winton in the film One Life “As a child, it was a thing, it didn’t really mean anything to me at that point,” Mr Winton said. “It took a while for me to re-evaluate and think ‘oh, actually this is quite special and unusual’. “It wasn’t that he kept it a secret, it was more that he was focused on the future and he wasn’t interested in patting himself on the back – and that was true throughout his life.” Sir Nicholas, who received a knighthood in 2003 for services to humanity, died in 2015 aged 106. Mr Winton said his grandfather had become friends with many of the rescued children and had met them when they went to Maidenhead in Berkshire, where Sir Nicholas and his grandmother lived. Laurence Winton said the family were pleased the film also showed the collaborative effort behind saving the children “We didn’t think of him as a hero because it was so hard to get him to accept that. He would just say ‘no, no.. I would do what anyone would do’,” he said. Sir Nicholas’s daughter wrote a book about her father, which forms the screenplay to the film One Life, starring Sir Anthony Hopkins. She died last year and was very sad she would be unable to see the movie, Mr Winton said. She had always wanted Sir Anthony to play her father and the actor had done a “brilliant job” in portraying him, he added. The family are also pleased the film showed the collaborative effort behind saving the children and had a relevant message for today, which was that it happened in spite of so many things. “I think that’s the lesson for us today, is to think ‘what’s changed’? Are things really different, do we think about refugees in a different way? antisemitism is still a huge issue,” he said. “That’s what would have made Nicky happy to see the story told, if he thought it was going to inspire people to do something and take action today or to support refugees today – we are very pleased to see it on that basis.”

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “repeat“, came with the note, “I’m not sure about that.”  And Jesus falls for Mo’s bromide.

Once again, I urge you to patronize this worthy artist; you can do so for as little as $1/month. Go here to sign up.

Thanks to the half-dozen readers who responded to my call for photos; our tank is now somewhat replenished and I can keep this going for a while. But please think of this site if you have good wildlife photos.

Today’s photos come from Jim Blilie of Washington State, but were taken by his son Jamie.  Jim’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge Jamie’s photos by clicking on them.

Jamie is now a freshman at Washington State University (WSU) at Pullman Washington. He is thriving there.  We love WSU.  It’s very welcoming and is focused on student success. Jamie is studying engineering.  Some of these photos were taken during backpacking trips he has taken to Idaho through the WSU Outdoor Recreation Center, a wonderful service WSU provides. Jamie is the wildlife photographer of the family, though has become a good landscape photographer as well.

Jamie did not identify this bird, photo taken a few feet from our house in Klickitat County, Washington; but I think it is a Western Kingbird (Tyrannus verticalis).  Any help with a positive ID would be welcome:

Bumblebee, species uncertain.  Taken on the trail to Lookout Mountain, Oregon, east of Mt. Hood:

Red-breasted nuthatch (Sitta canadensis) and an unknown species of flying ant, taken on Lookout Mountain, Oregon, east of Mt. Hood:

Golden Mantled Ground Squirrel (Callospermophilus lateralis), also taken on Lookout Mountain, Oregon, east of Mt. Hood:

A similar looking rodent:  Based on his location in the mountains of the Idaho panhandle, I think this is a Red-tailed Chipmunk (Tamias ruficaudus), although the eponymous part is not visible in the photo.  Jamie took this photo on one of his backpacking trips in northern Idaho:

Also taken on one of his backpacking trips to Idaho (Selkirk Range, close to Upper Priest Lake):  A very small brown spider (note the size of the adjacent moss).  We were unsuccessful in identifying this spider:

A Steller’s Jay (Cyanocitta stelleri), taken on our place.  We love the beautiful blue and black plumage of these jays.  These are very common here in winter.  In summer they seem to move to higher elevations (we are at 2000 feet (610m) above sea level) and then the Scrub Jays (Aphelocoma californica) move in for the summer.  The Steller’s Jays can make a pretty good mimic call of the Red-tailed Hawk’s scream (Buteo jamaicensis):

My favorite of the bunch:  A coyote (Canis latrans) in a snowstorm, taken from our back deck.  The coyote was perhaps 100 yards away:

A  beetle at 5600 feet (1707m) elevation in Oregon, taken on the Flag Point Lookout Tower.  Also unable to identify this beetle:

A Cyanide Millipede (Harpaphe haydeniana).  This millipede can exude hydrogen cyanide gas as a defense!  The photo was taken on the hike to the former fire lookout site, Sleeping Beauty, Skamania County, Washington.  This is a favorite hike (though unrelentingly steep) because of the very good views of Mount Adams from the top:

Finally, a ringer:  Jamie and me on top of Lookout Mountain with Mount Hood behind, just a day or so before he headed off to university:

Equipment:

Nikon D5600 (1.5 crop factor)
Nikkor AF-P DX 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 G VR lens
Nikkor AF-P DX 70-300mm f/4.5-6.3 G ED lens
Sigma 150-600mm f/5.0-6.3 DG OS HSM lens
Canon PowerShot SX530

In today’s politically polarized country, however, the notion that standardized tests are worthless or counterproductive has become a tenet of liberalism. It has also become an example of how polarization can cause Americans to adopt positions that are not based on empirical evidence.  —David Leonhardt

 

Glory be—the New York Times has published an article that should put to rest a fundamental tenet of wokeness: that standardized tests are socially harmful because they don’t help predict college or later-life success, and also discriminate against racial minorities.  In fact, they turn out to be the best single predictor of success regardless of ethnicity or socioeconomic status, according to NYT columnist and author David Leonhardt (a Pulitzer winner). Nor are they “racist” in any way that is meaningful, so racial gaps in college admissions cannot be imputed to the nature of standardized tests.  Those tests are, in fact, much better predictors of school and life success than are grade point averages.

I’ve put a quote from Leonhardt above to show how ingrained this idea has become among “progressives” (a point he repeatedly notes). There are several lessons from his piece, which is based on substantial data. Here’s my summary which is mine. And here it is (it’s coming now):

1.)  Standardized tests have repeatedly been shown to be the best single predictor of “success”, not only in college grade-point averages, but of the ability to get into a good graduate school and of the likelihood of being hired by a “desirable company”.

2.) Grade-point averages (GPAs), which many tout as being a better replacement for standardized tests, are not nearly as tests like the SAT for predicting “success” as defined above. This is largely because GPAs have steadily risen due to grade inflation, so they don’t carry the discriminatory power of standardized tests.

3.) Contrary to progressive opinion, the tests don’t appear to be “racist.” Further, the correlation between GPA and success is just as high for students coming from “disadvantaged” schools as those from “advantaged” schools. For a given SAT score, your average GPA is going to be the same regardless of whether your parents were rich or poor.

4.) The debate about the value of SATs doesn’t apply to most colleges, in which the majority of applicants are admitted. Rather, it centers on “elite colleges” (Leonhardt names Harvard, MIT, Williams, Carleton, UCLA, and the University of Michigan. These are colleges that most pride themselves on being meritocratic, though they are of course also concerned with diversity.

5.)  Many colleges and universities have gotten rid of standardized tests like the SAT on the grounds that they keep minority students out and reduce “equity.”  This is the case if tests are the only criterion used for admission. However, by adding criteria like “overcoming adversity”, one can achieve more racial balance (MIT is Leonhardt’s example of this). One reason is that tests can help identify promising students from minority groups who might otherwise be overlooked because they’re from schools that aren’t well known or because they have mediocre grade-point averages.

6.) Around 40% of Americans, regardless of ethnicity, think standardized tests should be a major factor in college admissions. Around 45% think it should be a minor factor, and 10-20% think it should not be a factor at all.

The lesson is that the progressives have been wrong: SATs are not only the most useful way to predict both college and life success for applicants, but, when used as part of a mixed-criteria system, can also help achieve greater racial balance. The many schools that have ditched such tests on the grounds of equity need to reinstate them.  My own view is that SATs should be mandatory but that other criteria, based not on simple race but on things like “overcoming adversity” (for which there are many signs: socioeconomic class, being handicapped, and so on) should be used, and together these may get us where we want.

You can read the article by clicking below, or find it archived here.

I’ve divided the content into short sections for your ease in reading (or read the original). Headings are mine, excerpts from Leonhardt’s piece are indented

Why tests were deep-sixed:

After the Covid pandemic made it difficult for high school students to take the SAT and ACT, dozens of selective colleges dropped their requirement that applicants do so. Colleges described the move as temporary, but nearly all have since stuck to a test-optional policy. It reflects a backlash against standardized tests that began long before the pandemic, and many people have hailed the change as a victory for equity in higher education.

. . .When I have asked university administrators whether they were aware of the research showing the value of test scores, they have generally said they were. But several told me, not for quotation, that they feared the political reaction on their campuses and in the media if they reinstated tests. “It’s not politically correct,” Charles Deacon, the longtime admissions dean at Georgetown University, which does require test scores, has told the journalist Jeffrey Selingo.\

In 2020, the University of California system went further than most colleges and announced — despite its own data showing the predictive value of tests — that it would no longer accept test scores even from applicants who wanted to submit them. In recent months, I made multiple requests to discuss the policy with university officials. They replied with an emailed statement saying that “U.C. remains committed to maintaining a fair admissions process that reviews every applicant in a comprehensive manner and endeavors to combat systemic inequities.” University spokespeople declined to discuss the policy by telephone or to schedule an interview with an administrator.

This is part of the eternal conflict between universities seen as meritocratic institutions and universities seen as institutions engaged in social engineering by creating equity among their students. The goals are in conflict for sure, but according to Leonhardt a mixed-criterion strategy can achieve a decent compromise. If this has satisfied MIT’s administration (see below), as it has, then it’s ok by me.

Leonhardt’s summary of why we need tests:

Now, though, a growing number of experts and university administrators wonder whether the switch has been a mistake. Research has increasingly shown that standardized test scores contain real information, helping to predict college grades, chances of graduation and post-college success. Test scores are more reliable than high school grades, partly because of grade inflation in recent years.

Without test scores, admissions officers sometimes have a hard time distinguishing between applicants who are likely to do well at elite colleges and those who are likely to struggle. Researchers who have studied the issue say that test scores can be particularly helpful in identifying lower-income students and underrepresented minorities who will thrive. These students do not score as high on average as students from affluent communities or white and Asian students. But a solid score for a student from a less privileged background is often a sign of enormous potential.

“Standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades,” Christina Paxson, the president of Brown University, recently wrote. Stuart Schmill — the dean of admissions at M.I.T., one of the few schools to have reinstated its test requirement — told me, “Just getting straight A’s is not enough information for us to know whether the students are going to succeed or not.”

An academic study released last summer by the group Opportunity Insights, covering the so-called Ivy Plus colleges (the eight in the Ivy League, along with Duke, M.I.T., Stanford and the University of Chicago), showed little relationship between high school grade point average and success in college. The researchers found a strong relationship between test scores and later success.

Likewise, a faculty committee at the University of California system — led by Dr. Henry Sánchez, a pathologist, and Eddie Comeaux, a professor of education — concluded in 2020 that test scores were better than high school grades at predicting student success in the system’s nine colleges, where more than 230,000 undergraduates are enrolled. The relative advantage of test scores has grown over time, the committee found.

“Test scores have vastly more predictive power than is commonly understood in the popular debate,” said John Friedman, an economics professor at Brown and one of the authors of the Ivy Plus admissions study.

The data on the predictive power of tests.

First, test scores themselves are very good predictors of college GPA, much better than are high-school GPAs (the regression of college GPA is much stronger and tighter in the former than in the latter case). The graph below shows that.

Here’s a plot showing the correlation between SAT scores (the test is taken in high school) and college GPAs, separated by “advantaged” vs. “disadvantaged” high school (the division is apparently made not by race, but by socioeconomic class, though I’m not sure).  Note that for a given GPA, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve come from an advantaged vs. disadvantaged school—your predicted GPA is about the same. That means that, if you choose students solely on how their college grades will turn out, you should go solely by standardized test scores and not by “advantaged” or “disadvantaged” educations. But of course there are other measures of “success” that we’ll see below, measures that haven’t been assessed by dividing up the students by their “advantage”:

If your sole criterion for “success” is college GPA, you don’t need to take into account “advantage” or “disadvantage” educations, whether the sign of that be race, socioeconomic class, or reputation of the school. But there are other criteria for success, like the two below. Both are highly correlated with SAT (or ACT-equivalent) scores, but the outcomes haven’t been separated by socioeconomic class or race. It is possible that “overcoming adversity” could add to the predictability for getting into grad school or getting a good job above just using SAT scores. (Click to enlarge all graphs.)

It’s possible that if you had an expansive definition of “advantaged” education, which surely relies somewhat on socioeconomic class but also on other types of potential disadvantages (physical handicaps are one, but there are others), you could show that disadvantaged students with the same SAT score as advantaged students would nevertheless do better in life.  Or, if you prize some kind of “experiential diversity” or “thought diversity” in colleges, then you might want to use criteria other than SAT scores or grades.  In fact, that’s what many college-admissions essays are about: “Tell us about your life—what you’ve done, have you done anything unusual” etc. etc.

As far as rich white kids being able to do better because they can afford tutoring, music lessons and the like, Leonhardt says this with regard to the inequities that do exist among racial admissions:

The [SAT-like] tests are not entirely objective, of course. Well-off students can pay for test prep classes and can pay to take the tests multiple times. Yet the evidence suggests that these advantages cause a very small part of the [racial] gaps.

It’s a long article, but the point is this: SATs predict a lot about success, but there are still huge inequities among races in how they do, though that’s more a problem for elite schools than non-elite ones. If we’re concerned about more than just merit, but in things like thought diversity, experiential diversity, and (in my view) educational reparations, then what can we do?

First, here are the data on different ethnic groups in America, and how they think standardized tests should be counted in college admissions. It’s not that different among groups:

What is the solution to get students who will succeed while maintaining a decent racial balance?

We can use a “mixed strategy”:

But the data suggests that testing critics have drawn the wrong battle lines. If test scores are used as one factor among others — and if colleges give applicants credit for having overcome adversity — the SAT and ACT can help create diverse classes of highly talented students.

This has apparently worked at MIT, which dropped the test requirement for a couple of years and then reinstated it. The reinstatement brought improvement:

M.I.T. has become a case study in how to require standardized tests while prioritizing diversity, according to professors elsewhere who wish their own schools would follow its lead. During the pandemic, M.I.T. suspended its test requirement for two years. But after officials there studied the previous 15 years of admissions records, they found that students who had been accepted despite lower test scores were more likely to struggle or drop out.

Schmill, the admissions dean, emphasizes that the scores are not the main factor that the college now uses. Still, he and his colleagues find the scores useful in identifying promising applicants who come from less advantaged high schools and have scores high enough to suggest they would succeed at M.I.T.

Without test scores, Schmill explained, admissions officers were left with two unappealing options. They would have to guess which students were likely to do well at M.I.T. — and almost certainly guess wrong sometimes, rejecting qualified applicants while admitting weaker ones. Or M.I.T. would need to reject more students from less advantaged high schools and admit more from the private schools and advantaged public schools that have a strong record of producing well-qualified students.

“Once we brought the test requirement back, we admitted the most diverse class that we ever had in our history,” Schmill told me. “Having test scores was helpful.” In M.I.T.’s current first-year class, 15 percent of students are Black, 16 percent are Hispanic, 38 percent are white, and 40 percent are Asian American. About 20 percent receive Pell Grants, the federal program for lower-income students. That share is higher than at many other elite schools.

“When you don’t have test scores, the students who suffer most are those with high grades at relatively unknown high schools, the kind that rarely send kids to the Ivy League,” Deming, a Harvard economist, said. “The SAT is their lifeline.”

Leonhardt ends his piece with the quote at the top, followed by this:

Conservatives do it [ignore the data] on many issues, including the dangers of climate change, the effectiveness of Covid vaccines and the safety of abortion pills. But liberals sometimes try to wish away inconvenient facts, too. In recent years, Americans on the left have been reluctant to acknowledge that extended Covid school closures were a mistake, that policing can reduce crime and that drug legalization can damage public health.

There is a common thread to these examples. Intuitively, the progressive position sounds as if it should reduce inequities. But data has suggested that some of these policies may do the opposite, harming vulnerable people.

In the case of standardized tests, those people are the lower-income, Black and Hispanic students who would have done well on the ACT or SAT but who never took the test because they didn’t have to. Many colleges have effectively tried to protect these students from standardized tests. In the process, the colleges denied some of them an opportunity to change their lives — and change society — for the better.

If there’s any lesson in this, it’s that the “progressives” have been misguided in their call for dropping standardized tests. Doing so causes confusion and also leaves out many worthy students who have no other way of being identified. Standardized tests like the SATs should be required for all students, particularly in “elite” colleges, as a useful form of predicting who will do well and who won’t. But there are other criteria that should be considered, too. Readers are welcome to answer this question:

If you want a pure meritocratic admissions process, one that ensures that students get good grades in college, that can be done by relying almost entirely on SAT scores and not GPAs. But perhaps you’d prefer some criteria beyond those necessary to judge “probablility of success”. If so, what would you look for? (Remember, the Supreme Court has rule that race itself cannot be a criterion for admission.

Today’s post, and perhaps one of the last, comes from reader Graham Parton of New Zealand. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photo by clicking on them.

Kia ora- I’m an immigrant to NZ since 2009 and exploring a fair amount of the country have taken snaps of various wild life – I’m not a wildlife photographer so these are mainly with a Canon M50 with 55-200mm lens.

First up is a weta [a cricket in the suborder Ensifera] on my wife’s arm—she is braver than I—taken from a day out to the Maud Island wildlife sanctuary in the Marlbourough Sounds:

This a New Zealand fur seal (Arctocephalus forsteri) on Wharariki Beach in Golden Bay. Despite being hunted nearly to extinction, fur seals are increasing in numbers across NZ and this little pup was in a nursery pool at low tide on the beach with others:

The kiwi (Apteryx sp.) is the eponymous signature bird of NZ and this one was photographed in red light foraging on a beach near Stewart Island – where mustelid predators have not migrated – although rats have come ashore/jumped off ships.  Originally in red light, it’s been grey-scaled.

This is a juvenile kea (Nestor notabilis) – a mischievous and inquisitive and intelligent alpine parrot.  This particular youngster took a liking to my pack when I was walking the Kepler track near Mount Luxmore:

Wekas (Gallirallus australis) are ubiquitous around many camp sites and tracks around the South Island – mainly on the look out for tidbits of food but they are not above invading tents and running off with footwear – or your chocolate rations:

Here’s duck photographed at Lake Rotoiti in the Nelson Lakes area of the S Island – I have no idea what species but suspect it’s an imported species! [JAC: It’s a mandarin duck, Aix galericulata, and is indeed imported.]

Here’s the South Island Robin (Petroica australis); this little guy was spotted in forest on the way to Milford Sound in Fjordland.

Cats are often considered a hazard for our native wildlife but our experience is that they are a mixed blessing – here is Squeak with a dead weasel he’s killed and brought home. Until the day comes when all mustelids are exterminated, it’s likely that cats will still have a niche role in NZ helping keep the population of rodents and mustelids in check:

Finally, a warning sign with a little class – letting people know about the little blue penguins (Eudyptula minor) that might nest near the Boat Shed Restaurant on Wakefield Quay in Nelson, NZ:

Two items this morning:

If you’ve never posted here before, please read the commenting rules “Da Roolz” on the left sidebar (or here), paying particular attention to the comments about civility towards other readers and your host. There have been a lot of nasty comments here, laden with insults that will not be tolerated. Any comment that addresses me as “dude” will be deep-sixed, and I’m not keen on comments who call me “Coyne.” As I say in rule #7, “Pretend that you’re speaking to me in my living room which is, in a sense, what this website is.”  There are all too many readers who completely disregard not only the rules, but don’t seem to have read a post before commenting on it.

Second, I have one more day’s worth of wildlife photos after today’s post. If I don’t get any more, it’s possible that I’ll cancel this feature—part of the slow death of this website. If you like the photos and want to keep the feature going, please contribute your good photos. I needn’t point out that content here is free, unlike Substack, and I count on readers to pitch in from time to time.

Thank you,
Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus), whose origin is shown below::

Thank you!

 

It’s a dismal gray day in Chicago; last night we had the first snowfall that actually stuck. The snow continues with a few barely discernible flakes. It’s a day of the doldrums.  As I walked home this afternoon,, I passed this tree, or rather the remains of a tree that’s crossed the Rainbow Bridge. It’s an ex-tree, singing with the Choir Invisible.

It was planted in honor of a beloved teacher at the U of C’s Laboratory School, in hope that a small sapling would become a mighty tree that would evoke her memory for decades.

Didn’t happen. The tree died young and all that remains just a bunch of upright sticks. Such is our fate: whatever “immortality” we hope to gain, through books, children, accomplishments—all of this will vanish. Even our immortal genes, carried in our descendants, will be washed out in the tide of interbreeding and genetic drift. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

Carpe diem.

Bill Ackman, you’ll recall, is the billionaire who helped bring down Harvard President Claudine Gay. First he chastised her for her performance before the House committee, calling out the antisemitism that occurred at Harvard on Gay’s watch. Then he announced that he would no longer donate to Harvard until they cleaned up their act. Finally, when Gay’s plagiarism in her scholarly papers came to light, he bored down on that, and kept doing it until she resigned as President.  There’s little doubt Ackman’s his stream of tweets about Gay promoted her resignation by calling everyone’s attention to Gay’s missteps and embarrassing the board of Harvard Overseers, which is Gay’s boss.

As I’ve said repeatedly, I think Gay shouldn’t have resigned until the evidence of plagiarism surfaced. Her remarks about antisemitism to the Representatives were wooden and unempathic, but a First-Amendment construal of Harvard’s speech code would indeed have deemed cries for genocide of the Jews as “conditional”. Sometimes it’s legal, and sometimes not. The problem was that Harvard doesn’t have a First-Amendment-based speech code, and it applied its own code unevenly, giving rise to hypocrisy.  However, I would have given her a chance, for if she’d implemented something like Steve Pinker’s “fivefold way”, Harvard would have greatly improved.

In the end, her plagiarism, which also called attention to a rather thin academic resumé, brought her down, and made me agree that she should resign.

Now, however, Ackman is somewhat hoist with his own petard, for his wife, Neri Oxman, a designer and a professor at MIT until 2021, stands accused of plagiarism herself.  It doesn’t seem quite as bad as Gay’s missteps, for Oxman, in her dissertation, did cite the sources of her information. What she failed to do, however, was put quotation marks around phrases and paragraphs she lifted from cited sources, and that’s a violation of MIT’s own plagiarism code.

Business Insider (BI), in the first two articles below, found examples of her plagiarism, and you can see that BI can barely contain its joy of catching an Ackman-adjacent person in the act of plagiarism. It’s almost tabloid journalism.

Click on either to read. The third article is a summary from CNN.  In the end, Oxman admitted guilt and said she’d correct the quotations, but Ackman is pushing back against the charges, vowing reprisal against both MIT and BI while not denying what Oxman did. But since Oxman is no longer at MIT, she has no academic job to lose.

Click below or find this article archived here:

Again, click below or go to the article archived here:

And from CNN, not paywalled.

The accusation (from BI):

The billionaire hedge fund manager and major Harvard donor Bill Ackman seized on revelations that Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, had plagiarized some passages in her academic work to underscore his calls for her removal following what he perceived as her mishandling of large protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza on Harvard’s campus.

An analysis by Business Insider found a similar pattern of plagiarism by Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, who became a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017.

Oxman plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation, Business Insider found, including at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.

. . .An architect and artist who experiments with new ways to synthesize materials found in nature, Oxman has been the subject of profiles in major outlets such as The New York Times and Elle. She has collaborated with Björk, exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and had paparazzi stake her out after Brad Pitt visited her lab at MIT in 2018.

There are two kinds of accusations. First, that Oxman “self plagiarized”, using her own writing in her dissertation word-for-word in her published papers. That’s okay, and isn’t really plagiarism because a dissertation isn’t published, and in most cases is intended to be turned into papers. Thus, BI’s statement below isn’t incriminating:

She also recycled phrasing she used in her dissertation in subsequent papers. The opening paragraph of her dissertation, for instance, appears almost word-for-word in an article she published in 2013. While re-using material isn’t a formal violation of MIT’s academic-integrity code, a guide to “ethical writing” recommended by the university to its scholars and students warns against it.

Self-plagiarizing isn’t a good habit if you use the same phrases or paragraphs in one paper after another, but “plagiarizing” from a dissertation into a paper is not at all a violation. I suspect MIT’s dictum here refers to using your own words repeatedly in published work. And that’s not what Oxman did.

The evidence:

Then there are the other cases, in which Oxman did cite her original sources but also used big chunks of wording from them—without quotation marks. That’s a no-no, but it’s not as big a no-no as what Gay did, which was lift chunks of prose and then not include her using proper citations.

Here are a couple of examples of how Oxman used wording from previously-published papers in her thesis. Notice that she does cite the sources in parentheses, though:

and one more:

The MIT academic integrity code (below; click to enlarge) says that even though sources are cited, this is a no-no. But remember, this is plagiarism in a dissertation, not in a published paper. I’ve circled the bit that Oxman violated:

Oxman apologized for these errors in a tweet, though she couldn’t verify one of the accusations because the source was online. She’s going to get MIT to correct the citations. BI notes:

Neri Oxman, the wife of billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, admitted to failing to properly credit sources in portions of her doctoral dissertation after Business Insider published an article finding that Oxman engaged in a pattern of plagiarism similar to that of former Harvard president Claudine Gay.

BI identified four instances in Oxman’s dissertation in which she lifted paragraphs from other scholars’ work without including them in quotation marks. In those instances, Oxman wrote in a post on X, using quotation marks would have been “the proper approach for crediting the work. I regret and apologize for these errors.”

. . .Oxman wrote on X that after she has reviewed the original sources, she plans to “request that MIT make any necessary corrections.”

“As I have dedicated my career to advancing science and innovation, I have always recognized the profound importance of the contributions of my peers and those who came before me. I hope that my work is helpful to the generations to come,” she wrote.

Oxman now leads an eponymous company, Oxman, focused on “innovation in product, architectural, and urban design,” she wrote on X. “OXMAN has been in stealth mode. I look forward to sharing more about OXMAN later this year.”

I don’t know how MIT will correct these errors, because I don’t think most Ph.D. theses are online (mine certainly isn’t). If it is they can fix it, but perhaps they’ll just append the corrections in her thesis that reposes in MIT’s library.

If you read the Business Insider articles, they come off as hit jobs, as if somehow they’re joyfully getting back at what Ackman for what he did to Claudine Gay by showing that Ackman’s wife did the same thing. But Oxman didn’t do the same thing: she is guilty of not using quotation marks around quotations taken from an attributed source in a dissertation. Gay, on the other hand, is guilty of not using quotation marks around unattributed quotations, and doing this in published papers, not in a dissertation.  Further, Oxman is no longer a professor at MIT, and was never dean or president of any university, so it’s not such a big deal. Yes, she should have cited sources correctly, but in the end the damage is minor. Her missteps are far more excusable than Gay’s. But they are missteps, and academics need to know what constitutes plagiarism.

Business Insider keeps mentioning Ackman in their two pieces, which of course is what gives this story its legs, but BI also adds superfluous material to make both Ackman and Oxman look bad, like this:

In 2019, emails uncovered by the Boston Globe showed Ackman pressured MIT to keep Oxman’s name out of a brewing scandal over an original sculpture she gave to Jeffrey Epstein in thanks for a $125,000 donation to her lab.

So what? This is irrelevant to the story, and is pretty much of a smear.

As for Ackman, he’s not denying that his wife did what BI accused her of, but is standing by her nonetheless (see the linked tweet below):

Her husband, Ackman, lauded her transparency in his own post on X following the publication of Business Insider’s article.

“​​Part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate,” he wrote.

However, this empathic stand is weakened by Ackman’s threat to examine the writings of Business Insider staff for plagiarism:

This is an excellent idea. We will review the work of the reporters and staff at BI for completeness. https://t.co/4VImfFN4A6

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 6, 2024

. . . and he’s going after plagiarism at MIT, too!

We are going to need help with our review of @MIT faculty and affiliates. Please contact Fran McGill at mcgill@persq.com if your company has the capabilities to assist us.

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 5, 2024

The guy is combative, that’s for sure! It’s not seemly for him to strike out at everybody, trying to find plagiarizing skeletons in their closets. Gay is gone; Oxman admitted fault and will correct her writing. It’s time to move on!

Here are Oxman and Ackman from NBC News; the caption is from NBC:

h/t: Greg Mayer

I’ve been first item has been sent, from one source or another, many times, and it’s time to put it on a Caturday Felid post.

From IFL Science (first headline below):

The first streaming video carried by laser beam from beyond the Moon has been received from 31 million kilometers (19 million miles) away. For extra points, it’s ultra-high definition (and very cute).

Among the technical challenges required for human colonization of the Solar System, improved communication systems may not be top of mind. However, when you consider how painfully long it took New Horizons to send back its images from its brief flyby of Pluto, it’s clear we need to pick up the pace.

Last month, NASA conducted a demonstration of the practicality of using near-infrared laser beams to transmit data from the Psyche mission, then at a distance of 16 million kilometers (10 million miles) from Earth.

At the time, NASA HQ’s Trudy Kortes described that achievement in a statement as “One of many critical […] milestones in the coming months, paving the way toward higher-data-rate communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition imagery and streaming video in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars.”

The scientific information may have to wait until spacecraft Psyche reaches its destination, the metal-rich asteroid of the same name, but the streaming videos are here right on time. The technical challenges of sending something like this are immense, and get larger the longer the video, so NASA wanted to keep it short. In that context, what could be a more appropriate introduction than 15 seconds of a cat chasing a laser dot?

Here’s the video. The cat is named Taters:

IFL Science:

 

 

ScienceAlert:

And an excerpt:

NASA on Monday announced it had used a state-of-the-art laser communication system on a spaceship 19 million miles (31 million kilometers) away from Earth – to send a high-definition cat video.

The 15-second meow-vie featuring an orange tabby named Taters is the first to be streamed from deep space, and demonstrates it’s possible to transmit the higher-data-rate communications needed to support complex missions such as sending humans to Mars.

The video was beamed to Earth using a laser transceiver on the Psyche probe, which is journeying to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to explore a mysterious metal-rich object. When it sent the video, the spaceship was 80 times the distance between the Earth and Moon.

The encoded near-infrared signal was received by the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, and from there sent to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.

“One of the goals is to demonstrate the ability to transmit broadband video across millions of miles. Nothing on Psyche generates video data, so we usually send packets of randomly generated test data,” said Bill Klipstein, the tech demo’s project manager at JPL.

“But to make this significant event more memorable, we decided to work with designers at JPL to create a fun video, which captures the essence of the demo as part of the Psyche mission.”

. . . ​So why a cat video? First, there’s the historic connection, said JPL. When American interest in television began growing in the 1920s, a statue of Felix the Cat was broadcast to serve as a test image.

And here’s that broadcast:

and, finally:

And while cats may not claim the title as man’s best friend, few can dispute their number-one position when it comes to internet videos and meme culture.

​Uploaded before launch, the clip shows Tabby, the pet of a JPL employee, chasing a laser light on a couch, with test graphics overlayed. These include Psyche’s orbital path and technical information about the laser and its data bit rate.

And that brings us to the next post: the Internet is synonymous with CATS:

********************

Here’s a 13 year old video, three minutes long, that speaks—or rather sings—truth to power. Note the presence of His Holiness Ceiling Cat at 1:31. Maru is in there, too.

Now when you do a Google search for “cats”, you see two things. First, the results: nearly 7.5 billion sites!

And you see this on the Google page. Click on the screenshot below, and then press the cat’s-paw button where I’ve added an arrow. See what happens! (Sound up, too.)

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Here is an 8½-minute video of cats doing what they shouldn’t be doing. (Actually, they behave appropriately in some instances.) My favorite is the cat taking a ciggie at 3:56. Also note “peacekeeper cat” at 5:52.

Unlike the video above, this one’s actually good.

 

*****************

Finally, lagniappe from reader Barry:

I sometimes have cats stay with me over the holidays (via a cat-sitting service in NYC). This one is a Scottish Fold. Her name is Ivy. She is adorable, but in this photo she looks alarmed. “Why do you put whipped cream on the lower half of your face and then scrape it off?”

h/t: Ginger K.

Today’s series, which is about the dangers caused by outdoor cats, comes from Athayde Tonhasca Júnior. His narrative is indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

The killer within

Walter Rothschild (1868-1937), an aristocratic banker turned zoologist, must have been delighted to see his paper published in the December 1894 edition of the Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club. The paper presented to the world the Stephens Island wren from New Zealand, a new species from a new genus – a momentous scientific discovery. Baron Rothschild named the novelty Traversia lyalli to honour Henry Travers, a dealer of animal skins who procured specimens for him, and David Lyall, an assistant lighthouse keeper who first brought the bird to the attention of ornithologists. Rothschild had another reason for feeling smug: he had knowingly scooped Kiwi lawyer and eminent ornithologist Sir Walter Buller (1838-1906), who learned about the hitherto unknown wren before Rothschild and had his own description in the pipeline for publication. Buller, understandably, was not happy with Rothschild’s ungentlemanly behaviour, and the men bickered for years afterwards (Galbreath & Brown, 2004). [JAC note: The Stephens Island wren is now known as Lyall’s Wren, Traversia lyalli]

Baron Rothschild pestering Rotumah, a Galapagos tortoise taken to Australia © C. J Cornish, 1902. Wikimedia Commons:

The race between the two men of science from almost opposite corners of the planet to have the honour of naming a new species was possible because both had bird skins to examine: they were shipped to England by Henry Travers (Rothschild had deep pockets) and given to Buller by David Lyall. But Travers and Lyall did not acquired those specimens: Tibbles, a domestic cat (Felis catus), did.

Stephens Island, a speck of land (1.5 km2) between the two main islands of New Zealand, was an ideal spot for a lighthouse. One was built in 1894 and manned by three keepers, their families, and Tibbles. The cat would go off on hunting expeditions around the island and often bring the bounty to one of the keeper’s house. David Lyall, an amateur naturalist, skinned and saved the most interesting corpses, and noticed they included the ‘rock wren’, as he called it, a flightless, shy little bird rarely glimpsed at night ‘running around the rocks like a mouse and so quick in its movements that he could not get near enough to hit it with a stick or stone’. An earth-bound bird, no matter how skittish, was no match for Tibbles, who gifted Lyall with all the specimens of rock wren (Stephens Island wren as we know it today) that ended up in Rothschild’s and Buller’s hands.

The lighthouse on the Stephens Island’s summit was home to keepers, their families and Tibbles the bird slayer © Herewhy, Wikimedia Commons:

The Stephens Island wren was widespread throughout New Zealand until the arrival of rats, who accompanied the Maori settlers. Stephens Island was the bird’s last haven until catastrophe befell it in the form of Tibbles and its descendants, the island’s first mammalian predators. The little bird was hunted to extinction by cats shortly after Rothschild and Buller squabbled about the priority of naming it.

One of the fewer than 20 known specimens of Stephens Island wren, most of them collected by cats © Museum of New Zealand:

We may lament the demise of the Stephens Island wren and assume it was an unfortunate consequence of geographical isolation. Cats have caused or contributed to the extinction of the Socorro dove (Zenaida graysoni), the little Swan Island hutia (Geocapromys thoracatus) and some 31 other bird, mammal and reptile insular species, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Alas, moggies’ threats to wildlife are much more far-reaching and worrying than these documented Robinson Crusoe scenarios.

Peter Churcher and John Lawton were among the first to raise the alarm. They convinced the owners of 78 out of 80 house cats living in the English village of Felmersham to gather their pets’ booty for a whole year. The final tally was 1,094 corpses or bodily remains, 64% of which comprised wood mice, voles, shrews and the odd rabbit, weasel and bat. The remaining 36% were from birds, mostly house sparrows, thrushes, blackbirds and robins. Based on published data and some calculations, Churcher & Lawton (1987) estimated that cats killed at least 30% of the sparrows in the village. Their distinguished colleague Robert May extrapolated the study’s figures to suggest that every year 6 million cats in Britain killed about 100 million birds and small mammals, an unimaginable carnage.

The feline killing fields of Felmersham © David Kemp, Wikimedia Commons:

These studies lobbed scat against the fan: angry cat lovers rubbished the papers arguing the premisses were wrong, the conclusions were misleading, the extrapolations unwarranted, or that lovely Mr Whiskers wouldn’t hurt a fly. Besides, cat advocates claimed, their pets did a valuable service by killing rodents. In reality, cats are opportunistic, indiscriminate hunters. They will prey on rats and mice if they are readily available, which usually happens in urban settings. In natural or semi-natural habitats, wild birds and mammals such as wood mice, shrews, voles, squirrels and rabbits are their most likely targets. Worldwide, 2,084 species, including 9% of all known birds and 6% of all mammals, are killed by cats; 347 (16.6%) of them are of conservation concern (Lepczyk et al., 2023).

Cat’s diet based on a review of global studies © Lepczyk et al., 2023:

Subsequent data set upon data set support the Felmersham study. In Canada, domestic cats (pets and ferals) are estimated to kill 100 to 350 million birds/yr.; For Australia, figures are 377 million birds/yr., or ~1 million birds/day – adding to the bag 649 million reptiles/yr. from 258 species. Studies in the UK, The Netherlands and other European countries show similar patterns (reviewed by Trouwborst et al., 2020). But these figures pale in comparison to those from the U.S., a country with 60-62 million pet cats and 50-80 million feral cats (American Veterinary Medical Association). The estimated tallies for moggies’ killings in the contiguous states are ~1 to 4 billion birds, 6 to 22 billion mammals, 230 to 870 million reptiles and 86 to 320 million amphibians/yr. Most prey are despatched by stray and feral cats, but pets’ contributions are not negligible: they are responsible for about a third of the kills (Loss et al., 2013).

A bird, probably a great tit (Parus major) leaving this world in a cat’s maw © dr_relling, Wikimedia Commons:

Despite these industrial scale butcheries, the impact of cats on wild populations is poorly understood. Cats may be only hoovering up sickened or old individuals that would not reproduce or would die soon anyway. An unequivocal link between prey populations and cat predation would require experimental settings of impractical, unfeasible scales. Yet, much circumstantial smoke is coming out of this factual gun. In northwest Bristol (UK), predation by pet cats wiped out 80–90% of the breeding productivity (an estimate of annual offspring output) of house sparrows (Passer domesticus), dunnocks (Prunella modularis) and robins (Erithacus rubecula) (Baker et al., 2005). Cats have been implicated in the extinction of at least 63 species – 40 birds, 21 mammals and two reptiles – figures that represent 26% of all known recent extinctions in these species groups (Doherty et al., 2016). In a ranking of invasive species threatening the largest numbers of vertebrates worldwide, the domestic cat came in third – only rats (Rattus spp.) and Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (the fungus that is wiping out amphibians around the world), do more damage (Bellard et al., 2016). Cats don’t have to kill to supress wildlife: fear alone would do. The mere presence of a tabby nearby increases stress in birds, reducing their fecundity. Songbird abundance may drop by 95% even when cat-induced mortality is lower than 1% (Beckerman et al., 2007).

Adding to the file the risk of diseases transmitted by cats to wildlife and humans – toxoplasmosis being the more notorious – and setting aside the nuisance factor (crapped lawns and vegetable gardens, nocturnal racket, urine stench), many conservationists argue there is a solid case for adopting the precautionary principle towards free-roaming cats, that is, acting even if evidence is incomplete because the stakes are right. In other words, implementing ‘better safe than sorry’ policies. That would entail not allowing pet cats outdoors and culling feral and other unowned cats.

Deer and wild pigs are regularly culled to reduce their damage to the environment. People don’t like these wet jobs, but usually accept them once they are explained the reasons © Nigel Corby, Wikimedia Commons:

Well, good luck to those conservationists, because perceived cat-hate is guaranteed to unleash a fleet of cognitive dissonance flying monkeys: cat owners in general disagree with the statement that cats are harmful to wildlife and are against any control option except neutering (Mcdonald et al., 2015). Some cat activists strengthen their case with misinformation, obfuscation, slander and political lobbying (Loss et al., 2018). And they are effective. Besides Australia, which started a culling programme, countries are not making much effort to address the possible risk posed by cats despite being required to do so by the Convention on Biological Diversity, Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species, and the European Union Habitats Directive, among other international laws (Trouwborst et al., 2020). In Britain, The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), a powerful lobby with over one million members, stands by the anaemic position – which is not upfront on their site – that “while we know that cats do kill large numbers of birds in UK gardens, there’s no evidence this is affecting decline in the same way [emphasis added] that these other issues [global warming, intensive agriculture and expanding towns and cities] are”. One would expect a bird conservation organisation to pay heed to the precautionary principle advocated by researchers. But many a bird-loving paying member and many a cat lover are one and the same, and RSPB knows which side its bread is buttered on. So it goes.

‘A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.’ Leon Festinger (1919-1989), A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance:

Here’s some Friday “gee whiz” evolution. A video showing what the maker, who speaks in what I think is Hindi) considers the “Top Ten Invisible Animals in the World”. But you don’t have to understand Hindi to marvel at how evolution has led to crypsis (camouflage). Note that it involves a combination of evolution of both morphology and behavior.

The list given:

Video Summary:-

1. Oak Leaf Butterfly
2. The Right Eyed Flounder
3. The Buff-Tip Moth
4. The Devil Scarpion Fish
5. Dacorator Crab
6. Eastern Screech Owl
7. Pygmy SeaHorse
8. Leaf Tailed Geeko
9. Leaf Insect
10. Leptocephalus

Given that I wrote about Claudine Gay’s resignation as President of Harvard just yesterday, it may seem like piling on to add two more takes. But these are from people who are eloquent as well as straightforward:  British author and political commentator Douglas Murray, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, needs no introduction here. First I’ll show you Murray’s Torygraph piece on Gay’s resignation, followed by an eleven-minute video discussion between him and Ayaan about the same thing.

Click below to access the Torygraph, which is likely paywalled; you can find the article archived here for free:

As I said, the most striking thing about Gay’s letter of resignation, and especially about her op-ed in the New York Times giving her take on the situation, is her claim of victimhood. She was, she said, a victim not just of racism, but also of  unnamed “demagogues” (apparently the antiwoke + Republicans + conspiracy theorists), all sworn to destroy the values of Harvard.  Presumably the resignation of Liz Magill, the white president of Penn, was due to other factors. Were there demagogues set out to destroy the values of Penn?

Murray, however, notes not only Gay’s own claims, but others who have bought into Gay’s “victimhood” narrative, when in fact she had to resign because the accusations of her scholarly plagiarism had become overwhelming, rendering her ineffective.

Murray:

Claudine Gay might have weathered the storm because she had the protective cover of being Harvard’s first black female president, and in an age of identity politics that puts her very close to the top of the oppression Olympics that now dominate everything in American public life. You can be rich, privileged and the president of Harvard. But it transpires that you can still claim to be a victim if you are Claudine Gay.

That is what she tried to claim in her resignation statement on Tuesday. She said that there had been “racial animus” in the attacks on her. In fact, the attacks started because of her glaring inability to stand up to racism, followed by allegations that Gay’s distinctly meagre academic work, included a significant amount of plagiarism. The plagiarism story had been around for a while, but after her Congressional embarrassment, a larger number of people – including Leftist media – started to look into these serious allegations.

At first, Harvard tried to ignore them. Its board embarrassed itself by repeatedly expressing its full support for her. Ordinarily, basic academic failings like seeming to lift whole chunks of work – including acknowledgements – from the works of others would have seen a student censured. But not the Harvard president, apparently.

Finally it became too much. Gay’s resignation letter on Tuesday could have confessed to her failings and apologised. But it did no such thing. She went out the same way she had got in: on a blizzard of victimhood.

Others joined in her defence. Ibram X Kendi (author of the mistitled bestseller How To Be an Antiracist) claimed that “Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism.” Nikole Hannah-Jones (who initiated the New York Times’s lamentably ahistorical “1619 Project”) claimed something similar. She said in the wake of Gay’s resignation that “Academic freedom is under attack. Racial justice programs are under attack. Black women will be made to pay.”

In its coverage of Gay’s resignation, even the BBC claimed that the embattled former president had been a victim of America’s “campus culture wars”. The broadcaster also said that “For her Right-wing critics, Dr Gay – who is black – represents much of what they loathe about modern American higher education, which they view as being dominated by a Left-wing ideology that places a greater emphasis on ethnic and gender diversity than on academic rigour.”

Which is a typical BBC smear. Note the way in which the report implies that Gay being black was the problem here. And that the idea that identity politics trumps academic rigour is some kind of phantasm from the fevered imagination of the Right. The trouble is that identity politics does trump academic rigour in the modern American academy. Gay’s own appointment last year was testimony to this. Although in her bitter resignation statement she claimed that academic excellence and standards are central to who she is, they have never been obviously so. She herself is almost entirely without academic distinction.

Murray then notes, as I did, Gay’s thin record of scholarship—only 11 published articles and one book that she edited—and the fact that, now demoted to her original job as a professor of sociology and black studies, she will continue to pull down her Presidential salary of $900,000 per year. That’s truly obscene, but I guess Gay, who had her own lawyer, cut some kind of deal with Harvard agreeing that, for all that dosh, she’d go gentle into that good professorship.  As Murray says at the end of his piece, “It was high time she went. But nobody should feel sorry for her. This already very privileged woman is going to remain on the teaching faculty of Harvard with a nice pay package of around $900,000 a year. Victimhood turns out to be nice work if you can get it.”

In the 11-minute video below, Murray discusses GayGate with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. He first adds Al Sharpton to the panoply of people attributing Gay’s resignation to racism.  Hirsi Ali responds that the case is “not all about race, it’s about the mediocrity and mafia that he represents so well, and that he has profited from for so many years. And I think it’s time that we ditch this diversity, equity, and inclusion movement that is really all about dismantling and degrading our institutions, about expunging our history, about indoctrinating kids at school. It started at universities and goes beyond that.”  She adds that DEI has spread “everywhere in America”, and we need to be aware of that.

Both Douglas and Hirsi Ali discuss Gay’s thin academic record and apparent plagiarism, with Hirsi Ali hurling the zinger,  “My grandmother would not trust Claudine Gay to herd her goats.” She then calls Ibram Kendi (see above) a “racist” who has used that term to benefit personally, though she thinks this form of “antiracism” is on the way out. (I’m not so sure, but Kendi is probably on the way out, but still has his millions.) The “mediocre mafia”, she says, “will disappear.”

The discussion goes into how Gay’s resignation may create a space in which merit rather than ethnicity can return as a criterion for advancement, with Ayaan arguing that the decline in merit has been promoted only by a loud vocal minority.

Hirsi Ali offers her own solution to America’s racial disparities that has left some people behind: “The way to lift up the people who are left behind is to make them a part of the values that make us come ahead: the values of hard work, the values of community, the values of commitment, responsibility, of getting up in the morning, of lifting yourself up by your bootstraps. That, I think, is for me what America is all about. And we can do that without degrading the standards of what has lifted up everyone out of poverty.”

But of course how does one do that? She offers no suggestions, but there was no time for them—if she had any.

Murray finally brings up the “young white men who nobody is speaking up for,” though that, to me, sounds a bit whiny.

In the end, Hirsi Ali expresses a hope that l’affaire Gay marks the ending of woke ideology but a beginning of a real way to address disparities without a victimhood narrative. Murray ends by saying, “Who would have thought that Harvard would be the place where DEI went to die?”

But I think DEI is far more entrenched in universities than either of them think. To get rid of it would entail either firing a ton of people or putting them in new jobs where they can’t work their mischief.  No, DEI is here to say—for a long time. It is not about diversity or inclusion, but aims solely at “equity”, or proportional representation regardless of merit.  DEI is indeed responsible fot hte decline of merit, which is the greatest mischief.  They might as well call the program just “E.”

Today’s batch of photos (we have more!) comes from reader Leo Glenn of western Pennsylvania, who also pays tribute to another contributor. Leo’s text and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. Note the felid lagniappe at the bottom.

It’s been a while since I contributed wildlife photos. I’m no Mark Sturtevant, but here are a few photos of insects I’ve taken this year, mostly on the daily dog walks.

Bald-faced hornet (Dolichovespula maculata) on goldenrod (Solidago sp.). Not a true hornet, which are in the genus Vespa, bald-faced hornets are a species of yellowjacket wasps. According to Wikipedia, they produce colonies of 400-700 workers, which is the largest colony size in its genus. They construct large paper nests, which they aggressively defend, a fact to which I can personally, and regrettably, attest:

Imperial moth caterpillar (Eacles imperialis), in its fifth and final instar, undoubtedly look for a place to pupate. They are polyphagous, feeding on many tree species, including pine, maple, oak, sassafras and sweetgum:

Another imperial moth caterpillar (Eacles imperialis) in its fifth instar, showing their color variability:

The aptly named pale beauty moth (Campaea perlata). They are in the family Geometridae, derived from Ancient Greek and meaning to measure the earth, as their larvae, also called inchworms, appear to be measuring as they perambulate along:

Splendid earth boring beetle (Geotrupes spendidus) And splendid it is. They are named earth boring because they make burrows to lay their eggs. They prefer fungi, but will also feed on dung, carrion, and feathers:

Spotted cuckoo spider wasp (Ceropales maculata) on Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota). Members of the spider wasp family (Pompilidae) are nearly all solitary. They are so named because the female captures and paralyzes spiders, transports them to its underground lair, and lays an egg in the abdomen of the spider. The hatched larva then consumes the spider from the inside. The spotted cuckoo spider wasp, as its name implies, does things a little differently. The female seeks out a female from another spider wasp species which already has a spider, follows her, and when she drops the spider momentarily to prepare her lair, the spotted cuckoo spider wasp dips in, lays her egg in the spider, and flies off. The unsuspecting spider wasp then places the spider in her lair and lays her own egg. But the spotted cuckoo wasp spider egg has evolved to hatch first and eat the other egg, before moving on to consume the spider.

Zabulon skipper butterfly (Lon zabulon), sipping nectar from a red clover flower (Trifolium pratense). Its proboscis is considerably longer than its body:

Giant leopard moth (Hypercompe scribonia). I had to move it to my palm to get a decent photo:

Common eastern bumble bee (Bombus impatiens) on mint flower (Mentha sp.):

Viceroy butterfly (Limenitis archippus). It was long thought to be an example of Batesian mimicry due to its strong resemblance to the monarch butterfly (It can be distinguished from the monarch by the black lines transversing its hind wings.). However, after it was discovered to also be distasteful to predators, it is now considered an example of Müllerian mimicry, which, to quote Wikipedia, is when “two or more well-defended species, often foul tasting and sharing common predators, have come to mimic each other’s honest warning signals, to their mutual benefit.”

One of my personal favorites, a lovely dogbane beetle (Chrysochus auratus) on its host plant, dogbane (Apocynum cannabinum). You can see my reflection, and my dog’s reflection, in its elytra.

Felid lagniappe: And finally, a few photos of our neighbor’s orange tabby, whose name is Moses. Moses likes to sit perfectly still in our driveway for long periods of time and stare at our house. My family call him the spy cat. He also likes to come up to the sliding door on our back deck and harass our cats (which are strictly indoor cats), causing them to hurl themselves into the glass with a resounding bong, He seems to prefer to do this in the predawn hours when the humans are still asleep. The first time it happened, I thought someone was breaking in.(Now we just yell, “Moses!” and try to go back to sleep.)  My repeated attempts to befriend him failed, until recently, when persistence paid off, and I was finally able to get him to come to me. The photos capture that first successful encounter. Now we’re best buds, of course.