NickS writes: Paul Campos has just started a series of posts about his experience suing the University of Colorado, and it's a remarkable story:

Part I:

Part I of the story describes the sheer absurdity of a law school dean who claims to be an expert on discrimination in America responding to a report of such discrimination from a faculty member by insisting something like that couldn't be happening at the institution she had arrived at eleven months earlier. It lays out the astonishing professional incompetence Lolita Buckner Inniss displayed when she retaliated against me in such a blatant way that my own lawyer was literally incredulous when I told him about it, because he was certain no lawyer could ever be so careless as to send the self-damning email that the Dean sent me. That documented retaliation made both this lawsuit and its costly resolution possible.

Parts II and III under the jump.

Part II:

Part I of this essay is about Dean Lolita Buckner Inniss's role in subjecting her employer to a costly lawsuit from a law school faculty member she's no longer allowed to supervise. But I'm not going to leave this matter without making sure some of my distinguished colleagues share the public blame for this fiasco. After all, Dean Inniss - who I had literally never spoken with prior to our meeting at which she dared me to sue the law school, despite the fact that I'm one of the most senior members of the faculty, while she had been the law school's dean for nearly a year at that point - could never have made such a spectacular mess of all this if she had not been given the opportunity to do so by the committee that gave me such an unjustifiably poor evaluation in the first place.

The litigation discovery process revealed all sorts of interesting details as to how exactly that happened.

First, the Faculty Peer Review Committee's written notes revealed an arbitrary and standardless process, in which different members of the faculty were subjected to wildly different standards of evaluation, for no legitimate or indeed legally defensible reason. (In fact to this very day the law school continues to violate a university rule that requires departments to use explicit standards of evaluation for this mandated peer review process).

...

Even by the standards of academia, this appears to be a bizarre and petty vendetta, based on the following facts. . . .

Part III -- follow the money:

CU Law School's budget is the fiscal equivalent of a flaming dumpster, that illustrates everything that's wrong with the absurd idea that the other departments at research universities should subsidize their law schools' reckless spending habits. . . .

Heebie's take: Yowza. And this is very important:

Too often, the details of this kind of story are never told because of a non-disclosure agreement, which is something I wasn't willing to consider.

He does not pull any punches!

Moby writes: I hate to publicize random economists, but this chart seems interesting as a potential explanation for why most of the economic figures look pretty good but the economic mood seems to be negative. The managerial class is who the media tends to write for and about, not honest working people like carpenters, bartenders, and data analysts.

Heebie's take: Fits my priors.

This is an uncomfortable read. The narrator is married with two kids, and agrees to conceive and carry a baby for her cousin to adopt. The cousin has been struggling with infertility for 14 years.

It does not play out the way anyone could predict. But it still does not go well, which is easier to predict.

Via Anne Helen Petersen

I had a conversation yesterday with a family member who genuinely believes that Biden's aids are propping him up physically, sort of how Reagan was propped up mentally by his staff and aids. This is not a Fox News oldster, either. His hail mary plan is for Biden to hand over the nomination at the DNC convention to someone a generation younger (Newsome or Whitmire or something) who can then attack Trump for being old.

Am I missing something, and Biden is literally worrisomely frail when you see footage of him? Or is Fox Messaging becoming universally absorbed?

All this lefty disenfranchisement - from the youngs over Israel, to the fretting over Biden's age, or feeling like various constituencies have been ignored - is really a major bummer. I agree with the complaints! They're not wrong! But I just don't understand how anyone feels the luxury to toy with anything besides preventing a Trump presidency.

Entirely silly but why not.

Full resolution version here.

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