More Trump Never Forgets. Michigan’s Punt – and a wee flashback.

Trump Never Forgets

 

On top of writing two new executive orders to curtail birthright citizenship and hounding Lisa Cook, the president is now pushing for new charges in the Reflecting Pool case. U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro dismissed the case and sharply criticized Interior Secretary Doug Burgum for the evidence presented in the indictment. Trump was livid — I’m honestly surprised he didn’t fire Pirro on the spot. Instead, he’s asking, or really demanding, that the Justice Department reconsider the case.

Pirro said the government’s decision to charge Olympic canoeist David Hearn with a felony was ill-informed, and that a botched renovation — not vandalism — was actually responsible for the reflecting pool’s damage. Now, at Trump’s urging, his “Justice” Department is exploring whether a case built on misdemeanor charges might still be viable.

Trump said Pirro should “revisit her hastily made decision,” and he posted a photo on social media captioned “Vandalism” that he claimed showed graffiti and damage to the Reflecting Pool. He also said “a highly credible witness” saw Hearn ripping and tugging at the pool’s coating. Hearn himself admitted that out of curiosity he reached into the water to touch a piece of coating that had already come loose from the bottom. Reopening a case like this would be highly unusual under normal circumstances. But Trump’s vengeance knows no bounds.

Michigan Punts on Freshman Grades – and a wee flashback

 

First the University of Michigan has allowed its students to terrorize the Jewish members of its board of regents. Then the state elects a Muslim to replace an incumbent Jewish regent. The state democrats then nominate an avowed antisemite to run for the Senate. Now is it merely circumstance that the university’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts has decided beginning in Fall 2027, in the interest of “mental health,” to stop reporting traditional letter grades on first-semester transcripts for incoming freshmen? They will replacing them with “pass” or “no credit” designations. Students will still get a letter grades and receive instructor feedback in every course, but those grades will stay internal. They won’t appear on official transcripts or affect first-semester GPAs. The college explained “We believe that covering grades will help students start strong and curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals.”

I’ve always been in the “you’re in college now, this isn’t 13th grade” camp. But when I brought this up recently, a dear friend suggested that maybe the transition to college is genuinely tough, and that Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts had seen a number of student suicides connected to grades. If so, we’d have to assume that underlying mental illness had gone undiagnosed, and that even though the number was small, the college judged it serious enough to shield all incoming freshmen. But that is speculation for no data were provided by the college to justify its decision. Why only this one college, and not business or engineering? Michigan has 19 schools and colleges. Why is this the only one with “sensitive” students, especially because I doubt if any of the departments within the college are noted for their academic rigor. I hope that my Phd alma mater does not follow this lead of That School Up North.

This will not end well. For what it’s worth, Johns Hopkins tried the same thing 40years and it was a dismal failure. Students mostly goofed off their first semester, which made it harder, not easier, to adjust to campus life and classroom rigor. The university stopped the practice in 2017 and said “Faculty members believe that covering grades can delay development of study skills and adaptation to college-level work. That delay is particularly a concern for students in sequential courses, where the second-semester syllabus builds directly on first-semester work.” Some students were naturally upset and a group of them issued this statement “Students from low income backgrounds, first generation students, students struggling with mental health, students with disabilities, international students, and sexual assault survivors, as well as students whose experiences exist at intersections of marginalized race, gender, and sexuality, are disproportionately affected by this change.”

I suspect the University of Michigan administrators would say the same things to justify this move. But those same administrators would be aghast at what my father did when he opened my first-quarter grades from the University of Georgia. Back then, grades were mailed directly to your parents. Dad opened the envelope, balled up the grades, and threw them on the floor. He pointed his finger at me and said, “Don’t you ever bring grades like that into my house again!” I was aghast. I thought I’d actually done pretty well, especially considering that almost every night that quarter, someone broke my dorm windows, set my room on fire three times with lighter fluid squirted under the door, scratched obscenities into my door, jammed my keyhole with chewing gum, and vandalized the bathroom that only I used. In the classroom, no one would even sit in the same row as me, and at least one professor was openly racist – I was the University of Georgia’s first Black male freshman.

So I picked the grades back up and unfurled them. I’d made an A, a B+, and a B. Later, when I made straight A’s, Dad said, “Don’t they give A pluses at that place?”

More than once I was asked “How do you handle the pressure of representing the entire black race?” My response was “That’s easy compared to handling the pressure of representing my family at home.”