University of Florida bars professors from testifying in a voting rights case

Probably what's going on is that someone on the board of trusties gets money from the political establishment in Florida and is worried that they'll lose it if the voting barriers are fixed and different leadership is elected.

This has similarities with the shenanigans pulled by Sinema and Manchin around the Build Back Better plan. Political horse trading to advance the agendas of special interests, at great expense to millions of people.

I wonder if the tech community could get involved to increase transparency around this stuff. Imagine if we had an open graph of the money flow so we could write a SQL query like (pseudo code) "select * from donors where payee in (select id from trustees)". Let people crowdsource the data and then maintain a page of declarative queries so that anyone can instantly see the web of money around public officials. It could be part of a build system that automatically creates a NASCAR jacket for each official so we could see who their donors are in AR.

Maybe such a thing already exists. It's traditionally been accomplished by investigative journalists and lawyers, but why couldn't it be public? It seems like it would be an effective way to end the bribe system.

The criticism is "this is a bad thing the current Republican Party is doing right now in a widespread fashion"; "there are past examples of the Democrats doing this" is not a defense. If it's a bad thing that we should try to stop any party from doing, then right now that means trying to stop the Republicans from doing it.

The bad thing we are talking about right now is the Republican Party trying to engineer a de facto one-party state through gerrymandering, court stacking, and just taking advantage of the ever-increasing "handicap" both the Electoral College and the two-Senators-per-state apportionment give Republicans due to the rural vs. urban alignment between the two parties. The argument "yes, but the Democrats would do the same thing if they were in the position to" may be true, but it's not a reason not to do something about the Republicans actually doing it right now.

>>Its an open secret that right leaning opinions are taboo across academia.

Nonsense

I went to a top school in the US and encountered if anything, a constant right-leaning bias, and some people at the same school at the same time are now top RW personalities on Fox, books, etc.

What is happening is that the RW, and particularly the GOP, which was formerly the party of science, technology, and progress, has in more recent years turned towards authoritarianism and this requires a decoupling from facts.

And, yes, the facts (e.g., anthropomorphic global warming, vaccination, voting dynamics, etc.++) do in fact lean against common RW shibboleths used to crank up their populist amplification needed for their ambitions.

If a bona-fide expert presents data and expert scientific interpretation about how vaccines, public health measures, or voting actually works, that is not political. What is political is calling that political and attempting to silence it because you do not like the conclusions.

What it does mean is that people making claims like yours are most likely in the wrong here, and are attempting to silence the very real opposition because they do not like it.

Stop it and rethink.

I would have said that public universities in the US are accountable to their boards of regents far moreso than the sinister "bureaucrats in the federal government."

I didn't think much about this until the recent news that the University System of Georgia was effectively ending tenure for its professors, and the drivers of that policy were the USG Board of Regents.

> To many professors, the most alarming proposal is that a faculty member may not only be separated from the university for clear cause, but also reasons “other than for cause," pursuant to other board policies. “Such other policies shall not be governed by or subject to the following policies on Grounds for Removal and Procedures for Dismissal,” the proposed change also says.

From: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/10/04/tenure-under-...

So I looked up the USG Board of Regents: https://www.usg.edu/regents/members

And it turns out that most of them are CEOs or work in finance -- the people who represent "capital" more than any others I can think of. For these people to decide that it should be easier to fire "tenured" professors makes sense to me, in that these are the people who would benefit most from being able to silence, for example, expert witnesses, far more than federal bureaucrats meddling in academic freedom.

Can I, in the process of litigation, bring in political polarization experts to testify that a subject is too politically polarized to permit experts testifying?