Free Republic

Dorian Abbot is an associate professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. He spends his days studying climate change and extrasolar planets. In a piece written for Bari Weiss’ Substack, Abbot says he’s never been particularly political. He uses an online tool to decide who to vote for. But a few years ago he began to have concerns about academic freedom. He says he mostly kept his thoughts to himself for several years but that changed last summer. In the fall of 2020 I started advocating openly for academic freedom and merit-based evaluations. I...

Business advocates who want to import more foreign consumers and more foreign workers are developing plans to counter President Donald Trump’s popular call for a merit-based immigration reform. The emerging strategy is to pair offers of minor concessions to Americans and Trump with demands for giveaways to business, including a bigger supply of low-wage workers and welfare-funded consumers. The immigration “pairing” strategy is being pushed by the industry-backed Business Policy Council, in cooperation with GOP Sen. Thom Tillis.

President Donald Trump called for a huge overhaul of the nation’s immigration rules to reduce the huge inflow of low-skill, welfare-dependent immigrants, but perhaps also to increase the inflow of productivity-boosting white-collar immigrants. In his Feb. 28 speech to the joint session of Congress, he declared: Nations around the world, like Canada, Australia and many others –- have a merit-based immigration system. It is a basic principle that those seeking to enter a country ought to be able to support themselves financially. Yet, in America, we do not enforce this rule, straining the very public resources that our poorest citizens...

The Texas Senate has passed a measure to require that all Texas schools base their grading systems on merit alone. The measure comes in the wake of revelations by teachers and others that some schools had instituted grading systems where no one fails. The Senate Education Committee and Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott found that “minimum grading policies” in some school districts were preventing teachers from assigning grades they believed students deserved.