So now you care about academic mobbing

Angry Mob by Robert Couse-Baker, CC BY 2.0

Princeton politics professor Keith E. Whittington (on the blog) has a wisely worded op-ed, on The Volokh Conspiracy at Reason, on the too often abdicated responsibility of university administrators to push back against viewpoint-based campus mobbing of faculty.

"It is now a familiar pattern," he writes: attack, petition, social media campaign, demand for termination.  Of the university's duty, he writes:

University presidents have a responsibility in such a situation. It should go without saying, but unfortunately it does not, that they have a responsibility to actually live up to their constitutional and contractual responsibilities and refrain from sanctioning the faculty member for saying something that someone finds controversial. They should insist that harassment and threats directed against members of the faculty will not be tolerated. Professors should at least be confident that when the mobs arrive, pitchforks in hand, that university leaders will not flinch and give in to the demands of the mob.

I hope the piece hits the desk of every university president in the land with a thunderclap of j'accuse.

Yet it is fascinating to me to see described today as cliché what was once fringe.  Canadian sociologist Kenneth Westhues, professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo, published his Workplace Mobbing in Academe (2004) seventeen years ago, and that book was built on his earlier Eliminating Professors (1998).

By the time I met Ken in 2009, he was already the world's leading expert on academic mobbing.  He still is.  Westhues's website is still the online clearinghouse on mobbing as a sociological phenomenon. But he's almost never cited, at least in the legal lit.  I find eight references to Westhues on Westlaw's JLR database, and none in the last dozen years.

At a program at the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) in 2010, I accepted the invitation of Westhues and Syracuse University law professor Robert Ashford to speak of my experience.  Ashford perceived a worthwhile connection to his inventive work in socio-economics, and Westhues flattered me with my name as a participle. 

The splash we made at AALS and in legal academics eleven years ago might be described well as mostly indifferent curiosity.  Mostly modifies indifferent, not curiosity.  

I wrote in the Journal of College and University Law in 2009 about the need for broader academic freedom, beyond published research and into the professorial "penumbra."  I presented at AAUP, besides AALS.  The article was cited once in a 2011 bibliography and once in 2013.  (Thanks, Profs. Benson and Jones.)  And that was that.

Not until cancel culture reached the well known coastal scholars of academia's elite institutions did mobbing hit the mainstream.  Now a lot of important people are wringing their hands over academic freedom and waning tenure.

Too bad they don't seem able to find my article.  Or Westhues's work.  Is there really a wheel until it's invented at a "top" school?

It's nice to see serious people having serious thoughts about academic freedom, at last.  But it's too late to give solace to a generation of victim-scholars.  And it's probably too late to resuscitate intellectual liberty on campus, for at least a generation yet.

With Keaton as Ken Feinberg for 9/11 20th, 'Worth' challenges tort norms with study of victim comp

Worth, a dramatization of Kenneth Feinberg's special mastership of the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund, dropped on Netflix today in select markets.

I frame my 1L Torts class with exploration of tort alternatives, and I periodically infuse our study with comparative law.  Typically, I begin Torts I in August with a study of the New Zealand accident compensation system.

I ask the class whether Americans might similarly embrace social compensation.  Notwithstanding their personal predilections, students readily identify objections based in deterrence dynamics, the American ethos of personal responsibility, and our cultural priority of "day in court" entitlement.

In the spring semester, I round out Torts II with a return to tort alternatives in America's exceptions to the rule, easing our study from worker compensation to compensation funds, such as 9/11 and BP.  Students are then challenged to consider: if Americans find the notion of New Zealand-style social compensation system so repellent, why do we embrace it when the stakes are especially high?

For two years now, I have used the German-made Playing God (2017), a documentary about Brockton, Mass.-native Feinberg, as a springboard for class discussion of the necessary parameters of social compensation systems, including valuations.  Previously, I used recorded lectures by Feinberg.  A good, recent, and more-concise-than-usual item is his talk at Chicago Ideas Week on the theme of his 2005 book, What is Life Worth?—the original title of the movie, Worth, according to IMDb.

Even if a torts professor does not wish to cover alternative compensation systems, these are useful audiovisual catalysts for discussion of the valuation of life and loss, as part of the study of damages.  Other worthy tools, in the podcast vein, include "Worth" on Radiolab (2014) and Feinberg's appearance on Freakonomics Radio (2018).

Starring Michael Keaton as Feinberg, Worth is necessarily a Hollywood conflation of events and issues, focusing on 9/11 upon its upcoming 20th anniversary.  Still, plenty of effort is exerted to remain faithful to history.  Feinberg is pictured enduring the heat of an angry and frustrated assembly of families, after which he has informative if discordant exchanges with individuals.  There are also discrete scenes of victim testimonies that might seem interruptive of flow in an ordinary drama, but can't help but captivate in the haunting context of 9/11.

These interactions and the orbiting characters who emerge in the story are clearly modeled on, or amalgams of, real events and persons, many of whom were recorded in videos from the time, and clips of which can be seen in Playing God.  Exemplifying his skills as a character actor, refined in landmark roles from Beetlejuice to Birdman to Ray Kroc, Keaton offers a compelling portrayal of Feinberg as the peculiar human protagonist whose likeness has become inextricable from American mass compensation systems, for better and for worse.

Worth is a superb ride and offers endless starting points for serious academic discourse on the subject of compensation models, not to mention the role of the legal profession and the complex sociology of death.  The film is a welcome addition to the audiovisual arsenal for classroom teaching to stimulate deep thinking on the wisdom of tort law.

SDNY rules against Locast, knifes beleaguered free TV

[UPDATE: At 9:47 a.m. today, Thursday, Sept. 2, I received word that Locast is suspending operations, effective immediately.]  

Locast, an online retransmitter of broadcast television, and the American public together suffered a major blow on August 31, as the federal district court in New York handed partial summary judgment to ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC in the networks' copyright infringement lawsuit.

Locast has irritated me, but only for not expanding fast enough.  Where I live, near Providence, R.I., the service is not available.  It is available in New York to the south and Boston to the north, but access is strictly geo-fenced.  As a result, my family cannot see free broadcast TV without springing for an expensive subscription to a cable service or streaming-channel consolidator.

That's not really Locast's fault.  Broadcasters have reduced their power over the years, making free TV incrementally more difficult to access.  I live just nine miles from the broadcast towers that serve the Rhode Island state capital, but I cannot receive any signal with an interior or window-mounted antenna.

Indeed, the networks seem to want out of the broadcast game altogether.  Kickbacks from online consolidators such as Hulu Live and YouTube TV, and the networks' profits from their own services, such as Paramount+ (and Hulu Live, in part), are more lucrative than broadcasting and come with no FCC regulatory strings attached.  Local affiliates, including vital broadcast news outlets, fall through the cracks, wreaking further havoc in our information market, but that's no matter to the bottom line.  Locast threatened to breathe life back into the corpse of free TV, so the networks pursued the service with a vengeance. 

Locast is a non-profit, and its "business" model is simple.  It sets up a technology hub in a place such as Boston and converts local broadcast signals to online streams.  Home cord-cutters thus have their access to free TV restored through the internet service they already have, no antenna needed.

On the face of it, of course, this business model would constitute copyright infringement for copying and redistributing the broadcast signals.  But Congress, in a rare showing of commitment to the public interest rather than to the profit margins of our corporate overlords, built an exemption into the Copyright Act.  Governmental or nonprofit organizations are permitted to retransmit "without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage, and without charge to the recipients of the secondary transmission other than assessments necessary to defray the actual and reasonable costs of maintaining and operating the secondary transmission service."

Locast is freely available and supported only by voluntary donations.  But streaming is interrupted at 15-minute intervals by 15-second pleas for donations.  Like the ad-free versions of pay-TV services, Locast offers absolution from these interruptions in exchange for a minimum "donation" of $5 per month.  The $5-donation model proved sufficiently successful that Locast was able to cover its operating costs and use the excess to expand to new markets.

And that, expansion, was Locast's sin, in the eyes of the district court.  Judge Louis L. Stanton opined that Congress could have written "maintaining and operating and expanding" into the statutory exemption, but did not.  So Locast's dedication of additional accounts received to expansion was fatal to its claim of copyright exemption.

I find the court's reading of the statute exceedingly cramped.  Locast plainly is spending money to do precisely what Congress intended: making free TV available to people who cannot receive it without hiring a contractor to install an antenna tower.  That the books must balance within each micro-market rather than across live markets, in the utter absence of evidence that a dime has been diverted to any other objective, absurdly splits hairs.

Locast lawyers, joined by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, say they are examining the ruling.  Locast announced yesterday that it is for now ceasing streaming interruptions requesting donations. 

There are ways that Locast can work around its current predicament, I reason. Locast has been supported by some major corporate donors who are not old-school TV insiders, such as AT&T, which contributed $500,000.  Internet service providers such as AT&T benefit from Locast, because retransmissions are streamed into homes, rather than broadcast.  With more careful balancing of the books, it should be possible, if cumbersome, to parse operations between discrete markets and to raise capital to support expansion directly.

It's a shame that such gamesmanship should be required for what is clearly a public service.  And a bigger problem might remain for American information and entertainment consumers in the ongoing, if prolonged, death throes of free TV.  We might hope that Congress would obviate the fray with bold measures that would reinvigorate the landscape of electronic expression by enhancing public-interest limitations on digital intellectual property and guaranteeing access to the internet for all Americans.

We also might hope to see pigs take flight.

The case is American Broadcasting Cos. v. Goodfriend, No. 1:19-cv-07136 (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 31, 2021). I bet Judge Stanton is one of those people who has both cable and Fubo and can't use either one unless someone helps him with the remote.

Chile reflexiona sobre los derechos digitales en desarrollo de nueva constitución

Foto por jpereira via The Loop (c. 2019; CC no especificada)

[English.] La creación de una nueva constitución está en marcha en Chile, y los derechos digitales podrían figurar de manera importante en un nuevo modelo de derechos civiles.

Los votantes chilenos pidieron una convención constitucional en una votación de 2020. La actual constitución de 1980 fue redactada bajo la dictadura de Pinochet. Entró en vigor con el fin del régimen de Pinochet en 1990 con la transición del país a la democracia, pero su texto original y sus muchas enmiendas nunca han sido verdaderamente un producto de la democracia. En contraste, la presente convención se desarrolla con una asombrosa representación de la diversidad chilena, incluidos los pueblos indígenas, casi sin precedentes en la historia de las democracias occidentales.

Chile tiene un historial de marcar el ritmo legal para América Latina. Chile y Costa Rica fueron inusuales en la experiencia latinoamericana por no haberse convertido en una guerra civil después de la independencia. Esa estabilidad suministró un terreno fértil para el desarrollo legal. Andrés Bello elaboró el código civil del país, siguiendo el modelo francés, en 1857. El código Bello fue muy influyente en el continente y anima el derecho civil latinoamericano todavía hoy en día. Costa Rica se convirtió en un innovador en derechos humanos en el sistema interamericano en el siglo XX.

Una propuesta de línea de base en el proceso chileno exige como mínimo el acceso a internet como un derecho humano. La realización del derecho requeriría el desarrollo de la infraestructura de internet en todo el vasto país, 2,653 millas de norte a sur, abarcando desiertos y montañas. La responsabilidad del gobierno sería sustancial. No se podía dejar que el sector privado desarrollara la infraestructura de internet con los márgenes de ganancia derivados de la densidad de población, una limitación que ha atrofiado la penetración de Internet de alta velocidad en los Estados Unidos.

Pero el acceso a internet es solo un mínimo, y hay muchas otras propuestas sobre la mesa que llevarían los derechos humanos convencionales, como la libertad de expresión y la privacidad, al mundo en línea. Muchos países han reconocido aspectos de los derechos humanos convencionales en el entorno en línea. Incluso en los Estados Unidos, los tribunales han reconocido que las órdenes judiciales civiles y penales que limitan el acceso de una persona a internet pueden contravenir los derechos civiles si no se adaptan estrictamente.

La idea que el acceso a Internet para recibir información, en lugar de hablar, ha sido una propuesta precaria en los derechos humanos, de la misma manera que los regímenes modernos de derechos humanos siempre han luchado con el acceso a la información (ATI). Hace diez años, un informe del Relator Especial de la ONU sobre la libertad de expresión describió acertadamente el acceso a internet como un derecho "habilitador" ("enabler" right). En los últimos años, expliqué esta caracterización del ATI en el marco moderno de los derechos humanos.

Participantes del proceso constitucional chileno, coordinado por Patricio Urriola Aballai, director ejecutivo de la Fundación Abriendo Datos, publicaron en mayo una "Carta Magna Digital" que explora el potencial de los derechos digitales para ser reconocidos como derechos humanos.  HT @ Observacom.

Netflix's 'The Chair' satirizes academic politics with troubling truths of contemporary campus culture

Netflix's The Chair is an enjoyable six-episode sit com on the absurdity of academic politics in American higher education today.  The show was created and written by Amanda Peet and stars Sandra Oh (Grey's Anatomy, Killing Eve) as the perpetually embattled chair of the English department at a small elite college.

In one storyline, reminiscent of Scott Johnston's Campusland (2019), well meaning professor Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass) is pilloried for a mock Nazi salute, turned into a social media meme, in a class lesson on fascism and absurdism.

Comedic parody derives its beauty, of course, from its grain of truth.  Dobson's predicament is precisely one reason I have resisted routine video lecture capture.  Humor has pedagogical value, but one remark out of context is a brewing tempest in a teapot.  The risk might be worthwhile if teachers could have confidence in academic freedom.  But they can't and don't.

As depicted in the show, university administrators obsessed with appearances and virtue signaling to the near exclusion of educational mission and pedagogical merit relish any opportunity to sacrifice an iconoclastic academic to the maw of groupthink.  No shackles of investigation or professional integrity can be permitted to slow the rush to condemnation.

Jay Duplass (Peabody Awards photo CC BY 2.0) 

Fictional Professor Dobson defends himself to the dean: "I’m tenured.  You can’t constrain my actions in my own classroom or my speech on this campus unless I’m in violation of the faculty code of conduct.  Which I’m not."

But there's the rub: arguably, he is.  An administrator at my university has enforced against faculty the university system's "Principles of Employee Conduct." The vague principles require faculty to "accord respect" to all persons and "to accept full responsibility for their actions."

If those terms were read in accordance with others—"foster forthright expression of opinion and tolerance for the views of others"—then no problem.  But if administrators are willing to read dissent, whistle-blowing, and classroom provocation as disrespect, which they are, faculty have no real recourse.  As I wrote more than a decade ago, and others periodically observe, tenure protection grounded in procedural due process is an empty promise in practice, and courts routinely abstain from recognition of any substantive academic freedom.

Faced with dismissal proceedings, Dobson reluctantly resorts to a lawyer in the final episode of the first season.  No spoilers.

The Chair is enjoyable mostly for the comedy.  But it delivers as well periodic gems of thought-provoking truth, besides the sad state of academic freedom: the need for critical reexamination of historical subject matter and diversification of faculty perspectives, without sacrificing academic integrity; the fate of classical studies in the age of impatience; university budget cuts to unremunerative liberal arts; the personal and professional challenges of growing old amid fast-paced social evolution; and what can or should be done today to remedy past social and economic injustices of race and gender.

When the father of our protagonist Ji-Yoon Kim criticizes her work-life imbalance, an aggravated Kim retorts, "What promotion means you don't have to work as much?!"

A story for our times.

Also among the outstanding cast are Nana Mensah (Queen of Glory, King of Staten Island) and the ageless Holland Taylor.  Sophie Gilbert at The Atlantic liked it too.  HT @ Prof. Irene Scharf.

American soccer traces roots to textile mills

In the first pandemic summer, I watched and adored the limited TV series, The English Game, which depicted the birth of modern soccer, or association football, in the context of industrialization and labor organization in the 19th century.

Fall River Rovers, 1917

For Boston.com, sports writer Hayden Bird now reveals a similar heritage for U.S. soccer in the communities of once abundant mills in my current home region, eastern Rhode Island and the Massachusetts south coast.  Bird explains in the piece:

[T]he early 20th century boom in American soccer is intertwined with the textile industry. The exponential growth of mills in the late 19th century (following the decline of the whaling industry) led to large scale immigration as skilled laborers were funneled in....

Answering the call were people who already had textile experience: those from Lancashire and the valley of Clyde. These regions, as historian Roger Allaway points out, “in addition to being the heart of the English textile industry also was the area of England in which association football [soccer] had most taken root among working class people in those same years."

And because of this, "textiles brought immigration and immigration brought football."

Bird's coverage embedded this video, which YouTuber soccermavn describes as "[p]erhaps the oldest extant professional U.S. soccer footage—snippets from the 1924 U.S. Open Cup final, played on March 30, 1924" in St. Louis, where the Vesper Buick hosted the Fall River, Mass., Marksmen.  The Marksmen prevailed 4-2.

The article is Hayden Bird, American Menace: When Fall River Ruled U.S. Soccer, Boston.com (June 21, 2018).  Hat tip @voteunion (Aaron Wazlavek), J.D.  See also Dan Vaughn, The Ghosts of Fall River, Protagonist Soccer (Oct. 29, 2018).

Tenth Circuit affirms injunction of Kansas ag gag law

My dog Rocky (2001-2019) at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, Kansas, 2009
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The Animal Legal Defense Fund has prevailed in an ag gag case in the Tenth Circuit, a three-judge panel upholding permanent injunction of the Kansas law.

I wrote recently about ag gag in the Eighth Circuit, where the court sustained a criminal prohibition on entering agricultural facilities on false pretenses.

The Kansas law was impermissibly viewpoint discriminatory, the Tenth Circuit panel held, in its requirement that the offender bear "intent to damage the enterprise conducted at the animal facility."  Because the law criminalized conduct exclusively with reference to the protected expression that would follow from entrance and recording on agricultural property, the court rejected the government's argument on appeal that the statute criminalized only conduct, not speech.

In dissent, U.S. Circuit Judge Harris Hartz—a member of the Judicial Education Advisory Board at the George Mason Law and Economics Center, participant in the Third Restatement of Agency, and once an academic—opined that merely retrenching the statutory definition to intentional deception would render the statute constitutional.  Judge Hartz and the majority found themselves in an R.A.V.-Wisconsin v. Mitchell tug of war, familiar to First Amendment scholars and law students, over whether the statutory intent requirement merely described mens rea or constituted impermissible viewpoint discrimination.

The dissent demonstrates what I wrote last week, that ag gag laws typically fail for overreach, but can be drafted constitutionally, thus, the mixed outcome in the Eighth Circuit.

The case is ALDF v. Kelly, No. 20-3082 (10th Cir. Aug. 19, 2021).  U.S. Circuit Judge Carolyn McHugh affirmed in the majority opinion, which was joined by her fellow Utahn Senior Judge Michael Murphy. Labor organizations, law professors, and a profusion of media organizations, including the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and Kansas press and sunshine advocates, lined up as amici against the Kansas law.

Legal educators tussle over politics in faculty honors

For persons interested in the ongoing tumult at the University of Arkansas Little Rock Law School over the renaming of a professorship after President Bill Clinton (e.g., TaxProf Blog, Wash. Times, Ark. Dem.-Gaz. (subscription)), apparently without faculty approval and with dubious official imprimatur, an August 19 legislative hearing on the matter is online on video.  On the Agenda tab, cue item F, at 2:06:39.

Citing, inter alia, named professorships awarded upon "cronyism" rather than merit, a police officer-student barred from open-carrying on campus in uniform until the legislature enacted a remedial statute, and refusal to permit a political conservative to teach constitutional law, Professor Robert Steinbuch concluded:

It saddens me to say but the law school is no longer an environment for unbiased legal education.  It's a hot bed of crypto leftist wokism unwittingly funded by the great people of this state being used by a select few who pocket a drastically disproportionate share of the resources to pursue their political agendas.

Dean Theresa Beiner testified that the law school decided after 20 years to honor the wishes of the donor who funded the professorship, and then, apparently, did so erroneously.  When a newspaper columnist asked for pertinent records under the state Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the law school discovered that Clinton had "withdrawn" permission amid the investigation of his conduct in the Lewinsky affair.

Three cheers for the Arkansas FOIA.  Full disclosure: I was a co-author with Professor Steinbuch and University of Arkansas Law School Professor Emeritus John J. Watkins of the sixth edition of the treatise, The Arkansas Freedom of Information Act. 

A cheer more for the legislator in the hearing who probed the process for awarding named professorships and compelled the dean's admission that the selection occurs substantially in secret under the statutory personnel exemption.  My recollection of the selection process for named professorships at that law school many years ago accords with Professor Steinbuch's more recent experience.  When I worked there, one professor—the same one who raised a red flag over the "Clinton" name—was stripped of his named professorship when he fell out of favor.  A past dean represented that the professorship here at issue had to be awarded to one professor—the one who kicked off the present controversy by using the "Clinton" name—because of the donor's intent, rather than merit, a contention unsupported by the donor.

At the same time, my experience as a law professor suggests that very little in the American workplace works on merit anyway, legal education and the work experiences of my law students informing my conclusion.  The dean's insistence to the contrary is quaint and typical of persons in power, whatever their politics.

The fireworks show (item F) runs about 48 minutes.  The referenced exhibit, a letter from the university chancellor to the committee, is available online.

Case Western-Red Cross program to consider international law, teachings of 'Star Trek'

Star Trek's Gates McFadden greets a soldier at a USO event
in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1996.
(Defense Department public domain image VIRIN 960303-A-6435A-009.)

A long time ago, at a law school far, far away (admitted metaphor malaprop), I wrote a symposium research piece on Star Trek's Prime Directive, as relative to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan to dethrone the Taliban after September 11.

I concluded back in those halcyon days that the most valuable lesson of the Prime Directive is that its violation is inevitable.  The rule of non-interference in pre-warp cultures in the 23rd century speaks importantly to the virtues of cultural relativism.  But there come times when a moral society must choose between its sacred writ to respect independent social evolution and its commitment to the natural rights of sentient life.

I don't know what the chaos in Afghanistan today says about my conclusion then.  Maybe I was right, that we were justified in invading Afghanistan with our higher calling (bellum justum), but we royally screwed up the implementation (snafu ineptus).  Maybe balancing western rights and regional relativism was always fated to fail, an impossible integration of irreconcilable norms.  Maybe I was wrong, and we should have built a wall around Afghanistan, as some then advocated only partly apocryphally, and waited for an interstellar society to emerge.

A wise Ferengi once said, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."  It's 2021.  Afghanistan is in chaos.  The Taliban are in charge.  And a next, next generation of the Star Trek franchise is trying to help us make sense of our world.

On September 8, Case Western Reserve University Law School and the American Red Cross will feature Case Co-Dean Michael P. Scharf to discuss, in present context, his 1994 law review article, The Interstellar Relations of the Federation: International Law and Star Trek the Next Generation.  Here is the event description:

On May 4, 2020 (“Star Wars Day”), the American Red Cross hosted a widely attended webinar on “Learning the Law through Film: Star Wars and International Humanitarian Law.” Inspired by the huge success of this event, the Red Cross decided to celebrate Star Trek Day on Wednesday, Sept. 8, by asking the Case Western Reserve University School of Law Co-Dean Michael Scharf to host a multi-visual online presentation of his  law review article “The Interstellar Relations of the Federation: International Law and Star Trek the Next Generation.”

With four new Star Trek series currently streaming, and a new film in production, the franchise is as popular as ever. On the 55th anniversary of the broadcast of the first Star Trek episode, you are invited to join an exciting hour-long trek through international law to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go where no one has gone before!

In this lunch-hour presentation, Co-Dean Scharf will discuss current controversial issues in international law by comparing them to the interstellar law encountered by Captain Picard and the intrepid crew of the Enterprise in seven years of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The presentation covers everything from the law governing the use of force to human rights law, the law of the sea to international environmental law, and treaty interpretation to international arbitration.

The event will include an introduction by Christian Jorgensen, legal advisor of the American Red Cross’s national headquarters, and an interactive Q&A via chat.

Naturally, I cited Scharf in my 2003 article.  And we both cited the imaginative and exemplary work of Nova Southeastern Professors Paul Joseph and Sharon Carton.  This vein of research and pedagogy rendered me fortunate to meet Joseph before he passed away much too early, in 2003, and also to meet Professor Christine Corcos, a treasured colleague, collaborator, and expert in teaching law with popular culture.

Incidentally, "Star Trek Day" on September 8 marks, as the CWRU event description says, the first franchise broadcast in 1966.  But the more important date of consequence in the lore of the Prime Directive is April 5, First Contact Day.

While we're on the subject, check out this paean to Trek from WNYC's Brooke Gladstone. This is a reprise of a 2006 piece, honoring Gene Roddenbery's birthday, August 19, 1921, a century ago.

Observers grasp at hopes for Afghan women

If you're like me, you're watching events in Afghanistan unfold with heartbroken anxiety.  (And there's Haiti, but let's take one tragedy at a time.)  I'm not usually a sucker for the broadcast news kicker (though once upon a time, I loved to write them), but David Muir punched the breath out of me with this one.

.@DavidMuir reports with a moving image from Kabul showing Afghan girls walking to school despite growing fears their freedom could be in jeopardy. https://t.co/uYhQDir8yx pic.twitter.com/bcJytv0415

— World News Tonight (@ABCWorldNews) August 17, 2021

After talking to our daughter, 22, my wife shared the realization that today's young adults don't have contemporary recollection of the brutality of Taliban rule in pre-9/11 Afghanistan, especially the implications for women's freedom and education.

Afghan women in literacy class in 2008
(U.N. photo CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Those of us in adult life on September 11 became acquainted with a flood of unpleasant subject matter in the 20-aughts.  I taught a couple of communications courses back then with Ahmed Rashid's Taliban (1st ed. 2000), for example.  Maybe ten years ago I gave my copy of the book to Goodwill, thinking it of only historical interest.  Now here we are.

That prompted me to wonder whether this Taliban is the same as that Taliban.  Is there any hope?  I noticed Taliban leaders on TV giving interviews to female reporters.  I wasn't the only one who noticed.  My academic colleague James Dorsey, my favorite commentator on MENA and author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, has published a commentary on point, in print and podcast.

Mideastsoccer · Defining change- Who are the Taliban that conquered Afghanistan

Spoiler alert, Dorsey does not reach the conclusion that this is somehow a kinder and gentler Taliban.  But at this point, we have to salvage any hope we can.

[UPDATE, Aug. 18.] A friend pointed me to this fundraising site, which is genuine: Support Afghan Guides and Fixers.  One of its organizers is Lupine Travel, a partner of mine and a solid UK-based enterprise.  

[UPDATE, Aug. 22.]  Check out this fascinating interview (Aug. 19) at PRI's The World with the exiled captain of Afghan women's soccer.