Tag: James A. Bacon
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Can We Call This a Statistical Sex Change Operation?
The number of Virginians who have changed the sex listed on their birth certificate increased from 166 during fiscal year 2020 to 275 in fiscal year 2021 and 384 in fiscal year 2022, according to Virginia Department of Health Director of Communications Maria Reppas. By my count, that’s 825 so far. The registrations follow a…
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Public Confidence in Higher-Ed Is Hemorrhaging
I started sounding the alarm years ago: through soaring tuition and leftist orthodoxy, higher-ed institutions would lose the support of a broad swath of the American people. At some point, parents rebel against paying small fortunes to have their kids indoctrinated to reject their values. As the latest Gallup poll shows, a steadily declining percentage…
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More Money for an “Indecipherable” K-12 Funding Formula?
by James A. Bacon Virginia public schools receive less funding from the state than the 50-state national average, less than the Mid-Atlantic regional average, and less than three of the five bordering states, says a new report from the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC). The state needs to radically update its methodology for…
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A Tale of Two UNESCO World Heritage Sites
by James A. Bacon Italians demand that people treat their UNESCO World Heritage sites with respect. Consider the recent example of the idiot caught scratching graffiti onto a brick of the ancient Roman Colosseum. Italians reacted with outrage at video (taken by an equally outraged American) when Bulgaria-born Englishman Ivan Dimitrov used his key to…
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UVa Admissions Trends: Whites Down, Asians Up, Blacks a Question Mark
by James A. Bacon As the University of Virginia community debates the implications of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling restricting the use of race in higher-ed admissions, The Jefferson Council is publishing publicly available data that provide context for the discussion. UVa’s office of Institutional Research and Analysis publishes three types of admissions data (applications,…
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Info-Wars in the College Admissions Debate
by James A. Bacon It will be exceedingly difficult to hold an honest conversation in Virginia about the role of race in higher-education admissions and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. College administrators are the gatekeepers of data critical to the discussion and they will not share it. I have been stymied twice this week in my…
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VMI Superintendent Praises Student Journalists
by James A. Bacon I increased my respect for Cedric Wins. In his personal Facebook page, the Virginia Military Institute Superintendent congratulated Lt. James Mansfield (class of ’22) and Cadet Russell Crouch (class of ’24), co-editors of The Cadet student newspaper last year, for winning the Virginia Press Association’s Journalist Service and Integrity Award. That…
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Whites Under-Represented in UVa’s Entering Classes
by James A. Bacon As the debate unfolds about how to apply the U.S. Supreme Court ruling restricting the use of race as a factor in college admissions, it would be helpful for the discussion to be rooted in reality. At the University of Virginia, any dialogue should be based upon the recognition that admissions…
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A New “Landscape” for UVa Admissions
by Walter Smith With the recent U.S. Supreme Court restricting “affirmative action” in college and university admissions, an all-consuming question in Charlottesville is how the University of Virginia might change its policies and guidelines for admitting students. While prohibiting the use of race as a decisive factor in admissions, Supreme Court Justice John Roberts allowed…
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Bacon News of the Week
When my daughter Sara Bacon was in high school, she had a good friend named Katie Macon. I always thought they’d make a great law firm — Macon Bacon & Associates, or some such. Never did I imagine that Macon Bacon would be the name of a college baseball team, much less that it would…
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Setting the Stage for the Great Race-in-Admissions Debate
by James A. Bacon People have been asking me what I think about the U.S. Supreme Court ruling prohibiting colleges and universities from using race as a specific basis for admitting students. I’m not a legal scholar, so I won’t offer any opinions on the legal or constitutional merits of the decision. I speak as…
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Policing Ain’t Bean Bag… Or Maybe It Is
Upon hearing that the Fairfax County Police Department had scrapped conventional shotgun shells in favor of “bean bag” projectiles, my initial reaction was to mock the change. Bean bags? What’s the next tool in the police arsenal — pillows? Given the approving tone of the article in The Washington Post, I was tempted to…
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Who Guides the Guides?
by James A. Bacon In the spring of 2022 University of Virginia alumnus Warren Lightfoot emailed Rector Whitt Clement, a fraternity brother, to share the experiences of a friend and friend’s daughter during a university tour. Among other negative observations about UVa, reported Lightfoot, the student tour guide had made a point of noting that…
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How Wokeism Is Ruining Medicine
by James A. Bacon The Woke Revolution’s takeover of K-12 schools, the criminal justice system, higher ed, the media, the military, the C-suite, museums, and other cultural institutions has been highly visible, playing out in blogs and the media for all to see. The conquest of the healthcare system has attracted far less attention, though…
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Virginia Police Shooting Incidents Up 43% in 2022
by James A. Bacon Along with the surge in homicides and assaults on police officers, the number of police shootings in Virginia jumped 43% last year, according to data from the Virginia State Police 2022 Crime in Virginia report. The shootings resulted in 22 fatalities, up from 18 the previous year. The increase since 2019,…