Sam Ulmschneider

3) To change: Hard to figure out strong+efficient high school appropriate grading standards for a course that, at the collegiate level, is mostly based on either blue-book style exams applying and describing theories or based on individual paper-writing. I need to revamp some balance + expectations.

2) Text coverage: I didn't meet my goals, but we did read all of Sandel's Justice and the selections in Princeton Readings in Political Philosophy (1st ed) from Plato, Aristotle, Bentham, Mill, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, de Gouge, Rawls, and Nozick, and did activities with each.

1) Things that went well: the students really went above and beyond my hopes in getting the ideas connected to the world around them, interrogating the texts, and getting excited by dialogue. Their creative-application activities actually made me laugh aloud regularly. Their papers are impressive!

Cruising towards the end of the semester teaching political philosophy to high schoolers for the first time, and I'm full of things I am glad have gone well, proud of all the texts and ideas we've covered, and considering tons of things to adjust so this goes even better for everyone next time.

Also depends on Congress taking a more active role. When so many decisions of policy consequence are down to judicial interv. because it’s all executive orders and fair weather federalism and administrative state magic bc Congress snoozes, the Court is so empowered it’s harder for it to be virtuous.

Alitos inevitable dissent will plant seeds of doubt for the future, and also I certainly don’t trust that their majority opinion will have the moral and legal clarity of Cooper. But nonetheless I can see WHY they took it instead of just doing an unsigned denial of cert.

Actually I think even the District Courts said desegregation had to be enforced in Cooper and the Warren Court was upholding the orders of both the district and appeal courts!

No, the appeals court already reversed the southern district courts in Cooper (I did have to look that up, though, so I can’t claim it was why I made my argument).

I dunno, if the Court held arguments and issued an opinion in Cooper v Aaron just so they could be ABSOLUTELY clear how far in the wrong Arkansas was, they can do the same here. Not that I trust the Roberts court to be doing this for the same right reasons the Warren court did in Cooper v Aaron.

I can’t help but imagine that Roberts somehow thinks that slapping down the Trump admin on birthright citizenship will right the ship of their legitimacy despite their other more hard-to-understand partisan rulings.

Right - a true bind if the legislature, say, changes the mail in ballot rules after the ballots have gone out or moves precincts out of a district in early October, which HOPEFULLY most state legislatures can’t or won’t do but these days anything is possible.

I would put Purcell at a couple-three months, but there’s real trouble in that the primaries at the start of March, so that still creates a problem where court intervention starts to become problem very early, in December and January, then again in late August for the general.

The part about the Texas gerrymander ruling I find most maddening is the way it hand waves clear error standard. The court has stood by that standard any number of times recently and the Court below, even if ultimately wrong on the interpretation of the law, just absolutely committed no clear error.

Yeah, lowering the stakes a great deal by expanding slots and eliminating some of the advantages of the most elite schools by drastically improving state and community colleges seems like a better option - it’ll mean that even the impossible-to-optimize admissions problem will be less damning.

Our current admissions model is a terrible mess no question, and the idea of establishing a pool of acceptable applicants and then randomizing within that pool of equally acceptable applicants, is appealing to me to in many ways, so I've been trying to think through the potential missteps in it.

On some level I think it doesn't fit well for many universities. What if you have set a goal to recruit more engineering students as you try to beef up that program? Or you have a long history showing that recruiting too heavily from one geographic region undermines your community engagement?

My favorite example of this has always been Yantai. Almost no Westerner knows of it, but it has 7 or 8 million people, three or four big universities, enormous ports, international airport, religious mythological locations, etc - but is only the 6th largest city even in the province of Shandong!

every once in a while to remind myself of the scale of Chinese politics and economics, I remember that about as many people live in the city of Guangzhou as do in the state of New York.

Absolutely fair! Everything has institutional and contextual constraints. I sympathize with your predicament, and didn't meant to tell you a 'solution,' just give hope that there are audiences out there someday for complex, nuanced political/philosophical translation projects.

*extremely nervous laughter*

As a student reading the Rosemont and Ames translation of the Analects - which made bold linguistic and rendering choices and explained them in very extensive introductions and supplements - changed my whole intellectual world. There's real value in translations that seem initially hard for readers!

You know it is funny, as someone who tries to think a lot about how frontier science might impact fundamental political assumptions and dynamics, I spend a lot of time thinking about gene-edit technologies and relatively little thinking about broadly available hormone therapies. I feel pretty dumb.

Rawls is probably the most important US political philosopher or theorist of the 20th century. He rivals Madison as the most important US political thinker of all time. His notion of a social contract dictated by reason, and justice as positional fairness is at the root of many contemporary debates.

i strongly, strongly believe that good writing is downstream of clear thinking and a strong understanding of the subject matter at hand. without fail, tortured writing comes from writers who don’t know and can’t think clearly about anything.

Trying to write a 30 minute lecture on Rawls and his influence is like the dictionary definition of a battle you lose before even getting onto the grounds of combat by your poor choices of strategy.

I never really get tired of thinking, reading, listening and learning to new work about the American Revolution. The period is just so rich not merely as a source of historical study but as a way to reason about political ideas and ideals, and national dilemmas more generally.

they recently reduced a local four-lane east-west major artery to two lanes for bike lanes - mostly an unmixed good and the traffic calming is great during 80% of the day - but during rush hours, the poor intersections back up more than a half-mile and the frustration and anger are palpable.

I dunno, I sometimes feel like elements of the the late 1990s had a distinctly 'darkness just waiting out there' feel from Waco to Ruby Ridge to Lockerbie to Columbine to Matthew Shepard at home, and then everything from the Asian financial crisis to Srebrenica to Rwanda/Zaire abroad.

Sometimes in those lectures I emphasize cracks were showing intensely. 1) culture wars & Buchananites, 2) economic polarization btwn workers v CEOs/investors, increasingly disconnected suburban/urban settings 3) LA riots + OKC bombs, 4) troubles of hegemony from Panama to Croatia - 90s are no lull.

I try to be 'present' and engaged with my students all class period, every period that I teach - walking and answering questions, checking in on activity progress, and so on. The price I pay in lost time for grading and planning is awful, and I question my prioritization all the time these days.