Camille Walsh

Okay thanks.

As student loan debt becomes racialized, it is more associated with deservedness — i.e. welfare queen narratives of taxpayer citizenship

Liberalism likes taxpayer citizenship — bucket of rights purchased by exercising individual freedom to acquire “good” or “bad” debt

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES Nos. 24–394 and 24–396 OKLAHOMA STATEWIDE CHARTER SCHOOL BOARD, ET AL., PETITIONERS 24–394 v. GENTNER DRUMMOND, ATTORNEY GENERAL OF OKLAHOMA, EX REL. OKLAHOMA ST. ISIDORE OF SEVILLE CATHOLIC VIRTUAL SCHOOL, PETITIONER 24–396 v. GENTNER DRUMMOND, ATTORNEY GENERAL OF OKLAHOMA, EX REL. OKLAHOMA ON WRITS OF CERTIORARI TO THE SUPREME COURT OF OKLAHOMA [May 22, 2025] PER CURIAM. The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided Court. JUSTICE BARRETT took no part in the consideration or decision of these cases.

BREAKING: By an evenly divided vote, the Supreme Court affirms an Oklahoma Supreme Court decision blocking the creation of a Catholic charter school. Barrett recused, allowing for the deadlock.

We don't know which conservative joined the liberals. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p...

disparate impact might be the closest legal acknowledgement of structural racism we have. so, of course they're going to attack it because denying structural racism is at the core of colorblindness, white innocence, victimhood, and nostalgia, racism, resegregation, and whitewashing history

Screenshot of the top of the article published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. Title is Race below the fold: The absence of race in the news media's coverage of student loans. Written by me, Lauren Shook, Jaime Ramirez-Mendoza, and Christopher Bennett. Abstract reads: The media discourse on student loans plays a significant role in the way that policy actors conceptualize challenges and potential solutions related to student debt. This study examines language that explicitly indicates race and racism in student loan articles published in eight major newspapers from 2006 to 2021. We found that 18% of articles use any of this language, though use has accelerated since 2018. This increase appears driven by terms that denote groups of people instead of structural problems, with 8% of articles mentioning “Black” in a racialized context but less than 1% mentioning “racism.” These findings emphasize the importance of treating the media as a policy actor capable of shaping the salience of racialization in discussions about student loans.

Our EEPA paper on the media's role in shaping our understanding of student loans, race, and racism is here! Email me if you don't have access & want a copy.

One of my fav papers for a few reasons but, most of all, it's my first paper with my husband 😍

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/...

How to Succeed in Government Without Really Trying The long history of promising an “efficient” federal government.

Why do so many voters assume that “running a government like a business” will lead to beneficial outcomes, even with very little historical evidence? Read @redheadmenace.bsky.social on the history of promising an “efficient” government. www.hnn.us/article/how-...

What the plaintiffs and the GOP want is a world where religious parents can object to anything and everything in public school they find offensive with the end game of destroying public schools.

You can stop asking where the mass opposition is. It's everywhere. People poured out to protest not only what Trump has done—and what they fear he will do next.

The message is: crowd large.

Many politicians, administrators, and business leaders, in bowing to Trump, have drawn confidence and comfort from the perceived vibe shift.

Events like this puncture that delusion.

Gonna keep saying this: In the 1840s, Southerners insisted that they could kidnap any person they alleged was a slave without any state or federal process. This turned even minimal process into resistance and raised the salience of the issue, which radicalized a bunch of people against slavery.

Must read: Mahmoud Khalil speaks out for the first time since his arrest by the Trump administration in an exclusive letter, dictated over the phone to his family, from ICE detention in Louisiana.

Columbia University’s immediate submission & betrayal of the core mission of higher education reflects cowardice and capitulation to a government that appears intent on destroying US higher education.

Full statement from AAUP President Todd Wolfson:

www.aaup.org/news/cowardi...

Anyway, I'm interested in book recs about Vichy France

A Supreme Court Justice who rules that President Biden can’t forgive student loan debt without an act of Congress, and rules that President Trump and Not An Official Position Musk can cancel any Congressionally-enacted spending they personally dislike, that Justice clearly isn’t ruling based on law.

Please add!

YouTube video by 30 Rock Official Liz Lemon Goes Corporate | 30 Rock

Totally. And I keep thinking of the “button classic” expensed dinner scene whenever someone lectures me about the “efficiency” of the private sector.

"taxpayer money"

This is a really good analysis. The Department of Education's Dear Colleague Letter on Title VI rests on an overbroad and ultimately unsupportable interpretation of the law. Educational institutions shouldn't let themselves be intimidated.

Race, Law, and Power in the United States A digital repository, anthology, and reading room from the Law and Liberation Lab

I was going to wait until this was ready, but as we’re publishing unfinished far-right-wing SCOTUS primers these days, I guess this is fine.

This repository, based on my Race & the Constitution course, is a pedagogical resource & archive. It’s also a digital sit-in.

padlet.com/lawandlibera...

I am really outdone. The Maryland National Guard cannot celebrate Frederick Douglass, the state’s native son and perhaps the greatest American this nation ever produced, because he’s Black and his chosen birthday happened to fall during Black History Month. (Ask me why he had to choose is b-day)

i am going to put a finer point on this: executive orders are not laws. and they certainly are not royal decrees. they are interpretations of existing law for the purposes of enforcement. the fact that so many people are treating them as laws is actually driving me a bit insane.

I spend a lot of time writing about many of the horrors of American history, but one consistent bright spot, something about which it is right to be proud, is that we've never had a king.

They must’ve been clicking between “how to nazi” and “white lotus spoilers” windows and mixed them up.

We have a lost child alert.

Yale Law School, your child is at the manager’s office.

Please come pick him up before he burns it down.

Now *this* is how you tell the public what's happening. Democratic party, please take note.

I mean, it couldn't be more obvious that this is a threat to leverage government power to retaliate against people who report critically on DOGE. An emergency for the future of free speech/free press.

3 fed gov't spending areas that seem less efficient (& lower ROI) than federal educ spending:
1) shipping troops to the border to solve an imaginary problem;
2) using military transport to export hard working, low wage immigrants to other countries;
3) contracts to SpaceX for exploding rockets.

This is what revisionist history looks like, in real time. And this also is why it might appear that archaeologists and historians have to dig deep to discover the existence of powerful women and marginalized groups -- because their legacies are so often erased.

It’s a shame they turned universities into landlords & pharmaceutical companies, cuz it would be nice if institutions devoted to learning might speak up about the value of knowledge in a time when 22-year-old edgelords from 4chan have been given carte blanche to erase data from every federal agency

list of banned keywords

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.