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Two American university campuses — the University of Texas at Austin and North Dakota State University — are being evacuated at this hour after administrators received early morning bomb threats. It’s not yet known if the threats are related.
UT Austin is the flagship campus of the University of Texas system, with some 50,000 students, 16,000 employees, and a 420-acre campus. It was the site of the 1966 Charles Whitman shootings, then the worst mass murder in American history.
Update, 11:22 am (ET): It has just been reported that the UT Austin evacuation was prompted by a telephoned bomb threat from a man with a “Middle Eastern accent” who claimed that he was connected to Al Qaeda and had planted multiple bombs throughout campus. The call came in at 8:35 am local time and claimed that the bombs were set to detonate in 90 minutes, which would have been approximately 15 minutes ago.
11:25 am: UT Austin says campus is being checked for bombs, no decision yet made on afternoon classes. Next update scheduled for 10:45 am local time, 20 minutes from now.
11:35 am: NDSU evacuation order appears to have been posted at 9:49 am local time, at almost exactly the same time as the UT Austin evacuation order. It’s always important to be careful in drawing conclusions based on early reports in such situations, but it seems — right now — somewhat unlikely that either threat was a copycat, or that the two were coincidental.
11:50 am: UT Austin still clearing buildings, latest update confirms that time specified in threat has passed. No bombs found so far, no decision made on when campus will re-open.
11:40 am: The NDSU incident is the third major bomb threat this week in eastern North Dakota, following threats at two nearby airports on September 11 and 12.
11:55 am: There’s a rumor going around that these threats might be in some way related to last season’s college football championship, in which North Dakota State beat (it’s said) UT for the national title. But they didn’t — they beat Sam Houston State, a college located some 150 miles away from UT Austin.
12:07 pm: Just tweeted: “An hour and 15 minutes after original NDSU warning, no updates. @UTAustin has updated twice on Twitter and given addl info to press.”
12:25 pm: An alert posted on the website of Valparaiso University in Indiana says there’s been a non-specific threat made there this morning via graffiti:
An unspecific threat to campus was made through a graffiti message alluding to dangerous and criminal activity alleged to be carried out during the chapel break period on Friday. The broad threat provided no details with respect to location or type.
No evacuation at Valparaiso at this time.
12:45 pm: All activities at UT Austin except for classes will resume at 5 pm today, according to a tweet from the university’s vice president for student affairs. Classes are cancelled for the day.
1:00 pm: First update from NDSU, posted about 15 minutes ago, says campus is still closed and that administrators expect to have another report “within the hour.”
1:15 pm: UT press conference going on now. Campus has reopened, administrators seem confident there was never a legitimate threat. UT Austin doesn’t kid around with campus crises, by the way — their warning went out via text, Facebook, Twitter, siren, website, media, and campus CCTV.
1:35 pm: NDSU has reopened, classes will resume at 2 pm local time. Between this and the hints dropped at the UT Austin press conference, I strongly suspect that the same person (or people) was behind the two threats, and that law enforcement knows a lot about who it was.
Sarah Jaffe has a great new piece up dismantling a bunch of complaints about the Chicago teachers’ union and their strike. The whole thing is well worth reading, but I wanted to piggyback on one particular bit.
Jaffe quotes Times columnist Joe Nocera’s claim that “the status quo, which is what the Chicago teachers want, is clearly unacceptable,” and responds with this:
“Here’s a deep-seated bit of ideology that’s really worth unpacking for a second. This is the image of unions in the American psyche these days. Most people think of them as little-c conservative institutions holding on to a dead past, trying to protect what their members have against a sweeping tide of change.
“It’s wrong, and the CTU couldn’t be a better example of just how wrong it is. Karen Lewis and her union are the ones actually fighting for reforms in the schools, starting with things we know work: smaller class sizes, well-rounded curriculum, support for teachers and school staff. They might legally only be allowed to strike over salary and benefits, but they’ve been out there at every turn arguing for change, not the status quo.”
The problem is obvious, and it’s symptomatic of the biggest problem in debates over American public education (primary, secondary, and higher) more generally right now: The most sensible proposals for reforming public education have been written out of “reasonable” public discourse.
In short, Nocera believes that CTU is fighting for the status quo because their proposals have been rendered invisible.
Just seven months ago, CTU released a comprehensive report on how Chicago’s public schools could be improved. It’s thoughtful, ambitious work, and it turns out that the pricetag on the union’s whole better-schools wishlist amounts to just 15% of the system’s annual budget. That money would buy improvements in everything from facilities to art and music instruction to school lunches, while increasing teacher pay, implementing universal pre-K and full-day kindergarten and dramatically expanding school libraries in the parts of the city that need them most.
If that’s what you get for $713 million, you could get big chunks of it for a lot less, and it’s not like the current impasse is free — not for the city, and not for the city’s taxpayers.
So why aren’t we talking about any of this? For the same reason we’re not talking about cutting tuition at public colleges, or increasing in-state enrollment, or hiring more full-time faculty. Because the dominant narrative of austerity, not the country’s actual financial situation, is driving public discourse.
And that narrative has no room for hope. Or change.
By now you’ve probably seen the report that a new poll out of Ohio found that 15% of very conservative voters said Mitt Romney was more responsible for Osama Bin Laden’s death than President Obama, with another 6% of moderate conservatives agreeing. (More than half of each group said they weren’t sure who should get more credit.)
Cue wringing of hands and mocking of conservatives. But I love their answer, and here’s why.
When Osama Bin Laden was killed, Barack Obama was the commander in chief of the military that killed him. Mitt Romney was adjusting to his new campaign wardrobe of open-collar shirts. And of course it’s not as if he did any of the prep work for the mission in his previous roles as Winter Olympics CEO, Massachusetts governor, or failed Senate candidate.
But here’s the thing. The folks who gave him credit for killing Bin Laden know all this stuff, or at least most of them do. They didn’t give the answer they did because they thought Romney was a member of Seal Team Six.
They gave that answer because it’s an idiotic question.
Romney had nothing to do with the Bin Laden mission. Nobody, even in the fever swamps of conspiracism, has ever claimed otherwise. The only reason to ask the question as framed is to poke at Romney supporters in the hope that they’ll either say something nice about the president or look dumb by refusing to.
Consider this: The folks at PPP could have asked whether Obama or Bush had more to do with the killing of Bin Laden. Or they could have offered “neither” as an answer, to represent folks who believe that the military would have done its thing whoever occupied the Oval Office. They didn’t. Instead they offered “not sure,” a nonsensical option that 31% of the Ohio electorate chose.
That’s right. Faced with a question that’s the political equivalent of “is the sky blue?” nearly a third of Ohioans, and more than ten percent of liberals, said they didn’t know. That’s not ignorance, it’s pollster nullification.
Four percent of non-conservatives polled gave Romney credit for the Bin Laden kill, by the way. I like to think that I’d have been among them.
I’m a big fan of Jay Smooth’s take on why telling people they’re racist is often counter-productive, but there are moments when not calling people racist is indefensible.
I just got a heads-up that the student who’s trying to start a White Student Union at Towson University is planning on bringing a guy named Jared Taylor to campus next month. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Taylor:
Taylor believes that white people have their own racial interests, and that it is intellectually valid for them to protect these interests; he sees it as anomalous that whites have allowed people of other ethnicities to organize themselves politically while not doing so themselves. His journal American Renaissance was founded to provide such a voice for white interests, as well as to convince whites that this enterprise is a legitimate one. … Taylor’s views have been described as racist by some academics, political commentators, journalists, and various other organizations. Taylor himself rejects any accusation of racism; he claims that his views are reasonable and moderate, and that they were considered normal by most key figures in American history.
And for context, let’s look at something Taylor wrote a few years ago:
“Our rulers and media executives will try to turn the story of Hurricane Katrina into yet another morality tale of downtrodden blacks and heartless whites, but pandering of this kind fools fewer and fewer people. Many whites will realize — some for the first time — that we have Africa in our midst, that utterly alien Africa of road-side corpses, cruelty, and anarchy that they thought could never wash up on these shores.
“To be sure, the story of Hurricane Katrina does have a moral for anyone not deliberately blind. The races are different. Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears. And in a crisis, it disappears overnight.”
To call this claim racist isn’t pejorative, or even argumentative. It’s straightforwardly descriptive. And to say that Taylor’s views “have been described as racist” instead of saying that they’re racist is silly. It’s pointless. It’s absurd. If this passage isn’t racist, if its author isn’t racist, then literally nothing and nobody is.
March 2013 update | Hi, all! I just tweeted a link to this post because Matthew Heimbach, the Towson White Student Union founder who was looking to bring Jared Taylor to campus last year, was right in the middle of today’s horrible racist brouhaha at CPAC.
“In 2008 less than half of all eligible voters between 18 and 24 voted.”
—Scarlett Johansson, last night.
“The youngest voters were the only age group to show a statistically significant increase in turnout.”
—The Census Bureau, 2009.
studentactivism.net 
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