More Migrant Dinghies Land In UK

Via The Sun:

HIGH above the sea near Dover, Border Force planes patrol while an army of drones watches for ­suspicious activity.

Yet beneath them, a small dinghy packed with around 30 migrants quietly traverses the world’s busiest shipping lane, slipping undetected into the shallows of nearby Samphire Hoe.

The landing on Tuesday was the second undetected vessel to hit our shores in two days.

Hours earlier on Monday, a boat carrying five migrants came ashore near Folkestone in what the Government claimed was an “isolated and rare” case. All five people aboard were detained at the scene.

That incident was the first undetected migrant landing for a year, striking a humiliating blow for the Home Office as Britain’s hapless border control descends further into farce.

Twenty-one of the passengers aboard the second dinghy were detained by cops, but at least ten more are still being hunted.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has launched an urgent investigation into how the 30-plus migrants reached Kent without being spotted by British authorities.

There's a certsin amount of kabuki theater going on over this issue:

At least five more boats are thought to have launched yesterday too, carrying upwards of 200 new migrants.

Tracking data showed French rescue boats escorting each one to British waters before they were picked up by Border Force vessels.

. . . French ships generally escort migrant dinghies to a handover point with Border Force or, in some cases, the [Royal National Lifeboat Institution], with the two nations communicating throughout.

The main problem is apparently not stopping the migrants, but heading off demonstrations by UK citizens:

The threat of arrivals in Hampshire sparked demonstrations at Gosport on Tuesday, where six people were arrested for offences including careless driving and assaulting police officers.

The last-minute change to Dover saw the taxpayer-funded coaches given a police escort away from the Gosport coast over fears they could be attacked.

Footage showed the buses surrounded by blue lights in what George Madgwick, the Reform group leader on Hampshire council, described as a motorcade more fit for a world leader.

He added: “This has to be seen to be believed. The money spent . . . this country’s broken.”

. . . Donna Jones, Hampshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner, had previously warned Border Force that Hampshire was “not prepared or set up to process” Channel migrants.

She added: “The burden on the police to deal with the arrival and potential protest activity is unsustainable.”

Home Office and RNLI boats repeatedly turned off their transponders in an apparent attempt to hide their destination from protesters.

However, the arrival of two coaches and dozens of riot police in Gosport indicated the migrants would be dropped there.

Another Normandy mega-dinghy which launched earlier this month was taken to Portsmouth, prompting an hours-long stand-off with masked Patriot Platform protesters.

Border Force officials are understood to have committed to the Gosport plan before fears that activists could block the only road in and out of the port forced them to change tactics.

So the "undetected" dinghies are tracked and escorted during their whole voyages over the Channel, and their ports and times of debarkation are carefully planned and scheduled for late night to avoid protests. Once the migrants arrive, thedy're loaded onto government-funded charter buses, which take them to migrant hotels inland.

The de facto policy appears to be that the migrants will be in the UK indefinitely, with the aim of relocating them to rural areas:

Rural areas will be asked to accept more people seeking asylum, a minister has suggested, as the government faced criticism from Conservative MPs for placing migrants in their constituencies.

Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, said small towns and the countryside may be asked to house more people crossing the Channel in small boats “as long as numbers are so high”.

His comments were made in parliament as MPs expressed concern at the chaotic procedures of his department.

Jonathan Gullis, the Conservative MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, said people seeking asylum were being “dumped on” his constituency by private contractor Serco.

. . . More than 40,000 people have crossed in small boats so far this year, including 1,800 last weekend alone, according to official figures. The government predicted in February that the numbers arriving in the UK via small boats could reach 60,000.

There doesn't seem to be any coherent plan to return migrants either to France or their home countries, nor any serious plan to deal with the fact that they are primarily young men. At this point, the UK parliamentary system is simply not dealing with this major social problem, while respecctable opinion seems incapable of even addressing the fact that it exists.

More Takes On Trump's Greenland Deal

The YouTube interview with John Hulsman,a foreign policy consultant, embedded above, is from earlier thia year; he correctly predicts the end of Keir Starmer, but more importantly, he puts the Greeland deal announced last Friday in a wider context. Trump's negotiating style, as he puts it, is to "ask for the stars and get the moon", and Trump has been doing this all along. In discussing the "framework" NATO deal announcd in January, Hulsman thinks Trump was able to negotiate the ability to develop Greenlanmd's minerals.

The current deal that was signed at the UN yesterday continues the objective Hulsman also discusses, giving the US de facto control over the territory while allowing Denmark and Greenland to claim de jure sovereignty. More importantly, as Monica Showalter points out, this is now independent of NATO.

In 1951, we entered into an agreement with Denmark allowing us to establish a base at Thule. Article XIV of that Treaty states that “This Agreement, being in implementation of the North Atlantic Treaty, shall remain in effect for the duration of the North Atlantic Treaty.” If we left NATO or it otherwise ceased to exist, we had no clear right to maintain defenses there. Nor did we have exclusive rights to ban foreign investments which posed security threats to us. In time, the treaty was inadequate to protect our interests, as Russia now had ICBMs, and Russian nuclear submarines were navigating Arctic waters. Moreover, the small population of Greenland was talking about independence, and Russian and Chinese governments were not averse to bribing them substantially in exchange for operating rights there. Our agreement was with Denmark, and it’s unclear it could bind an independent Greenland.

In other words, with the new agreement, Trump has effectively uncoupled Greenland from NATO. In his UN address yesterday, he strongly implied this was to NATO's benefit:

By expanding America’s footprint in the Arctic and North Atlantic, this deal also protects Europe in addition to America and greatly protects them. It also very much enhances NATO, which has a great leader. And Mark, I know you’re in the audience, and you are indeed a great leader, Mark Rutte, which is now growing stronger than ever before. NATO is doing things that nobody thought they would be able to do, including raising their number to 5% from 2%.

Nevertheless, NATO isn't forever, while US interests are a separate matter. Trump alluded to the potential fate of Europe, which would certaintly involve NATO, in later remarks:

It is deeply ironic that the United Nations has an entire institution, the UNESCO group of people and countries devoted to protecting cultural heritage. Yet with their ceaseless promotion of mass migration, these globalists are actively destroying the greatest cultures and most extraordinary heritage in all of history.

It's hard to avoid thinking that the UK-style parliamentary system is failing in both the UK and Canada, and potentially in other countries like France and Germany. In Canada, a longer-standing Quebec separatist movement has been joined by more recent ones in Alberta and Saskatchewan. In the UK, plans to house migrants in a former military facility near the village of Piddington have created a vocal separtist movement there:

A tiny English village has voted to leave the United Kingdom as a symbolic protest against government plans to house up to 1,200 migrants seeking asylum on a nearby military base.

Residents of Piddington, which has a population of about 350, voted overwhelmingly for secession in the nonbinding referendum. The results announced Wednesday showed 285 votes in favor of breaking away, with 26 villagers voting against.

. . . The center-left Labour Party government of Prime Minister Andy Burnham says it is making progress in processing asylum claims more quickly, so that migrants spend less time in state-sponsored accommodation, and stopping people crossing the English Channel in inflatable dinghies.

More than 41,000 people made the hazardous journey in 2025, but the number so far this year is down by more than 40% from the same period last year.

. . . “I understand the strength of feeling,” Burnham said Wednesday. “I will look at the issues being raised by the community and in the referendum, but we have to ensure that we have a fair plan” that spreads the burden of accommodating new arrivals across the country.

If Europe and Canada face political instability, it's only prudent to be aware of the contingency and plan for it; ensuring Greenland's position in the US defensive posture is a key part of such planning. Greenland was once seen as a support base to protect US convoys to Europe, but it's just as valuable as a base to attack European convoys to Canada. As I said yesterday, the timing of the Greenland announcement is remarkably close to Carney's announcement of "middle power" talks with European countries.

What's Really Going On With Greenland?

We now have Canada surrounded. 🤠 pic.twitter.com/uAMj89DY8T

— Eric Trump 🇺🇸 (@Eric_TrumpRv) September 19, 2026

The media commentary on Trump's Greenland deal doesn't seem to be very insightful. At The Wall Street Journal,

The Trump administration wisely connected Greenland’s security to America’s broader strategic position in the Western Hemisphere and the North Atlantic. The new agreement improves Washington’s strategic position as well as that of its European partners, which will benefit from a strengthened northern flank. The pact makes America and its partners safer and puts China and Russia on notice that the U.S. and its Arctic partners will stand shoulder to shoulder against their malign behavior in one of the world’s most dynamic regions.

But wait a moment. As far as we've seen, the Greenland deal is a trilateral agreement between the US, Denmark, and Greenland that's independent of NATO. According to Trump, as of this past January, a future deal involving NATO and Greenland is still in the works:

Based upon a very productive meeting that I have had with the Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, we have formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic Region. This solution, if consummated, will be a great one for the United States of America, and all NATO Nations. . . . Further information will be made available as discussions progress. Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, and various others, as needed, will be responsible for the negotiations — They will report directly to me. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Russia echoes the idea that the deal doesn't involve NATO:

The Kremlin said on Tuesday that a ‌deal between the United States, ‌Denmark and Greenland that will allow a ​larger US military presence on Greenland was a matter for those involved and that cooperation between Russia ‌and Washington ⁠in the Arctic was currently not on the agenda.

But so far, I haven't seen anyone mention that the announcement of the Greenland deal came on the heels of the kissy-kissy talk in Strasbourg of Canada becoming an EU "associate member".

Trump suggested the proposed EU arrangement could be a “hostile act” and threatened heavy tariffs on Europe if he judged its intentions to be unfriendly — raising the stakes ahead of Carney’s speech.

Asked about Trump’s comments, Carney said Canadians were united in rejecting outside attempts to dictate the country’s choices.

“Canadians are united that nobody is going to tell us what language we speak. No one is going to dictate our culture or with whom we can strike agreements internationally,” Carney said.

But the reality of the situation is far more constrained. According to the Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada,

With the release of the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), the Trump administration has delivered a comprehensive articulation of how it sees America’s core interests, what it expects from allies, and how it plans to compete in a world defined by great-power rivalry and economic insecurity. Whatever one thinks of its ideological framing or tone, the document is strategically significant. For the first time, we have a clear statement of second-term Trump priorities and an account of how Washington understands China, the Indo-Pacific, and even its own neighbourhood.

For Canada, the implications are profound. Our relationship with China—and our ability to operate with a degree of autonomy in the Indo-Pacific—will increasingly be shaped by how the United States defines the strategic map. And this strategy defines it in strikingly zero-sum terms: a return to spheres of influence, a renewed focus on balance of power, and an unapologetic assertion of U.S. primacy in the Western Hemisphere alongside intensified economic competition with China in the Indo-Pacific.

Frankly, it's hard for me to avoid thining a strengthened and normalized US military presence in Greenland represents a threat to Canada. The US has developed and probably continues to update war plans involving Canada since the 19th century.

Approved in 1930, War Plan Red did not propose a direct attack on Britain, especially not its superior navy, but an invasion of Canada. The US (always designated as ‘Blue’) would shore up North America as a defensive fortress and so prevent Britain from gaining a foothold for their own invasion south of the border.

Crucial to the success of War Plan Red would be capturing the port of Halifax, in Nova Scotia, as this provided a strategically vital base for British ships. So important was this target that the plan even proposed the use of poison gas to secure it. The hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls had to be seized too so that the Canadian power grid could be disabled.

A US presence in Greenland would facilitate a blockade of Canada's eastern ports and Hudson Bay, while it would also serve to prevent reinforcements from Europe. I assume Canada's strategic and military planners, insofar as it still has them, are aware of this, and indeed, NATO's European planners must be as well. So why is this dog not barking -- and just as intriguing, why does Putin not seem upset? It's almost as though he doesn't see the deal as a threat.

Ceuta Update

There's been very little current coverage of the Ceuta migrant crisis in US media. The report above is from German DW, and neither talking head is a native speaker of standard English, or even the semi-understandable mumbling we're supposed to revere in the UK. However, DW does continue the common current estimate of 10,000 Moroccan migrants remaining in Ceuta that I cited in my posts here in late August. According to France 24, which is slightly more detailed,

Police on Friday began moving hundreds of migrants from the beaches of Ceuta to the Spanish enclave's port area.

During the transfer, the police struggled to contain crowds of people jostling to secure a spot at the new tented site after weeks of living on the beaches. Authorities say there are enough tents for 1,700 people.

According to the DW report, police were forced to use rubber bulets to contain them, but it's worth noting that these were apparently a very small proportion of the estimated 10,000 remaining in the exclave. In tact, moving maybe 1700 into tents, where they'll remain inmdefinitely until "processed", seems nothing more than a token gesture. Roughly 8-9000 will remain on the beach or wherever else to harass the locals, damage businesses, and continue the public health nightmare.

Protests from residents are increasing:

Ceuta is bracing for a possible new mass crossing on Wednesday after calls spread on social media for migrants to enter the city on the same day that elections are being held in Morocco.

Tensions in the Spanish city in north Africa are rising and thousands of Ceutis marched in protest to the border with Morocco on Sunday. A sea barrier that was erected after the mass influx of migrants in July has broken apart, and doctors and nurses are preparing to strike.

José Manuel Albares, the Spanish foreign minister, said that Madrid had activated channels to counter calls circulating in Morocco for a new crossing. The interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, is visiting Ceuta on Monday.

About 80,000 people entered Ceuta irregularly during the crisis that began on July 30. The government has been unable to provide reliable figures, but estimates about how many remain in Ceuta, which has a regular population of 83,000, range between 10,000 and 15,000.

Aha! Note the received estimate is slowly creeping up to 15,000, although "the government has been unable to provide reliable figures". The report continues,

At Sunday’s demonstration, Cuetis chanted “expel the invaders”. There is a growing sense among residents that the city has surpassed its limits to cope with the numbers of migrants on its streets and beaches. Trampolin beach, which was cleared for a second time amid a stampede last week, has been fully occupied once more by a makeshift village of shelters.

The pressure is also being felt within the health service. CEMSATSE, the union with the largest representation among health workers in Ceuta, has called a strike for Thursday, the day after the threatened crossing.

It said the health system has “surpassed its operational capacity” and accuses the health ministry of failing to recognise an emergency. The health minister, Mónica García, has denied that there is a crisis in Ceuta’s health system and said the city’s only hospital was operating at 53 per cent capacity. Employees and patients protested outside the hospital in response.

García has previously accused those who warned that migrants could bring disease to Ceuta as being xenophobic, insisting that “migrants do not bring diseases, they contract them here because of poor conditions”. Yet she has subsequently reported cases of tuberculosis, varicella and scabies among migrants, as well as about 60 cases of gastroenteritis linked to contaminated water or poor food.

It's hard to imagine how uncontrolled sewage from 10-15,000 people, along with unsafe food and water, could be anything but a major public health crisis. The Spanish authorities have been able to put up tents for only 1700 of these people, who are clearly there in such numbers that clearing the beach is a sisyphean task. According to Reuters,

The vast majority of the ​migrants are men and ​boys. The temporary ⁠housing is built only for adult men, so minors are being separated and housed separately.

Three NGO leaders told Reuters that authorities had ​been too slow to provide migrants with minimum shelter required ​under the ⁠European migration pact, and that reception centres opened so far could not accommodate those still sleeping on the streets.

One NGO estimated that about 4,000 migrants remained outdoors on Ceuta's beaches and ⁠pavements, ​meaning the new centre would not be sufficient to ​clear makeshift camps in public areas. Two NGO leaders said officials probably expect most migrants to return voluntarily ​to Morocco.

But so far, they aren't going back, amd the one estimate of 4000 remaining from an HGO seems lowball indeed -- and this leave out the contingency of a whole new wave expected on Tuesday. So far, Spain seems to have been deliberately unwilling even to face realistically the consequences of 10-15,000 migrants semipermanently camped out in Ceuta, much less the practical requirements involved in any serious attempt to remove them.

Golly Gee, There's No Such Thing As Class Anymore!

Again, Real Cleqr Politics is either deliberately obtuse or crossing the line into gaslighting. Two pieces yesterday try to convince us that social classes are neither identifiable nor relevant, The Term Working Class Is Useless by Monica Potts at The New Republic, and Death of the Professional-Managerial Class by John Judis at Compact Magazine. Let's start with The New Republic:

Our political imagination has had a hard time catching up to this reality—that someone who drives a truck (which are very expensive, by the way) and wears a trucker hat and has literal grime on their hands from work might be better off than someone who’s filing patient financial forms at a desk in a hospital’s back office. It doesn’t fit our traditional image of working-class America. That’s why so many people reach for a definition that is kind of cultural and feels right.

Americans are even doing so in defining themselves. The Pew Research Center released a report just before Labor Day revealing that 60 percent of Americans—across education, income, occupation, and racial and ethnic groups—say they’re “working-class.” This percentage has ticked up over the years, but the term has increasingly taken on a partisan tinge. Two-thirds of Republican voters say the term describes them well, versus 55 percent of Democrats, and Republicans are more likely to do so regardless of their job, level of education, or income. Which means, increasingly, people who vote Republican just describe themselves as working class. Many Democrats worried about winning more working-class voters who vote Republican could just be chasing solid Republican voters who now use that label. That’s a losing game.

As best I can parse this out, she's saying more Americans are calling themselves "working class" while also calling themselves Republicans, so we should stop trying to reach out to the "working class", because this a chimera. Now John Judis, wsho self-identifies as a "longtime leftist", argues that the Professional Managerial Class is made up of Professionals, who are more leftist, and Managers, who are more right-wing (leave aside that this is the fallacy of hypostatization). This means that the class is fractured, which means that it does not exist (aside, that is, from the fact that this is a hypostatization):

In other words, as far as shared class consciousness goes, a diversified working class does not exist. There are many reasons for this. Differences over cultural issues of race and sex and over socio-economic issues like immigration have divided the potential members of a diversified working class. These differences often intersect with differences in political geography, creating a gulf between the world views of small town and metropolitan America. Divisions have also arisen in between private sector industrial and white-collar workers and the unionized public sector workers whose salaries they pay in taxes. These divisions have contributed to the disapproval of unions among workers who might have been expected to support them. Ruy Teixeira and I described some of these tensions in our book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?

. . . There are still large gaps in income and status between wage-laborers and professionals, and the political leadership that would unite them is absent. The labor movement is weak and divided. No more than a few percent of Americans could even name the current head of the AFL-CIO. Many Democratic Party leaders are still in hock to culturally progressive lobbies, foundations, and think tanks. The organization to which Mamdani and his allies belong, the Democratic Socialists of America, purports to speak for the working class but enthusiastically embraces the most extreme stands on immigration (open borders), crimes (abolish the police and prisons), sex (biological men in women’s sports) and race (reparations). The PMC may be in ruins, but the diversified working remains, at best, a work in progress.

So these writers are both leftists, and they're either concluding we should ignore the working class, because it's turning Republican, or despair that professionals and managers are too divided to become part of a diversified working class. But what about the traditional Marxist divide between the workers and the bourgeoisie, something to which only Monica Potts alludes even vaguely? If we can no longer define a coherent working class, can we still define a bourgeoisie? Well, I rediscoverd an essay I submitted to The Dartmouth Review in 2007, which they never published, which begins by making this point:

We’ve become squeamish over the past generation on the subject of social class, which is unfortunate, since in the case of the Dartmouth petition trustee dispute, it’s clear that divisions based on social class are playing themselves out. For instance, Peter Robinson, one of the petition candidates elected to the Dartmouth Board of Trustees in 2005, said in an interview with The Dartmouth Review following his election,

I will be the people's Trustee—maybe even the peasants' Trustee. Some of the members of the board, I'm told, attend Trustee meetings by flying into Lebanon in their own private jets. I will be taking the red-eye Jet Blue to Boston and then going north to Hanover on the Greyhound bus.

Yet in the volumes that are being written on the petition Trustees, the class question is the dog that isn’t barking.

That class seems to have fallen off the agenda as a matter for intellectual attention is particularly puzzling in light of the extraordinary critiques of American culture that appeared in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, such as C Wright Mills’s White Collar and The Power Elite; Vance Packard’s The Status Seekers; Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life; Ferdinand Lundberg’s The Rich and the Super Rich; and – after an interval that suggests the trend was petering out -- Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. All these books rely heavily on class as part of their social analysis, and it’s worth mentioning that they appear as non-fiction at a time when the American novel was beginning to falter badly (the novel is itself often a vehicle for discussing social class).

I didn'r realize at the time that Jeffrey Hart, the Review's faculty adviser, was sinking into dementia and apparently no longer endorsing my work. Looking at it almost 20 years later, that was a darn good essay. But then, Hart and the Review never produced more than B-listers like Robinson, Laura Ingraham, Dinesh D'Souza, and William S Lind.

The point that Mills and Lundberg in particular were making in thr 1950s and 60s continues to be as valid as ever, the true upper class as envisioned by Marx continues to exist, and it's clearly identifiable. We've seen in recent discussions of Ivy admissions, including here, that members of the identifiable upper class maintain mechanisms that overwhelmingly favor their offspring in a theoretically meritocratic admissions process. But it's also recognized that an Ivy degree is a less certain class indicator than attendance at particular "independent" secondary schools -- this was the case, for instance, with Graham Platner, whose class identity was exposed from his semester at Hotchkiss.

They can also be relably identified by having multiple homes in specific zip codes, such as Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, Aspen, Jackson Hole, the Hamptons, and Hillsborough. They serve on non-profit boards. They are members of particular clubs and secret societies like the Bohemians and Skull and Bones. What's incongruous is that leftist writers like those above are beginning to despair of their ability to identify the working class at all, but the bourgeoisie has always been clearly identifiable.

So, why is RCP trying to convince us class is irrelevant? Isn't it peculiar that writers who claim to be leftists are being paid to do tnis?

"College Is Coming Apart"

Typical of Real Clear Politics, it ran two essays on higher ed yesterday that are remarkably obtuse. The first is at The Atlantic by Ian Bogost, Collegr Is Coming Apart.

College in America makes two promises. On the one hand, college is a credentialing service: It awards a degree that affirms knowledge and sends a graduate into a career. On the other hand, college is a coming-of-age service. It forms identity through social exploration and intellectual development. It is the American ideal for how a young person figures out who they are. Partying, drinking, Greek life, sports, and other forms of college life always risked undermining the educational project—and vice versa. But the two categories coexisted well enough.

. . . Now AI has separated the two purposes of college almost entirely. Writing an essay previously required doing something resembling the assigned academic work. Because AI makes it possible to complete coursework without much or any intellectual labor, AI has disconnected the output from the process (if students choose the shortcut).

He claims that the combination of AI and research cuts by the Trump administrations have somehow driven college life asunder -- but in summing things up, he contradicts his whole argument:

Undergraduate education, credentialing, scientific research, professionalization, and coming of age still occupy the same campuses. But they are clearly no longer parts of the same enterprise. They have not been so for many years—probably many decades. Looking back at my own career, I can see clearly that every single term of it has taken place in the shadow of this family of mismatches. Teaching and research sometimes align, but not always. Becoming educated has little to do with becoming an adult, apart from taking place on the same campus.

He started out claiming that two very recent developments, AI and Trump, have "destroyed the sanctity of learning", but now he concludes this has probably been going on for many decades. Certainly my experience as a graduate assistant 50 years ago was that students weren't coming out of college well educated at all. So what on earth is his point? I dunno, but he got it into The Atlantic. I'd be interested to see if an AI editor could clean this up, or maybe just tell the guy to start over.

Here's the second piece; English Departments Have Lost the Plot:

WVU business professor Craig Warmke got some attention by calling out the Princeton English major course offerings. It’s all the sort of thing we have come to expect. Courses on: dolls, socialism, makeovers, capitalist burnout in contemporary fiction… You get the idea.

The problem with the Princeton syllabus is not the individual courses. Fine, study socialism and Sondheim! The problem is the overall balance. These courses are all held in equal regard. The problem is the lack of insistence upon the canonical works of English. The problem is contemporary fiction instead of Shakespeare, dolls instead of George Eliot. Of the twelve courses you take as an English major, none is obliged to be on Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth—authors our grandmothers might have read as school-leavers. Yes, the syllabus is ideological, but it is also just lame.

. . . So here is my plea to the students themselves. Challenge yourself to read the canon. Take it upon yourself to read the biggest works written in English, the grandest. You can still write about gender if you study Elizabethan poetry, as Camille Paglia did. You can still write cultural commentary if you read the old works, as Susan Sontag did. You can still be a modern if you read the classics, as Merve Emre is. The question is not what you think of the debate about woke colleges and canons—the question is whether you are up for the challenge.

The auhor, Henry Oliver, is apparently some sort of post-doc fellow, which just illustrates the problem in a different light: there aren't all that many tenure-track jobs for PhDs who specialize in tbe canon, which is maybe his real subtext. But this goes to the economic issue that neither he nor the Atlantic writer mentions -- if students don't sign up for courses, the universities won't offer them. The fact is that students prefer courses in dolls, socialism, and makeovers. The Princeton English Department requires only one pre-1700 course for a major, because students won't major in English if more are required, and that means fewer English profs.

But what kind of students are Princeton and other elite schools admitting? Not long ago, I brought up ALDC, Athletes, Legacies, Dean’s Interest List (often linked to major donors), and Children of faculty and staff.

ALDC is an acronym that emerged from the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard lawsuit, where internal admissions data was made public for the first time. It refers to four categories of applicants who receive preferential treatment in the admissions process at Harvard and, by extension, at most elite universities.

. . . The most comprehensive data on how ALDC preferences work at an Ivy League school comes from the SFFA v. Harvard trial, where Harvard’s own admissions records from 2014 to 2019 were analyzed by economists. The findings were striking.

During that period, ALDC applicants made up roughly 5% (SFFA v. Harvard, trial disclosures) of Harvard’s applicant pool but accounted for approximately 30% of admitted students. The overall admission rate for non-ALDC applicants hovered around 4.5% to 5%, while ALDC applicants were admitted at dramatically higher rates.

Recruited athletes were admitted at approximately 86% (SFFA v. Harvard, trial disclosures), making athletic recruitment by far the single largest admissions advantage available at Harvard. Legacy applicants were admitted at roughly 33%, which was more than five times the overall acceptance rate during the same period. Applicants on the Dean’s Interest List were admitted at approximately 42%. Children of faculty and staff were admitted at close to 47%.

My own estimates, looking at the reported makeup of recent Ivy first-year classes, have been that probably fewer than 25% of admissions are competitively based on the traditional criteria of grades, SATs, and extracurriculars. ALDC, for instance, omits foreign students, who are sought after, because they pay full freight. Children of faculty, as a practical matter, encompasses children of faculty at other schools as well. Among other things, this ensures a student body makeup that reflects and reinforces typical faculty attitudes.

As I look back at my Ivy schoolmates now 60 years ago, I'm recognizing how many were legacies, preppies, rich kids, and faculty children, in many cases the worst possible choices for me to consider as friends. But if elite schools are admitting classes made up of 75% students who shouldn't be there, what can these writers expect from this sort of student body? Instead, they're blaming Trump and AI. But 50 and 60 years ago, the colleges were admititng the same people, who were partying and doing analog plagiarism and cheating at precisely the same rate students are using AI now.

The big problm is that universities haven't been reforming themselves, and this will need to start with admissions.

Fun With AI

ai users are so conditioned to writing unnecessarily verbose prompts that they even write their memes like that. pic.twitter.com/2Dj0lOJRo7

— George Crudo (@GeorgeCrudo) August 28, 2023

As I've noted here now and then, I've resumed writing for literary web zines after about a 15-year break. One thing that didn't exist in the earlier time was AI. AI is very political, and the literary web zines are almost unanimous in forbidding the use of AI. According to the UK Guardian,

The self-published zine has long been central to cultural revolutions, from queer activism to Black feminism and the riot grrrl punk movement, producing titles such as Sniffin’ Glue and Sweet-Thang along the way. But now the traditionally analogue art form faces a new shift: artificial intelligence.

AI may seem incompatible with the these cult DIY booklets, but some creatives, designers and artists have begun to experiment with the technology, causing alarm in parts of the underground publishing world. It has been their Dylan-goes-electric moment.

Wait a moment. I'm olld enough to have lived through Dylan-goes-ekectric. It was a nothingburger. I asked the oracle, "What was Bob Dylan's first electic album, and how did its sales compare with earlier albums?" It answered,

Bringing It All Back Home, released in March 1965, was Bob Dylan's first album to feature electric instrumentation. The album was split structurally: side one featured him backed by a full electric rock band, while side two retained his traditional acoustic sound.In terms of sales and chart performance, Bringing It All Back Home significantly outperformed all of his earlier albums, marking a massive commercial breakthrough.

. . . While the shift to electric rock alienated purists within the contemporary folk scene, the gamble proved to be a highly lucrative turning point that transformed him from a niche folk icon into a massive global rockstar.

There's been no such turning point among the web literary zines. A typical policy is absolutely against its use:

We will not consider AI generated works, whether in part or in full.

I asked the oracle, "What are typical AI novel writing products, and why are they used if publishers forbid them?" It answered,

Sudowrite, ChatGPT, and Claude, which writers use to brainstorm, outline, or draft text despite traditional publishers banning fully machine-generated prose due to copyright and quality risks.

. . . Independent creators face heavy output pressures on online marketplaces, prompting some to risk using automated text.

Hack or no, it's hard to make any kind of money as a writer. A lot of the market for writing is in genre fields like romance, science fiction, and fantasy, where characters, settings, and action are formulaic and stereotypical. They don't pay much, but they pay something -- why not automate the job and make a decent hourly wage? One problem is that if the genre publishers acknowledge this, it's an insult to their readership. But that's simply how it is.

The way AI large language models work is they digest huge volumes of writing and calculate the probability of one particular word following another. Thus they can compose understandable prose, generate plots, and imitate style. In this post, I asked AI to create a typical Lydia Davis micro fiction, and it came up with something so close it was unintentionally satirical. Amazingly, an AI detector rated it human-written -- this may have been because I asked AI to imitate a particular human writer.

I asked the oracle, "Can you write me a typical 100 word micro fiction that would appear in a literary web zine?" It replied,

The kitchen smelled of burnt toast and her mother’s cheap lavender water.

Elena unrolled the blueprint across the grease-stained counter, weighing the corners down with a salt shaker and a half-empty jar of honey. The ink was fading, a grid of rooms that never came to be. Outside, the midday freight train rattled the windowpanes, blurring the neat lines of the master bedroom.

She traced the hallway with a sticky index finger. Ten years ago, they called this a fresh start. Now, it was just paper. She folded it twice, tucked it into her coat, and left the front door wide open.

Then it said, "I can draft a matching 25-word author bio to accompany it." I told it to go ahead:

Elena Vance is a writer from Los Angeles whose short fiction has appeared in several digital journals. She explores themes of forgotten spaces and family inheritance.

I asked it, "Can you come up with a better name for a lady micro fiction writer than Elena Vance?" It answered,

Here are several distinct name options for a lady microfiction writer, grouped by the "vibe" or literary tone they project:

Maeve Thorne – Short, punchy, and memorable. Ideal for writers who focus on precise, striking prose.

Selah Glass – Elegant but slightly fragile; pairs perfectly with ethereal or experimental writing.

Arden Wells – Gender-neutral and classic; carries a strong, sophisticated literary presence.

Unfortunately, I fed the story above into the free GPTZero AI detector, and it flagged it as 100% AI generated. Nevertheless, I think AI is trying to tell us something. I'm still trying to think out how you could write a story about AI that a literary web zine would publish.

UPDATE: "Can you write me a 100 word micro fiction as though Mark Twain had written it?"

The old hound, Buster, possessed a theological mind and a deep reverence for the dinner bell. When the town preacher asserted that all righteous creatures would find eternal rest in the hereafter, Buster thumped his tail against the porch planks in absolute despair.

To a dog who spent his earthly days chasing elusive rabbits and dodging the cook’s broom, the prospect of sitting perfectly still through eternity sounded remarkably like a permanent stay at the county pound.

He closed his eyes, let out a heavy sigh, and decided right then to commit some small, comfortable sin before supper.

GPTZero also flagged this as AI-generated.