Is AI A Political Issue?

I notice a piece in Politico, The Democratic Split Over Whether to Befriend AI — or Vilify It, that takes 2800 words to tell us that Demnocrats are split over AI. Well, everyone is split over AI, in part because nobody seems to be able to tell us what AI is. I think what's generally meant falls within the category of "generative AI", which creates "new" content using a combination of natural language processing and massive data search.

For example, I asked Chrome AI mode, "Please write me a 500-word report on George Washington". It answered, in part,

George Washington (1732–1799) was the foundational figure of the United States, serving as the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolution and as the nation’s first president. His leadership style, defined by a commitment to republicanism and the voluntary relinquishing of power, set the precedents for the American executive branch.

Military Leadership and the Revolution

Washington’s military career began in the Virginia militia during the French and Indian War, but his historical significance peaked in 1775 when he was appointed to lead the Continental Army. Despite facing superior British forces, chronic supply shortages, and internal political dissent, Washington’s primary achievement was the preservation of his army. His strategic patience and decisive victories at Trenton, Princeton, and Yorktown eventually forced a British surrender. More importantly, his refusal to accept absolute power after the war—symbolized by resigning his commission to Congress in 1783—cemented his reputation as a "Cincinnatus" figure who prioritized civilian rule over military dictatorship.

This really isn't bad. I wouldn't want to turn it in as a middle-school history assignment, since the vocabulary and concepts are pretty advanced, but I could probably modify the request by adding "as if written by a 13-yeae-old" and get a lot closer. But this simply magnifies the Cliff's Notes problem: back in the day, a graduate assistant needed a set of Cliff's Notes for any texts covered in freshman comp so he could catch plagiarists. Now, it would be a lot harder to allege, "This looks like you got it out of AI", since the range of possible outputs is much wider and harder to prove.

This also goes to the nature of education. If the object of college classes is to produce people who can write papers as though a machine had written them, then AI will replace many four-year degrees at far less cost. Let's face it, this is a major problem. My Google news feed is already aware of it. Instead of linking, say, to the Washington Post, it will embed a video report prefaced by an AI-generated news story. It carries a warning, "This material was generated by AI, which can make mistakes".

But the story is written in complete, grammatical, idiomatic sentences that are on topic and more or less informative. There are human Washington Post reporters who can't do that well. In cases like this, it seems to me that the Washington Post can fire a lot of reporters and editors and produce a better product at less cost. This can be a political issue: maybe we need laws that restrict the amount of news that can be reported by AI and require a certain number of less capable humans. Yeah, that'll work, kinda like DEI that isn't based on race but outright discriminates against talent.

Then I took the next step: I asked Chrome AI mode, "Please write me three paragraphs that look like they were written by David Glann in The New Yorker". It dodged the question, but it did show me how this could definitely be done:

David Glann, writing for The New Yorker, typically examines the intersection of high culture and the quiet indignities of modern existence. His prose is marked by a droll, slightly detached elegance, often punctuated by specific, almost tactile observations of urban life. A piece by Glann might begin with a sensory detail—the precise, metallic click of a turnstile or the specific shade of grey in a Tuesday morning fog—before expanding into a meditation on the shared anxieties of the professional class.

His middle paragraphs often drift into a characteristic blend of erudition and self-deprecation, weaving references to obscure literature or art history into the mundane fabric of a commute. He possesses a keen ear for the performative nature of intellectual life, often skewering the pretensions of his peers while simultaneously admitting his own complicity in them. The sentences are long and rhythmic, carrying the reader through a series of clauses that mirror the wandering, inquisitive nature of a mind trying to find meaning in the architectural sprawl of Manhattan.

Ultimately, a Glann essay concludes by pulling back the lens, shifting from the specificities of a personal encounter to a broader, more philosophical vista. He has a gift for the "melancholy epiphany," where the smallness of the individual is contrasted against the vast, indifferent mechanisms of the city. His final lines often leave the reader in a state of contemplative unease, having been led gracefully to a conclusion that feels both surprising and, in retrospect, entirely inevitable.

I think it's telling me that if I paid it a little more, it would in fact write me a David Glann story, which is another way of saying David Glann is a semi-sophisticated hack who could indeed be replaced by a machine, and you could persuade the upper bourgeoisie to pay for it. So I went one step further: "Please write me the initial paragraph of a hypothetical John Updike story about a middle class guy in midlife crisis". Unbelievably, it came up with this:

Thomas felt the sudden, waxy weight of his own skin as he stood in the fluorescent glare of the suburban hardware store, clutching a brass deadbolt he didn’t know how to install. At forty-four, his life had become a series of quiet, repetitive geometries—the neat diagonal of the morning commute, the predictable cooling of his marriage, and the unsettling realization that his soul was being slowly replaced by the mortgage-backed security of his own routine. Outside, the autumn light slanted across the asphalt with a cruel, golden clarity, mocking the soft, spreading middle of a man who had once dreamed of soaring but had instead learned only how to settle.

You know whwt? This thing has potential. I think I could publish a New Yorker that the same audience would buy for a fraction of the cost, with new writers like Jonathan Christopher, Sarah Beriswanger, Lawrence Fromme -- I'm already working up their Wikipedia entries. This really should be against the law.

UPDATE: Please write the hypothetical first paragraph of a newly-discovered chapter of Moby Dick:

The Great Leviathan, though often portrayed as a creature of mindless malice, possesses a silence more profound than the deepest trenches of the Pacific. It is a quietude not of vacancy, but of an ancient, brooding intelligence that defies the frantic measurements of man’s harpoons. To look upon the unblinking eye of the whale is to witness a mirror of the primordial void, where the turbulent anxieties of the Pequod’s deck are swallowed whole by a vast, watery indifference.

Poppy Bush Nostalgia

I'm convinced that Victor Davis Hanson is actually an AI bot, but the intellectual welterweights at Instapundit are linking to his latest essay, Pseudo-Recessions:

As the 1992 campaign approached, incumbent president George H.W. Bush was seen as a shoo-in for reelection.

The First Gulf War ended in 1991 with a spectacular U.S. victory at the head of a coalition that had expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait with few losses.

For much of 1991, Bush’s approval ratings hovered between 90 and 70 percent.

By February 1992, an obscure Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton, emerged as the favorite Democratic nominee. But he was written off as having little chance to knock off the popular Republican incumbent president with far more foreign affairs experience.

Bush, however, had just lost his brilliant 1988 campaign manager, Lee Atwater, to cancer. And third-party prairie-fire candidate Ross Perot had entered the race, drawing off conservative Bush support.

I'm even older than Hanson, but my memory of 1992 is very different, as is my memory of 1980, for that matter. According to a 2015 essay by Jules Witcover in Politico,

The first Bush president, George Herbert Walker, never would have reached the Oval Office in 1989 had the 1980 presidential nominee, Ronald Reagan, not chosen him as his running mate. But heading into the convention in Detroit, it was not at all clear that Bush would be Reagan’s pick. . . . In 1974, when Vice President Gerald Ford became president in the wake of Richard Nixon’s resignation, Ford passed over Bush, regarded by many other party leaders as a quirky lightweight, as VP in favor of New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

Witcover goes on to outline that in 1980, Reagan hoped to enlist Gerald Ford as his vice presidential running mate on a "dream ticket", but once that idea fell apart, he was forced to fall back on Bush, who'd impressed him as a "wimp" in the primaries. He concludes that Poppy Bush's term, and then the political careers of his sons Dubya and Jeb, were

a wholly unanticipated outcome of an old and bizarre political episode in vice-presidential selection that unexpectedly put the first Bush on the path to the presidency, with his two sons after him. What, one could ask, would Ronnie think today if he knew what he hath wrought?

In 1988, Bush ran on the basis that he would represent Reagan's third term. But by 1992, he'd broken his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge by caving to Democrats in 1990 budget negotiations. This became fodder for his primary opponent Pat Buchanan, and it also gave credibility to Ross Perot's third-party campaign that portrayed Bush as part of a uniparty political establishment. But Bush himself repeatedly supplied episodes that further damaged his standing, like when, at a state dinner in Japan just before the 1992 primary season, he fainted and vomited onto Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa's trousers.

During one of the presidential debates, he visibly checked his watch as a woman from the audience asked him a question. Following an episode at a grocers' convention where he appeared to be amazed at a supermarket scanner, media characterized him as being out of touch with everyday life. There was a similar episode on his Cigarette speedboat at Kennebunkport.

And on one hand, although Bush's approval reached 80% in the immediate wake of the First Gulf War in 1991, his failure to continue to Baghdad and remove Saddam Hussein laid the seeds for another war a dozen years later, and there was an underlying sense of unfinished business in 1992. Certainly the 1991 Desert Storm victory did him no good by 1992. But Ed Driscoll, agreeing with Hanson, concludes in the Instapundit post,

But with Atwater having passed away from brain cancer in 1991, the following year, Bush looked utterly exhausted on the campaign trail, in sharp contrast to Clinton’s rockstar energy and charisma. While Rush Limbaugh was on the scene by 1992, there was no Fox News, no original era Drudge Report, no Blogosphere, and the DNC-MSM could still shape reality uncontested for millions of voters[.]

. . . One of my favorites was the DNC-MSM, in lockstep with their candidate Bill Clinton, pummeling Bush in the run-up to the 1992 election over a minor recession that Clinton described as “the worst economy in 50 years,” only to turn around and reveal that, as the Charlotte Business Journal wrote in 2010, “The U.S. economy actually grew 4.2% in the fourth-quarter that year and went on to enjoy a terrific decade-long run of prosperity.

Lee Atwater could promote Bush as Reagan's third term only as long as Bush was able to follow through, but he wasn't able to do that. Rush Limbaugh, on the other hand, gave him something to work with. One take on the First Gulf War was that Bush needed it to distract attention from the fact that he'd had no domestic successes up to the fall of 1991, and without that distraction, he wouldn't be able to run a successful campaign in 1992. That he had a serious primary opponent in Pat Buchanan undescores this, as well as the fact that it wasn't just Bill Clinton who beat him in 1992, it was also the erratic Ross Perot.

Jules Witcover asked what Reagan might have thought of the outcome of choosing Bush as his runnong mate in 1980, but I'm not sure if this matters -- a measure of Trump's effectiveness is that he was able to end the putative Bush dynasty and the related Cheney faction of the Republican party. Witcover didn't anticipate this when he wrote in 2015; he really didn't even anticipate Trump.

The Bottom Of The Ivies

A week ago, I linked to YouTube testimony from a disaffected Brown student, Alex Shieh, who pointed out that applicants from designated prep schools that act as Ivy "feeders" have a big advantage over other applicants, and that the Ivy system is effectively designed around the wealthy and the upper bourgeoisie, whose offspring attend these schools. This simply repeats an observation about the Ivies that's become commonplace.

Then, earlier this week, I began to wonder if the Brown shooting rampage would affect Brown's standing in the US News college rankings. That in turn reminded me that Brown has traditionally been regarded as at the bottom of the Ivies. Chrome AI mode says, "In the mid-20th century, Brown was sometimes viewed as a 'poor relation' or 'on the fringe' compared to the older, more established social prestige of the 'Big Three'". However, this has changed: The bottom of the Ivies is now Dartmouth, which tied with Brown at 13 in the US News 2025 rankings. According to Ivy Coach Daily:

Dartmouth College rose in its US News ranking to [13th], up from 18th the prior year. Still, Dartmouth has the lowest ranking among the Ivies, which is largely the byproduct of the US News ranking methodology, which tends to benefit larger universities that often have a greater population of economically disadvantaged students (Dartmouth is the smallest school in the Ivy League).

The proportion of economically disadvantaged students among the Ivies is relative indeed, as Alex Shieh pointed out. But I'm intrigued that since I was a student at Dartmouth in the 1960s, its reputation has fallen so far, to the point that 2025 was a good year if it could just pull even with Brown. At the same link,

US News downgraded Brown University’s ranking to 13th place nationally for its 2025 edition, down from 9th in 2024.

Whew, Brown had to drop out of the top ten just so Dartmouth could pull even with it! I asked Chrome AI mode, "Has Dartmouth's position in the US News Rankings declined in recent years?" It replied,

Dartmouth College's ranking in U.S. News & World Report has trended slightly downward over the past 20 years, shifting from a consistent top 10 position in the early 2000s to the low-to-mid teens by 2025. 20-Year High: It frequently ranked #7 in the 1990s and maintained a top 10 presence (e.g., #9 in 2011) for much of the subsequent decade.

Current Standing: As of late 2025, Dartmouth is ranked #13 among National Universities, an improvement from its recent low of #18 in the 2024 edition.

So Dartmouth has moved from somewhere in the middle, below Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, but above Brown, Cornell, and Penn, to the bottom, below Brown and consistently out of the top ten. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Has the Dartmouth Board of Trustees had any public reaction to Dartmouth's decline in college rankings?" It answered,

The Dartmouth Board of Trustees has not issued a formal, dedicated public statement reacting to recent fluctuations in college rankings. Instead, the administration and Board have generally adopted a stance of downplaying the significance of rankings as a primary measure of institutional success.

Key elements of their collective reaction and messaging in 2024 and 2025 include:

- Redefining Success: President Sian Beilock, in consultation with the Board, has stated that Dartmouth should be evaluated by the "knowledge we contribute" and the "caliber of leaders we produce" rather than "simply by prestige, or rankings, or endowment size". . .

- Focus on Internal Metrics: Recent Board discussions have focused on internal "priorities of impact" rather than external lists, specifically touting improvements in student mental health, campus housing, and financial aid expansion.

Blah blah blah. Nevertheless, I seem to recall there was a brouhaha some years ago when the admissions office, for whatever reason, reduced the proportion of athletes in its admissions quotas. I think it might be reasonable to surmise that this would have the effect of raising average test scores in an entering class, which in turn could impact its ranking. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Did Dartmouth reduce the number of admissions slots reserved for athletes?" It answered,

Yes, Dartmouth has reduced the number of admissions slots reserved for recruited athletes.

Starting in 2020, the college implemented a 10% reduction in the number of recruited athletes per entering class. This policy was established to provide the admissions office with more flexibility in shaping the incoming class and to balance the student body between athletic and other pursuits.

Key details regarding this reduction include:

- Targeted Reduction: The goal was specifically to reduce the number of "recruited" athletes in each class by 10%.

Now we're atarting to get someplace. Regular vistiors know that one of my favorite topics is the relative size of elite-school admissions quotas: if we acknowledge that elite schools traditionally treat public high school graduates applying on the basis of grades, SATs, and extracurriculars as just one admissions category among several, which may also include athletes, preppies, and legacies, what is the actual relative size of the "meritocratic" admissions quota?

The\ short answer is that this is a closely guarded secret among all the nominally "selective" schools. But we can estimate its size if we can get an idea of the relative size of the other major categories. Chrome AI mode gave part of the game away farther down in its answer:

Recent reports from late 2025 indicate that the admission of recruited athletes [at Dartmouth] has become more selective as a direct result of these reduced slots. While the number of recruited spots decreased, athletes still represent a significant portion of the student body, comprising roughly 19% of the undergraduate population as of late 2025.

But if the current proportion of athletes, admitted in a separate quota, is 19%, and this represents a reduction of 10%, then the previous quota must have been something more like 21%. In other words, even with a reduction, something like 20% of applicants to this elite school have always been admitted on the basis primarily of athletic ability, not intelligence, and Dartmouth has been able to increase its standing by slightly tweaking this quota. This is astonishing.

But in this post, I linked to a story in The Atlantic that said,

Less than 2 percent of the nation’s students attend so-called independent schools. But 24 percent of Yale’s class of 2024 attended an independent school. At Princeton, that figure is 25 percent. At Brown and Dartmouth, it is higher still: 29 percent.

So at Dartmouth, we can say with a fair degree of assurance that the quota for preppies is 29%, while the quota for athletes is 19%, or something at least close to those numbers, which puts just those two quotas at 48%, which amounts to nearly half of all those accepted in recent entering classes. But this leaves out quotas for other generally recognized groups, including legacies, foreign students, and children of celebrities, politicians, and major donors, not to mention DEI.

All of these quotas are probably relatively quite a bit higher than we might normally assume; I never would have imagined the quota for athletes would be as high as 19%, much less higher. If we give these others values in the 10-20% range, we can begin to surmise that the quota for public high school students applying on the basis of SATs, grades, and extracurriculars, the "meritocratic" group, is much lower than we might think -- I've estimated this at 20% here, but even that may be optimistic.

As I've said, a question that's been at the back of my mind ever since I was a Dartmouth undergraduate is why my schoolmates turned out to be so unexceptional. I'm still working on a satisfactory answer, but I think I'm making progress.

Brown VP For Public Safety and Emergency Management Placed On Leave

🚨 BREAKING: Brown University just put its police chief on LEAVE after the emergency response was horrifically BOTCHED, letting the shooter get away and kill an MIT professor

Trump administration is also INVESTIGATING.

BROWN MUST CLEAN HOUSE! Don't stop with him!

This was a… pic.twitter.com/RDAn66pvdy

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) December 23, 2025

Continuing the trend, most of the aggregators haven't picked this up. Via the UK Daily Mail,

University officials announced Monday that Rodney Chatman, the head of public safety at the school, was placed on leave effective immediately, and his day-to-day responsibilities were given to former Providence Police Chief Hugh Clements.

The decision comes amid intense scrutiny over the school's security policies in the wake of the December 13 mass shooting, during which students Ella Cook and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov were tragically killed and nine others left with injuries.

Remarkably, as I noted yesterday, Chatman had been on administrative leave for much of his time in his previous position, chief of the University of Utah campus police. At Brown, earlier this year, two campus police unions issued "no conficence" votes about him. It looks like it took the December 13 shootings to get anyone to listen. The Daily Mail continues,

School president Christina Paxson sent out a detailed letter to the Brown community acknowledging 'the anxiety, fear and stress' in the community on the back of the shooting and outlining the actions officials will make moving forward.

'I understand the gravity of the concerns about safety that follow a tragedy of the magnitude that Brown has suffered,' she wrote.

'I want to assure you of Brown’s deep commitment to take every possible action to increase the safety and security of our campus, with the goal of protecting our community from future harm.'

As I noted last week, the application deadline for the fall 2026 school year is January 5, which leaves families conaidering applying to Browm just enough time to reconsider their choice. I suspect this was one among several factors that gave the Brown Board of Fellows, which is what they call their board of trustees, the vapors. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Will the shootings affect Brown's college ranking?" It answered with remarkable complacency,

Major college ranking systems like U.S. News & World Report and The Wall Street Journal do not currently use "campus crime" or "safety statistics" as direct metrics in their ranking formulas. Consequently, a single tragic event such as the December 13, 2025, shooting at Brown University is unlikely to result in a direct drop in its numerical ranking.

I'm sure the Fellows on the Board found this vastly reassuring. It intrigues me that President Paxson was radio silent for much of last week. She issued a weepy letter on Friday, after the suspect's identity was released:

Nothing can fully bring closure to the lives that have been shattered by last weekend’s gun violence. Now, however, our community has the opportunity to move forward and begin a path of repair, recovery and healing.

. . . We recognize the profound anxiety and fear that members of our community and the surrounding region have experienced in recent days, and we hope this significant development provides some comfort, even as we continue to navigate the impacts of last weekend’s tragic violence. It is my hope that this news also will end the harmful and dangerous online targeting of members of the Brown community, arising from rampant and baseless speculation, some of it based on individuals’ ethnic origin, culture and religion.

. . . As we look ahead to healing and recovery, I am so proud of everything that makes us Brown.

Currrently, Brown is tied for 13 on the US News ranking. Strangely, its graduate engineering program, the poor quality of which was a factor in Neves Valente's shooting rampage, is nevertheless a relatively high 42. The Wall Street Journal ranking, behind a paywall, has Brown at 36, which is probably somewhat more realistic, but still on the high side. Dartmouth, my alma mater, is tied with Brown at 13 in the US News rankings, but at WSJ, it was at 57, probably also much more accurate.

I suspect that Brown's ratings will decline in next year's surveys. Other areas of pressure would include alumni, who'll be less willing to donate if they feel Brown has become a laughingstock, and the problem of lawsuits from victims -- the lack of cameras in the building and nearby campus areas, the slow campus police response, the fact that a homeless guy was living in the basement, and the fact that Neves Valente had been spotted on campus and his suspicious presence reported in previous weeks will be factors in lawsuits.

Add to this the factor that the main duty of any corporate board is to hire, evaluate, and fire the CEO, and the Brown Board of Fellows' options narrow. Nwevertheless, this past May,

A familiar face will continue to occupy the president’s office at Brown University for the next two years.

Brown President Christina H. Paxson’s contract was set to end on June 30, 2026, but the university’s Corporation unanimously approved a two-year extension earlier this month, according to a letter sent by Chancellor Brian T. Moynihan to the Brown community on Tuesday.

. . . “During a tumultuous time facing American higher education, Brown is fortunate to benefit from President Paxson’s steady and principled leadership,” Moynihan wrote. “We are excited that the University will continue to benefit from her strategic vision, boundless energy, unwavering dedication and fortitude during periods of momentous change. Our community has been made stronger by her sincere belief in all the good that Brown can do in the world.”

Townhall commented,

It has taken the university more than a week since the fatal shooting of two students to come to the decision to suspend Chatman.

But I now feel certain that at some point, we'll get another weepy letter from President Paxson, this one announcing her unanticipated decision to retire. I wish I could have listened in on the conference calls among the Fellows on the Board. Brown will have to settle numerous lawsuits, buy Paxson out of her contract, and pay outside attorneys and consultants. This will be an expensive time.

Fox Paul Mauro Interview On The Brown Shooting

I've been puzzled that so little attention has been paid to the Brown shooting in any media, mainstream or alt. This is partly because the holidays started on Columbus Day. Oddly, the only analysis or opinion that's run at all at Real Clear Politics was its link to a Conservative Treehouse piece that suggested Brown may have disabled its surveillance cameras at the behest of left-wing groups, which I discussed here, but so far, we've had no corroboration that this was or wasn't done.

About the closest any media outlet has come to serious analysis of the issues surrounding the shooting is an interview over the weekend Fox did with its contributor Paul Mauro, who held policy-level positions with NYPD in a 23-year career. He touches on several key issues in the interview, embedded above. At 2:10, he begins:

Brown University police leadership really has to own a lot of this. They really seem to have had no provisions in place for hardening that target. That was an outer-perimeter building for that university. The fact that the person who was a quote-unquote "hero" here was living in the basement showed you how lax things were. But in light of what [Neves] just did, usually by now we have some kind of an image of how he lived, what he was up to, what his gripe was, there doesn't seem to have been a manifesto, he seems to have purposely tried to keep himself vague here, and that's a little odd, because the whole thing feels ideological, but he's not giving us a message, which is a little bit contradictory in these events. And then there's the fact that he clearly took measures to avoid the cameras, try to hide, all of that, then he keeps his rental car overdue, which would have caused an alert, and then he kills himself Tuesday, when the case didn't seem very close to being solved. So there's a lot of internal inconsistencies here, and it may just go to a disorganized mind that was slipping down and had a gripe agaist the world.

This repeats what I've been saying for the past several days, that Brown's vice president for "Public Safety and Emergency Management" was hired from the University of Utah, where he'd been on administrative leave for much of his tenure due to concerns that he was unqualified, as well as complaints from his staff. This is the last guy who's going to rock any boats and the one guy you'd expect to be completely feckless in managing any real emergency -- and this is how Brown wanted it.

He's also raising the issue of Neves Valente's motive -- what point was he trying to make? What was his gripe? There's been general speculation that he must have spent time in the lecture hall in the Barus & Holley building, and the shooting must have had some relation to this. An interview with one of Neves's few friends during his time at Brown suggests the problem:

Scott Watson said he was a former classmate and friend of Neves Valente during his time at Brown University 25 years ago.

. . . "He was bored because he knew more than any of us, he already should've had a PhD," Watson said. "He hated Brown and he hated Providence."

. . . "Basically, he thought the quality of education was too low," Watson said. "He moved from Portugal to go to a school with an education level that he thought was ridiculous, he didn’t like the people, and he didn’t like the food."

While I've tried to focus my grievances in a more constructive direction, I can certainly relate to his issues with the Ivies. The quality of undergraduate educaion there is low, largely because PhDs everywhere are a uniform product. There's little qualitative difference between a Harvard PhD and one from the University of Arkansas; they both meet the same course requirements and have very similar experiences in formation. So why go through the admissions rat race and pay so much more for an Ivy?

It appears that Neves pursued an Ivy degree with high expectations and discovered that Brown was, in the words of frustrated undergraduate Alex Shieh, a "fraud" and a "racket"; its Physics PhD program was no better than any low-ranked public institution. I'd be ticked, too, just not to the point of shooting up a lecture hall. It's a shame Neves couldn't put this in perspective. Paul Mauro continues,

. . . I think they would have gotten {Neves without the "hero's" help], but fortunately, you had this homeless person. Homeless people, when it comes to wherever they're living, can be very proprietary, even if it's a cardboard box on a sidewalk. So the fact that this guy came into this building and was wandering around for two weeks, came to the attention of this homeless guy, I'm not surprised actually, that he kinda followed him, says why is he coming into my domain, I'm the one who lives in the basement here, who's this new face? He was used to seeing students, people of a certain age, and here's this anomaly, I assume he tried to talk to him at some point, and obviously the perpetrator wanted no part of him, but yuou do have to say he was remarkably observant, followed him all the way to the car, and finally got to the police, it was unfortunate that he delayed as long as he did, but when he finally got to the police, he knew the fact that the car had Florida plates, might be a rental car, he knew the make and model, and that advanced things significantly, there's no denying that.

Like several other commentators, Mauro discounts "John's" contribution. He attributes the guy's motive to the proprietary instincts of any homeless person and complains that he waited too long to notify police. But there's a general consensus that homelessness seriously affects mental health, so that even if "John" was mostly concerned that Neves was encroaching on his territory, he displayed unusual insight and persistence in pursuing Neves and recording the details of his car. Once he got to see the state attorney general, the AG charadcterized him as "articulate" and "persuasive", potentially the best witness he ever had. This is not a garden-variety druggie.

But let's conduct a thought exprriment. Let's say that homeless guy "John" went straight to the police station at maybe 5:00 PM on that Saturday instead of waiting until Tuesday, when the police announced they wanted to talk to him. What do you suspect the reaction of the desk sergeant would have been to a homelss guy coming in to the station Saturday evening amd saying he'd seen the shooter that afternoon? Right. He'd have taken him straight to see the state attorney general, wouldn't he? "John" did the only possible thing and waited to hear the police would listen. The homeless guy had a good idea of how the world works. Mauro goes on,

You know, at the end of the day, I feel like the heads of security at the Brown University police were just acting in accordance with what Brown University executives, from the president on down, wanted. I'm going to use may own jargon here, these are defunders. It's very easy to be a holy man on a mountain, as the saying goes, it's very easy to sit in an Ivy League school and act like none of this matters and the police are the problem, but when you consider that we have high schools and grammar schools conducting active-shooter drills across this nation and some of the stuff we've seen, the idea that the Brown University police, it's a police department, they aren't security guards, they are gun carriers who are licensed to make arrests just like any police department, and the fact that they had no security measures in place at this building, seem to have had no protocols in place to respond to an active shooter in conjunction with Providence police, I mean the cascading litany of failures here really does argue that there need to be some major changes here, and if you're working in security at another higher education institution across this country, don't wait for it to happen to you, learn from this, because it really was, in my estimnation, a pattern of failure.

Here's something Mauro doesn't mention. The whole Brown shooter case is a vindication of surveillance cameras and license plate readers. There seems to be a consensus that if there'd been cameras in the building and nearby, it would have been easier to track Neves, the incident might have been reported earlier, and other measures like card key entry might even have kept Neves from entering the building at all. But there's also general paranoia about license plate readers, when in fact like cameras, they're everywhere. And they were how Neves was tracked to Brookline and New Hampshire.

Academics and misguided human-rights activists will continue to resist this technology. No doubt Brown will continue to refuse to allow its cameras to feed the Providence real time crime center. I agree with Mauro that Brown and higher education generally will make no changes following this episode, even though it's urgent that they do.

People Had Been Complaining About Brown's Security For Years? This Is Hard For Me To Believe.

Via The New York Post:

In 2021, Brown University allegedly refused to call Providence police after a caller claimed to have placed bombs throughout campus and was carrying an AR-15 gun, according to the Brown Daily Herald.

The local K-9 unit was finally called an hour later — after the school’s public safety officers spoke up, according to the paper.

But it took Brown another hour to send out an alert to students.

One of the officers later claimed the university went as far as altering its officer’s report of the incident to remove mention of his concerns, and references to the delay.

. . . So far in 2025, security officers have issued two votes of no confidence against the university’s police chief Rodney Chatman and the school’s department of public safety.

A scathing October editorial in the Brown Daily Herald called the problems with the school’s security a “threat to public safety” and said the university was “failing in its obligation” to keep students safe.

Mr Chatman is actually Brown's Vice President for Public Safety and Emergency Management as well as the Chief of Police. He started that job in September, 2021. Prior to that, he had briefly been campus police chief at the University of Utah, where his record was sketchy indeed. According to KUTV,

Chatman previously led the University of Utah Police Department, where his tenure ended in 2021 amid investigations, lawsuits and lingering fallout from the murder of student-athlete Lauren McCluskey.

. . . Chatman was hired in January 2020, more than a year after McCluskey’s murder, replacing former police chief Dale Brophy, who retired as the department faced intense criticism over its handling of the case. Chatman came to Utah from the University of Dayton in Ohio, where he served as executive director of public safety and chief of police.

. . . In December 2020, Chatman was placed on administrative leave after allegations he impersonated a peace officer by beginning work without certification from Utah’s Peace Officer Standards and Training board. The Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office later found insufficient evidence to file charges, noting the university knew Chatman was not Utah-certified when he was hired and that he met the legal definition of a police officer.

. . . Chatman sued the University of Utah alleging retaliation, but a judge did not rule in his favor. He left the university in June 2021 after remaining on administrative leave.

. . . At Brown, Chatman has again faced internal criticism. In October 2025, two campus police unions issued votes of no confidence in Chatman and Deputy Chief John Vinson, citing low morale, staffing reductions, fear of retaliation and failures in safety technology.

. . . Following Saturday’s mass shooting at Brown University, which left two people dead and nine injured, Chatman has maintained a low public profile as Providence police continue their investigation. Chatman was not seen on camera at the news conference where local, state and federal law enforcement announced the arrest of their suspect. The university has not said whether his leadership is under review.

Soldier of Fortune has more detail on the controversies at Brown:

The allegations against Chatman were lodged by the International Brotherhood of Police Officers Local 863, which represents 10 Brown University police sergeants. In August, the union issued a formal vote of no confidence in Chatman and Deputy Chief John Vinson, citing a lack of transparency, a toxic workplace culture, and an atmosphere of fear inside the department.

. . . Underlying many of these complaints is what union leaders describe as a “cover-up culture.” Internal reports from 2021 and 2023 allege that Brown police were slow to notify Providence police about significant threats, raising concerns that leadership prioritized institutional reputation over public safety.

. . . Brown University launched an internal investigation into the department’s workplace culture last April, but the probe itself quickly drew criticism. Deputy Chief Vinson was initially involved in the investigation despite past leadership controversies during his tenure at the University of Washington, where he was described as coercive and prone to micromanagement.

The university has since hired CriticalArc, a security software company, to lead the investigation. Reporting by the Brown Daily Herald has raised questions about potential conflicts of interest stemming from professional connections between Chief Chatman and the firm.

The union asked the Rhode Island State Police to conduct an independent investigation, arguing that Brown cannot credibly police itself.

But although some students, as well as Brown's own campus police, have rasied concerns about security, Chatman appears to have been doing pretty much what he was hired to do by the people who actually make the decisions. According to CNN,

In March 2021, a Brown University doctoral candidate wrote an op-ed in the school paper criticizing Brown’s increasing use of surveillance cameras and lack of transparency.

“In the span of two decades, Brown University quietly deployed an expansive surveillance apparatus, unbeknownst to many in the community; it’s well past time we critically examined our University’s pervasive surveillance of College Hill,” John Wrenn wrote.

“It is impossible to cross (or even approach) Brown University without being surveilled,” he added. “I encourage you to try.”

In some people's view, which apparently includes PhD candidates, this is a bad thing. I've already noted here that it's an open question whether Brown actually deactivated its security cameras in response to demands from leftist organizations. So far, we've received no clear confirmation or denial, but CNN is among those who are suspicious:

Law enforcement has released a series of videos from nearby homes and vehicles showing what the FBI has called an “unknown suspect,” but none of those appeared to come from Brown’s own surveillance cameras or from the building where the shooting took place. The shortage of visuals has led to sharp questions about surveillance at Brown.

. . . Pat Brosnan, a security consultant and former NYPD detective, said 1,200 cameras was “almost non-existent” coverage given Brown’s campus area of 146 acres.

. . . Brosnan, who was critical of Brown’s security policy, said the resistance to cameras on college campuses is largely driven by an anti-surveillance ideology rather than cost considerations.

“(It’s) exactly the opposite of what, say, retailers, airports, major stadiums, what they do,” he said. “They figured this out a long time ago. They stopped debating the philosophy and started designing for reality.”

This is a lesson I learned when I was involved in the quixotic Dartmouth alumni trustee movement in the 2000s: in discussions with undergraduates, I learned that they deeply resented not just cameras, but the card-key building entry system. I suggested in vain that such systems, in an environment where unfounded rape accusations take place, can protect people by supplying evidence of where they were and when. No matter, they didn't want this on principle.

Fast forward to 2025, and students (maybe even PhD candidates as well) are slowly and reluctantly beginning to recognize that in the real world, the pros of such systems outweigh the cons. Notwithstanding, according to Fox News,

The shooting at Brown University exposed a major gap for a recently opened "real time crime center" in Providence that costs over $1 million, but didn't include surveillance video from the college campus.

. . . In August, the City of Providence, where Brown University is located, announced it had launched a "real time crime center" that has access to hundreds of surveillance cameras — but none at the Ivy League institution.

Eric O'Neill, a cybersecurity expert and former FBI operative, told Fox News Digital it would have been helpful if Brown University allowed the crime center to use their security camera feeds.

"It certainly would have been nice if Brown had subscribed to the data center because my understanding is that there's real-time monitoring, which would have meant that someone would have seen the activity on the cameras and perhaps law enforcement could have been alerted earlier," O'Neill said.

The problem for Brown is that, as obsevers as diverse as Alex Shieh and the campus police sergeants have pointed out, Brown is a brand, a trademark, an image, and on one hand, it doesn't want the potential for urban crime even to be mentioned in its vicinity. On the other, even though surveillane technology has become a proven crime fighting tool, its use conflicts with the luxury beliefs attaching to academic and upper-class culture.

The result is that Rodney Chatman is precisely the man the powers that be at Brown want in that job. If he was hired from a job where he'd been on administrative leave because he was allegedly unqualified, so much the better, he'll be that much more willing to go with the program at Brown! I very much doubt that he'll leave Brown unless President Paxson and a good many others go as well -- and I don't see this as likely.

The Bigger Problem With Brown And The Ivies

I found the video embedded above in my YouTube feed this morning. While it doesn't specifically note the circumstances, it appears to be the testimony of Alex Shieh. a former Brown undergraduate, before a House Judiciary subcommittee last June regarding rising tuition costs and institutional bloat at Brown. One of the first points he made has been borne out since the 1960s by Ferdinand Lundberg, Alan Dershowitz, and Jerome Karabel:

I'm a legacy student at Brown. I went to a prep school that feeds to the Ivy League. My parents are doctors who can afford the $93,000 a year sticker price. In other words, I'm exactly who the Ivy League was built for. . . . According to The New York Times, the median student's family makes over $200,000 a year. Half the student body comes from the top 5% of earners.

Shieh appears to have dropped out of Brown since his testimony to form a corporate startup, and not long before his testimony, he barely avoided disciplinary action there:

“Elite academia is in crisis because of a refusal to accommodate ordinary Americans and an unaccountable class of bureaucrats who treat universities as corporate brands rather than institutions of learning,” Shieh told Fox News Digital in a statement. “I think we need to rethink what it means to be elite. Today, elite schools are elitist. I’m fighting for them to be elite in a meritocratic sense, where they are filled with the best and the brightest, not the richest and most well-connected.”

Shieh, a rising junior who was cleared of wrongdoing by the university on May 14, 2025, had previously angered school officials by sending a DOGE-like email to non-faculty employees identifying himself as a journalist for The Brown Spectator and asking them what they do all day to try to determine why the school’s tuition has gotten so expensive.

This is precisely the problem I had at Dartmouth in the 1960s: I couldn't understand why my schoolmates were so ordinary, when we'd been told we were the crème de la crème. It's taken me the rest of my life to find at least partial answers to that question -- I was a public school kid from the northeastern suburbs who'd gotten in on SATs, grades, and extracurriculars, when as a practical matter, the pool of those admitted from that group is something like 20% of any incoming class.

The other 80% are primarily athletes; legacies; preppies; wealthy foreign students; children of celebrities, politicians, and major donors; and DEI. What makes them special is their parents' power and money; they don't have to be smart. By all indications, one of the two students killed at Brown last week, Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, born in Uzbekistan but a naturalized US citizen after immigrating with his parents, a scholarship student and aspiring neurosurgeon, a public school applicant from suburban Virginia, appears to have been one of the fairly small number admitted on merit.

On the other hand, althogh the other student killed, Ella Cook, went to public school, she lived in Mountain Brook, AL, where the median household income is $191,128, and she was Episcopalian; apparently she wasn't a scholarship student. She was noted as being fluent in French, so I was curious how she learned it so well. According to Chrome AI mode,

Cook had a love for traveling "anywhere — especially where French is spoken". She also worked one summer as a program assistant at an organization that runs summer study programs at universities around the world, which likely provided additional language immersion exposure.

This suggests she had the wherewithal and contacts for frequent foreign travel, which again suggests she wasn't admitted to Brown in the same applicant pool as Umurzokov.

What continues to intrigue me is the two cases that have come to light who somehow didn't make it through the Brown/Ivy program, "John", the former Brown student who is now homeless and lived in the basement of Barus & Holley, and Alex Shieh. Shieh appears to have dropped out in frustration, calling Brown a "fraud" and a "racket".

What continues to puzzle me about "John", whatever the cause of his homelessness, is that he was capable of insightful observation, noticing that something was significantly out of kilter with Claudio Neves Valente, and he was then able to follow through conscientiously enough to track him through the neighborhood, note significant features of his car, and even investigate it carefully enough to discover it had a false license plate.

It's impoprtant to recognize as well that Neves Valente was armed and definitely capable of shooting, which is something "John" must have instinctively recognized about him -- yet he persisted to the point of accosting him to ask what he was up to. Then he reported what he'd found on line and on the tip line, making, in the words of the state attorney general, a remarkably persuasive and articulate case.

Here's my question, and I put it especially to Ivy alumni in particular: how many of your schoolmates, especially those who've gone on to successful careers based on their Ivy credentials, would be capable of doing what "John" did? At this point, in my estimate, I would put that number as not much more than one, "John" himself. No matter what personal qualities may have brought him to homelessness, it strikes me that his combination of high intelligence, ability to read people, abiity to draw important inferences, initiative, fortitude, and communucation skills are something like a putative best possible outcome for an Ivy education. So why isn't he already one of the most prominent Brown alumni? Instead, he's homeless.

It really sounds to me as thougn some corporate mover and shaker, maybe even a member of Brown's Board of Fellows, should take "John" in and give him a very, very close look. The personal qualities we've seen from this guy suggest to me that Brown had some very high-quality material to work with, but it managed to botch the job. How did this happen?

The same applies to Alex Shieh. He's asking obvious questions. Why on earth does Brown cost $93,000 a year, and even students on scholarship can't afford it? This isn't much different from commentators now asking how Brown President Christina H. Paxson makes $3 million a year, when the university was comically unable to protect its students from last week's shooting.

The answers to any questions like this will all involve Alex Shieh's insight: "I'm exactly who the Ivy League was built for." The Ivy League was definitely not built for "John".