Sen. Al Franken (D., Minn) will resign in light of the increasing number of women alleging sexual harassment and assault. It is the end of a remarkable career that took Franken from Saturday Night Live to the most exclusive club in Washington.
The resignation reminded me of a column that I wrote when Franken first ran. I wrote about the striking difference between Franken and Peter Agre, a nobel prize winning humanitarian respected around the world. As I discussed in the column, the result seemed inevitable in American politics as voters decided between the cheap shot celebrity and the world renown scientist. Franken would respond to my column and went on to trounce Agre who would have doubled the IQ of the Senate by simply joining it.
As the governor of Minnesota looks for a replacement, it is worth noting that Agre is still available and still the more qualified candidate. In case Gov. Mark Dayton has lost his number, here is his academic email and site.
The 2007 column is below:
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Texas State University is this week’s ground zero in our campus speech debate. The most recent controversy was triggered by an 
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Trinity College Dublin has dropped the word “Freshman” 
The University of Illinois is facing criticism over the actions of one of its graduate students and its own failure to act against him. Tariq Khan, a PhD student at the university, was 
University of California -Riverside student Edith Macias achieved a degree of fame (or infamy) when she was involved in an ugly incident in September with a fellow student wearing a Make America Great Again hat. Macias ripped the hat off the head of student Matthew Vitale and then spouted profanities in a college office. Now Macias is 
Harvard University has been accused of failing to cooperate with 
Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, is the latest focal point for the growing free speech crisis on college campuses. University student Lindsay Shepherd, 22, teaches tutorials on language use for first year communications students in a class called “Canadian Communication in Context”. She showed brief clip featuring psychology professor Jordan Peterson who is against forced use of genderless and “made-up” pronouns. Shepherd said that the clip spurred a lively and beneficial discussion in the class. However, one student filed a compliant and now Shepherd is facing an investigation for creating a “toxic environment” for showing the clip without publicly denouncing the views expressed in the clip. It appears that the school’s motto, 
We have hit another milestone today with over 33,000,000 views. We are also expected to reach 35,000 followers on Twitter. That hardly makes us competition for the largest sites but it is still an impressive collection of people seeking a place for civil but passionate discourse on legal and policy issues of our time (and perhaps a few wacky stories). We often use these milestones to look at the current profile of the blog and its supporters around the world.
The controversy continues to grow at Rutgers University after the school hired Mazen Adi as a lecturer in its Political Science Department. Adi’s former position was a spokesman for the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Despite his work for this bloodsoaked mass violator of international law and human rights, Rutgers insisted that Adi’s expertise was in the areas of “international law and diplomacy.”
After removing the portraits of his white predecessors from the dining hall of Pierson College, Pierson College head Stephen Davis is now saying it was all a terrible misunderstanding. Davis earlier proclaimed the removal of the portraits in the interest of the “campus-wide conversations about diversity and inclusion in public art and representation.” All of the prior “Masters” were white. Now, after a backlash, Davis is saying that the portraits will be returned.
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As in prior years, Professor Luna Turley (shown here with adoring students) appeared as a visiting scholar yesterday to teach the Torts class on animal liability at GW Law School. To the chagrin of the assigned professor, she was generally viewed as a significant improvement as she showed the basis for determining domestication or wild characteristics in animals.
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