Wednesday, October 28, 2026
Straws in the Wind - Part 508
From the Chronicle of Higher Education: ...The Survey of Earned Doctorates [is] an annual survey by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics on research doctorate recipients at American institutions... The 2025 survey found that the number of doctorates earned in the humanities dropped 20 percent since 2015, while the number of doctorates earned in the social sciences saw a smaller decline of 3 percent. Over all, the number of doctorates increased by 8 percent. This survey also found that these two disciplinary areas are among the longest doctorates to complete...
Wayback
From The Atlantic: ...People all over the world use the Wayback Machine all the time. What began as an effort to preserve the web has become an essential tool for journalists, researchers, historians, and the broader public.
Yet the future of this tool has become extremely vulnerable. The New York Times is now blocking the Internet Archive’s ability to preserve its articles. The Guardian has restricted our access to its published articles and removed articles from some of the Wayback Machine’s interfaces. USA Today and a growing number of other news organizations have also placed barriers in the path of web archivists (even, yes, The Atlantic). As of May 2026, Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab had identified more than 340 local-news sites that were limiting the Internet Archive’s ability to preserve their journalism.
The publishers taking these steps have all pointed to one reason: the unauthorized use of their work by AI companies to train large language models. They complain that our library serves as a back door around paywalls, licensing negotiations, and technical restrictions. The Times has said that it is blocking us because the Wayback Machine allegedly provides “unfettered access” to its work. But this fear-based approach does not take into account that the Internet Archive is taking steps to prevent AI companies from scraping the materials we preserve.
I understand why publishers are angry. Journalism is expensive. Reporting requires skilled people, time, courage, legal support, and institutions willing to withstand pressure. Journalists have watched advertising revenue disappear and subscription growth slow while technology companies build enormously profitable products using material created by others. Publishers have every right to challenge commercial businesses that they believe are inappropriately exploiting their work.
But blocking a nonprofit library is the wrong response to this problem. Impeding the Wayback Machine’s preservation work will not prevent powerful AI companies from gathering training data. It will certainly not restore the advertising-based business model that supported newspapers in the 20th century, a business model that has long since collapsed. What it will do is prevent historians, researchers, courts, ordinary readers—and, most ironic, journalists themselves—from consulting an accurate record of what once appeared on the web. It is difficult to quantify the scale of what we stand to lose. A continuous record of web activity is an enormously powerful accountability tool, especially at a time when seeking the truth and reporting it has become ever more complicated and the informational environment is growing only more complex...
Full essay at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/10/blocking-internet-archive-will-not-stop-ai/689065/.
Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 208
From the Harvard Crimson: Harvard Law School raised a record $135 million dollars in fiscal year 2026, surpassing its two most recent fundraising years by more than $50 million, according to a person briefed on the giving. The Law School rode to the record fundraising year on the back of a $31.4 million gift from former Board of Overseers President Morgan Chu, an intellectual property attorney who graduated from HLS in 1976. The gift — the largest in HLS history — endows six new professorships across the school.
The fundraising haul follows two slower years of giving for the Law School. The School brought in roughly $73 million in 2025 and roughly $84 million in 2024...
Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/10/26/harvard-law-record-donations/.
Tuesday, October 27, 2026
No Hastings - Part 3
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge... by Serranus C. Hastings’ descendants to the removal of his name from San Francisco’s 148-year-old law school after revelations that he ordered troops to slaughter thousands of Native Americans in the 1860s...
Full story at https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/u-s-supreme-court-lets-hastings-name-change-22484142.php.
Straws in the Wind - Part 507
From the Daily Pennsylvanian: An emeritus Penn professor was arrested last week after blocking an Uber Eats robot in Center City. Carolyn Marvin, a professor emeritus at the Annenberg School of Communication, was approached by police on Oct. 14 after repeatedly standing in the path of one of the food delivery company’s sidewalk robots. Marvin described the act, which resulted in a criminal violation notice for disorderly conduct, as an exercise of her First Amendment rights... She criticized the “cute little robots flashing googly hearts,” writing that they “distract us from thinking about the real people they displace.” ...
She emphasized the importance of being able to “protest these abuses in the same public space the robots are occupying.” Police arrested Marvin on the 1200 block of Filbert Street after receiving a report of criminal mischief involving a robot...
Full story at https://www.thedp.com/article/2026/10/penn-uber-eats-robots-artificial-intelligence-arrest.
Cash in the Bank
From time to time, we have noted that the state is sitting on a lot of cash. While some of that cash is in reserves associated with the General Fund, much is in "special funds" that are earmarked for various purposes (such as roads, transit, etc.). Here is what the Legislative Analyst's Office (LAO) has to say about state cash:
Executive Summary
California’s Cash Balance Reached Astonishing $100 Billion. The state’s cash balance—the internal borrowable resources the State Controller uses to ensure the state can pay its bills on time—is very strong. It now sits around $90 billion, only modestly below the peak of over $100 billion held in May 2024. As shown below, the state’s cash balance has been rising for some years, but it rose most dramatically after the pandemic in 2020. This is all the more remarkable given the situation less than two decades ago: during the Great Recession, California faced a cash crisis, with cash nearing administrative minimums while a frozen credit market nearly precluded emergency borrowing.
This Balance Results From Unplanned Cash in Special Funds, Not Necessarily an Inherent Sign of Fiscal Strength. The state’s cash balance has remained strong despite weakness in the state budget—double digit deficits in 2023‑24, and persistent structural shortfalls since. This is because the state’s cash balance and its General Fund budget condition can be related but are not directly linked. Rather, most of the balance increase reflects unplanned cash that built up in special funds: money that has been appropriated but not yet disbursed, now representing about half of all special fund balances. These balances accumulated for several reinforcing reasons—increased state and federal infrastructure funding occurred simultaneously with supply chain constraints and slowing project time lines, the pandemic‑era General Fund revenue surge spilled into special funds through transfers and loans, and federal funds surged such that departments rationally drew down those time‑limited funds before their own state fund balances. Beyond unplanned cash, reserves also built up during the surplus years—which does reflect genuine fiscal strength—and new funds and expanded services have added modestly to balances since 2020.
Having This Much Cash Has Been Useful to the State… A large cash balance confers genuine benefits. The state’s ability to manage daily cash flow without external borrowing saves interest costs and reduces bond market dependence. California has not needed to borrow for cash flow purposes in more than a decade and has not been at risk of a cash crisis, despite a sharp revenue decline in 2022‑23 and significant budget deficits since. Beyond routine cash flow management, the state has also used its cash balance to advance specific policy goals and has used indirect borrowing from cash resources to balance the General Fund budget. This latter borrowing occurred via two “maneuvers”—which essentially allow the state to make cash payments now while deferring their recognition in the budget to future years, effectively using the cash balance for an interest‑free loan.
…But Over Reliance on Cash Borrowing Carries Real Risks. Using the state’s cash balance in these ways is not without trade‑offs and risks. These maneuvers create real future obligations that are invisible in standard budget documents. Further, cash borrowing carries two structural risks that make it a poor substitute for more conventional budget solutions. First, the policymakers and taxpayers who benefit from deferring costs today will not always be the same ones who must repay them, creating an incentive to borrow and a disincentive to repay. And, second, repayment must be proactive: if repeatedly deferred, the obligation grows and the tool eventually disappears. As such, in this report, we recommend the Legislature treat cash borrowing as an option of last resort, maintain its planned repayment schedules, and avoid any further delays.
Maintaining Cash Vigilance Is Critical. The state’s cash balance has already declined somewhat from its May 2024 high, and we expect it to continue declining. In particular, this will occur as the backlog of infrastructure funds eventually works through the system, as pandemic‑era federal programs unwind, and if the state continues to use reserves to address deficits. This decline should be viewed as normal and expected—it reflects the unwinding of the dynamics described in this report, not fiscal deterioration. Nonetheless, we recommend the Legislature avoid actions that accelerate that decline unnecessarily. This would include further cash borrowing to balance the budget, or further delays in repaying existing maneuvers. The state has come a long way from the cash crisis of the Great Recession. We recommend the Legislature preserve that fiscal resilience, particularly given heightened economic and financial market uncertainty.
Full report at https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/5198.
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