Phi Beta Cons - National Review Online

A Reader Responds on Counselors [George Leef]

Last week, I posted on the subject of guidance counselors, suggesting that we shouldn't be surprised if they generally do a poor job. Here is a response from a reader who emphatically agrees:

That counseling post touched a nerve here.

My kid's counselor, who clearly means well and wants to do good but is only slightly older than the kids she is counseling, was so unimpressive at the required parent meeting that we couldn¹t even admonish the kid for calling her "Bambi." The nickname was el perfecto. I now have to look up Bambi's real name whenever an official communication is required.

The counselor said she had a Master's in counseling. We checked the course requirements out of curiosity, as we'd never before interacted with anyone who was such a blank slate. I'd be a blank slate, too, if I had to sit though that nonsense. I'd reckon that only ed-school courses could do more brain damage. (I did take one once — but only one; it was just too much risk.)

Our kid says counselors get used a lot. Girls go and cry about their problems, none of which the counselor can do anything about. Plus, they can get out of class while they do it.

I know of a counselor at another school who sided against parents when a rebellious but excellent student expressed interest in dropping out. The counselor advised kid that once he was 16, neither the school nor his parents could legally make him attend. This, according to the school, is advocating for the student.

The parents were, of course, completely overjoyed that the counselor was such a great advocate for the child. At the high-end private schools, counselors seem to be treasured for their connections as college-placement agents.

Counselor problems may not be new. A long, long time ago, a high-school guidance counselor told my husband that he would never be college material and switched him to the vocational-education high-school courses. Maybe he got the Ph.D. in physics just to prove the counselor wrong?

03/09 02:50 PM Share

In Her Own Words [John J. Miller]

In today's WSJ, Diane Ravitch explains why she changed her mind about school reform.

03/09 04:42 AM Share

Monday, March 08, 2010

The UNC System Wants More Money [George Leef]

In today's Pope Center piece, my colleagues Jenna Robinson and Jay Schalin write about the nasty fight in North Carolina over proposals to squeeze more funds out of citizens and students for the UNC system.

Of course, lowering costs is extremely difficult, so the discussion is about getting more money. As the authors write, "The economic downturn is no time for politicians and bureaucrats to be picking the pockets of students and taxpayers to pay for their profligate ways." It is no time, but that's exactly what they want to do.

03/08 02:20 PM Share

Assemblyman Urges Ban of Muslim Student Group from UC Irvine [Candace de Russy]

Assemblyman Chuck DeVore recently wrote to University of California Irvine's chancellor, according to Southern California Public Radio, advocating that he ban the Muslim Student Union from campus after a number of the group members were arrested while disrupting a presentation by Israel's ambassador to the United States. DeVore also accused the MSU of "passing the hat'' for Hamas at a fundraiser for the "terrorist organization'' last year.

MSU spokesman Hadeer Soliman responded that "a few'' of the arrested students did belong to the group and that the organization is "being implicated under a `guilt by association' theory.''

UCI Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky defended the arrests but also took issue with parties calling "for draconian sanctions against these students or of punishment for a larger group. Only the students who were actually disruptive should be punished.''

It remains to be seem what punishment, if any, UCI will mete out to the offending students.

03/08 01:49 PM Share

A Sad Policy Choice [Jane S. Shaw]

That was a polite but provocative interview with Diane Ravitch, John. If what Ravitch means by accountability is the government-mandated and politically managed tests prescribed by the No Child Left Behind Act, I agree with her on that.

On choice, however, Ravitch seems illogical. Here are some of her claims, as I understand them, with my comments:

Charter schools are skimming the cream of the students from our poorest communities and therefore are (somehow) illegitimate. But why are those schools getting the “cream”? They must offer something valuable.

Charter schools should be eliminated, because they aren’t any better than public schools, on average. Again, if so, why are they popular (some schools have hundreds of students on their waiting lists)?

The voucher movement is pointless because if it were to take off, there wouldn’t be enough schools for those who wanted to attend; Catholic schools, in particular, are dying, and should be supported. But wouldn’t the voucher movement be a good way to support them?

Students are getting abysmal educations at the public schools — taking tests but not learning history or reading novels and poetry, but we must “maintain a good public education system.” Isn’t that the system that failed?

Ravitch calls herself a Burkean conservative who opposes “tearing things apart” — referring to the public school system. She seems to have forgotten that the reform movement exists because a rotten public school system has been tearing this country apart. Allowing parents to choose another school is not just a safety valve; it’s a way to use competition to bring up the quality of all educational institutions. Burke would have liked that, I think. Certainly, his contemporary Adam Smith would have.

03/08 10:28 AM Share

Noose Hustling? [Candace de Russy]

Gil Sewall joins PBC to comment that student "race hustling" may be playing a role at the race protests at the University of California at San Diego. One incident fueling the turmoil, Sewall writes, involves "a suspicious noose."

This past weekend the AP reported at length on this same racially charged story. What the news agency forgot to mention, however, is that it was a minority student who hung the noose.

03/08 09:50 AM Share

Timothy Carney on SAFRA [George Leef]

Today there is an excellent Washington Examiner piece by Timothy Carney, who has been doing terrific work exposing the twin myths that Republicans are for free enterprise and Democrats are for "the little guy." (His books The Big Ripoff and Obamanomics are must-reads.) In this piece, Carney shows that the status quo with federally subsidized "private" student loans is a bad system, but that the proposed complete takeover by the feds wouldn't be any better.

The federal government should never have gotten into the college-lending business, and the best course of action is for it to get out of it as quickly as possible.

03/08 09:20 AM Share

Sunday, March 07, 2010

Ravitch, cont. [John J. Miller]

If you've read Robert's review of Diane Ravitch's new book and want more Ravitch, here's my podcast interview with her.

03/07 07:20 AM Share

Friday, March 05, 2010

Two New Works on Education Policy [Robert VerBruggen]

One: Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Ravitch, a former advocate of testing and accountability, explains why she changed her mind and now supports the traditional public-school system.

I have a review in the next NR (March 22 cover date, Al Gore on the cover, should be arriving over the next week or so). I highly recommend the book, but I didn't find it entirely convincing. Subscribers can read my piece already here — just sign up for a free digital account with your subscriber number.

The second: Primary Sources: America's Teachers on America's Schools, a report from the Gates Foundation and Scholastic Inc.

03/05 12:00 PM Share

Mau-Mauing at UCSD [Gilbert T. Sewall]

The University of California at San Diego race protests continue. Weeks of shameless histrionics to extract university resources along racial lines have not ended, and tensions seem to be escalating.

The affair began with a February 15 off-campus costume party called the Compton Cookout, an event meant to mock Black History Month. The invitation made mention of malt liquor and ghetto dress. It is still unknown who attended the party, and some doubt it even occurred. Exploiting the event, the Black Student Union issued an expansive set of race-based demands.

Clips on You Tube show the protests, the mau-mauing (as author Tom Wolfe once labeled it).

Chancellor Marye Anne Fox has repeatedly apologized and begged for mercy. She has expressed “solidarity” with the protesting students. BSU leaders have not been satisfied with her contrition and demand more.

“They handed us over a bulls**t-a** document,” BSU leader Fnann Keflezighi said after the meeting to the UCSD Guardian, the student newspaper. “Basically, it said everything that we already knew, no concrete things on how they’re going to implement anything. They’re dumber than we thought they were — dumber than I thought they were.”

Ms. Keflezighi, however inelegant her words, may be right. The administration has played into the hands of student race hustlers, and any legitimate outcries about the Compton Cookout have been lost in the psychodrama. Responding to student outcries, the administration has put up its own website.

Chancellor Fox sounds very distressed. But she gives no impression of understanding the situation or being in control. “Racism is not going to happen in our community,” she declared on the website before the statement was ridiculed and replaced. “This implies that racism is an act rather than an attitude, and that human nature can be changed by fiat,” one knowledgeable UC observer had responded. Another had asked: “Do campus authorities even know what’s going on here?”

A suspicious noose and Ku Klux Klan hood made out of a pillowcase have appeared from nowhere, fueling black students’ outrage. But after three weeks, the outrage looks calculated and cynical. If the undergraduate injustice collectors get their way, and if they are representative of America’s future black leadership, be prepared for more campus race tension in the future.

— Gilbert T. Sewall is director of the American Textbook Council and president of the Center for Education Studies.

03/05 10:16 AM Share

A 'Charter College' in Massachusetts [Jane S. Shaw]

Okay, times are hard. Public universities have been there before, and one of the models that emerged after the 2001-02 recession was "charter colleges," akin to "charter schools." The Massachusetts College of Art and Design, a state-supported college, became more autonomous, as described in today's Pope Center article by Charles Cieppo and James Stergios of the Pioneer Institute. In return for greater freedom (including the right to retain all tuition and fees), the school agreed to keep support from the Commonwealth relatively low (about 30 percent) and also to keep a lid on in-state tuition.

The school's transition has been pretty successful. Mass Art achieved greater enrollment and higher-quality students (as measured by SAT scores and class rank). And revenues initially soared, because out-of-state students were required to pay much more.

But the hoped-for number of students from outside New England wasn't reached, posing financial problems down the road. The argument is that private competitors such as the Rhode Island School of Design give greater discounts to students through scholarships.

That may well be true. Mass Art officials may not have done their homework when they raised prices. But I suspect that, in addition, the incentives still aren't quite right. Those new revenues were probably not used as efficiently or as creatively as they should have been to raise quality. But Mass Art officials are still in the learning process. If they keep experimenting, through trial and error they should get prices and quality in the proper relationship.

03/05 09:44 AM Share

Thursday, March 04, 2010

1 in 16 College Men Confess to Rape? [Robert VerBruggen]

Matthew Yglesias points to an NPR report about the research of David Lisak.

I found one of Lisak's studies, and it does seem to lend credence to the view that rape is common on college campuses. Lisak surveyed 1,882 men at a "mid-sized, urban commuter university" during the '90s; 20 percent of the subjects were above age 30, so this is not a typical school, but the results are pretty frightening nonetheless.

To be classified as a rapist/attempted rapist, a man had to answer one of the following questions in the affirmative:

1. Have you ever been in a situation where you tried, but for various reasons did not succeed, in having sexual intercourse with an adult by using or threatening to use physical force (twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.) if they did not cooperate?

2. Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your advances (e.g., removing their clothes)?

3. Have you ever had sexual intercourse with an adult when they didn't want to because you used or threatened to use physical force (twisting their arm; holding them down, etc.) if they didn't cooperate?

4. Have you ever had oral sex with an adult when they didn't want to because you used or threatened to use physical force (twisting their arm; holding them down, etc.) if they didn't cooperate?

6.4 percent of men responded yes to at least one question — for 80 percent of them, it was (2). It's important to note the "even though they did not want to" in that question — a woman's drunken mistake does not constitute rape, but these men confess that even while drunk, their victims did not consent.

I would like to see this survey repeated (perhaps with shorter, clearer questions) on a lot more campuses.

Until now, I've been skeptical of the "college rape crisis"; you can read most of what I've written here.

03/04 03:41 PM Share

Lee Speech [John J. Miller]

The Chronicle of Higher Ed describes Columbia U. president Lee Bollinger as a "committed free-speech advocate." In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I was a student at the University of Michigan and Bollinger was dean of the law school, it sure would have been nice to have had some of Bollinger's committed advocacy in the fight against the administration's speech code. Alas, Bollinger was virtually silent. Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe wrote the definitive column on it here.

Two decades ago, we sure could have used an organization such as FIRE. Today, thankfully, it exists. President Greg Lukianoff discusses the latest threats to campus speech here:

A recent dramatic example of the silencing of basic dissent happened at Bucknell, where students were not allowed to protest the stimulus plan by handing out obviously fake "Obama stimulus dollars." Bucknell has steadfastly refused to back down from this absurd decision. Bucknell's effort to censor discussion of the stimulus bill is stunning not only because the stimulus has been criticized by practically everybody, but most importantly because it demonstrates how difficult it is to have a meaningful discussion when students can actually get in trouble for taking the "wrong side" of an issue. As long as speech codes mandate that campus judiciaries investigate clearly protected speech, and "offensive" arguments can be and are censored on campus, the difficult process of learning through debate and discussion cannot properly take place. Without robust debate and discussion, we can only expect the national level of discourse to—in the best case—stay the same, or worse, become even more polarized.

03/04 03:08 PM Share

Dershowitz on 'Anti-Apartheid Week' [Robert VerBruggen]

"How about a Real Campaign against Abuses?"

03/04 10:06 AM Share

Putting the "High" in Higher Learning [John J. Miller]

The books-for-crack crime ring at George Mason University.

03/04 05:21 AM Share

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

'A Drive to Diversify the Faculty Yields Results in Rochester' [Roger Clegg]

That’s the title of the Chronicle of Higher Education's current cover story. The only two problems with the drive are its illegality and unfairness, as I note in my comment at the end of article:

Now reread this article, asking yourself whether, if Rochester were doing all it's doing in order to increase the number of white and overrepresented minorities on its faculty, there would be any question that it was engaging in illegal racial discrimination. And, no, the Supreme Court's University of Michigan decisions do not protect the school, because employment discrimination is covered by a very different statute. (See my May 19, 2006 Chronicle of Higher Education essay.) Legal considerations aside, by all means cast a wide net, but then ignore skin color and national origin and just hire the best qualified individuals.

03/03 04:33 PM Share

Outreach Based on Religion is Wrong? Outreach Based on Sex is Right? [David French]

The last few days have seen an interesting juxtaposition of stories in Inside Higher Ed. A little more than a week ago, news broke that the president of Northwest College in Wyoming sent a letter to 1,000 Mormon high-school students arguing that the college was a good fit for LDS students and offered a Mormon-friendly environment. The letter itself doesn't offer any improper admissions advantages for Mormons and merely notes the existence of an extensive local Mormon community. Yet this was enough to send Americans United for Separation of Church and State into a tizzy:

Rob Boston, senior policy analyst for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the letters create some real problems.

“The president’s actions are completely inappropriate,” he said. “A public university shouldn’t even know what religious backgrounds its students are coming from.”

With all due respect for Mr. Boston, the college president's letter hardly violates the letter or spirit of the Establishment Clause. Also, given the fact that universities are frequently hostile to Mormons (faculty members often disdain Mormons and Evangelicals), a message to applicants indicating that the college offers a welcoming environment can make sound business sense for a college in a community with a high Mormon population.

Three days after Inside Higher Ed wrote about Mormon recruitment in Wyoming, it ran a largely flattering piece about the University of Pennsylvania's new outreach to "gay applicants." The article begins:

At many colleges, it's a standard part of the recruiting process once applicants are admitted. Current students who share individual traits or academic interests help reach out to prospective students with similar backgrounds or interests. So the young woman who expresses an interest in engineering will hear from a female junior in engineering. A black admit might hear from a black student, and so forth. The idea is that these students may be uniquely well positioned to answer questions and to make the case that the college is a good place to be a female engineer, a black undergrad, or whatever.

I would also note that targeted outreach is common well before students are admitted, with universities who are particularly proactive developing relationships with high schools and developing a number of targeted outreach programs to create a "diverse" student body. Acknowledging that there is a significant public/private difference between Penn and Northwest College, it strikes me that the efforts are remarkably similar. In both cases, the college identifies a population that it deems significant enough (either in numbers or to create "diversity") to specifically identify as worth recruiting, and the college reaches out to describe available opportunities — not to create special advantages. And yet it looks like the Penn program may be replicated (Dartmouth is already doing something similar), while Northwest College is not only discontinuing its program, donors are reimbursing the college for the cost of the letters.

Too bad. I thought Northwest College had the right idea.

03/03 03:17 PM Share

My Retrospective on the PBS College Debate [George Leef]

This week's Pope Center Clarion Call is my retrospective on the debate I participated in last week. The question was the supposed need for the U.S. to graduate more students from college in order to remain economically strong. As PBC readers know, I think it's ridiculous to believe that the productivity of our economy will be affected in the slightest if we were to lure some more students into college, devoting resources to (perhaps) teaching them things that will have no connection with the work they'll later do. Since we already have a glut of college graduates doing fairly low-skill jobs, the marginal benefit of adding some more must be vanishingly small.

The debate was co-sponsored by the Lumina Foundation, which proclaims that its mission is to increase the rate of college graduation. I tip my hat to Lumina for putting its mission up for debate, but I believe that after listening to it, reasonable people have to doubt whether that mission is sensible. Before doing any more work premised on the alleged benefit of college, shouldn't the Foundation undertake a study to find out just how college work actually affects students, especially those with mediocre-to-weak academic capabilities? Do they really gain in human capital so they can get better jobs and be more productive? Or is it the case that for many, college is just an expensive diversion?

03/03 02:23 PM Share

Fake Hate Crime, or No Hate Crime? [Robert VerBruggen]

From the LA Times:

"As a minority student who sympathizes with the students that have been affected by the recent issues on campus, I am distraught to know that I have unintentionally added to their pain," the student wrote. She was suspended Friday and remains under investigation for a possible hate crime.

. . .

The woman wrote that she and friends had been playing with the rope early last week, making a lasso and then a noose.

She said that she took it to the library Tuesday, strung it above a desk and forgot about it. Its discovery Thursday night caused a firestorm on campus, where tensions were high after a Feb. 15 off-campus party that mocked Black History Month.

03/03 01:52 PM Share

Guidance Counselors Not Doing a Good Job? [George Leef]

That's the thrust of a new study from Public Agenda, financed by the Gates Foundation. Inside Higher Ed has a piece on it today. IHE writes, "high school counselors may be a weak link in the chain needed to get more students into college."

The findings of the report are that high-school counselors often do a rather poor job of assisting students. I'm not surprised. Counselors don't suffer any loss if they don't give excellent service.

What seems amiss here is the assumption that these counselors are doing a good job if they manage to persuade more and more students to enroll in college. They trouble as I see it is that too often they fail to persuade students that college would be a costly mistake.

03/03 10:10 AM Share

Defacebook [John J. Miller]

Facebook is the enemy of your college application, reports Kyle Smith:

What’s next? College admissions offices. Though a 2008 Kaplan survey showed only 10% of colleges copped to checking out the networking sites of applicants, 38% of those said such searches turned up negative info.

Some colleges think it’s a little invasive to do this kind of thing — after all, if providing a place for sex/drink/drugs away from parental eyes is pretty much the top attraction of higher education in the first place, why get worked up if the kids start early?

But as admissions offices fill up with people who grew up on MySpace, that’s going to change.

03/03 08:29 AM Share

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Re: Today’s Generation [Carol Iannone]

Jane, I would say that in every era, no matter how depraved, a majority of people are probably going to fly pretty straight. The question may be how large the minority of troublemakers becomes, and how much they impinge upon the lives of others.

03/02 03:56 PM Share

First Came the Christians, Then Came the Klan? [David French]

Whenever I speak about the presence of Christian student groups on campus and especially about the nonsensical application of religious-nondiscrimination rules to religious groups, I always (and I mean always) get some variation of the following question: "If we permit Christian student groups to discriminate on the basis of religion, what's to stop the Klan from forming student groups?" The notion that tossing Christian student groups from campus is a mere side effect of an all-consuming effort to halt student white supremacy is absurd on its face ("I'm sorry, Johnny, but you're going to have to stop your Bible study or it might inspire a battalion of Klansmen to gallop through the quad"), but yet the notion persists.

Just this week, my ADF colleague Greg Baylor met this argument head-on at a debate against Prof. Marci Hamilton at the Cardozo School of Law. He reports:

Prof. Hamilton asserted that the “bottom line question” in this case is as follows: if the Court orders Hastings to recognize CLS, will public law schools be required to recognize the Ku Klux Klan?

. . . .

During the “equal access” debates in the 1980s, opponents argued that requiring public schools to give student Bible clubs access to meeting space would lead to the proliferation of Nazi, skinhead, and Klan groups on campus. Over 25 years after the adoption of the federal Equal Access Act, we can safely say that these fears were utterly unfounded. The notion that groups of racist law students are poised to seek official recognition from America’s public law schools, just waiting for the Supreme Court to rule in CLS’s favor, is frankly preposterous.

More fundamentally, there is an enormous distinction between an entity engaging in invidious race discrimination and religious organization requiring its leaders and members to share its religious views. A synagogue that requires its rabbi to be Jewish is not like the Klan. A mosque that requires its imam to be Muslim is not like the Klan. And a CLS chapter that requires its Bible study leaders to be a Christian is not like the Klan. Sometimes, unfortunately, it is necessary to say what ought to be self-evident.

This is exactly right. Belief- and conduct-based "discrimination" is fundamentally different from race-based discrimination. Your race does not dictate your beliefs or your conduct. White people can (and do) join the NAACP because they believe and support the NAACP's mission. But does a Muslim have the same beliefs as a Christian? Obviously not.

03/02 01:24 PM Share

UC San Diego: Another Fake Hate Crime [Robert VerBruggen]

Inside Higher Ed has the story.

03/02 12:53 PM Share

Charlotte Allen's Piece on Student Loans [George Leef]

I just read the piece by Charlotte Allen that Robert mentioned, and it's insightful. She is right that the root of the problem is the easy flow of federal loans meant to increase "access" to college. It's the same as the federal government's push to increase home ownership: a seemingly lofty goal that turns out to have terrible consequences for many individuals. (Of course, politicians don't consider individuals when dreaming up grand-sounding social programs.)

The instance Allen cites of a woman who is struggling with huge college debts from an apparently unsuccessful first try at college and trying desperately to save enough money to go back to college is sad but enlightening. She is employed as a paramedic. If she eventually manages to get her college degree, will she be more productive in that or some other job? Is it likely that she will recoup the expense? Or isn't it far more likely that some educational institution will have pocketed her very hard-earned money in exchange for an education that will do little or nothing to improve her life?

Apropos of my recent debate, just how does it make the American labor force any more competitive if this woman and many other people like her obtain college degrees?

03/02 12:32 PM Share

Internship Opportunity [John J. Miller]

Want a paid media internship in D.C. this summer? Details here.

03/02 10:55 AM Share

Re: Hookup Culture [Carol Iannone]

Well, David, I did say the gaze would work “at certain moments.” The man has of course to be alert and see where he would be welcome, and watch that he doesn’t come off like Peter Sellers as a clueless Inspector Clouseau. But if he is led to be confident of his growing masculinity rather than letting it be denigrated and destroyed by the umpteen movies and television shows and commercials and other kinds of entertainment that promote the stupidity and repulsiveness of men and boys, he will choose the right moment.

Also, the “eeeww” business and women being so full of themselves and all this putting down of men so extensively comes from feminism and in its venom and intensity is rather new in our culture, but old enough for quite a few young people to have grown up inside of it and to accept it as reality when it is only a cultural moment, and one that will pass. We see this moment full blown on campuses today, what with the influence of women’s centers and the like, and the distortion of the curriculum away from classic works that when understood in their fullest sense support a healthier view of human nature and the relationship between the sexes. And of course it is also reinforced by popular culture and things like The View. An article in the Post points out the one-sidedness of this. All of this, including the alpha/beta bit, is part of the package that is keeping men from developing their finer qualities and natural male confidence, and perhaps keeps women from helping them do that. And women and girls, too, who are not the perfect ten and all that, also have to develop confidence in their femininity and better qualities.

There are many aspects of this which can't be gone into here, having to do with the unnatural coarsening of our culture, the strange egalitarian belief that everyone has to get the best of what is being called the best at any time or else some monstrous injustice is being committed, and the extent to which animosity between the sexes, admittedly a perennial in human nature but not to the extent of today, has overtaken their natural complementarity.

03/02 10:30 AM Share

Monday, March 01, 2010

Today's Generation [Jane S. Shaw]

Carol, what a vivid and painful picture you painted of those students in Perugia. As you say, the victims include not only the girl who was murdered but the perpetrators, including the American accomplice, Amanda Knox. You extrapolate from this sordid scene to describe students today who are lacking supervision and self-direction. But I look at this generation a little differently.

For many years I have read about the deterioration — moral, ethical, academic — of today’s youth. For me, this message started with Kay Hymowitz’s 1999 book Ready or Not, but it has been reinforced from many quarters, including Mark Bauerlein’s book The Dumbest Generation. We must discount these claims a little on the grounds that one generation always has a bias against the “young’uns.” That doesn’t destroy either author’s arguments, but it should force us to be cautious.

When I read Hymowitz’s argument that young people were lacking self-discipline and a moral compass, I found myself puzzled. I had been meeting young people who seemed admirable on virtually every scale, from academic ability to personal responsibility.

Keep reading this post . . .

03/01 03:19 PM Share

New AAC&U Study on Employer Views [George Leef]

Last Friday, the Pope Center released an article wherein I took a critical look at the latest study from the AAC&U, a survey of employer views regarding college graduates.

What I took issue with was the vaguely worded questions that could be interpreted as support for the "We need more college graduates" line. Even though many employers respond that they expect workers to have "higher" skills than in the past, that should not be interpreted to mean, "No one who hasn't graduated from college could be capable of doing the work we have here."

On the other hand, the survey does reinforce a point that can't be stressed often enough, namely that many employers believe that college graduates are weak in very basic skills such as writing.

03/01 01:31 PM Share

More about Education Schools [Jane S. Shaw]

North Carolina's high schoolers almost lost at least a century of American history, as the Department of Public Instruction decided to begin its 11th-grade U.S. history course at the year 1877. Holly Brewer, a professor of history at N.C. State, protested, creating a Facebook group that quickly topped 9,000 members, and the DPI backed off. Jenna Ashley Robinson of the Pope Center suggests that when products of education schools, rather than historians, are writing the curriculum, we can expect history to be replaced with social justice and multiculturalism.

03/01 01:02 PM Share

IHE Mentions the PBS Debate on College [George Leef]

I rather expected a full article, but Inside Higher Ed today has a "quick take" piece on the debate I participated in on Friday evening. (Scroll down past several others and you'll find it.)

Why the use of snicker quotes around the word "marginal" when Rich Vedder and I argue that it does little or no good to lure academically weak students into college? Nearly all of the people who might be induced to enroll in college to increase our college enrollment and graduation rates would have to be drawn from the ranks of those who have poor academic records — that is, students who are at the margin of college qualification.

I'll write a Pope Center piece on the debate this week.

03/01 12:11 PM Share

'Humor' Backfires on Pa. Prof [Candace de Russy]

East Stroudsburg University sociology professor Gloria Gadsden says she's been suspended indefinitely for what she felt were humorous postings on Facebook — one, about hiring a hit man and, two, about not wanting to kill any students although "Friday was a different story."

Especially after the shooting at the University of Alabama-Huntsville earlier this month, administrators at the university were not inclined to get the joke.

03/01 11:21 AM Share

Charlotte Allen on Student Loans [Robert VerBruggen]

She weighs in here, and cites my book review from last year on the subject.

03/01 10:20 AM Share

British Prof Tries to Uphold Standards [George Leef]

Here's an interesting story about a British professor who wouldn't give students nice grades despite lousy performance. Trying to appease the students, the administration intervened, whereupon the professor went to court arguing that his authority had been undermined — and the court agreed.

Always encouraging to hear that a professor is fighting back against administrators who just want to make sure the students are happy.

03/01 09:18 AM Share

Friday, February 26, 2010

Berkeley and UC San Diego Unrest [Robert VerBruggen]

At Berkeley, it's about budget cuts; at San Diego, it's about racial incidents.

02/26 05:35 PM Share

Lady Gaga's Thesis [Carol Iannone]

Lady Gaga, A.K.A. Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, wrote what she calls a “crazy” 80-page thesis on Spencer Tunick, who photographs crowds of naked people, while she attended the Tisch School of the Arts. According to Wikipedia, “At age 17, Germanotta gained early admission to the New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. There, she studied music and improved her songwriting skills by composing essays and analytical papers focusing on topics such as art, religion and socio-political order.”

I have not seen or heard her perform. I’d love to see what part her essays and analytical papers play in her act.

02/26 10:53 AM Share

More on For-Profits [Jane S. Shaw]

This post will be a letdown compared to the engrossing conversations of the immediate past, but for those following the battles over proprietary colleges, here's an update. On February 7, the Chronicle of Higher Education featured for-profit colleges, with four articles ranging from an overview of the market to a profile of a struggling student (accessible by subscription only).

The articles' positive spin was a little surprising since the Chronicle tends to reflect academic leanings (which are decidedly opposed). But these schools now enroll close to 10 percent of all college students, so it’s an important segment of higher ed. (And they advertise a lot.)

Stephen Burd of Higher Education Watch (the group that constantly complains about college loans) denounced the series. Why? The article didn’t bring up all the sins of for-profits, past and present. "In a package of stories that runs nearly 7,000 words, the federal government’s concerns about many of these institutions certainly merit attention," he writes.

Although I agree that the series was a little soft, his condemnation is like saying that every time the Chronicle quotes Gordon Gee, it should bring up his lavish pay package.

By the way, the Chronicle editor, Jeffrey Selingo, responds in the comments to Higher Education Watch.

02/26 09:28 AM Share

It’s as Easy as Fishin’, You Can Be a Mathematician [Fred Schwarz]

Jane, I read Professor Blumenthal’s Pope Center article, and while I found the hostile tone rather off-putting, I’ll concede the possibility that his course may do what he says — discuss current mathematical research in a rigorous way that is intelligible and illuminating to non-specialists. He doesn’t make clear whether it’s a required course or an elective, but either way, if Blumenthal’s description of his own accomplishments is true, it’s quite impressive.

But there’s danger in generalizing from the success of one highly talented and motivated teacher with a novel method of instruction. Reading Blumenthal’s piece, I couldn’t help being reminded of Max Beberman and the New Math. As this article explains, in the late 1950s Beberman came up with an unconventional theory that elementary-school students should be taught about math, rather than being taught to do it (this was at least a decade before calculators became commonplace). By all accounts, Beberman himself was a wonderful and enthusiastic teacher, and the schoolchildren he taught learned to love the subject.

The problem was — as I learned as a student in the 1970s, though it was clear to others years before — that what worked for Beberman the evangelist was ineffective in the hands of less talented and motivated public-school time-servers. I and my grade-school classmates suffered through years of “open statements” and “solution sets” before finally reaching the promised land of middle-school algebra, where you could actually solve real-life problems instead of floating around in the ethereal plane all day long.

New Math crashed and burned pretty quickly, though it keeps coming back in new guises, such as the “fuzzy math” that my nephew recently suffered through (and don’t get me started on that). But I suppose that if we ever reach that orgastic future that my Phi Beta Cons colleagues look forward to, one good teacher will be all you need, and students around the world will be able to take Professor Blumenthal’s class. Still, I hope everyone will forgive me if I’m skeptical. Getting a general notion of how mathematicians think may be interesting or useful to a small fraction of students, but I think most of them would be better served by actually doing some math themselves.

02/26 08:12 AM Share

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Murder Abroad [Carol Iannone]

A friend of mine loves to recall her study abroad in the early Seventies. For part of her year overseas, she stayed with a family who lived close to Paris. Her studies were valuable, but what she remembers most and with most fondness is the time she spent with her host family. Every evening, for example, dinner was an event that she was invited — even expected — to attend. The whole family gathered around a well-prepared meal and spent time in conversation as each course slowly unfolded. While the rest of France was still reeling from “’68,” my friend was getting a sense of the old, bourgeois, traditional, family-centered France, enjoying the everyday pleasures of food, drink, and a warm, satisfying, and orderly home life. It was a formative experience for her and put her on the road to native fluency in the language, something that proved very useful to her in later life.

I couldn’t help thinking of this as I read of the dreadful events involving American student Amanda Knox, who had barely begun her year abroad in Perugia, Italy, when she was arrested for murder — a crime, along with related offenses, for which she has been convicted and sentenced to 26 years in prison. According to the prosecution, on the night of Nov. 1, 2007, Amanda and her boyfriend of only a week or two, Italian student Raffaele Sollecito, together with Rudy Guédé, a kind of hanger-on in the university town, got together. They entered the flat Amada shared with a number of other female students, including Meredith Kercher, an English girl. The three surrounded Meredith in her bedroom and tried to force her into some kind of sex act. She resisted, and a violent struggle ensued in which her assailants mortally wounded her with knives and then left her to die. Sollecito and Guédé have also been sentenced to prison time, the first to 25 years, the second to 30, reduced to 16. Appeals are underway.

How different was Amanda’s situation from my friend’s. Instead of living with a family, Amanda lived with several other female students in an unsupervised situation in the second-floor apartment of a cottage. The picture we get from press coverage is of very little accountability and regularity in the students’ lives. There seemed to be a lot of partying, and even their part-time jobs centered around bars and discos. (Indeed, after the bloody deed, Rudy went home, washed up, dressed, and went out nightclubbing.) Amanda was free to stay overnight at Raffaele’s house, in which he evidently also lived without accountability or supervision. The young women who shared Amanda’s flat and the male students who lived on the floor below were free to bring anyone they wished into their apartments. There was plentiful use of drugs and alcohol. The night before the murder was Halloween, and all the students had been out celebrating. This seemed to continue into November 1, a holiday in Italy, a holy day, in fact, and the murder took place late that night, after what appears to have been a rather aimless day.

The whole thing is reminiscent of Mark Bauerlein’s point in his book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30) — that in our culture today, young people are oriented mainly or even only toward each other and have no hierarchy in which to locate and organize themselves. Look at how many lives have been damaged by this act, principally and most horribly of course that of the victim, and then those of her family and friends, but also those of the perpetrators and their families and friends, and really those of all the people who lived in that house and had this awful thing happen in their own residence, including their discovery of Meredith’s brutalized body, during what should have been their blessed year of study in Perugia.

Amanda’s odd behavior after the murder; her giving fuzzy, conflicting reports of her actions; and falsely implicating an innocent black man, Patrick Lumumba (her boss at the bar she worked at), give rise to speculation about how much postmodernism has eroded the capacity for truth. But that could be the subject of another post.

02/25 02:03 PM Share

College as a Part-Time Job [Carol Iannone]

Regarding Mark Bauerlein’s interesting piece on how being a student has become a veritable part-time job, I think we could add grade inflation as a factor, underwritten by student evaluations. Since most students can get A’s and B’s with very little effort, they have lots of time to devote to other things, including “social and leisure activities.”

02/25 01:04 PM Share

Foreigners Have Also Oversold College [George Leef]

Here's a comment from a reader:

And the over-valuing of the college degree isn't confined to America. My wife and I just got back off a cruise; surprising how many waiters, bartenders, blackjack dealers, etc., had college educations in their home country, but were working on a cruise ship because they could earn more money that way. One major difference for them, though — it turned out that "English" was the most-valuable college course on their resume.

02/25 10:38 AM Share

Campus Rape Goes 'Unpunished'? [Robert VerBruggen]

Inside Higher Ed notes:

The University of Massachusetts at Amherst acknowledged that it allowed a student who confessed to raping a friend to stay on campus without significant punishment, according to an investigation by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, appearing in The Boston Globe. The university said that its handling of the incident was a mistake. The incident is described in a broader report suggesting that minimal punishments often follow reports of sexual assaults on campuses in New England.

Evidently, it's a common notion that schools should "punish" rapists themselves. I realize I'm a crazy, bloodthirsty, right-wing law-and-order nut, but I was under the impression that rape is the kind of infraction our society deals with by throwing the offenders in prison.

The Boston Globe's report coughs up these even-more-disturbing factoids:

The Justice Department grant program encourages schools to train campus disciplinary boards to respond effectively to assault charges, including using “appropriate sanctions, such as expulsion of students’’ who have perpetrated sexual assault.

Schools are not specifically required to tell local police about sexual assaults reported on campus; that decision is left to the victims. Most states require citizens to report felonies, but most college administrators will not unless the victim wants them to, according to Brett Sokolow, a lawyer with the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management.

The Justice Department is in on this? Schools don't have to report sexual assaults on their campuses?

Part of the problem here may be that many of the incidents schools classify as "rape" are actually no such thing. (The Center's report itself repeats the ridiculous statistic that one in five college women are sexually assaulted before graduation.) Schools can't very well report to the police every regretted drunken sexual encounter that occurs on their campuses. But that's no reason for schools to slap almost all rapists on their wrists — on ten New England college campuses between 2003 and 2008, 240 sexual-assault reports resulted in only four expulsions — and no reason for the Justice Department to advocate such a thing.

02/25 10:29 AM Share

Yet Another Note on the Hookup Culture [David French]

With all due apologies to PBC readers, I've got to throw in one last "hookup" post and respond to Carol. First, let me start with our broad and important areas of agreement. I agree that the evolutionary biology argument seems strained at best. I don't follow the field closely, so I'm liable to immediately make a fool of myself when I speak on this topic (when has that ever stopped good blogging?), but I definitely track Carol's critique. I find evolutionary biology — at least the behavioral branch of it all — to be so theoretical and malleable as to be virtually useless as a guide for understanding human choices. I'm happy for someone to explain to me why I'm wrong and why evolutionary biology can Explain Everything About Life, but for now consider me unimpressed.

I also agree with Carol that feminism calls on men to suppress their natural masculinity, and this leads to the "beta" behavior, and that people are ultimately too complex to be so roughly categorized. But I've just got to respond to this:

The truth is, even the merest so-called beta has all the masculinity needed to attract women if only he would exercise it. The simplest masculine look or “male gaze” at certain moments can make females melt. Confidence shown in conversation and interest in a subject can attract female admiration. If men would dress to complement their masculine form rather than wearing baggy shorts, baseball caps turned backward, and oversized Hawaiian-type smock-shirts that used to be the reserve of retired overweight men on vacation, they would be very appealing to women.

Oh how I wish that were true! My life would have been so very, very different in high school and college. The reality is that a "male gaze" has to come from someone a woman already finds attractive. Otherwise, the "ewww, I think David likes me" text messages start flying. And what do women find attractive? On the college campus, one constantly hears students lament "where have all the nice guys gone?" Well, the ones who pay attention and have a modicum of self-confidence often react to market pressures and display the stereotypical "alpha" behavior that may not be "nice" but certainly is "attractive." As for the ones who stay "nice?" They're still there, but they're just as (un)attractive as they've always been.

As we hear about the alleged inherent attractiveness of the "good guys," I'm reminded of what happens when we forget what the market is really like and instead talk about the market we'd like to see. The "good guy" is the Toyota Prius of the dating world: He's the person you (allegedly) should end up with. But the Ford F150 is where the moneys' made. The feminist tries to force people to like the Prius — ultimately a fool's errand. The conservative exhorts F150 owners to use their powers for good and not evil.

02/25 09:35 AM Share

Ponnuru's Case Against College [George Leef]

Writing in Time, NR's Ramesh Ponnuru has an article making "The Case Against College Education."

I'm glad to see such educational skepticism getting into "mainstream" publications.

I'll comment on a couple of points. Ponnuru writes, "People with college degrees make a lot more than people without them, and that difference is rising." The average earnings argument is extremely bad on several counts, among them that it cannot account for the effects of credential inflation. As the bachelor's degree has become increasingly common and routinely used as a screening device by employers, good career paths for people without degrees have been blocked off. It's not that employers pay more just because someone has a B.A. to his name, but that they offer fewer and fewer job opportunities to people who don't have that credential.

Second, he addresses the argument that college should be about more than job training: "To talk about college this way may sound elitist. It may even sound philistine, since the purpose of a liberal-arts education is to produce well-rounded citizens rather than productive workers." Ponnuru then makes the sound point that it's a mistake to think that people can't be well-rounded unless they go to college until age 22. What I'd add is that at many schools, the old "well-rounded" part of the curriculum is terribly eroded. Colleges that still have a solid core curriculum are few and far between.

02/25 08:29 AM Share

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

The Globalization Myth [Jane S. Shaw]

On the Pope Center's site today, George Leef demolishes a recent report from the AASCU arguing that the nation needs to produce more college graduates to be internationally competitive. Among his evidence is the news (from two sources) that China is experiencing a glut of college graduates. Many of them live in poverty; the average wage of college graduates is about the same as that of migrant workers.

By the way, George will be one of four debaters at the National Press Club on Friday night (February 26) addressing the question, "Does the U.S. Really Need More College Graduates?" George is arguing the negative (surprise!) along with economist Richard Vedder. Taking the affirmative position are former secretary of education Margaret Spellings and president of the United Negro College Fund Michael Lomax. The debate will be aired on PBS stations over the next few weeks.

02/24 01:32 PM Share

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

More Formal Education Doesn't Necessarily Make You Better [George Leef]

Just today I came across an excerpt from a 1997 book entitled Heads You Win! by Quinn Spitzer and Ron Evans. It contrasts business leaders of the WWII generation with those of today. The old business leaders didn't have nearly the formal management training of today's. They did very well with skills learned not in the classroom, but "in the industrial jungle." The point is that formal education isn't the only or necessarily the best way for people to learn how to do things.

Here are a few paragraphs:

During the 1990s virtually an entire generation of top executives left their businesses, retired, or passed away. Many of these executives had achieved legendary status - [David] Packard at Hewlett-Packard, [Akio] Morita at Sony, [Sir John Harvey-]Jones at ICI, [Sam] Walton at Wal-Mart, and [Jan] Carlzon at SAS, to name a few. These leaders shared some notable characteristics that differentiate them from their successors. They lived through the Great Depression, which crippled the world's economy in the 1930s; they experienced the horrors of World War II; they served their business apprenticeships in the postwar rebuilding
period of the late 1940s and early 1950s. But what may differentiate them most from their counterparts of today is the issue of management. This 'old guard' was the last of a breed of executives who developed their management skills almost entirely in the workplace.

The executives of [the immediate post-war] period were not uneducated — in fact, many were extremely well educated - but they did not learn their approach to business from a business school, a management expert, a celebrated management book, or an outside consultant. Options such as these were not generally available. These executives learned their business skills in the industrial jungle. . . .

The forty-year-old executive of the 1990s, by contrast, probably holds one of the tens of thousands of MBAs awarded each year. His formal management education is supplemented by dozens of business periodicals and hundreds of management books. If, however, a situation seems resistant to even this mass of management wisdom, there are several hundred consulting firms and more than a hundred thousand consultants ready to provide additional management skill and knowledge.

That does not necessarily mean that the business executives of the past were superior to those of the present. . . . Still, we suspect that if those [managers] of years gone by found themselves at the helm of any of today's extraordinarily complex and competitive business enterprises, they would steer a straight and successful course.

02/23 05:56 PM Share

Harvey Silverglate on the Consequences of the Speech-Code Mindset [David French]

Run, don't walk, (or click rapidly) to read Harvey Silverglate's new essay on Minding the Campus. Harvey details the critical cultural and legal link between the speech-code culture and the increase in abusive prosecutions based on highly ambiguous statutory language. Speech codes use intentionally vague terms that give maximum power to university authorities and teach students (our future leaders) that ambiguous language can be the key to highly flexible and seemingly arbitrary exercises of power. Harvey puts it like this:

As federal guidelines shape speech restrictions, a related trend — that of campus groupthink spreading to the real world — has developed. It goes without saying that tomorrow's leaders are molded on today's campuses, so it should come as no surprise that political leaders, many of whom were educated in the 1980s when speech codes began to become all the rage, show little compunction about enacting and enforcing dangerously malleable laws. Perhaps this explains the current disrepute into which the idea of clarity of legal requirements, an important aspect of "due process of law," has fallen: Students have been taught by example that precision of language is best to be avoided. Vagueness, after all, can serve a number of purposes—-none of them salutary.

Please, read the whole thing, and learn (once again) that when it comes to campus authoritarianism, the virus can't be contained.

02/23 05:33 PM Share

'Gender-Bias Bunk' [George Leef]

That's the title of an excellent Forbes article by Christina Hoff Sommers. Gender bias in academia, and especially in science, has taken on the trappings of a religion (just like global warming): Question it, and you'll be attacked for undermining the faith.

She concludes: "Now any engineering, physics, math or computer-technology program that moves too slowly toward gender parity is inviting a government investigation and loss of funding. The nation's leading programs are under pressure to adopt gender quotas and rein in their competitive, hard-driven, meritocratic culture — a culture that has made American science the mightiest in the world."

More collateral damage from the the egalitarian mania that grips Washington.

02/23 02:00 PM Share

Out, Out, Damned Department! [George Leef]

That would be the Department of Education. In this piece, Cato's Neal McCluskey argues that it was a mistake (constitutionally and policy-wise) to have created it in the first place, and that since it just wastes money we don't have today, it ought to be eliminated.

Ultimately, I favor the complete separation of school and state. A necessary first step is the separation of school and the federal government.

02/23 12:55 PM Share

A Battle between Statistics and Logic [Jane S. Shaw]

Fred, you raise some good points about math. Should students learn about about the real world or about the beauty of abstraction? (And can the normal college student appreciate the latter?) Robert Blumenthal of Georgia State College and University describes his course, "Great Ideas of Modern Mathematics," in his Pope Center article and recommends courses like it for the “core” curriculum. Is he right, or should it be reserved for aficionados?

02/23 10:22 AM Share

Just Like Bentham's Panopticon! [John J. Miller]

Schools that spy with laptops—The Onion investigates.

02/23 06:42 AM Share

Monday, February 22, 2010

California Leadership Gets It; Berkeley Faculty Does Not [Carol Iannone]

Students and faculty advisers are trying to create the Sixties all over again at Berkeley in response to tuition rises in the University of California system, according to a report in the New Yorker (abstract here). But administrators and state leaders have seen the light of reality. Mark Yudof, at whom the protests have largely been directed, replies: “You can protest. You can put up signs — at Berkeley they like to occupy trees and run nude — but the answer is I still don’t have any money.”

Yudoff keeps a photograph of Winston Churchill on his desk and remarked last year that “being president of the University of California is like being manager of a cemetery: There are many people under you, but no one is listening.”

Other realists include Diane Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum, who wonders: “If you tell me some union janitor doesn’t understand it, okay, but I don’t understand why the Berkeley faculty doesn’t understand that the problem is Sacramento.”

02/22 01:14 PM Share

Huntsville Killings Trigger Tenure Scrutiny [Candace de Russy]

David, ever judicious, cautions against "over-generalizing" the underlying reasons why Asst. Prof. Amy Bishop allegedly shot three of her colleagues to death at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. In particular, he urges that one not "over-dramatize" academe, that is, not leap to judgment that the murders (in the words of a Chronicle of Higher Education article he cites) are "evidence that academic life today [above all, 'the high stress of the tenure process'] is a petri dish for madness."

David D. Perlmutter, in a thoughtful piece (also at the Chronicle), fully acknowledges that the killings do not necessarily have a "cause-and-effect" rapport with promotion and tenure or that "the 'system'" per se is to blame for the "bloodletting." That said, he argues persuasively, the system is seriously flawed and can cause assistant professors not only considerable "stress" but also "paranoia" and "obsessive suspicion."

Both candidates for tenure and the tenured professors who oversee the process suffer the consequences of the flawed system. Most convincingly, Perlmutter unfavorably dissects sloppily ("cursory and mealy-mouthed") applied elements of the process (such as yearly evaluations, three-year reviews, and mentoring) by "incompetent, rude, fumbling, and oblivious search [as well as promotion-and-tenure] committees."

The Huntsville deaths and Perlmutter's analysis can serve to provoke a useful discussion of the current, wretchedly subjective tenure system. His critique of the process, however, is in one respect anodyne: He fails even to consider the extent to which politically and personally motivated academic cliques have corrupted it.

02/22 12:28 PM Share

Statistics: The Key to Life [Fred Schwarz]

I have regrettably little to say about the hookup culture, but on the subject of college mathematics instruction, I see George Leef has suggested that:

What schools should do is create a challenging course for non-majors that will (or at least can) give students a look into the way mathematicians think — their approach to problems. Taught well, such a course could really be mind-expanding, showing students the beauty of mathematical logic.

While I agree that it would be a good idea for college students to learn more math, I’m not sure this is the way to accomplish it. In general, I’m skeptical of college classes that purport to teach about a subject, rather than teaching the subject itself. If you shy away from details and specifics, there’s no way to be rigorous and nothing you can test on, so it ends up being one of those classes where if you just show up most of the time, you’ll get an A. (I majored in math myself; I don’t know if that makes me more or less qualified to hold an opinion on this question.)

This is particularly true in mathematics, where, outside of a few high-profile problems (like the four-color theorem) that can be easily grasped, it’s hard for most laymen to understand the subject matter except in a very fuzzy way, and even harder for most experts to describe it comprehensibly, let alone explain how mathematicians have approached it (though this is not true for a master like John Derbyshire or, presumably, the author of the article George links to). Most areas of mathematical research are so complicated and abstract that talking about them would be like trying to explain sex to a Martian: Unless you already understand the point of it all, there’s no way to make it sound interesting.

If I were designing a math requirement for college students, I would make everyone take a class in statistics. The basic concepts require no more than high-school algebra; they have many applications to real life (a knowledge of statistics will teach students more about how the world works than any political-science class); and best of all, the students can actually perform calculations and get results themselves — instead of studying the subject at arm’s length, and thereby absorbing the implicit message that math is too complicated for the average person to do.

02/22 11:46 AM Share

Students: Watch What You Say [George Leef]

In today's Pope Center article, Jane Shaw discusses a new report we have done that analyzes the extent to which colleges and universities in North Carolina inhibit student speech with vague codes that prohibit speech that might, for example, "be offensive."

Not one school of the 55 surveyed received a clean bill of health in this regard ("green light"), and most received "red light" ratings for having rules that clearly violate First Amendment rights.

02/22 11:04 AM Share

The Usual Blather About Higher Ed [George Leef]

Typical is this piece in the Las Vegas Sun, in which the writer gives Nevada's higher-ed chancellor the chance to state the establishment's party line on how "we should be producing more graduates ready for high-paying jobs."

The truth of the matter is that when it comes to college credentials, supply does not create its own demand. Just because Nevada and other states "produce" more college graduates, employers are not magically catalyzed to create more "high-paying jobs" for them. Furthermore, very few entry-level jobs call for advanced academic study — work that a bright person who had graduated from high school (or maybe even not) couldn't possibly learn to do without college courses in something or other.

How long will higher-ed officials be able to get away with the silly notion that taxpayers should give them more money because the economy depends on constant expansion of the college credentialing system?

02/22 10:01 AM Share

Sunday, February 21, 2010

How To Silence a Professor [John J. Miller]

A case study in how public employees protect their perks in New Jersey.

02/21 06:15 AM Share

Friday, February 19, 2010

The True Test [Fred Schwarz]

We’ll know that Joe Stack is a tea partier when conservatives start putting his manifesto on college reading lists, the way liberals did with the Unabomber.

02/19 11:18 AM Share

How is Privatization of Public Universities Going? [George Leef]

In today's Pope Center article, my colleague David Koon takes a look at the trend toward decreasing state financial support and control over public universities.

I think it's good economically and philosophically to replace money confiscated from taxpayers with money voluntarily paid for services or donated. Not everyone agrees. David's article quotes Patrick Callan of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education as saying that the trend toward autonomy may result in public universities' "shirking their commitments to providing access." But "access" means college that's heavily subsidized by taxpayers. That's one of the main reasons why higher education has been so oversold.

02/19 10:35 AM Share

Re: The Hookup Culture and Masculinity [Carol Iannone]

David raises a number of interesting points, but I remain dismayed that all over the Internet and everywhere else, it seems, people are accepting this alpha-beta business as their understanding of the relationship between the sexes. Women really want alphas but “settle” for the pathetic betas in order to have families. Now we hear from the evolutionists that these same women are ready to abandon their betas if an alpha should amble by. Why should we accept this limited construct of human nature and of the potentialities of our lives?

I repeat, regarding evolutionary biology, not long ago they were claiming that women were naturally monogamous. As female behavior grew wilder, they changed the evolutionary scenario to conjure up the prehistoric woman with serial partners. If contemporary women begin to curb themselves a bit as the culture keeps changing, and they probably will, the evolutionists will no doubt revise the scenario yet again. This scenario seems just to correspond with what we see of behavior today, and expresses no abiding truth about human nature.

Feminism is largely responsible for the cultivation of “beta males” by making men suppress their natural masculinity. The truth is, even the merest so-called beta has all the masculinity needed to attract women if only he would exercise it. The simplest masculine look or “male gaze” at certain moments can make females melt. Confidence shown in conversation and interest in a subject can attract female admiration. If men would dress to complement their masculine form rather than wearing baggy shorts, baseball caps turned backward, and oversized Hawaiian-type smock-shirts that used to be the reserve of retired overweight men on vacation, they would be very appealing to women.

What about the man who is the star of a cable show called The Ace of Cakes? Is he alpha or beta? I suppose with his successful business, he is an alpha, but he dresses like a beta, or really a delta or epsilon, and thus arouses little feminine interest.

02/19 08:35 AM Share

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Vote of No Confidence [Jane S. Shaw]

I saw this as good news: The New York Times reports on a study showing that the American public distrusts colleges, seeing them more as businesses committed to making money than as institutions committed to the education of American youth.

The analysis is flawed — colleges and universities are not run like businesses, but, rather, as well-funded nonprofits on a "maximize revenue" model, as Robert Martin discussed in a Pope Center paper. But the study's implication — that the underlying motivation of most administrators is to bring in more income (as opposed to running a tight ship) — is correct.

Peter Drucker once wrote that businesses exist only by the “sufferance” of society at large. If they fail to live up to the standards demanded by society, they will lose their support in the broader community and ultimately cease to exist. That's even more true of academia.

Stories like this help to undermine the complacent academic view that whatever they are doing is good for society.

02/18 04:56 PM Share

Medill Innocence Project Update [Robert VerBruggen]

Some new developments occurred about a week ago.

For background, read PBC's previous coverage here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The organization is also in the news regarding another matter.

02/18 04:21 PM Share

Don't Over-Generalize From the Huntsville Murders [David French]

One of the sad rituals following mass murder is the attempt to understand why the killer did what they did. The explanations all too often center around alleged stresses that pushed the killer "over the edge." For years, teachers and parents falsely believed bullying caused the Columbine massacre. Recently, some explained the Fort Hood terrorist attack by arguing that Major Hasan essentially caught PTSD from returning soldiers and "snapped."

And now, from the Chronicle of Higher Education, we have this:

The shooting deaths of three biology professors at the University of Alabama at Huntsville this month, allegedly by a colleague who had recently lost an appeal of her tenure denial, seemed to many observers to confirm the worst about faculty workplaces. In conversations on The Chronicle's Web site and elsewhere, people have seized on the killings as evidence that academic life today is a petri dish for madness: The high stress of the tenure process, the pressures to be brilliant at research and teaching, the cloistered environment, the extent to which internal politics affect people's careers—it's a combination that could damage even psychologically healthy people.

Academic life as a "petri dish for madness"? We may have a winner for overstatement of the year. At this point, we don't even know if Amy Bishop was mentally ill. Nor do we know if academic life had anything to do with her killing spree. After all, she killed her brother under suspicious circumstances years before she was a professor.

I sincerely doubt that the work environment at UAH was any worse than the work environment at a normal public university — and considerably less stressful than the work environment in, say, Afghanistan. Perhaps a thorough investigation will reveal the "real" reasons for the murders. Perhaps Amy Bishop is mentally ill, or perhaps she is, quite simply, evil.

Let the investigation continue, mourn the fallen, be grateful for those who intervened, and — please — let's not over-dramatize the academic workplace.

02/18 11:26 AM Share

Are Poor Teachers to Blame? [George Leef]

Should we blame teachers for poor academic results by students? That's the topic of a debate scheduled for March 16 at New York University. Rod Paige, Terry Moe, and Larry Sand will argue that we should. Teachers' union president Randi Weingarten and others will argue against them. Details on the debate are available here.

If you're in the NY area, this looks to be very worthwhile.

02/18 10:57 AM Share

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Is Heckling a Right? [George Leef]

In the wake of the ugly incident at UC Irvine, some people are seriously arguing that heckling should be protected speech. An Inside Higher Ed story goes into the details.

If a lecturer has free-speech rights, why don't people in the audience have an equal right to shout their displeasure? Many years ago, Murray Rothbard resolved this apparent conflict by showing that it disappears when you take property rights into consideration. The invited speaker doesn't have the right to say just anything he wants; he's been invited for a particular purpose and his right to speak is thus limited. And the same for the audience; they've been admitted to a building for the purpose of listening and, if permitted, asking questions. They don't have a universal right of free speech in the building any more than the invited lecturer does. If UCI wanted to allow audience members carte blanche to shout and disrupt, it could, but it did not. It was the university's building, so the university got to set the rules for its use. End of controversy.

02/17 04:03 PM Share

Erskine Bowles to Depart UNC; Pope Center Comments [George Leef]

In today's Clarion Call, my colleague Jay Schalin writes about Erskine Bowles, who has served as president of the UNC system for five years but is stepping down to work on a problem far more daunting than improving efficiency in higher education — the national-debt problem.

Jay's take is that Bowles did a pretty good job, and I'm inclined to agree. Bowles was willing to listen to ideas about higher education that did not emanate from within the system.

I hope he'll be equally willing to listen to "non-mainstream" ideas on curing the federal addiction to spending.

02/17 03:16 PM Share

Profs Weigh In on Jones's Admissions [Candace de Russy]

Various professors are stepping up to comment on the unraveling of the "science" of global warming.

The latest discrediting of this "science" involves, once again, Prof. Phil Jones, whom many warmists, as Wesley Pruden of the Washington Times points out, have regarded as "an archbishop in the Church of Global Warming."

As widely reported, Jones headed the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, which was viewed as the holy wellspring of the raw data on which climate science depends — until recently, when leaked e-mails among researchers showed evidence of manipulation of data and evidence.

Jones, who was forced to resign in uproar over this disgrace, has now admitted to a BBC interviewer that, according to his findings, the earth might have been warmer in the Middle Ages. If that is the case, as Pruden comments, "the notion that fluctuations in earthly temperatures are man-made is rendered just that, a man-made notion."

In the interview, Jones conceded joltingly

that for the past 15 years there has been no "statistically significant" warming [and] that he has lost track of many of the relevant papers — that his office was overwhelmed by the clutter of paper . . . An environmental analyst for the BBC said the professor told him that his "strengths" include "integrity" and "doggedness" but not record-keeping and "office tidying." He's just not dogged about keeping things straight.

Wow! And this from a leader of leading scientists upon whose word governments around the world rely and could decide to dedicate untold amounts of their citizens' resources to reduce "man-enduced" global warming.

Some academic scientists have had the integrity to respond honestly to Jones's disclosures:

John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and once a ranking member of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says the temperature records have been compromised and cannot be relied on. The findings of weather stations that collected temperature data were distorted by [being located near heat- and cold-producing sites].

. . .

Terry Mills, a professor of applied statistics at Britain's Loughborough University, looks at the U.N. panel's data and applies a little skepticism. "The earth," he told London's Daily Mail, "has gone through warming spells like these at least twice before in the last thousand years."

Let more such scientists come forth, or we will likely witness more politically tainted "scientific" dodgery — and perhaps even the death of science itself.

02/17 02:55 PM Share

Boys Not Going to College: A Problem? [George Leef]

Richard Whitmire keeps saying that it is, most recently in this commentary piece in the Chronicle.

He writes, "Some people will argue that those students were never college material in the first place. True, few of those 72,000 boys [who drop out in 9th grade] each year were probably Princeton bound. And if you listen to conservative education commentators, these boys shouldn't even be thinking about college. The country already has too many 'degreed' burger flippers, they argue."

It's not only "conservatives" who make that argument, but let's go on.

"There are reasons to think otherwise. First, such gender imbalances trigger unhealthy (and expensive) social trends. Among African-Americans, women graduate from college at twice the rate of men, leaving few black 'marriageable mates' — men whose education credentials match those of black women."

I don't see why that's much of a social problem — nothing requires black college-educated women to marry only black college-educated men — but more to the point, how will a policy of putting academically weak black males through college solve it? I doubt that a "degreed burger flipper" is much more desirable as a mate than a non-degreed one. And some of those college-degreed black women, like some college-degreed students of all races and both sexes, are probably doing mundane work that any high-school student could learn.

Whitmire goes on: "Also, if President Obama is right about improving the flagging U.S. position in world education rankings, the country needs to rapidly ramp up the number of college graduates." But the president is mistaken in his apparent belief that there is a direct relationship between the level of "educational attainment" in a country and its economic health. College work (which many students do remarkably little of, as Mark Baurelein notes here) doesn't necessarily do anything to make a student more valuable as an employee. College may add little or nothing to human capital, as I argued here.

I agree with Whitmire when he says we must "shake up teachers' colleges." That's a necessary first step in improving our woeful K-12 system. Poor teaching is just one of many reasons why K-12 education is so ineffective.

02/17 02:08 PM Share

The Hookup Culture and Masculinity [David French]

I almost hesitate to stick my nose into Robert and Carol's interesting debate about "hooking up," but I've got to come to Robert's aid on one point — while the "alpha" and "beta" designations in men are reductive, they are still instructive. Yes, there are men who might be alpha in some areas (quite accomplished in their careers) but beta in others (quite insecure around women), and I'm sure there are alpha and beta elements in us all. There is, however, an enduring constant in at least the way men perceive female attraction: The "bad boys" get the girls. Heck, if this perception weren't widely shared, about half of all teen literature would vanish overnight, the entire "rom-com" genre would go extinct, and people like, well, me ("the nice guy" — at least until I went to law school) would stride across the dating landscape like a colossus, crushing all those who would oppose us. Suffice to say, that was not my experience.

But why is the "bad guy" so attractive? I'm going to go way out on a limb here and say that these bad guys are at least classically masculine in some important senses. They're perceived as strong, as aggressive, and in some strange ways, as honorable (especially if they are part of a "brotherhood" like a gang, a mafia crew, or even a perennially alcohol-poisoned fraternity) and protective of their own. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that as our culture (including our heavily feminized Christian evangelical culture, by the way) continues to discourage the positive development of those qualities in men — by discouraging military service, for example — you're more likely to see women drawn into destructive lifestyles than you are to see them change their fundamental attraction from masculine to more feminine men.

Recently, I got a thoughtful e-mail from a campus minister regretting the lack of available, virtuous men to date and marry the women in his campus ministry. This is an excerpt from the e-mail I wrote in response:

Basically, when I think of what a man is and should be — the ultimate expression of manhood — I think of the men who stormed Omaha Beach, or charged the Confederate line at Cold Harbor, or (to take a nonviolent example) braved the firehoses at Selma. First, there was the brotherhood: the bond between the men in the unit that civilians can’t ever experience or understand. There was the honor: the connection to the high purpose of the mission (the defense of the defenseless and the triumph over evil) and the legacy of those who’d served before. There was also courage: to get onto the landing craft meant that they might die, to leave the landing craft meant that they probably would die, yet they did it anyway. And there was also aggression: Their ultimate purpose was not to go die but to go kill, and they performed their mission with excellence.

I mention those elements because I think they describe something essential about the highest elements of manhood — the combination of the aggression with courage with duty with honor with brotherhood. You see shadows of these things in good sports teams, in some fraternities, and even (but rarely) in some men’s groups. But you often see perversions of them as men — without an object upon which to focus their aggression, without real brothers to stand beside, and without a higher purpose to motivate them — flail around aimlessly, often violently or petulantly. Unable to express their natures, culturally condemned as those natures are misunderstood by a feminized church and education system, and without a higher call, there is nothing there but pursuit of the hookup, aimless adventures, and effortless access to porn.

We're not raising sons to storm Omaha Beach. We're raising them to . . . what? Have any higher purpose? Any higher calling? And if not, is it any wonder that women aren't finding them attractive — as "nice" and otherwise accomplished as they might be?

02/17 01:48 PM Share

Obsession [John J. Miller]

The sad and strange story of Amy Bishop, the professor accused of killing three colleagues at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, continues to emerge. Here's a detail that probably won't make it into many of the profiles:

A family source said Bishop, a mother of four children - the youngest a third-grade boy - was a far-left political extremist who was “obsessed” with President Obama to the point of being off-putting.

02/17 05:29 AM Share

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

This Helps to Explain Why We Have Such Great Teachers [George Leef]

Prof. Mike Adams writes here about a course taught in the education school at UNC-Wilmington, where the students — future school teachers — are taught Black English.

Just going on a a limb here, but I'll bet they aren't taught how to diagram sentences.

02/16 02:55 PM Share

Another Great Scholar on Campus [George Leef]

Claremont McKenna student Charles Johnson writes here about a speaker his school hosted recently, a prominent spokesman for Islam who blamed the Ft. Hood massacre on America's culture of violence and access to guns. Intolerance bred from Islamic zealotry? Nah.

02/16 02:11 PM Share

Re: A Few Thoughts about Hookup Culture [Robert VerBruggen]

Carol — I'm not sure too many people actually use the term "alpha male" the way you seem to interpret it. Users of the term don't contend that it explains everything there is to explain about female attraction; they contend simply that women like to be with high-status men, and that some women are willing to sacrifice monogamy to do so.

Seen this way, the concept has two important ramifications on college campuses: (1) College males who want to attract women should learn to send signals that they are high-status, and (2) when students don't practice monogamy and women are free to follow their whims, some men will have multiple partners and other men none. This is the situation Allen describes; I believe this situation exists, but is not as pervasive as others seem to think (again, only 40 percent of college women participate in the hookup scene at all, and only 10 percent do so regularly).

You mention that the "alpha male" concept doesn't take into account the "higher" things that women might look for. Of course it doesn't. But neither does the statement, "Men are attracted to youth and hourglass figures." Sure, men also look for other things, but (believe me) that doesn't make the statement any less true.

And as for the point about mafiosi: Despite their violent nature, they get girls, so if anything, they're particularly good examples of the alpha-male phenomenon at work. Allen used the example of serial killers who get love letters in her piece.

Also, I don't understand why it's important how evolutionary psychology arrived at the place it is today. My concern is: What actual evidence is there that its current arguments about human nature are wrong?

Finally, regarding whether monogamy is "natural": Human societies have had plenty of different mating systems, and even in monogamous societies, many people stray, so I have a hard time believing it is. But so what? Capitalism isn't "natural," either; nor is democracy. It doesn't much matter whether an institution is part of human nature; what matters is whether it channels human nature in a useful way. Monogamy minimizes sexual jealousy by forbidding adultery, and it makes sure that low-status men have access to partners by restricting high-status men to one partner apiece. Those are two very valuable features, and that's why monogamous cultures have dominated non-monogamous cultures for centuries now, "unnatural" as either may be.

02/16 01:41 PM Share

Life Imitates Art in a Defining Instance of 'Self-Important' [Roger Clegg]

For those of you who missed John Miller's Corner posting this Sunday, let me inform you of a news report that "Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has donated the handcuffs used on him during his arrest last year outside his home to the Smithsonian Institution's black history museum."

This would not have surprised Iowahawk; read the blog's (mildly profane) spoof on the Gates arrest here.

02/16 12:51 PM Share

Re: A Few Thoughts about Hookup Culture [Carol Iannone]

I believe the alpha-male designation is reductive and simplistic and not helpful. It does not take account of man's higher nature and the full scope of human possibility. Drug dealers and pimps and mafiosi are alpha males.

What I meant as unscientific was that the evolutionists changed the story when they observed changes in current female behavior, and they are not just observing the current scene; they are reading back from it into our supposed evolutionary history. They are just making things up to fit what they see of the current scene. There is no science involved. Remember, conservatives were interested in evolutionary biology because they thought it supported the idea of a given human nature and a natural basis for monogamy. That’s turning out to be a false prop.

Regarding the statistics Robert cites below, what was that about only 40 percent of college women hooking up? But granted, some of those numbers are encouraging. Still, marriage is supposed to be the norm. The extent of departure from it is what causes the problems, and that extent has grown with divorce, cohabitation, and illegitimacy, less among college graduates, true, but still enough to be a problem. Most college campuses have an ample representation of the offspring of divorced, affluent, college-educated parents. And aside from the personal choices of college graduates, is it far-fetched to suggest that the rampant disorder and sexual license of many college campuses, amply illustrated by the posts we’ve had on Sex Week at Yale, transmogrifies into the filth and perversity of much of our popular culture?

If the center holds, it’s holding because of cultural and religious formation of man’s higher functions, not because of anything the evolutionists are telling us. Given enough of the acid of their reductive, materialistic views of human nature, that center may erode further.

02/16 12:01 PM Share

Re: Nathan Harden [George Leef]

I'd like to second John's praise. Excellent writing by Nathan. I'd be willing to bet that alumni donations drop due to his reporting on "Sex Week at Yale."

02/16 11:38 AM Share

Of Guilt-Trip Testing, Dewey and Freud [Candace de Russy]

Recently, at Minding the Campus, I posted a completed sociology exam discovered by a colleague in an eastern U.S. college classroom. Here is an entirely representative sample of the questions and answers on the test, all of which relentlessly drove home the point, as I noted, that this "country is rotten to the core and that whites and males are evil":

Question: How does the United States "steal" the resources of other (third world) [sic] countries?

Answer: We steal through exploitation. Our multinationals are aware that indigenous people in developing nations have been coaxed off their plots and forced into slums. Because it is lucrative, our multinationals offer them extremely low wage labor [sic] that cannot be turned down.

Chuck Rogér, at the American Thinker, blames this kind of now rampant conditioning of students by progressives on philosophical elites at the turn of the twentieth century — notably those who "mainlined" John Dewey's "psychologizing" of education at the expense of knowledge and Sigmund Freud's propagation of the "guilt-urge."

Rogér vigorously condemns and rightly warns against what these progressives have wrought:

Purveyors of this elitism have successfully drilled generations of Americans in the "thinking" required to accept guilt where none is warranted. Those elitists' efforts have bred unhealthy social trends and economic policies sufficient to cast the future of America in a far dimmer light than traditional values and sound economics would otherwise have assured.

Damn Dewey and damn Freud, both of whom appear to have been utterly incapable of appreciating the destructiveness in what they preached. Damn today's progressives, who seem genuinely unable to grasp the ruin they call down on America, so blinded are they by their unremitting, high-minded guilt.

02/16 10:57 AM Share

College Math Ain't What It Oughta Be [George Leef]

In yesterday's Pope Center article, Prof. Robert Blumenthal of Georgia College and State University argues that the mathematics requirement at most colleges and universities these days is just a rehashing of high-school topics. (More evidence for my argument that it's erroneous to assume that just by getting through college, a student has advanced in knowledge and skills!) What schools should do is create a challenging course for non-majors that will (or at least can) give students a look into the way mathematicians think — their approach to problems. Taught well, such a course could really be mind-expanding, showing students the beauty of mathematical logic.

02/16 10:36 AM Share

Monday, February 15, 2010

Nathan Harden [John J. Miller]

Wow. That's all I can say after reading Nathan Harden's dispatches from Yale.

Harden is not just a writer. He's also a musician. If you've enjoyed his posts on Phi Beta Cons, try his songs on MySpace.

02/15 06:21 AM Share

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Sex Week at Yale, Day 9 [Nathan Harden]

Today was the ninth and final day of “Sex Week” at Yale. The Beatles said it best: “Eight days a week, I lo-o-o-o-ove you. Eight days a week, is not enough to show I care.”

The day began with a talk by alt-porn producer Tristan Taormino. She was introduced as a filmmaker who “tries to promote a pleasure-positive view of sexuality, and also tries to challenge gender norms through porn.”

Taormino is author of the book Opening Up, which serves as a kind of how-to guide for a variety of non-monogamous lifestyles. Her talk was called “Beyond Monogamy: The Case for Open Relationships.” She argued that high rates of infidelity and divorce disprove the idea that humans are naturally monogamous. She called cheating a “shadow institution” in American culture.

Non-monogamous relationships allow people to be more honest, Taormino said, and to pursue supplementary relationships in an ethical way. By maintaining open communication, people in such relationships can learn to overcome what she called “dark emotions,” such as jealousy and insecurity.

The second talk today, entitled “Sexual Fantasies,” was presented by sex therapist and HBO personality Susan Block (aka Dr. Suzy). Block has spoken at every Sex Week since the event’s inception in 2002. At that time, she said, conducting a Sex Week was considered “a crazy idea, a fantasy.” But Yale has inspired other colleges and universities to hold similar events, she said.

During her talk, Block described various categories of sexual fantasy. She brought along a number of adult-themed DVDs that she had produced. Not all the titles are printable here. But there was one called “The Bonobo Way,” and another called “Eros Day,” which she said contained footage of an orgy she had held in celebration of Obama’s victory. She handed out her DVDs to students, along with about 20 Doc Johnson “Pocket Rockets.”

The final event of Sex Week was a talk called “Positively Sexual,” by prominent porn star Sasha Grey.

Grey, who at 21 years of age is perhaps the best-known porn actresses in the U.S., spoke about how she got into the adult-film industry, and about her experiences in the business. She also talked about her plans for life after porn. She said she hopes to start a family some day. “I obviously will not be performing in adult films then,” she said.

In an interview, I asked Grey what she hoped students would take away from her talk. “People my age are uncomfortable with their sexuality, and I want to change that,” she said. “Ignorance breeds fear. The more you learn, the more you’re aware of yourself. If we had better sex-ed in this country, there would be less teen pregnancy and a lower STD rate.”

With those words, Sex Week at Yale 2010 came to a close.

— I would like to thank the folks at NRO, especially Robert VerBruggen, for the support this past week. To follow me on Twitter, click here.

02/14 10:18 PM Share

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Sex Week at Yale, Day 8 [Nathan Harden]

I have never before been lectured by a naked person. It happened today at Yale.

The day began with a talk by female-to-male transsexual porn star Buck Angel. Buck told students his personal story of gender transformation. Born female, he said he never felt comfortable with his own body until he began a series of surgeries and hormone treatments as an adult. He later used his unique anatomy to pioneer a new niche in the adult-film industry. Buck told students that he saw his work as educational, and he hoped to help others become more comfortable with their own sexuality. “I really want to reach the younger generation,” he said.

The next event was an instructional presentation by porn producer Madison Young. Her bondage suspension performance last night, I learned, was moved off campus at the behest of the Yale administration. Young’s lecture today, however, was held on campus. Her talk, entitled “BDSM 101,” introduced students to the basics of bondage, discipline, and sadism and masochism.

Young played one of her videos for demonstration purposes. In the video, she was naked and bound by all four limbs. Soon, a man on screen began thrashing her with a whip. Welts were visible on her torso. I looked away, but I continued to hear the sound of the whip striking her, as well as the sound of a male voice taunting her.

When the video ended, Young asked a volunteer to come up and pin clips on her thighs. Two other students ripped the clips away with attached strings, following her directions. Young then removed the top of her dress, exposing her bare chest, and began to show students how to position nipple pinching devices. At that point, I left the room.

In the classroom next door, about a dozen students had gathered for an event sponsored by the Anscombe Society at Yale — a group that promotes premarital abstinence. The speaker, David Schaengold, said students who practice abstinence “shouldn’t feel their views are irrational.” Casual hook-ups are demeaning, he said, because they require students to use one another as mere objects of gratification. “If you think of your moral heroes,” he said, “it’s probably not possible to think of them doing lots of casual hook ups.”

The evening ended with another instructional class on oral sex, and a panel entitled, “Sex, Gender, & Pornography,” featuring six adult producers and porn stars.

02/13 11:26 PM Share

Untenured Radical [John J. Miller]

The suspect in three killings at the University of Alabama in Huntsville had been denied tenure:

The Associated Press reported that a biology professor, identified as Amy Bishop, was charged with murder.

According to a faculty member, the professor had applied for tenure, been turned down, and appealed the decision. She learned on Friday that she had been denied once again. ...

Dr. Bishop had told acquaintances recently that she was worried about getting tenure, said a business associate who met her at a business technology open house at the end of January and asked not to be named because of the close-knit nature of the science community in Huntsville.

“She began to talk about her problems getting tenure in a very forceful and animated way, saying it was unfair,” the associate said, referring to a conversation in which she blamed specific colleagues for her problems.

“She seemed to be one of these persons who was just very open with her feelings,” he said. “A very smart, intense person who had a variety of opinions on issues.”

02/13 07:08 AM Share

Friday, February 12, 2010

Sex Week at Yale, Day 7 [Nathan Harden]

Today, Sex Week provided students with the opportunity to learn about erotic body modification. Elayne Angel, author of The Piercing Bible (described on the cover as “The Definitive Guide to Safe Body Piercing”), gave a talk entitled “Erotic Piercings.”

(“Angel” is a popular surname for guest lecturers at Sex Week. Tomorrow, Yale students will hear from porn producer Joanna Angel, as well as Elayne Angel’s husband, Buck Angel, who is a prominent female-to-male transsexual porn star.)

Elayne Angel began her talk with a warning for those in attendance: “If you’re offended by sexual material and photos of genitals you should leave now,” she said, “because there’s going to be a lot of that.”

Her slide show cataloged a variety of piercing techniques. The piercing styles had distinctive names such as the “Princess Diana,” the “VCH,” and the “Prince Albert.”

As visual aids, Angel utilized photographs of genitals she had pierced in the course of her professional practice. She explained the erotic benefits as well as the health risks associated with each type of piercing. “Virtually any piercing has the potential to arouse,” she said. But she warned students that, when done incorrectly, genital piercings can cause permanent nerve damage and loss of sensation.

Next on the agenda was an “Erotic Bondage Suspension Performance.” The featured guest was Madison Young, a well-known producer of bondage, domination, and sadomasochism porn. The event was described on the schedule as “a multi-media rope bondage erotic performance and installation that investigates the multiple levels of identity with in the adult industry and the civilian and familial gaze upon an adult film star.”

The event was plagued by scheduling difficulties. Ms. Young’s co-performer, James Mogul, was replaced on the schedule by a woman named Eden Wells. The time of the performance was pushed back from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. And, in the hours leading up to the event, its location was changed twice — first to the gymnasium, and then to a private residence just off campus.

No word yet on why the event was moved.

02/12 11:27 PM Share

A Few Thoughts on the 'Hookup Culture' . . . [Robert VerBruggen]

. . . in response to the Charlotte Allen article I linked to previously and Carol's post about it.

First of all, based on my observations in college, I think there's a lot of truth to the "alpha male" phenomenon. In fact, based on everyone's observations in the world at large, I think it's obvious, and has been even during times when the marriage norm was incredibly strong — across time and place, look at the success that male music stars, athletes, political leaders, etc., have had with women. It's simply true that women are attracted to men of high status, and that some women are willing to leave (or jeopardize) committed relationships with lower-status men to pursue higher-status men.

Other women, of course, will prefer commitment from lower-status guys. In a sexual marketplace where the constraints of monogamy aren't imposed from above (by religion, social norms, etc.), that's the female dilemma: Share a high-status man, or extract commitment from a lower-status man. Enough women choose the former option that alpha males get a lot of the women, leaving some other males with no one (as happens in polygamous societies).

The fact that institutions (monogamy, marriage) have kept these tendencies in check doesn't disprove their widespread existence, and I don't think it's troubling or unscientific at all that evolutionary psychologists have abandoned the "women are naturally monogamous, and that's that" meme for something that actually squares with the available facts.

However, I would like to expand on my original post about Allen's article, in which I called the piece "a bit alarmist and harsh in places." While the trends we see in young people's college years (and beyond) are troubling, the center holds — both in college and in the adult marriage market. I would guess this is due to two factors: One, lots of women will choose monogamy over high-status mates; two, social norms against promiscuous behavior and in favor of marriage still have some sway.

While the hookup culture exists on college campuses, it's not ubiquitous. Virtually any woman who wants to hook up can do so, but an Independent Women's Forum (IWF) survey of college girls found that only 40 percent had. Only 10 percent had done so more than six times.

Also, this situation doesn't persist much beyond college; eventually, monogamy takes hold again, forcing former participants in the hookup culture to pair up. IWF found that 83 percent of college girls considered marriage an important goal, and 63 percent of them wanted to meet their future husbands in college. These girls will follow through, if current trends are any guide; across the educational board, nonmarriage is rare: By the time they hit 40, at least 80 percent of women in each educational category — high-school dropout, high-school graduate, some college, college graduate — have been married.

And contrary to popular belief, the hookup culture's worst effects are seen not in college, but among the less educated:

To sociologists who study marriage, what's troubling lately is the chasm that has opened up between the most- and least-educated women. About 80 percent of female college grads ages 30-44 have been married at some point, compared with 71 percent of women who did not graduate from high school, according to the latest Pew research. The marriages of college grads are also increasingly stable. From the 1970s to the '90s, rates of divorce fell by almost half among college-educated women, but they remained high among women with less than a four-year degree. If there's a crisis in marriage, it's because the least educated and poorest women are no longer getting married. And they are the ones who could most benefit from the institution.

02/12 01:55 PM Share

Why Are So Many College Students Leftist Zealots? [George Leef]

Early indoctrination has much to do with it. In this article, Mary Grabar reports on the way social-studies teachers are using their students to help push one of the causes of the Left — statehood for the District of Columbia.

02/12 12:55 PM Share

Bertonneau on Culture and Memory [George Leef]

In the third in a series of articles for the Pope Center on the travails of teaching today's college students, Prof. Thomas Bertonneau discusses the connection between culture and memory — now a perilously weak connection, he finds.

02/12 10:45 AM Share

Re: The Hookup Culture [Carol Iannone]

I too found Charlotte Allen’s survey of the dating scene informative, but I have to say I’m weary of this alpha-male/alpha-female model for human behavior being shoved on us by sociobiology. It is reductive and it also changes as circumstances change. At first sociobiology seemed to underwrite the idea of a hard-wired human nature, resistant to remaking by “progressive” social engineers who wanted to fashion new versions of male and female, according to feminist or socialist or whatever ideas. This is where conservatives found it appealing. It seemed even to give a natural basis to marriage: The woman was monogamous by nature and wanted protection for her children; the man was polygamous by nature but wanted to know the children were his so he’d agree to a monogamous relationship. George Gilder’s whole thesis about men and marriage was that women would civilize men by demanding that they enter this kind of covenant.

But then Francis Fukuyama in The Great Disruption declared that traditional sexual mores would never return because society had learned to manage sexual freedom and its effects — single motherhood, divorce, serial and multiple sexual partners, the whole thing. What was that about being “hard-wired”? Behavior that had developed through eons of evolution was changing in a few decades? So now there is this newer version of our “hard-wired” behavior evolved through eons of evolution, that women are not monogamous at all, but ever ready to move on to a better mate, to an alpha male, or to a bigger alpha male, when one comes along.

Indeed, our prehistoric female forebear now sounds more like the single mother with children from more than one partner, or the divorced mother with a generous settlement who can exercise her sexual freedom in a new version of “having it all,” instead of the canny old-fashioned girl who spots and snares her man. The change in the theory came from observing female behavior at present and fitting the evolutionary model to it.

When female behavior still seemed to be defined by searching for the one man with whom to have a family, which persisted well into the sexual revolution (indeed, women having sex before marriage was often perceived to be the price to pay in order to land a man), we had the monogamous model. Now another kind of flamboyant, sexually promiscuous behavior is seen among some women, and so the theory is revised to fit that.

This is not scientific, and it’s also not useful in building a good society. And it certainly doesn’t support conservative values. This is what happens when people lose their belief in the transcendent and must rely on the limited observation of the senses and the unenlightened power of reason.

One thing is for sure, though. The campus dating scene has become a zoo. Wendy Shalit may have been the first to call attention to what by now has become routine, and Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons may have been the first widely read fictional treatment of it. See Shalit’s review of three books on “coming of age in America,” pace Margaret Mead, two of which cover the college scene.

02/12 09:40 AM Share

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Sex Week at Yale, Day 6 [Nathan Harden]

Weather continued to disrupt travel today, leading to the cancellation of a talk by sex-toy maven Patty Brisben. Brisben is the founder of a company called Pure Romance, which sells female-oriented sex toys at Tupperware-party-like events across America to the tune of $80 million per year.

Brisben has spoken here in past years. And this year, her company is the biggest financial sponsor of Sex Week at Yale. Her presentation was to be followed by a special “Girl’s Night Out” event, where free vibrators were promised to the first 50 female students in attendance. The snow, however, forced Yale ladies to make other plans.

Some of them may have chosen to attend the Yale Film Society’s presentation of Midnight Cowboy, which took place at a Yale auditorium right down the street. Midnight Cowboy is described on the Sex Week website as the only X-rated film ever to win an Oscar.

Earlier in the day, Lamont Hiebert, co-founder of LOVE146 — a non-profit organization that runs safe homes in Asia for victims of child sex slavery — had given a talk about child trafficking and exploitation. Currently, there are an estimated 27 million people enslaved around the globe, he said. And 100,000 children are exploited for sexual purposes each year in American alone.

Keep reading this post . . .

02/11 11:41 PM Share

Neumann U. Alumns Turn Thumbs Down on Circuses [Candace de Russy]

PETA, the radical animal-rights group, wants to put circuses out of business, and, it would appear, the Neumann University Alumni Association agrees. At least in part because of a letter on the subject from PETA, the alums, reported CNS News, ceased and desisted from offering discounted tickets to a Barnum & Bailey’s Circus show.

PETA, notes Bethany Stotts, has a record of hammering Ringling Bros., for instance, alleging that "ringling beats animals."

CNS also indicated PETA has been on an anti-circus jag across the education spectrum. For example, the group declared it sent "Ellie," a "play" elephant with a bloody bandage wrapped around a head wound, to greet students as they exited elementary schools. The elephant sported a button reading "Circuses Are No Fun for Animals" and dispensed activity books illustrating the group’s accusations of animal abuse.

But it seems that all is not pristine in PETA Funland. CNS adds:

According to the consumer group [the Center for Consumer Freedom], PETA is guilty of “hypocrisy,” because it has euthanized the vast majority of stray cats and dogs it takes in and had found homes for fewer than one percent in 2008.

Records PETA filed with the state of Virginia last year show they euthanized more than 95 percent of the pets in its care, excluding animals brought in to be spayed or neutered and then returned to their owners. “Out of the 2,216 animals PETA took during 2008, it managed to find homes for a mere seven animals — despite an annual budget of $32 million.”

“What’s the reason for PETA’s hypocrisy? Money,” the CCF said. “It’s easier and cheaper to run media campaigns berating circuses than to actually roll up a sleeve or two and save cats and dogs. The last thing PETA wants to do is actually take care of animals. That’s expensive” (emphasis added).

Circuses, no fun for children? How about if Neumann's alums convene to consider if PETA is any fun for animals?

02/11 07:23 PM Share

Another Reader Weighs In [George Leef]

Here is another comment from a reader who thinks that the paucity of conservatives on college faculties has much to do with hostility from leftists:

I am a public-school teacher with a B.A. and M.A. in history, both with honors from good schools. When people used to ask me if I was going to get a Ph.D. and teach in college, I told them I would never get a job. The reason I wouldn't, of course, is that at some point my conservative point of view would come through, probably because my dissertation would not be on how Ronald Reagan's foreign policy affected the feminist Wicca of El Salvador.

I used to grade Advanced Placement exams. Ninety-eight percent of the college and high-school instructors were left wing, and they were obviously so used to both speaking in a way that was condescending to anyone who didn't share their view point and never encountering those strange other people. One professor told me her department chair was a Maoist. I asked her if someone who thought Ronald Reagan was a good president could get a job in her department, she said absolutely not. When I asked if Mao was worse than Reagan, she became too angry to respond.

02/11 02:30 PM Share

Neal McCluskey Takes Off the Gloves [George Leef]

In this Cato@Liberty post, he pummels the Student Aid and Financial Responsibility Act to a pulp. It's just a piece of political grandstanding that will shuffle some money from one pocket to another but won't save taxpayers anything and will probably lead to the further overselling of higher ed.

02/11 02:07 PM Share

Liberal Professors and Unlawful Discrimination [David French]

Jere Surber's "explanation" for liberal bias in the academy has touched off quite a bit of commentary, both here and elsewhere, yet not much of it has examined the issue from a legal perspective. How much of the bias is the result of systematic and unlawful discrimination? And (more important) how do we identify discrimination in the absence of overt bans on conservative applicants?

I spent much of the early part of my career working for large law firms. My focus was in commercial litigation, but I spent many long hours assisting in employment litigation as well — often defending companies from allegations of race and gender bias. In the modern era, race and gender discrimination claims don't typically hinge on "smoking guns," where a supervisor or employer makes explicitly race- or gender-discriminatory decisions. While you do find cases where someone might say, "I don't want any more [fill in the ethnic category] working here," it is far more typical to see the following in meritorious discrimination cases:

1. A failure to hire or promote without explanation in spite of demonstrably similar or superior credentials or qualifications;

2. When explanations are provided, justifying the failure to hire or promote seemingly equivalent or superior candidates through the use of unquantifiable and highly subjective criteria: "John wasn't perceived as a team player; while Bill exhibits strong leadership skills and the ability to rally the crew around him."

3. Extreme scrutiny of the applicant's record in isolation from other applicants' qualifications; including sometimes comprehensive critiques that — discovery reveals — favored applicants did not receive.

4. Discipline based on perceived failures that is unevenly applied (i.e. We didn't fire Jane because she's black. We fired her because she was frequently late for work. But then scrutiny of attendance records reveals that Jane's peers were late more often than Jane).

But here's what makes a faculty case more difficult than, say, cases involving discrimination in hiring auto workers: Universities are quite successful at persuading courts (and often the media) that what they do is just so darn complex and specialized that outsiders can't begin to understand or evaluate their hiring processes.

This leaves us with such abject absurdities as universities claiming the highest possible academic rigor, then rallying around notorious professors who record rap albums rather than produce serious scholarly works, department chairs who barely possess the credentials to teach junior high, and "scholars" who don't publish but continue to rise through the academy through the strength of their radical (and often grotesquely irresponsible) activism. (Yes, I'm talking to you, "Group of 88.")

It's only when the academy stops employing (and even promoting) the likes of the Group of 88 that I'll listen to Jere Surber's argument that liberals are the ones who study "large-scale historical processes and complex cultural dynamics." And what kind of "complex cultural dynamics" is he talking about? Perhaps Mark Anthony Neal's recent lecture: “Looking for Leroy: HomoThugs, ThugNiggaIntellectuals and ‘Queer’ Black Masculinities.”

Yep, that's some complex stuff.

02/11 01:01 PM Share

Free Speech for Me, Not for Thee [Carol Iannone]

Muslim students (possibly along with non-Muslim supporters) at UC Irvine disrupted the appearance

of Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the United States. It was obviously planned. They were half the audience, and periodically one of them would burst out in some incoherent invective, cheered by the others, and have to be escorted out. This happened about a dozen times; then at one point, they all left in a noisy exodus and continued their tirades outside. Michael Oren expressed the wish that they had stayed inside because they were the ones he wanted to reach. But wishing to reach them is like wishing to live in another universe. These students are not learning the life of reasoned discourse, but the ways of mindless propaganda and mass intimidation.

02/11 11:00 AM Share

A Reader Responds: There Is Bias Against Non-leftists [George Leef]

After posting yesterday's Clarion Call on the controversy over why leftists dominate in the faculty ranks, I received this response from a reader who prefers to remain anonymous:

I found your post on conservatives in academia poignant. When I followed the link to the Pope Center discussion, I realized that I am a data point in this discussion.

You see, I received a master's degree in historical theology from a liberal institution by hiding my conservatism. (I'm not even a conservative by the contemporary definition; I just know I am not a liberal.) When I wrote my master's thesis on Augustine's distinction between auctoritas and potestas in the City of God, certain passages caused my professors to realize they had been harboring a pariah in their midst. My application to a respectable doctoral program was turned down on the grounds that my application materials were "not universally excellent." It turns out that several of my professors damned me with faint praise in their letters of recommendation, and my application was doomed.

The idea that conservatives do not love history, philosophy, and literature is ridiculous. I spend all my spare time poring over the minutiae of early Christian literature, and I have managed to be published several times. But I know that I am not welcome in academia. I know that I could try again at one of the new "conservative" Catholic institutions that have recently cropped up, but I am too old to drop everything now to pursue a doctorate. So I study, write, and publish when I can, but it's not the same as being in a setting where the open discussion of ideas is welcomed and even cherished. How I miss a world that does not exist!

02/11 10:01 AM Share

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Sex Week at Yale, Day 5 [Nathan Harden]

Last night, while I was busy at Babeland’s Lip Tricks how-to seminar, the Yale Political Union held a debate on the topic, “Resolved: Reject Hookup Culture.”

The debate was interrupted by a group of pranksters known around Yale as “The Pundits.” The Pundits suddenly began making out on the stage and in the aisles. The Yale Daily News published a photograph this morning of what looks like a girl in a bra, grinding on top of a young man, just in front of the speaker. We can safely assume, therefore, that at least some students voted “Nay” on the proposition under debate.

Today, Day 5 of Sex Week at Yale, saw the forces of nature at war in New Haven: It was sex vs. the blizzard. For a while, the blizzard appeared to be winning. A presentation on the science of sexual attraction by Andrew Trees, author of the book Decoding Love, was canceled due to inclement weather.

But Sex Week soon got back on track. The next speaker was a man who goes by the name “Flyness,” or sometimes “Your Royal Flyness,” as he informed us. Flyness is author of the book From MySpace to My Place: The Men's Guide to Snagging Women Online. We were told that he has met more than 500 women online. He offered students tips on how to succeed in the fine art of seduction.

During the Q&A, a female student asked a question that seemed to stump His Royal Flyness: “How do we get a first date?” Within Yale’s hookup culture, she explained, getting someone to sleep with you isn’t difficult. Rather, it’s forming a meaningful relationship that many students need help in order to achieve.

Traditionally, dating comes before sex. At Yale, it’s the other way around.

Later in the evening, students participated in a special event called “Give Some, Get Some — Speed Date for Charity.” Speed dating entails the gathering of a group of students, who rotate around the room — musical-chairs style — for a series of random one- five-minute “dates.” It’s a fun way to meet new people and practice making rapid-fire decisions on matters of relational compatibility, all in succession.

Dating is dead at Yale. And random hookups now dominate romantic life. But speed dating offers students an opportunity to make up the dating deficit in a single night.

02/10 11:28 PM Share

Why Are Most Professors Leftists? [George Leef]

That has been a hot topic lately.

In this week's Pope Center Clarion Call, seven professors who are not leftists comment on the thesis that the job of being a professor just doesn't jibe with the vision conservatives and libertarians have of themselves.

I find the Gross and Fosse thesis unpersuasive. There are probably just as many conservatives and libertarians who like teaching, research, and writing as there are leftists, but many of them choose to pursue that work outside of the largely hostile environment of academia.

02/10 10:59 AM Share

'Progress toward equity' [George Leef]

Thomas Sowell's column today digs into the recent controversy in Berkeley where the "racial achievement gap" (i.e., white and Asian students doing better than black and Latino students) is to be attacked by reducing the amount spent on science education so as to spend more on social work and remediation.

What makes this especially interesting to PBC readers is the fact that this plan is enthusiastically supported by the educational theorists. Sowell writes that a University of San Francisco professor of education praised it because it's vital to "narrow the achievement gap." Moreover, Sowell continues, "In keeping with the rhetoric of the prevailing ideology, our education professor refers to 'privileged' parents and 'privileged' children who want to 'forestall any progress toward equity.'"

Welcome to the world of the education experts, where families that encourage children to work hard in school are "privileged" as though they were our equivalent of European nobility, and where the primary educational goal is "equity" among designated groups rather than assisting all pupils to progress to the best of their ability.

02/10 10:42 AM Share

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Sex Week at Yale, Day 4 [Nathan Harden]

It’s day four, and Sex Week is really picking up steam. Or maybe it’s just getting steamier.

The first event wins the award for longest lecture title of the week. It was called (are you ready?), “Let’s Get It In To Get It On: Women-Initiated Prevention Options for Safe, Sensational Sex.” The main speaker was a woman named Maryann Abbott, who bears a title even longer than that of her speech: Abbott is the Project Director for the Female Condom Multi-level Community Intervention at the Institute for Community Research.

Ms. Abbott did share some great information about the latest developments in the evolution of the female condom. The “FC,” as she referred to it, offers women a way take charge of their own health and safety, especially women in Third World countries where there may be high rates of STD infection, and where cultural conditions allow them little control over whether male partners use condoms.

Unfortunately, the commendable dedication of Ms. Abbott and her associates to the cause of the female condom translated into an excruciatingly long tag-team lecture on its manifold benefits. I watched students trickle out one by one. By the end, only four students remained. The energy in the room had reached a low that is probably only achievable through continuous exposure to clinical language about sex.

Things didn’t stay boring for long.

Keep reading this post . . .

02/09 11:35 PM Share

The Hookup Culture [Robert VerBruggen]

Charlotte Allen's Weekly Standard cover story, though a bit alarmist and harsh in places, is one of the best articles about modern dating I've ever read.

UPDATE: Relatedly, Matthew Yglesias has some interesting thoughts about the effects of the gender imbalance on campus.

02/09 07:58 PM Share

Purdue's George Avery Has a New Cato Paper [George Leef]

Prof. George Avery of Purdue, who sometimes comments on posts here, has written a new paper for Cato. The subject is the manipulation of scientific evidence in order to promote certain policies.

Michael Cannon links to and discusses Avery's paper here.

Apropos of my earlier post, I could add, "Who opposes the use of phony evidence to push environmentalist policies that will ensure that poor people stay that way?"

02/09 02:59 PM Share

Those Angry, Crazy Conservative Kids [David French]

It's clear that Nancy Thomas, director of the Democracy Imperative at the University of New Hampshire, has had enough. Student activists have finally crossed lines of propriety and legality, and they need to be called out. She writes in Inside Higher Ed:

We need to be clear about what these acts are: attention-seeking tactics that intimidate faculty, students, and guest speakers, distort facts, reduce public issues to simplistic sound-bites, and inhibit the thoughtful exchange of ideas and deliberation, both in and out of the classroom.

Which "acts" is Ms. Thomas talking about? What horrors does she reveal? Perhaps she's concerned about activists at North Carolina violently disrupting former Congressman Tom Tancredo's speech. She was possibly frightened by the attack on Minutemen founder Jim Gilchrist at Columbia. Or maybe she's talking about California students illegally interrupting a speech by a respected foreign diplomat. Or she's alarmed at students seizing control of administration buildings for days at a time. Doubtless she's disturbed by various "pieing" incidents aimed at conservative commentators. Certainly death and rape threats against peaceful student activists got her attention.

Or perhaps not. Here's what really gets her goat:

An organized group of conservative students whose tactics are already well-known on many college campuses: selling cookies at reduced rates to women and students-of-color in protest of affirmative action; sneaking video cameras into classrooms and campus forums and posting out-of-context excerpts, often anonymously, as evidence of liberal indoctrination on campus; hosting a gun raffle; researching and publicizing campaign contributions of faculty members and staff. High jinks? Really? Check the campusreform.org Web site, which advises, “Why take action? Because it will shock your opposition.” Is that why activism matters, to shock and discourage others? Are faculty members and other students “the opposition?”

Oh, and she's also upset at James O'Keefe's alleged criminal activities in Sen. Mary Landrieu's officies. You may recall James O'Keefe . . . he's the conservative activist who I don't think is a student anywhere.

Surely Ms. Thomas is joking. Selling cookies (gasp)? Taping forums and (oh, the horror!) posting excerpts? Raffles? Disclosing campaign contributions by (allegedly) unbiased faculty? Can the campus survive such atrocities? Oh, and of course there's Leadership Institute's website, which currently contains such incitements as conservative students' (peaceful) efforts to oppose student-fee increases at UNC, an article arguing that Climategate is an "embarassment" to Penn State, and a post celebrating Ronald Reagan's birthday.

I would hope that the director of a Democracy Imperative would understand that the free speech she condemns is the lifeblood of a republic, while the litany of violence I recount above actually threatens political discourse. But of course that's violence from the left, so it can't really be threatening. Those activists, after all, are idealistic.

02/09 02:30 PM Share

What Is America's Most Overrated Product? [George Leef]

Marty Nemko says that it is undergraduate education. He makes his case in a speech followed by some good Q and A here.

02/09 01:57 PM Share

UNC Losing its Sacred-Cow Status [George Leef]

John Hood of the John Locke Foundation writes here that UNC system spending, which has long enjoyed almost sacred-cow status, is now starting to come under scrutiny. The old line that used to silence criticism (often prospectively) was that the state benefited from the great human-capital gains of students, which in turn meant a robust economy. More people are questioning the connection between higher-ed spending and economic strength (which is notably absent in North Carolina these days).

02/09 01:26 PM Share

Re: Conceit Thick as Paint [George Leef]

John Rosenberg offers his thoughts on that astonishing essay by Professor Surber here.

I'll add this point. For all Surber's proclaimed deep study of the world, it's obvious that he doesn't have any idea what conservatives really think. Surber blathers away about how liberals understand "the trajectory of history," which he says is about overcoming prejudice and unearned privilege and resisting oppression in favor of justice. Is our oh-so-learned philosophy professor unaware that conservative advocates of free markets and the minimal state have demonstrated that it is precisely the existence of governmental power that obstructs poor people from making progress?

Who opposes eminent-domain laws, which are so often used to deprive poor people of their property?

Who opposes the public-education monopoly that does such a lousy job of teaching the basics to inner-city children?

Who opposes minimum-wage laws that price the unskilled out of the labor market?

Who opposes the federal meddling in the housing market that has done so much harm to people of all sorts who were lured into bad investments?

The many "liberals" who manipulate public policy for their own gain behind the smokescreen of good intentions must love it when academics play the role of the useful idiot.

02/09 12:56 PM Share

'Liberal Reformers' Flex Their Muscles At SIU [George Leef]

Southern Illinois University history professor Jonathan Bean writes here about the proposed reforms to his school's sexual-harassment policy. The "reforms" trample upon the free-speech and due-process rights of students and faculty — pretty much par for the course when activists get control over university policy.

02/09 10:22 AM Share

Monday, February 08, 2010

Sex Week at Yale, Day 3 [Nathan Harden]

After a brief turn yesterday examining spiritual concerns, Sex Week turned its attention today back to matters of the flesh.

The first talk of the day was entitled, “Why Nature Wants You to Get Laid Right Now.” Featuring Ken Mosesian, executive director of the American Fertility Association, along with program director Corey Whelan, the presentation was tamer than its title suggested.

Much of the talk was directed toward females. Mosesian and Whelan offered students tips on how to safeguard their reproductive health. They discussed the damaging effects of STDs, including sterility. They also told girls in the audience that their biological clocks are ticking faster than they may realize. Educated women, they explained, often wait until later in life to start families. But, by middle age, women frequently have difficulty becoming pregnant. Pregnancy later in life also carries increased health risks for both mother and child.

At Yale, where sex education normally deals exclusively with preventing pregnancy, it was refreshing to hear a talk based on the assumption that babies are actually desirable.

The second talk of the day, entitled “Getting What You Want,” featured advice on a host of alternative sexual and relational lifestyles including casual hookups, open relationships, and polyamory. Diana Adams, who introduced herself as “an alternative-family attorney,” spoke about her experiences in carrying on a three-way relationship with another man and woman in New York’s polyamorous community. “Having situations where there are multiple partners requires a heightened level of communication,” she noted.

Adams was joined by Melanie Boyd, director of undergraduate studies for Yale’s department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Boyd spoke about Yale’s naked parties. (Yale students have a long-held tradition of holding special parties where students show up nearly, and sometimes completely, in the nude.) Boyd said the tradition showed that Yale students were willing to move beyond established cultural norms. “It’s a great indicator of how easy it is to define your own sexual space,” she said.

The final presentation of the day was called, simply, “The ‘M’ Word.” Author and sex educator Logan Levkoff addressed students for nearly an hour on the topic of masturbation. “History has not been good to masturbation,” Levkoff said, “probably because of the apparent anti-masturbation message in the Old Testament.” She then offered her own interpretation of the famous story of Onan from Genesis 38.

Next, Ms. Levkoff showed students an array of frightening devices from the Victorian age, which were designed to combat autoerotic behavior. These included various belts, trusses, rings, girdles, and cages.

Finally, she moved on to more modern and more pleasurable objects. With the aid of her slideshow, she educated students about an array sleeves and plastic gizmos designed to enhance solitary bliss.

02/08 10:30 PM Share

An Excellent Summer Seminar at Assumption College [George Leef]

If you know any bright high-school students who would like to spend a week in July at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass., learning about America's place in Western civilization, the seminar described here looks to be splendid.

02/08 06:52 PM Share

Interview With Prof. Jackson Toby [George Leef]

In this interview, Prof. Michael Shaughnessy talks with Jackson Toby about his recent book The Lowering of Higher Education.

I recently reviewed Toby's book here.

In brief, Professor Toby maintains that many American students today go through school and enter college with an entitlement mentality. They lack strong incentives to work hard. Consequently, for all its high costs, our education system on the whole accomplishes remarkably little.

02/08 05:59 PM Share

Martinez Amicus Highlight: Fourteen States Weigh In [David French]

Late last week, there was a "deluge" of amicus briefs in support of the Christian Legal Society in CLS v. Hastings. On Friday, I highlighted FIRE's excellent brief, but FIRE wasn't the only noteworthy party to weigh in.

Fourteen states signed on to an amicus brief drafted by Michigan's solicitor general. It's heartening to see states argue (correctly) that their best interests are preserved by the "free marketplace of ideas" rather than that their (alleged) interests somehow override the First Amendment. Read the whole thing.

As good as the entire brief is, my favorite part was a footnote 1:

The West Virginia Attorney General Darrell McGraw wishes to disclose that his daughter, Elliotte Catherine McGraw, is a student at Hastings College of Law and the President of the
Hastings Democrats. The Hastings Democrats were recently notified by the school that in order to maintain the Club's standing as a student organization, it was required to open its membership to all students, irrespective of party affiliation.

Not only does this footnote demonstrate the personal impact of the case — even on public officials — but it once again demonstrates the complete absurdity of the school's policy. The Hastings Democrats have to be open to Republicans? Really? I've asked this question before, but I'll ask it again: What conceivable state interest is served by forcing private groups to be open to people who may hate their mission?

Fourteen states recognize that the First Amendment protects the long-term health of our republic. What will the other states say?

02/08 05:50 PM Share

Conceit as Thick as Paint [Jane S. Shaw]

I can’t believe I’m reading this, and you won't, either. It's too early for April Fool's Day. The article by Jere P. Surber in the Chronicle Review explains that academics are liberals because they understand the trajectory of history, just as President Obama does. (He also points out that “you don't have to be a militant Marxist to recognize that people's political persuasions will align pretty well with their economic interests,” and those in the liberal arts don’t earn as much money as other academics.) He sums up:

It is because we liberal-arts professors have a personal stake in our relative economic status; we have carefully studied the actual dynamics of history and culture; and we have trained ourselves to think in complex, nuanced, and productive ways about the human condition that so many of us are liberals. Most of us agree with President Obama that there is a "right side of history," and we feel morally bound to be on it. Although we'd like to see some parity in compensation with our colleagues, we chose our fields with full awareness of the tradeoff. Part of our compensation lies in knowing that our studies can complement our standing on the "right side," rather than having our basic commitments dictated to us by the limitations of other, narrower professions.

02/08 03:41 PM Share

Alumni and "Sex Week" [Jane S. Shaw]

I wonder how many Yale alumni are gnashing their teeth at Nathan Harden’s description of “Yale Sex Week,” which began Friday and ends on Valentine’s Day. My guess is that some are reconsidering their annual gifts to the school. Unfortunately, Yale doesn’t have a campus center of excellence to which they can donate their money instead, such as Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. For a few ideas, however, see Jay Schalin’s end-of-the-year advice on how dissatisfied alumni can give wisely.

02/08 12:02 PM Share

Nice Work If You Can Get It [George Leef]

Being a professor at a UNC institution, that is. In today's Pope Center piece, Jenna Ashley Robinson scrutinizes the data on faculty compensation.

The AAUP may think that faculty salaries are low, but most North Carolina taxpayers would probably think differently.

02/08 11:56 AM Share

Swell-Headed Liberals [Candace de Russy]

"Why are liberals so condescending?" asks Gerard Alexander, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, in a probing piece at the Washington Post. (This week, for your information, he will deliver the American Enterprise Institute's Bradley Lecture, titled "Do Liberals Know Best? Intellectual Self-Confidence and the Claim to a Monopoly on Knowledge.")

Alexander's road map to the liberal mind should hold much interest for conservatives who find themselves often befuddled by the deeper mainsprings of liberals' perverse outlook.

One of his insights concerns their claim that conservatives are motivated by emotion and anxiety, while liberals take on the superior job of hearkening to logic and and evidence. On this score Alexander samples the pronouncements of liberal academics:

George Lakoff, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley and a consultant to Democratic candidates, says flatly that liberals, unlike conservatives, "still believe in Enlightenment reason," while Drew Westen, an Emory University psychologist and Democratic consultant, argues that the GOP has done a better job of mastering the emotional side of campaigns because Democrats, alas, are just too intellectual. "They like to read and think," Westen wrote. "They thrive on policy debates, arguments, statistics, and getting the facts right."

Alexander places this sort of self-puffery in the context of a liberal tradition that has long brought low America's debate on vital issues. A must-read, folks.

02/08 11:36 AM Share

Re: Espenshade's Dilemma [George Leef]

You have to wonder: Has Professor Espenshade never spoken with any of those Asian students? If he had, I think it would be impossible to (in good faith) maintain the argument that the apparent discrimination against them might actually be due to their weakness in those "soft variables" such as recommendations.

I got to know a number of my older son's debate-team colleagues. Most were of Chinese, Indian, or other Asian ancestry. The notion that those students would have had lukewarm letters of recommendation or written sloppy essays is laughable. Espenshade is grasping at straws.

02/08 10:30 AM Share

Sunday, February 07, 2010

Sex Week at Yale, Day 2 [Nathan Harden]

Yesterday, Sex Week at Yale got off to a racy start. Students attended a fetish fashion show, along with presentations on porn and kinky sexual subcultures. Today, things took an unexpected religious turn. The Rev. Debra W. Haffner, an ordained minister in the Unitarian Universalist church, presented a talk entitled “Sexuality, Religion, Faith, and Morality.”

Haffner describes herself as “a minister and a sexologist.” During her talk, she voiced her support for gay marriage, premarital sex, and abortion rights. Amusingly, however, she said that she felt like a conservative compared to the rest of the speakers at Sex Week.

Only at Yale can a pro-choice, feminist Unitarian be made to feel conservative.

Haffner opposes the freewheeling hookup culture that prevails on most college campuses. However, she added that it was important for people of faith to remain “sex positive.” And she criticized religious restrictions on premarital sex. “As a religious leader,” she said, “I made the decision that I would not marry virgins. . . . I think sexuality is too important to a marriage.”

She also emphasized her support for abortion rights. “It is precisely because life is precious that it should never be unplanned,” she said.

Later in the afternoon, I attended a panel discussion called “Love Junkies and Sex Addicts.” Panelists included Rachel Resnick, a self-described addict and author of a memoir entitled "Love Junkie," anthropologist Megan Douglass, and clinical sexologist Michael Rothenberg.

During one memorable portion of the discussion, Mr. Rothenberg recounted the time he administered what he called “family therapy” to an elderly couple and their masochistic female “sex slave.”

“He had a need to beat,” Rothenberg said of the elderly man. “She had a need to be beaten,” he said of the sex slave. Meanwhile, “Grandma was just going along for the ride.”

The panelists closed by unanimously affirming the need for better sex education in America. The need to improve sex education has emerged as a regular theme at Sex Week. Several speakers have singled out abstinence education, in particular, as a leading cause of sexual dysfunction in America.

02/07 11:51 PM Share

Saturday, February 06, 2010

Sex Week at Yale, Day 1 [Nathan Harden]

Over the past few years, I have walked into many classrooms at Yale. But today was the first time I ever found a bra and panties decorating the door on my way in. Ladies and gentlemen, today marks the first day of Sex Week at Yale — the officially sanctioned symposium of sex that takes place every other year.

First held in 2002, Sex Week at Yale is now realizing its fifth incarnation. Sex Week is, essentially, a series of guest lectures and sex-related special events. Taken together, they probably defy every preconception you have about what goes on inside an Ivy League university.

Kicking things off today was Lex Alptraum, editor of a prominent adult-themed website, who gave a lecture about the threat that Internet piracy poses to the porn industry.

Later, we heard from Katherine Gates, a Yale alumna who is a curator at the Museum of Sex in Manhattan. Ms. Gates is also the author of a book called “Deviant Desires.” During her talk, she gave students a photo- and video-aided peek into the world of sexual subcultures, which she divided into the categories of “fetishes” and “kink.” Topics included zoophilia, balloon fetishes, men dressing up like women, men dressing up like animals, men dressing up like babies (complete with diapers), gay fur erotica, sneeze fetishes, and cannibal play. “There’s nothing in the world that someone isn’t getting pleasure out of,” noted Ms. Gates.

The evening ended with the YCouture Fetish Fashion Show. Student designers showed off their erotic designs with the aid of student models. The dining hall was transformed into a catwalk, complete with a spotlight, sub-woofers, and dance music. In front of a packed audience, students paraded lingerie and negligee and a whole lot of skin. The outfits evoked various role-play themes, including devil and angel, boss and secretary, and one that I can only describe as girls in leather with chains.

And that, folks, was only day one.

Throughout the coming week, I will be reporting on Sex Week for NRO. Check back here each day for the latest from Yale — training ground for three of the last four U.S. presidents and host of the leading college sex festival in the nation.

— Nathan Harden is an author and commentator. He graduated from Yale in 2009. He is a contributor to the forthcoming book New Conservative Voices Under 30 (HarperPerennial). You can follow Nathan on Twitter here.

02/06 11:57 PM Share

Thomas Espenshade's Dilemma [Robert VerBruggen]

His research shows that elite colleges practice severe affirmative action — giving large bonuses to blacks and Hispanics and holding Asians to much higher standards. He wants to report on his research. But he doesn't want to admit that elite colleges practice severe affirmative action.

I mentioned this problem in my review of his book, and John Rosenberg pointed it out a little while back, but Espenshade just keeps on rolling, giving interviewers hilarious quotes like this one:

People may read this and want to say, “Oh, because I’m Asian American, my SAT scores have been downgraded.” That is not really the way to interpret these data. Many times people will ask me, “Do your results prove that there is discrimination against Asian applicants?” And I say, “No, they don’t.” Even though in our data we have much information about the students and what they present in their application folders, most of what we have are quantifiable data. We don’t have the “softer” variables — the personal statements that the students wrote, their teacher recommendations, a full list of extracurricular activities. Because we don’t have access to all of the information that the admission office has access to, it is possible that the influence of one applicant characteristic or another might appear in a different light if we had the full range of materials.

Now, it is kind of nice to see someone who does multivariate statistics admit he missed some variables. But when an Asian student is about as likely to get into a given school as a white student whose SAT score is 140 points lower, it's pretty tough to attribute that to personal statements and a "full list" of extracurriculars. Do Asians have so little to say and participate so few activities that they lose 140 points' worth of value?

Rosenberg has more.

02/06 06:28 PM Share

Friday, February 05, 2010

The Headline Says It All [Robert VerBruggen]

"College Makes Students More Liberal, but Not Smarter About Civics, Study Finds."

02/05 03:35 PM Share

'Stimulating' Stimulus Funds [Candace de Russy]

Researchers at Florida Atlantic University received $8,408 in stimulus funds to study whether mice become disoriented when they consume alcohol, the Washington Examiner reported.

Otherwise tagged by droll Mal Kline in his commentary on this absurd use of taxpayer dollars, "Mickey Gets a Mickey."

02/05 01:57 PM Share

More on Abstinence Research [Robert VerBruggen]

Robert Rector and Kay S. Hymowitz have published thoughts.

02/05 01:45 PM Share

Teaching and Tenure [Jane S. Shaw]

Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University, puts a good idea on the table — increasing the role of teaching in granting tenure. Some schools already incorporate instruction into tenure review, but raising the visibility of the practice is a good thing.

02/05 01:26 PM Share

Chicken Soup for the (Constitutional Litigator's) Soul [David French]

One of the worst things about being a lawyer is reading legal writing. Leave it to lawyers to take the most profound questions of our cultural life and then drain all passion and vitality from them in seemingly endless and technically argued "briefs." Some of this is, of course, necessary. We channel disputes into court so that they'll be decided in a dispassionate, reasoned manner, and incessant table-pounding can be as tiresome as the typical legal brief is boring. (Not every case is the most outrageous injustice ever.)

But there are occasions when a legal brief can soar. Yesterday, FIRE filed a truly magnificent amicus brief in support of the Chrsitian Legal Society in CLS v. Martinez. The brief clearly and unequivocally states the core issue in the case:

The school has taken the remarkable position that a religious student organization is not permitted to discriminate on the basis of religious belief. This policy prevents Petitioner Christian Legal Society from adhering to the very principles that are the reason for its existence when making decisions on leadership, voting membership, and — because the group's statements come from its leaders and members — its message.

FIRE then goes on to not only convincingly argue the merits of CLS's free-assocation argument but also to issue a searing indictment of the culture of censorship on campus. In fact, the brief reads like a greatest-hits compilation of absurd efforts to destroy disfavored groups and silence disfavored speech. (My favorite anecdote involves a student attempt to pack the board of YAF at Central Michigan University, then vote to dissolve the group.)

The brief does what few legal documents do effectively: It grounds abstract constitutional principles in the very real world experienced by students and student groups. Please, read it all. In a world of dry and stultifying advocacy, FIRE's brief really is chicken soup for this constitutional litigator's soul.

02/05 12:38 PM Share

The Overselling of Elementary School [Robert VerBruggen]

Calvin makes the case in today's classic strip. Hobbes is not impressed.

02/05 12:08 PM Share

Hispanic-Serving Institutions [Roger Clegg]

There’s an Inside Higher Ed article today about “The Emerging Hispanic-Serving Institution,” which begins by noting, “In the 1980s, the designation Hispanic-serving institution (HSI) was created by the federal government to direct funding to nonprofit colleges where at least 25 percent of the full-time-equivalent students are Latino.” And that, in turn, prompted my posted question/screed:

Why should the federal government give more money to some schools, and less to others, based on what country the students' ancestors came from? There is no good reason, and certainly none that would pass muster under the "strict scrutiny" the courts use in applying the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause. If the feds want to give more money to schools where the students are from disadvantaged backgrounds, say, or do not speak English as their first language, then they may do so — but they do not have to use national origin as a proxy for poverty or linguistic ability. In other contexts, we would condemn that as stereotyping.

02/05 11:37 AM Share

Bertonneau, Part Deux [George Leef]

In this Pope Center essay, Prof. Tom Bertonneau argues that many young Americans — those who disdain books and any but the lightest reading — are sliding back into "orality," the state that precedes literacy.

America spends great amounts of money to make sure that kids have computers in school and that classrooms are fitted up for all sorts of fancy media stuff, but we used to get much better results with a far less expensive learning tool, the book.

02/05 11:05 AM Share

Refining the Law-School Question [Jane S. Shaw]

Robert, your post about law schools is apt — but Northwestern Law School dean David Van Zandt paints with a very broad brush when he claims that law-school graduates must start their careers at a salary of $65,000. More finely grained distinctions would be helpful.

The Pope Center provided some in 2008 with a study of North Carolina law schools by Andrew Morriss and William Henderson. They reviewed many characteristics of the five law schools in North Carolina for which there was historical information (North Carolina now has two additional law schools).

Schools differ in a variety of ways, including tuition (and thus the debt students must incur to complete school), the on-campus interviews they provide, the starting salaries their graduates obtain, and whether they provide better regional or national opportunities. A low-priced law school may not provide outstanding salaries initially, but the debt burden is going to be light. Such information is available for law schools; in contrast, for bachelor-level colleges, there isn't much.

02/05 10:35 AM Share

Thursday, February 04, 2010

When Is Law School Worth It? [Robert VerBruggen]

When you start your first lawyer job at $65K a year or higher, one analysis finds.

Some say that's too low (obviously, the methodology is debatable), but to have a 50-50-plus shot of hitting even that number, you have to go to one of the top 70 or so law schools in the country. The median starting salary for a lawyer is right around $57,000, so more than half of law-school students are probably wasting their money.

02/04 04:22 PM Share

Should the U.S. Keep Up with the Chinese? [George Leef]

We often hear that our prosperity is in danger because we are falling behind various nations in the percentage of people who have college educations, especially China.

If this story is accurate, it seems that the Chinese, in an effort to boost their economy through a heavy "investment" in higher education, have managed to do just what we have: to oversell it.

02/04 04:08 PM Share

Re: How One Student Aced [George Leef]

I also found the article Candace has commented on to be very revealing.

I know Kevin Carey somewhat, having sparred with him on a couple of occasions at higher-ed events in Washington. We don't see eye to eye on very much, but he's an intelligent fellow who writes well on higher-education-policy issues.

I defy anyone to point to anything in his undergrad experience (by his own admission, it didn't have very much education in it) that was necessary or even slightly important in enabling him to become a highly placed education-policy expert. His current employer probably would not have considered him for employment if he hadn't had a B.A. to his name, but what did Carey learn at Binghamton that is essential to doing education-policy work? Seemingly, nothing.

And for that matter, what did I learn at Carroll College (now University) that's essential to my work? With a great deal of assurance, I say, nothing.

Of course, I'm not arguing that Kevin and I would have been better off not going to college. My point is that the common notion that a college education is essential to doing most of the work in the economy is mistaken. The ability of individuals to do work seldom depends on anything they studied in college.

02/04 02:55 PM Share

Calling All Undergrads [Robert VerBruggen]

NR's New York office is looking for a summer intern.

02/04 02:34 PM Share

Finally, a Decent Study of Abstinence Education? [Robert VerBruggen]

I ask this not because I like the results — personally, I'd rather schools didn't teach sexual morality, and I'd also rather they left it to parents to teach (or not teach) the facts about contraception — but because I like the methodology.

Most studies of abstinence education compare kids who get it to kids who don't, the problem being that they're different groups of kids that might have different tendencies regardless of what they're taught. You can try to "control" away the differences, but this approach will never be as good as a true experiment, with randomly assigned experimental and control groups.

By contrast, a new study randomly assigned kids to one of three different weekend seminars. One seminar taught abstinence, a second taught "comprehensive" sex ed (basically, "abstinence is great, but if you have sex, here's how to do it safely"), and a third taught only safe sex. Over the next 24 months, according to the students' self-reports, a third of the first group, 42 percent of the second, and half of the third started having sex. Just as important, none of the seminars had any impact on how likely sexually active kids were to use condoms.

In school, I hated preachy seminars like these, so I'm skeptical one can really have this strong of an effect. Also, I worry that the kids who took the abstinence course just told the researchers what they wanted to hear. Further, the subjects in this study were black urban middle-schoolers (average age 12), and the results may not hold for different demographics.

I hope other academics try to replicate this research — and, my skepticism aside, I hope this does prove to be a way of lowering teen pregnancy and STD rates.

02/04 01:59 PM Share

Three Harvard Heroes [David French]

A friend brought a moving story from the Sunday Boston Globe to my attention. It begins:

They were three best friends at Harvard Law School who turned their backs on lucrative careers to follow an exceedingly rare path: Michael Weston, who jogged through Harvard Yard in combat boots and openly scorned corporate life, joined the Marines. Helge Boes and his girlfriend Cynthia Tidler, who shared their friend’s sense of duty and adventure, joined the CIA.

Their choices — made out of passion, patriotism, and an urge to live an unconventional life — intertwined their fates.

Boes, a covert CIA operative, died when a grenade went off during training in Afghanistan in 2003, leaving Tidler, whom he had married after school, a widow. In their grief, Weston and Tidler reconnected and married earlier last year. Three months later, Weston deployed to Afghanistan; he died there in October, in a helicopter crash, widowing Tidler once again.

The story is tragic, heroic, and inspirational. Our civilization cannot continue exist without such men and women. And yet, buried within the article, is this stinging indictment of our educational elite:

Since 2000, only about 22 Harvard Law graduates, out of some 4,500, have pursued military careers, according to a spokeswoman for the school. By comparison, Notre Dame Law School had twice as many sign up — out of about half as many graduates.

Less than one half of one percent enlist in a time of war. That's shameful. Of course, not all can or should serve, but a ratio that low? From a school that prides itself on attempting to foster a sense of civic engagement and responsibility? I could blame an administration that until recently banned military recruiters from campus, but ultimately the blame rests on the students. They know of our struggle with jihadism. They know of the sacrifices of their peers from other schools and other walks of life. They know that other Americans their age are dying for them. Yet — in overwhelming numbers — they choose a different path.

Harvard students, I have a suggestion. Walk on your own campus . . . into Memorial Hall and Memorial Church. Reflect on the men and women who came before you. Read the story of Michael Weston, Helge Boes, and Cynthia Tidler to understand the men and women it can still produce. Then, perhaps for the first time in your life, consider doing something truly selfless.

Why not join the fight?

02/04 01:32 PM Share

Yale Cuts Staff and Resources [Robert VerBruggen]

The New York Times has the story.

02/04 01:08 PM Share

How One Student 'Aced' His Degree at Binghamton U. [Candace de Russy]

Read all about (at the Chronicle of Higher Education) not only Kevin Carey's poker-playing and other revelry during his four years on the campus, but also his "lifeguarding" and other studies as well as his pass/fail astronomy course in satisfaction of a science distribution requirement (for which he only had to answer correctly 20 percent of the final-exam questions to pass).

But take special note of this revealing and damning bit of Carey's reminiscences, concerning the point in his undergraduate years when — or so he thought at the time — he had 88 actual college credits to earn:

Except, not really [i.e., he did not have that number of credits to earn]. Late last year, I was reliably informed that Binghamton, unique among the scores of individual SUNY [State University of New York, where for twelve years I served on the board of trustees campuses, endeavoring evidently without much success to raise academic standards] awards four credits for classes that require only three faculty-contact hours per week [emphasis added]. The origins of that sweet, state-approved deal for faculty members are shrouded in the mists of time, dating back half a century. When asked about it, a university spokesperson told me that "Binghamton faculty well understand what student work is required to satisfy a four-credit designation." She didn't explain how the policy is enforced, or how it could be, given the autonomy that faculty members enjoy in defining course content.

I also talked to the provost, who insisted that Binghamton's four credits are more substantive than, say, the State University of New York at Stony Brook's three. But there are no external studies or standards to verify that.

Carey wraps up his disclosures by remarking wryly that he really ended up with the equivalent of an associate, not true four-year, degree. "Who knew?" he exclaims.

It would be fitting also to ask, "Who cared?" The B.U. faculty? The campus administration? The SUNY Board of Trustees?

Would the adults on such campuses where such lax standards and course loopholes prevail please stand up?

02/04 12:36 PM Share

The Parable of the Lifeguard [Roger Clegg]

Suppose you are a lifeguard, and you are presented with studies showing that boys are more likely to drown than girls, probably because they engage in riskier behavior. Now, how does this affect the job you do as a lifeguard?

Well, I hope that one thing you do not do is shrug if you see a girl drowning. You also should not try to rescue boys who are not drowning.

In fact, if this datum doesn’t help you spot drowning people, and it probably doesn’t, then it won’t affect the way you do your job as lifeguard at all. You look for people flailing and screaming, and knowing that most of them will be boys is really irrelevant to you.

Would it prompt you to support “Safety First” swim programs for boys only? Well, so long as there is some percentage of girls who would benefit from such programs, it’s not clear why you would want to exclude girls from them. Maybe the “Safety First” videos you show in the programs would be more likely to depict boys doing typically boy-things, but that’s about it.

And, of course, if further studies showed that it’s not so much sex that matters, but some other factor, then you would care even less about gender, and would be even less supportive of a program for boys and boys alone. For example, if there were some way instead to target risk-seekers for the program — thereby excluding cautious boys (and girls), and including risk-seeking girls (and boys) — then you would be all for it.

Anyway, I hope the applicability of this little parable to concerns over the “underrepresentation” of this or that group will be obvious.

Keep reading this post . . .

02/04 12:05 PM Share

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

UNC Students Get an Actor, Not a Scholar, for MLK Day [George Leef]

East Carolina students recently were treated to an address by Gloria Steinem on feminism. Keeping the trend of major talks by intellectual dabblers going, UNC just hosted actor Danny Glover as its speaker for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. My Pope Center colleague Jay Schalin attended the talk and writes about it in this week's Clarion Call.

The trouble with Glover isn't so much that he doesn't know what the heck he's talking about (unlike Gloria Steinem), but that he uses MLK's infatuation with socialistic redistribution programs (and it's worth pointing out that King knew nothing about economics) to advance his own fevered ideas about the need to radically change the U.S. by dumping what is left of laissez-faire capitalism in favor of an egalitarian nanny state.

It's too bad that few if any UNC students will ever hear that there were civil-rights leaders of the MLK era who adhered to the Frederick Douglass/Booker T. Washington approach that blacks should demand only freedom and look to their own efforts to improve their conditions, not to the government. Such a leader was T. R. M. Howard, about whom Prof. David Beito and his wife have written a splendid biography, Black Maverick. Back in 2008, Beito spoke about Howard and other black entrepreneurs at North Carolina State, and I wrote about his talk here.

02/03 11:53 AM Share

"Pretty Shabby" [John J. Miller]

Roger Kimball on Howard Zinn — today's NRO has a sneak preview of an article that will appear in the next issue of NR, which goes to the printer today.

02/03 11:36 AM Share

Another Comment on the Value of a Degree [George Leef]

Cato's Andrew Coulson says that figures on the supposed value of a college degree are "meaningless."

Exactly.

02/03 11:20 AM Share

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

The State of Catholicism in Catholic Colleges [David French]

Catholic parents, you can now breathe easy. According to a new study released at the annual meeting of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, Catholic students "remain profoundly connected to their faith" during their college years. Of course, despite this profound connection Catholic college students will not only move away from the Church's teaching on abortion and same-sex marriage, they are also less likely to attend mass and less likely to pray after four years at a Catholic school. But there is a bright side: Not only are students more likely to support a cut in defense spending (yes, that was one of the attitudes surveyed), their decline in religiosity is ever-so-slightly less extreme than it would be had they attended a public university.

I'm not sure that's a great recruiting pitch: "Causing less spiritual decline than State U!" But Protestants, don't get cocky. Your colleges do worse. In some cases, much worse. Your kids are not only more liberal on abortion and same-sex marriage, the church attendance drop is basically catastrophic, they are praying much less, and (unlike Catholic students) even less likely to read the Bible. And that's after attending a religious school. Read it and weep.

02/02 06:19 PM Share

Student Paper Is Prime Source on Ice-Melting [Candace de Russy]

The reputedly expert Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has already had to backtrack on biased statements about global warming, is once again in hot water, reports the Telegraph.

The IPCC's latest scientific transgression consists in basing assertions about ice disappearing from the earth's mountain tops on a dissertation written by a geography student studying for the equivalent of a master's degree at the University of Berne.

The IPCC accepted the student's claims of ice loss, derived from interviews with mountain guides in the Alps, even though other scientists point out, one, there is no long-term data regarding ice from ice climbs and, two, the latter do not accurately show ice reduction because climbers knock down (reduce) ice as they climb with their axes and other paraphernalia.

On the basis of this anecdotal evidence, as well as similar claims made in an article published in a popular magazine for climbers, the panel proceeded to issue a study affirming loss of mountain ice in various parts of the world.

Some scientists, fortunately, are protesting the group's repeated use of unreliable information sources and non-peer-reviewed data. Prof. Richard Tol, based at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, calls its scientific work in this instance "sloppy." And, in the judgment of Roger Sedjo, a senior research fellow at the U.S. research organization Resources for the Future:

'The IPCC is, unfortunately, a highly political organisation [most of whose leaders border] on climate advocacy. It needs to develop a more balanced and indeed scientifically sceptical behaviour pattern. The organisation [sic] tend to select the most negative studies ignoring more positive alternatives.'

But is the IPCC so far gone scientifically that it is beyond redemption? Can it be reformed so as to base its work only on reliable, objective, peer-reviewed scientific literature and publish it transparently? If not, the panel, which is wrongly influencing governmental decisions throughout the world that affect billions of people, should be dissolved.

02/02 03:07 PM Share

Post Literacy [Jane S. Shaw]

As George Leef mentioned Friday, Tom Bertonneau, an instructor at SUNY-Oswego, has written another series of articles about today’s youth. In 2009, Bertonneau argued that many students today are “post-literate,” unable to follow the sequence of facts and logic that must be grasped if a literary work is to be understood. In his latest essay, he challenges the popular view that those students, although weak in understanding the written word, can absorb “images, especially moving images, and the spoken word.” He persuasively reveals that they can’t follow movies any better than they can follow books.

The essay evoked some eerie memories for me. I have always wondered why, in college, I didn’t understand novels better, sometimes making grossly erroneous judgments. I wasn’t post-literate, but somehow I had slid through high school not recognizing that novels are like architectural constructions that build upon and incorporate many small pieces of material as they progress. With one detail contributing to the next, you have to pay attention at each stage of the process. Rather, I thought the idea was to “get the main point” — and otherwise just enjoy the story.

Add to that some laziness (which I had plenty of), and you have what may be the equivalent of today’s “slackers.” Their condition is worse, though: They come into college with a severe deficit of reading experience, and the constant influx of high-tech media makes intense concentration difficult and unattractive. Their state is therefore harder, perhaps impossible, to reverse.

02/02 01:48 PM Share

Who is Defending Liberty? [David French]

One of the more irritating assumptions in modern cultural/political life is the common theme one encounters on campus (and elsewhere) that the cultural Right restricts liberty while the Left defends it. And no one (allegedly) restricts liberty more than those tyrannical members of the "Religious Right," with their repressive moral code and puritanical sensibilities.

If this is the case, then why is it — as a card-carrying member of the "Religious Right" — I have never in my career been involved in a case that limited or constricted pre-existing legal rights? Why is it that every successful case has resulted in greater liberty, not just for my clients but for the entire campus community?

For example, when a speech code falls — regardless of whether that case was brought on behalf of a conservative — every person on campus enjoys greater free-speech rights. When a court protects a professor's in-class speech, all professors enjoy greater liberty. Whether the issue is speech zones, student fees, or student free association, again and again, conservative Christians find themselves on the side of liberty. Yet the "repressive" stigma still exists. Why?

Perhaps the answer is found in a case like Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, where Christian conservatives are defending a traditionally recognized right (the right to expressive assocation) against a culturally and politically driven demand (a demand that religious student groups be open to anyone who wants to join). The Left is trying to create a right that destroys a right. As of now, there is simply no widely recognized right of private citizens to join any private expressive association they want to join — regardless of their belief or conduct. In fact, even in the campus environment, only the courts of the Ninth Circuit have forcibly opened private associations to non-adherents.

In large part, the culture war — despite its heated rhetoric — has been fought within certain bounds. The two side square off from within their perspective camps and then attempt to influence the electorate (and elected officials) using their rhetoric, their votes, and their resources. Yet Martinez threatens to disrupt this balance and take the culture war to a new level of intensity and intrusiveness. In ADF's Academic Freedom File, Jordan Lorence explains:

Under a proper understanding of the First Amendment, this case is most emphatically not a clash between religious freedom and rights pertaining to sexual orientation. Religious groups and gay rights groups share common ground in the need for freedom of association. Both are vulnerable (in different parts of the country) to the hostile reactions of university administrators and fellow students. Both can pursue their objectives best if free to decide for themselves who will lead and speak for them.

On the other hand, if Respondents [UC-Hasings Law School] were to prevail in this case, it would provoke a collusion between religious freedom and rights of sexual orientation. That would mean, in essence, that when sexual orientation is added to the list of forbidden grounds under non-discrimination laws, religious and other groups that adhere to traditional moral views could be driven from the public square in the name of enforcing non-discrimination. This would raise the stakes in the political battles over sexual orientation discrimination to a dangerous extent. It would be far better to adhere to the framers’ wisdom of “live and let live” under the First Amendment than to treat religious and sexual orientation discrimination laws as a rationale for ostracizing dissenters.

Only by defending free association can the Supreme Court truly defend liberty in this case. Any other ruling risks placing private associations under the thumb of majoritarian sentiment.

02/02 11:45 AM Share

Guns on Campus [Robert VerBruggen]

Here's an interesting case:

A University of Kentucky graduate student has sued the university and others, claiming he was wrongfully fired from his job at the UK Chandler Medical Center because he had a handgun in his car.

The car was parked at Commonwealth Stadium while he was at work.

Michael Mitchell, who had a permit allowing him to have a concealed weapon, was working as an anesthesia technician at the medical center in April 2009, when he was fired.

Mitchell contends that under state law he was allowed to have the gun in his car and that state law supersedes UK rules prohibiting deadly weapons on campus by anyone other than authorized personnel, such as police, security or military personnel; or students who are participating in athletic or academic activities such as Reserve Officers' Training Corps or rifle team.

He's right (his complaint is here). Kentucky law specifically requires people and organizations to allow guns in cars on their property. I don't support this law, especially when it applies to private entities — Reason makes a good case against these kinds of provisions here — but the school is acting stupidly (as Obama might say).

02/02 10:52 AM Share

More Skepticism on the Value of a College Degree [George Leef]

Today's Wall Street Journal has an article entitled "What's a Degree Really Worth?" The writer explains that the widely quoted figure of $800,000 in additional lifetime earnings has come in for a great deal of criticism.

Indeed it should. Casually tossing around big numbers like that is apt to have the same effect as billboards touting the huge payoff if you win the lottery. It lures in unsophisticated people who don't think carefully about benefits and costs. The truth of the matter is that obtaining a college degree may put many marginal students in a financial hole, just as if they blew a paycheck buying lottery tickets. And it's not just that the economy is in the doldrums right now, making it hard for graduates to find good jobs. (The piece mentions a Berkeley graduate working for a small newspaper and making $34,000 per year — well below what she needs to service the $60,000 in loans she needed to get through college.) The phenomenon of college graduates spilling over into "high school" jobs is nothing new. I first encountered mention of it in the 1999 book Who's Not Working and Why by Frederic Pryor and David Shaffer.

Higher education can be very beneficial to some people, but it can be a complete waste of time and money for others.

02/02 09:46 AM Share