The whole point of certified public accountancy is the notion that a business cannot be expected or trusted to perform an objective accounting of its performance, at least not sufficiently free of the risk of conflict of interests to satisfy current or potential investors or creditors. The hallmark of a just judiciary is disinterested objectivity. People trust the compliance certification services of Underwriters Laboratories and give greater weight to product reviews and comparisons from Consumer Reports because they understand that the very raison d'être of these organizations is their objectivity and lack of conflicts of interest.
That is not to say that any of these organizations or activities are perfectly or completely bias free. Rather, insofar as the absence of bias is an ideal objective, it is merely the case that they approach it far better, on average, than organizations and institutions that are trusted not only to provide a product or service but also to self-certify the quality of their product or performance.
If you want a diverse, competitive market collectively striving for excellence in education at all levels, separate teaching from testing.
If you want the testing and certifications of academic achievement as free from bias and conflict of interests as possible, separate the testing and certifying function not only from the teaching function, itself, but also from government at all levels.
I doubt I’ll get any serious argument on this blog when I merely assert without arguing that the U.S. Department of Education is a captive regulator to all intents and purposes controlled by the education industry, specifically including state departments of education, university schools of education and, of course, the public teachers’ unions. Similarly, state and local public school systems and individual school PTA’s and such are to all intent and purposes controlled by the very personnel they are supposed to be governing or monitoring. If you want to argue against these assertions, feel free. But I take them as a given.
(It must be said, however, that state departments of education have not always been entirely captive regulators. Indeed, I’m no economist or political scientist but my best guess is that many if not most governmental regulatory agencies, the politics motivating their creation aside, began as relatively disinterested organizations. Corruption typically takes time; however, I believe it eventually, inevitable will occur.)
Anyway, say what you will about the No Child Left Behind program (and I’ll gladly join you in various criticisms), every time I hear a teacher, any teacher (including the good ones) complain about “teaching to the test” I want to jump up and down shouting for joy. Sure, standardized tests have all sorts of problems and, yes, deciding what should constitute the core curriculum in many subjects is a contentious and ultimately subjective matter. I might prefer that every high school graduate read, say, Hamlet and Twelfth Night rather than Macbeth and The Tempest, but I’d sure as hell prefer that they have read one or the other rather than neither.
If we looked not to diplomas and degrees from schools that have, to put it mildly, all sorts of conflicts of interest but to independent testing agencies, different in important ways from and yet similar to the organizations that administer standardized college and professional school exams now, we would go a long way toward creating an entirely different sort of educational system. Such a system would be largely indifferent to how you learned (or how much time you spent learning) algebra or, yes, let’s get it out and be done with it, biology, English literature or conversational Spanish, focusing only on whether you passed whatever standard (and therefore admittedly somewhat arbitrary) benchmark involved. It wouldn’t matter whether you were home schooled, publicly educated or attended the Toniest of upper class prep schools. Oh, and I’ll save the argument for another day, but I’d say roughly the same sort of system should apply to higher education, as well.
I continue to believe in a system of tax funded, voucher supported, primarily privately operated schools, contra what appears to be at least one of my co-bloggers position on the subject. To be sure, we are all here capable of educating our own children or, at least, of paying for someone else to do it, but it isn’t the fault of children born in the inner city or squalid, rural trailer parks or, for that matter, of legal immigrants who will eventually join the middle class or better but whose children need education today. I would no more condemn them to ignorance than deny them food, shelter or medical attention simply because they are unfortunate enough to have parents who cannot or will not provide better.
On the other hand, I also firmly believe that the overwhelming majority of parents want the best education for their children they are capable of receiving and that, given even the minimal required resources to do so, that self-same overwhelming majority are best situated to determine how best to accomplish that. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest that many will opt to include rigorous religious education as part of their children’s overall education, nor that I would disagree with much of that religious education, nor that some of it might well conflict with evolutionary theory. You want certification that you have studied introductory biology? Take and pass the test. (Or one of several available tests in a market similar in that sense to the alternative availability of the ACT and SAT.) Potential employers, universities, etc. could and would establish their own standards based on such test results for purposes of employment, admissions, etc. Indeed, employers and schools would have good reason to care about the integrity and independence of the testing agencies and the rigor of their tests and the market pressures to maintain and improve that objectivity and rigor would tend to prevent educators’ inevitable attempts to co-opt the tests.
I may write a third post providing some more detail of the system I envision. By way of shortstopping certain sorts of criticism for now, let me just say that I don’t see this as a panacea but merely as a preferable system to the one we now have There are, no doubt, all sorts of details to be worked out and problems obvious even to me in this alternative approach. Feel free to name them if you wish. What I would be particularly interested in reading, however, is anyone who wishes to argue that the present system, the one we have now, is preferable, and why they believe that is so.
Showing posts with label Education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Education. Show all posts
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Anarchy, State and Ignorance
Your children are not your property. They’re not mine, either, thank Gawd, and just as important, they’re not the state’s property, either.
One of the problems of framing political theory in terms of fundamental or natural property rights (the naturalist fallacy aside) is that once we begin thinking of a person as having property rights in himself, it’s a small leap to thinking that one person can have some sorts of property rights in someone else. (Yes, I know, there are ways around this, but that doesn’t make it any less a problem, and an entirely avoidable one, at that, if we just abandoned the notion of property existing outside a legal system, itself a function of the ideally minimal state. But that’s another rant for another thread.)
Positive Liberty readers will have noted a certain amount of crankiness lately when it comes to schooling, education, creationism, Intelligent Design theory, Darwinian evolutionary theory, home schooling, etc. People do care about what is taught in schools and people do care about their children’s education and want excellent schools. Tempers flare, intemperate statements are made, feelings get hurt, my jokes get even dumber than usual, and so on.
Of course, when I say “people” I don’t mean everyone. There are many people who really don’t give a damn about excellent schools (we call these people NEA members) and there really are parents who don’t give a damn about their children's education.
There are people who believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God not only about matters spiritual but matters historical, too, including natural history. And there are people who believe that with the empirical sciences in one hand and Occam’s straight razor wielded deftly enough in the other they can whittle down language and the reality to which it ideally relates to a tidy little material ontology with a surprisingly handy analytic framework undergirding and making sense of both. We call the first sort fundamentalists and we call the second sort Richard Dawkins. They have much in common, not the least of which is an almost invincible ignorance of each other’s area of interest and expertise. But that’s another rant for another thread.
One of the problems of framing political theory in terms of fundamental or natural property rights (the naturalist fallacy aside) is that once we begin thinking of a person as having property rights in himself, it’s a small leap to thinking that one person can have some sorts of property rights in someone else. (Yes, I know, there are ways around this, but that doesn’t make it any less a problem, and an entirely avoidable one, at that, if we just abandoned the notion of property existing outside a legal system, itself a function of the ideally minimal state. But that’s another rant for another thread.)
Positive Liberty readers will have noted a certain amount of crankiness lately when it comes to schooling, education, creationism, Intelligent Design theory, Darwinian evolutionary theory, home schooling, etc. People do care about what is taught in schools and people do care about their children’s education and want excellent schools. Tempers flare, intemperate statements are made, feelings get hurt, my jokes get even dumber than usual, and so on.
Of course, when I say “people” I don’t mean everyone. There are many people who really don’t give a damn about excellent schools (we call these people NEA members) and there really are parents who don’t give a damn about their children's education.
There are people who believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God not only about matters spiritual but matters historical, too, including natural history. And there are people who believe that with the empirical sciences in one hand and Occam’s straight razor wielded deftly enough in the other they can whittle down language and the reality to which it ideally relates to a tidy little material ontology with a surprisingly handy analytic framework undergirding and making sense of both. We call the first sort fundamentalists and we call the second sort Richard Dawkins. They have much in common, not the least of which is an almost invincible ignorance of each other’s area of interest and expertise. But that’s another rant for another thread.
Friday, August 22, 2008
"Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors ... and miss." *
There shouldn’t be a minimum legal drinking age, although I probably wouldn’t mind too much if it were set at, oh, say, six. If Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the rest of the Uber-Nannies out there want to keep pre-schoolers from bellying up to the bar, well, okay. After all, it’s for the children.
Syndicated columnist and (inexplicably) frequent reason contributor, Steve Chapman offers scraps of arguments against a proposal from an advocacy group called Choose Responsibility to lower the legal drinking age to 18. To date, the proposal has been signed by over 120 college presidents, predictably incurring the irrational wrath of MADD and other quasi-professional scolds.
Chapman’s arguments, such as they are, pretty much boil down to the assertion that many people under the age of 21 are too immature to drink and that more of them will drink and suffer problems as a result. As a corollary, if 18 year olds can buy alcohol, those under the age of 18 are more likely to have more ready access to booze because high school seniors will buy it for sophomores and freshmen, etc.
Here, however, is the money quote from Chapman’s lamentable column:
Mr. Chapman, if you don’t think 18 year olds who vote for Republican or Democratic candidates are imperiling innocent bystanders like me, you obviously haven’t been paying attention.
Seriously, though, there’s so much wrong with this mindset it’s hard to know where to begin in rebutting it. Here, however, is the principal objection:
The mere fact that something is dangerous or harmful to some members of a group is never sufficient justification to prohibit all members of a group from using or having access to it. The fact that some members of group X will abuse access such that members of the general population are harmed is equally insufficient to prohibit all members of that group from having access.
I accept the fact that institutional rights and privileges, e.g., voting, driving on public roads, necessarily involve some sometimes arbitrary regulation. Moreover, I certainly accept the fact that libertarianism is, for the most part, an NC-17 rated show. Children do require restrictions on their liberty for their own good. The question, however, is whether the default agent responsible to impose such restrictions should be the state or their parents. Admittedly, some parents sometimes fail in those responsibilities and the state must then intercede. See, however, the immediately prior paragraph as to why that fact alone does not justify depriving all parents of properly parental authority.
Serving your 16 year old daughter a half glass of wine at Thanksgiving or sharing a beer or two with your 17 year old son as you both watch the game or accepting the fact that your 19 year old college student may well get drunk on campus as opposed to driving off into the woods with friends specifically to go binge drinking, thus creating an even more dangerous situation isn’t an abrogation of parental responsibility. Imposing a universal prohibition to reduce abuse by a few and inadvertently but predictably creating such even more dangerous situations is.
Moreover, effectively arguing that it should be easier for the typical high school student to buy illegal drugs (never mind that they should be legal, too) than a six-pack of beer is, at best, a fairly odd case on utilitarian grounds as to why eighteen year olds shouldn't be permitted to drink. If Mr. Chapman doesn't understand these things, I trust the rest of the good folks over at reason do.
(* - Robert Heinlein)
Syndicated columnist and (inexplicably) frequent reason contributor, Steve Chapman offers scraps of arguments against a proposal from an advocacy group called Choose Responsibility to lower the legal drinking age to 18. To date, the proposal has been signed by over 120 college presidents, predictably incurring the irrational wrath of MADD and other quasi-professional scolds.
Chapman’s arguments, such as they are, pretty much boil down to the assertion that many people under the age of 21 are too immature to drink and that more of them will drink and suffer problems as a result. As a corollary, if 18 year olds can buy alcohol, those under the age of 18 are more likely to have more ready access to booze because high school seniors will buy it for sophomores and freshmen, etc.
Here, however, is the money quote from Chapman’s lamentable column:
Why permit 18-year-olds to vote but not drink? Because they have not shown a disproportionate tendency to abuse the franchise, to the peril of innocent bystanders.
Mr. Chapman, if you don’t think 18 year olds who vote for Republican or Democratic candidates are imperiling innocent bystanders like me, you obviously haven’t been paying attention.
Seriously, though, there’s so much wrong with this mindset it’s hard to know where to begin in rebutting it. Here, however, is the principal objection:
The mere fact that something is dangerous or harmful to some members of a group is never sufficient justification to prohibit all members of a group from using or having access to it. The fact that some members of group X will abuse access such that members of the general population are harmed is equally insufficient to prohibit all members of that group from having access.
I accept the fact that institutional rights and privileges, e.g., voting, driving on public roads, necessarily involve some sometimes arbitrary regulation. Moreover, I certainly accept the fact that libertarianism is, for the most part, an NC-17 rated show. Children do require restrictions on their liberty for their own good. The question, however, is whether the default agent responsible to impose such restrictions should be the state or their parents. Admittedly, some parents sometimes fail in those responsibilities and the state must then intercede. See, however, the immediately prior paragraph as to why that fact alone does not justify depriving all parents of properly parental authority.
Serving your 16 year old daughter a half glass of wine at Thanksgiving or sharing a beer or two with your 17 year old son as you both watch the game or accepting the fact that your 19 year old college student may well get drunk on campus as opposed to driving off into the woods with friends specifically to go binge drinking, thus creating an even more dangerous situation isn’t an abrogation of parental responsibility. Imposing a universal prohibition to reduce abuse by a few and inadvertently but predictably creating such even more dangerous situations is.
Moreover, effectively arguing that it should be easier for the typical high school student to buy illegal drugs (never mind that they should be legal, too) than a six-pack of beer is, at best, a fairly odd case on utilitarian grounds as to why eighteen year olds shouldn't be permitted to drink. If Mr. Chapman doesn't understand these things, I trust the rest of the good folks over at reason do.
(* - Robert Heinlein)
Thursday, July 10, 2008
May I Misquote You On That?
With a tip of the virtual mortarboard to reason’s Nick Gillespie, we find an interesting report from Andy Guess in Inside Higher Ed of a study by J. Scott Armstrong and Malcolm Wright with the remarkable conclusion that all scholarly papers and what they laughingly call 'studies' and 'research' in all academic disciplines are entirely made up – plucked from out of the old nether orifices, as it were, by so-called 'scholars' who certainly never bother to read the citations or made-up quotations they litter their papers with, knowing full well that no one is ever going to bother to check and, besides, those earlier studies and so forth are just as phony and filled with errors and fabrications as the new stuff, so why bother?
Or something like that.
Or something like that.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Nothing But Net (Gain)?
I'm still waiting to hear a valid negative (against) a kid accepting a scholarship, free education, at an early point in his life. – Howard Avery, whose 8th grade son Michael committed to the University of Kentucky’s basketball program this month.
The obvious “valid negative” here, Mr. Avery, is that neither you nor your son knows what the fair market price of his talents really are. You might, after all, be selling (out) way too low.
Child athletes, be they gymnasts, tennis players or whatever, pose a special problem for our culture, especially given how much we pretend that much of our interference in each other’s lives is “for the children.” Nothing, of course, could be farther from the truth. There have probably been few cultures that have hated children more than ours does, going out of its way to regulate and micromanage their every activity, forcing them to spend over a decade in penal-like
But I digress. So what if professional athletes and prostitutes both ruin their bodies for the amusement of total strangers? We do still outlaw child prostitution, quaintly enough, but child athletics are not only encouraged, they are actively promoted. What better way to get your kid into Princeton or Stanford on a free ride than to find some niche sport you can start them in at around three or four in hopes of having them recruited for the varsity team? And if the kid shows enough talent for a possible pro career? Hey, who wants to waste years grooming a kid to go to Johns Hopkins Med School when the NBA draft is right around the corner? And nobody ever sued a starting point guard for malpractice, either. (Point shaving, on the other hand, well, you know.)
Children pose a special problem for libertarians. Put a bit more amusingly, a friend of mine says that libertarianism is an adults-only activity. On the one hand, children are not and cannot be regarded as their parents’ property. On the other hand, the only viable recourse against child neglect and abuse is the state. Obviously, reasonable people can disagree as to what exactly should count as actionable abuse or neglect. So, for that matter, can unreasonable people, people who contend a mere spanking or letting kids eat junk food are sufficiently egregious to warrant state intervention. But surely even the most adamantly purist libertarian would admit that, for example, children are entitled to the same level of police protection against assault that adults are and that it shouldn’t matter in such cases that the assailant is a parent. (Anarcho-capitalists, on the other hand, might have a problem with child free-riders, here, but I digress again.)
I have little concern whether Michael Avery goes on to play for Kentucky someday though I do hope the kid manages to get some good advice from a sports attorney between now and then, too. I hope he doesn’t get injured along the way or that he manages to get someone to pay for some heavy insurance against such an accident keeping him from a lucrative pro career. I don’t even know if such insurance is possible, but if it is I hope he gets it. And maybe, just maybe all this is not only what the kid really wants but, far more unlikely, he is sufficiently mature to be making these sorts of decisions. In any case, I wish him well.
As for the Kentuckys and the sports fathers of the world, it would be nice if I could wave a magic wand and forever prohibit any of them from contending that what they were doing was really “for the children.”
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Gene R. Nichol at William & Mary
I’ve said before that the values of the College are not for sale. Neither are ours. – College of William & Mary former president Gene R. Nichol
I rarely post specific biographical information on the internet, but I will make an exception today and note that I am one of the less distinguished graduates of the College of William & Mary in Virginia. I was therefore a recipient this morning of a lengthy and, in my opinion, typically self-serving letter from its now former President Gene R. Nichol. Mr. Nichol's contract the Board of Visitors has declined to renew and who has therefore resigned, effective immediately.
Along with many others, I actively opposed renewal of Mr. Nichol’s contract. I would probably have just silently applauded the BOV’s decision but for certain assertions in his resignation letter. As Mr. Nichol seeks even now to portray himself as a righteous martyr to the forces of troglodyte conservativism, I think it is necessary that some of us who opposed his continued tenure to respond to that portrayal. Mr. Nichol contends his ouster resulted from “four decisions, or sets of decisions,” as follows:
1) His removal of the cross from the Wren Chapel;
2) His refusal to prohibit a “Sex Workers’ Art Show” at the College;
3) His efforts to increase funding to attract lower income students; and
4) His efforts to “increase diversity” at the College.
Taking these in reverse order and obviously speaking only for myself, I will say first that I am largely unaware of whatever efforts Mr. Nichol actually made to “increase diversity” at William & Mary, but if it involved any sort of affirmative action style preferential hiring policy for faculty or staff, then I would have opposed it. I share to some extent Mr. Nichol’s dismay at seeing that among “35 senior administrators of the College [there were] no persons of color.” But the only morally proper solution to such situations is the removal of legal barriers which will then lead to greater diversity occurring as a matter of course over time. In any case, I am also unaware whether whatever he did or tried in this regard stirred much controversy. As far as I know, such efforts didn’t receive much coverage in the press or internet and they certainly didn’t have anything to do one way or the other with my opposition to his presidency.
I frankly applaud anything Mr. Nichol did to increase scholarship funding for low income students. I suspect that his real motives for those efforts were, as they so obviously are in so many other institutions of higher education, merely the attempted end-run around increasing legal barriers to the reverse discrimination of affirmative action. Even so, I believe it is entirely proper that the College seek out on a colorblind basis and provide adequate funding to permit academically worthy, low income students the opportunity to attend.
As for Mr. Nichol’s “[refusal], now on two occasions, to ban from the campus a program funded by our student-fee-based, and student-governed, speaker series,” good for him. If Nichol were being let go simply because of his defense of the students’ right to spend their own student activity fee money on the Sex Workers’ Art Show, I would rise to his defense. As I understand it, the show in question, pornographic or not, is political in nature and thus unquestionably worthy of First Amendment protection. But for all I care, W&M students could have Tijuana style donkey shows on campus. Hell, they could hold the shows in the Wren Chapel -- just please remove the cross first! -- and I’d support their right to do so just as readily. (I recognize, of course, that I'm almost certainly in the minority among Nichol's opponents on this point.)
Finally, in his own words, President Nichol:
altered the way a Christian cross was displayed in a public facility, on a public university campus, in a chapel used regularly for secular College events -- both voluntary and mandatory -- in order to help Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and other religious minorities feel more meaningfully included as members of our broad community. And it was certainly motivated by the desire to extend the College’s welcome more generously to all. We are charged, as state actors, to respect and accommodate all religions, and to endorse none. The decision did no more.
Well, no. In the first place, the (oddly third person) sentence “The decision was likely required by any effective notion of separation of church and state,” is a fine bit of legal weasel-wording. "Likely required"? "Any effective notion"? No one prior to Nichol ever raised a legal challenge in the entire hundred year history of this 300 year old university’s state control. In the second place, if the existence of the cross constituted “endorsement” of Christianity, then why doesn’t the altar, itself? Whatever others may think about a Christian cross sitting on a (still consecrated) Christian altar in what was once a private university, there is scant evidence that non-Christian students somehow felt... what? That they were only meaninglessly included until Gene Nichol came along? In fact, the cross was routinely removed whenever any secular or non-Christian activity took place in the Chapel, anyway, and had been from as long as I, at least, can remember.
There were other highly questionable decisions and actions in his thankfully brief tenure, not the least being his silly and, I believe, hypocritical battle to try to preserve the school’s athletic logo (an Indian feather) and the decision to place an English professor as temporary chair of the philosophy department. Regarding the former, Mr. Nichol apparently was insufficiently concerned about the extent to which this Indian feather logo, far more prominently displayed throughout the College than the Wren cross, might make Native American students feel less than "meaningfully" included.
But it wasn’t Mr. Nichol’s substantive decision regarding the Wren Chapel cross or any particular one of his other such decisions, per se, that led me to oppose his continued tenure as president of the College. Instead, it was Mr. Nichol's leadership style and, more troubling, his character, at least as evidenced by his behavior throughout these controversies. He unilaterally had the cross removed almost literally in the dead of night without so much as a thought for those who might be troubled by his decision, let alone the manner of its accomplishment. No doubt he genuinely did not expect nearly the reaction he got. In any case, his behavior afterwards, especially including his subsequent, highly questionable account of his knowledge regarding the impact of that decision on a pending gift to the College made it more and more clear to me that Mr. Nichol was not the sort of person best suited to lead the first college in the nation to institute an honor code of conduct for students.
Moreover, it became clear that Mr. Nichol came to William & Mary apparently convinced that he and those who agreed entirely with him were in sole possession of the moral high ground against any and all opposition. At least that is the strong impression he gave to this alumnus. Here is one final example of that mindset, a paragraph from his resignation letter:
I add only that, on Sunday, the Board of Visitors offered both my wife and me substantial economic incentives if we would agree “not to characterize [the non-renewal decision] as based on ideological grounds” or make any other statement about my departure without their approval. Some members may have intended this as a gesture of generosity to ease my transition. But the stipulation of censorship made it seem like something else entirely. We, of course, rejected the offer. It would have required that I make statements I believe to be untrue and that I believe most would find non-credible. I’ve said before that the values of the College are not for sale. Neither are ours.
Stipulation of censorship? Apparently, this law professor would have us believe he does not understand the substantive legal (never mind moral) differences between a contractual quid pro quo, one that occurs in litigation settlements all the time, and censorship.
Apparently, also, Mr. Nichol believes that the BOVs decision was “based on ideological grounds.” And perhaps it was. Not being privy to their deliberations, I could not say. I’m not so naïve as to think that some, perhaps many of Nichol’s opponents are not, in fact, paleoconservatives of the first order or that some delegates in Virginia’s state legislature didn’t make untoward threats, veiled or otherwise, to the Board of Visitors. In a just world, the Commonwealth would have approximately 20% say in William & Mary’s affairs, as that is roughly the current percentage of state support. But this isn’t a just world and Nichol, who is no stranger to politics, knows it isn’t.
One more point needs to be made. Both Gene Nichol and his family were subjected to entirely unwarranted and utterly irrelevant personal attacks (e.g., crude and cruel comments about Mr. Nichol’s weight) throughout the course of his controversial administration. Such attacks and those who made them are despicable.
Parts of the blogosphere are already chattering about this turn of events and, as usual, both the Right and the Left are grossly oversimplifying the situation. Suffice it to say here that for at least some of his critics, the controversy that dogged Gene Nichol was not so much about crosses or feathers or diversity or sex workers or any of those specific issues but finally about the man, himself. It is far too facile to frame the controversy exclusively in terms of liberal or conservative politics or policies.
But if Gene Nichol now becomes a poster child for liberalism, then it is liberalism that has been most poorly served.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Indoctrinate Who?
I haven't yet seen Indoctrinate U, a supposedly Michael Moore-esque but libertarian documentary about leftist university speech codes and such, but efforts to find a general distributor have been abetted, however unintentionally, by a bit of nonsense over at the New York Times, nonsense shown for what it is at The Volokh Conspiracy, FIRE, Power Line and by Evan Coyne Maloney, the filmmaker himself.
Documenting intolerance to non-leftist ideas or the expression thereof on American college campuses isn't far removed from documenting racial bias in the Klan, except of course that the Kluxers acknowledge that they're racists. That's hardly to say that all or even most university faculty members oppose free speech (though many apparently do) or that university administrations are generally intolerant to conservative or libertarian perspectives (though many apparently are) or even that the vocal majority of leftist organizations on most campuses (the various demographically aggrieved or special interest whiners) oppose free speech -- oh, wait a minute, yes it does.
True, most university faculty members are liberals or leftists of one sort or another. The good news here, though, is that many if not most students pay little attention to their professors beyond listening either for confirmation of their preexisting political prejudices or evidence of deviant speech that might fuel their self-righteous indignation. The quest for diversity has university administrations pretty much cowed, for there are few fates worse than getting stuck with a reputation of being a hostile environment to women and minorities. Hence, however approvingly some faculty may look on such nonsense, much of the hothouse political correctness of the schools these days is self-inflicted by students, themselves, with an assist from administrators who care far more about attracting the right demographics for their freshman class than whatever the students experience or learn once there.
I have no idea whether Indoctrinate U is a good film or whether it will succeed in finding a wider audience. I can predict, however, that its attempted showing on college campuses themselves, is certain to result in howls of protest from the usual suspects on those campuses and that they will be utterly oblivious to the irony of it all.
Documenting intolerance to non-leftist ideas or the expression thereof on American college campuses isn't far removed from documenting racial bias in the Klan, except of course that the Kluxers acknowledge that they're racists. That's hardly to say that all or even most university faculty members oppose free speech (though many apparently do) or that university administrations are generally intolerant to conservative or libertarian perspectives (though many apparently are) or even that the vocal majority of leftist organizations on most campuses (the various demographically aggrieved or special interest whiners) oppose free speech -- oh, wait a minute, yes it does.
True, most university faculty members are liberals or leftists of one sort or another. The good news here, though, is that many if not most students pay little attention to their professors beyond listening either for confirmation of their preexisting political prejudices or evidence of deviant speech that might fuel their self-righteous indignation. The quest for diversity has university administrations pretty much cowed, for there are few fates worse than getting stuck with a reputation of being a hostile environment to women and minorities. Hence, however approvingly some faculty may look on such nonsense, much of the hothouse political correctness of the schools these days is self-inflicted by students, themselves, with an assist from administrators who care far more about attracting the right demographics for their freshman class than whatever the students experience or learn once there.
I have no idea whether Indoctrinate U is a good film or whether it will succeed in finding a wider audience. I can predict, however, that its attempted showing on college campuses themselves, is certain to result in howls of protest from the usual suspects on those campuses and that they will be utterly oblivious to the irony of it all.
Friday, June 15, 2007
Be Happy! Pay Taxes!
New "research" indicates (?) we feel better when we pay taxes! Giving to charity makes us even happier! (That much I believe.)
Well, now. This little tidbit made the memeorandum aggrigator, so I took a peek. Sooooo.... let's take a look at the experiment here: Nineteen (count 'em, 19!) all female university students at the University of Oregon? $100 at stake? Yeah, that sounds to me like a tightly controlled experiment, a representative sample and statistically significant results.
That the researchers did detect some correlation between MRI readings and revealed preferences, I don't doubt. Conclusions beyond that?
Geez!
Well, now. This little tidbit made the memeorandum aggrigator, so I took a peek. Sooooo.... let's take a look at the experiment here: Nineteen (count 'em, 19!) all female university students at the University of Oregon? $100 at stake? Yeah, that sounds to me like a tightly controlled experiment, a representative sample and statistically significant results.
That the researchers did detect some correlation between MRI readings and revealed preferences, I don't doubt. Conclusions beyond that?
Geez!
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Friday, June 8, 2007
Constant Viewer: Ocean's Twenty-One
HOLLYWOOD, June 2026 – Principal photography is scheduled to begin this week for Ocean's Twenty-One (working title, O-21: Bingo!), the tenth sequel to the glossy remake of the original glossy Sinatra Rat Pack action / adventure / comedy / romance / paid vacation for middle-aged actors and singers. Once again George Clooney’s Danny Ocean gathers up the usual suspects: Brad Pitt, Elliot Gould, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan; newcomers Orlando Bloom, Hugh Jackman, Tobey Maguire, Owen Wilson, John Travolta, Johnny Depp; the starting lineup of the Los Angeles Lakers, a CGI performance from the late Prof. Irwin Corey and a special cameo appearance by CBS News anchor Paris Hilton.
This time around also features the return of Matt Damon, missing from the last six sequels since his election ten years ago to the U.S. Senate. Sen. Damon (D-Mass) is ironically reprising his role as "Good" Will Hunting for O-21, now an MIT professor whose mathematical formula to beat the odds at BINGO becomes the film’s McGuffin when Danny and the boys try to clean out every Sunday afternoon BINGO game in Branson, MO in time to make the Early-Bird Special at Denny's. An unnamed aging actress and a pliant ingenue or two round out the cast.
Asked about his new casting choices, Clooney explained from his Palladian villa, Palazzo dei Sequali, “Hey, we’d have gotten Stallone and Willis back if they weren’t busy shooting Rocky Dies Hard IV. But you know, it really doesn’t matter. We plan on milking this cash cow one way or the other until they finally pay us to stop making the damned things."
Clooney surprised television audiences early last year in his first ever return to “E.R.,” then in its thirty-second season, earning an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of “the bleeding guy on the gurney.”
* * * * *
P.S. -- Constant Viewer has seen Ocean's Thirteen and can think of at least thirteen good reasons why you shouldn't, all of which bear portraits of George Washington.
This time around also features the return of Matt Damon, missing from the last six sequels since his election ten years ago to the U.S. Senate. Sen. Damon (D-Mass) is ironically reprising his role as "Good" Will Hunting for O-21, now an MIT professor whose mathematical formula to beat the odds at BINGO becomes the film’s McGuffin when Danny and the boys try to clean out every Sunday afternoon BINGO game in Branson, MO in time to make the Early-Bird Special at Denny's. An unnamed aging actress and a pliant ingenue or two round out the cast.
Asked about his new casting choices, Clooney explained from his Palladian villa, Palazzo dei Sequali, “Hey, we’d have gotten Stallone and Willis back if they weren’t busy shooting Rocky Dies Hard IV. But you know, it really doesn’t matter. We plan on milking this cash cow one way or the other until they finally pay us to stop making the damned things."
Clooney surprised television audiences early last year in his first ever return to “E.R.,” then in its thirty-second season, earning an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of “the bleeding guy on the gurney.”
* * * * *
P.S. -- Constant Viewer has seen Ocean's Thirteen and can think of at least thirteen good reasons why you shouldn't, all of which bear portraits of George Washington.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
What's Red and Green and Blue All Over?
Libertarians of a certain sort are notoriously obsessive when it comes to political theory and economics. The too easy trope for such political obsession, whether of a libertarian bent or not, is to call it 'religious' and for some, at least, the label is apt. There are Articles of Faith, after all, about which any contrary evidence is brushed aside, studiously ignored or defined away. In full rant mode, the true believer's gaze takes on a disquietingly feral intensity of the sort that, in another setting, would prompt mental health professionals to go running for the industrial strength Haldol. You know the type; otherwise you wouldn't be reading this.
Still, when it comes to a fanatical devotion usually reserved for the unexpected minions of the Spanish Inquisition, nothing beats your dyed-in-union-label Marxist. I fondly remember listening back in the 60s and 70s to these fellows at school, standing behind tables strewn with ink smudged CPUSA pamphlets printed on paper too flimsy to make credible toilet tissue. As it became my avowed purpose in life by the mid 70s to distance myself as far as possible from my proletarian origins, their efforts were ultimately wasted on me. Still, like Scientologists, Lyndon LaRouche's followers and cultists of all sorts, one had to admire their almost inexhaustible capacity for cognitive dissonance.
They're getting harder and harder to find these days, even in American universities. Harder but, by golly, still not quite impossible. Here then, by way of Arts & Letters Daily, is a bit of newly-minted nostalgia (hey, that phrase sounds vaguely dialectical!), eco-socialist John Bellamy Foster's latest searing indictment of The Imperialist World System.
Let me just stir your own memories with the opening paragraph:
Oh, yeah... good times!
Still, when it comes to a fanatical devotion usually reserved for the unexpected minions of the Spanish Inquisition, nothing beats your dyed-in-union-label Marxist. I fondly remember listening back in the 60s and 70s to these fellows at school, standing behind tables strewn with ink smudged CPUSA pamphlets printed on paper too flimsy to make credible toilet tissue. As it became my avowed purpose in life by the mid 70s to distance myself as far as possible from my proletarian origins, their efforts were ultimately wasted on me. Still, like Scientologists, Lyndon LaRouche's followers and cultists of all sorts, one had to admire their almost inexhaustible capacity for cognitive dissonance.
They're getting harder and harder to find these days, even in American universities. Harder but, by golly, still not quite impossible. Here then, by way of Arts & Letters Daily, is a bit of newly-minted nostalgia (hey, that phrase sounds vaguely dialectical!), eco-socialist John Bellamy Foster's latest searing indictment of The Imperialist World System.
Let me just stir your own memories with the opening paragraph:
The concept of the imperialist world system in today’s predominant sense of the extreme economic exploitation of periphery by center, creating a widening gap between rich and poor countries, was largely absent from the classical Marxist critique of capitalism. Rather this view had its genesis in the 1950s, especially with the publication fifty years ago of Paul Baran’s Political Economy of Growth.1 Baran’s work helped inspire Marxist dependency and world system theories. But it was the new way of looking at imperialism that was the core of Baran’s contribution. A half-century later it is important to ask: What was this new approach and how did it differ from then prevailing notions? What further changes in our understanding of imperialism are now necessary in response to changed historical conditions since the mid-twentieth century?
Oh, yeah... good times!
Monday, May 7, 2007
And Don't Even Get Me Started on The Price of Textbooks!
If I were a real economist, as opposed to someone who merely pretends to understand economics on the internet, I’d want to know why, since 1958, college tuition has continued to increase at an average rate of 8% and somewhere between 1.2 and 2.1 times the general inflation rate.
William F. Buckley, also no economist, offers the following analysis:
The rest of Buckley’s column addresses that amalgam, including the increased role of the federal government in guaranteeing and subsidizing loans since the 1960s. Though he doesn’t especially stress this factor, my instincts are that it is crucial in understanding why the cost of college, together with the cost of health care, has consistently outpaced overall inflation.
Backtracking a bit for a moment, first, it is certainly true that more Americans and more Americans as a percentage of the overall population have sought a college education in the past fifty years. But that is true of the increase in demand for all sorts of goods in the last half century, too, some of which have actually decreased in real price over the same period.
As with health care, however, higher education is labor intensive, also using lots of high capital-investment labor, at that. Still, when you look at the PhD glut in some academic fields and the increased reliance on contract instructors for many undergraduate courses, the similarity between, say, hospitals and universities begins to shrink. So, also, while some academic disciplines require heavy capital investment, especially science, engineering and medicine, by contrast, law schools (which, by the way, almost invariably run at a profit) and most of the humanities and social sciences operate much as they did fifty years ago. If anything, computer assisted legal research has diminished the need for the one major capital expense of previous generations of law schools; namely, law libraries.
Choice colleges are indeed vastly more competitive than they were decades ago, but choice colleges represent a tiny fraction of the four thousand colleges from which students can themselves choose. Okay, so maybe Yale or Stanford or other brand-name universities can set their tuition pretty much wherever they please, but does that mean No-Name College can do the same?
George Washington University in Washington, D.C. charges nearly two thousand dollars more in annual tuition than Harvard ($35,630 vs. $33,709). GWU is a good school with a good reputation, don’t get me wrong; but it certainly doesn’t carry the same cachet as an Ivy League school, let alone better. What permits it and hundreds of much less prestigious schools to charge tuition comparable to that of the nation’s most elite schools?
Buckley’s third observation, that “since the fifties, teachers have been demanding a living wage,” is especially amusing from a man who ten years ago wrote, “Mr. Carey insisted that part-time workers for United Parcel Service earned ‘too little to live on,’ which prompts the question, Why aren't they dead?” Still, we know what he means.
Collective bargaining of one sort or another plus the genuinely rising value of academic stars over the years have largely eliminated the notion of an academic career as one of genteel poverty, at least for those who successfully run the tenure gauntlet. Still, unless fifty years of higher than inflation raises in tuition can be accounted for by faculty salaries, there must be more at play than full professors now earning six-figure incomes at many universities.
Finally, there is what I would call the amenity issue. There’s something to be said about this. College dormitories weren’t air conditioned when I was an undergraduate (and, yes, air conditioning had in fact been invented back then), nor were student lounges, dining facilities and many other amenities nearly as comfortable or in some cases downright posh as they are today.
Still, not counting the one significant and comparatively inexpensive option of community colleges, it is odd that in the absence of some extrinsic factor there would not be more price competition at least among the vast majority of schools that don’t make the cut in the U.S. News rankings every year. And the most likely culprit would appear to be ready access to subsidized loans.
Universities are free to set tuition at a level that factors in the student’s ability to borrow money. Were that money not readily available to prospective students and the result was a decrease in the number of students applying for or accepting admissions offers, there would be at least that much more pressure on the schools to cut or at least contain costs. In a crude sense, it is as though car dealerships knew that young car buyers could count on Mom and Dad (or Uncle Sam) kicking in a few thousand dollars toward the negotiated purchase price. How do you think the average dealer would use such information? Is there any reason to expect universities to act differently?
One critical factor missing from my argument is whether the amount available to borrow has increased commensurately over the years. The student loan market is a hodge-podge and the sorts of loans available to students have varied over the years. Thus, I admit I haven't been able to determine whether, as I suspect, increased tuition costs have successfully put upward pressure on loan limits. I know that students may borrow more nominal dollars today than in my student days, but I don't have any clear data as to how borrowing limit increases over the years, adjusted for inflation, have tracked tuition increases. [UPDATE: Reader AC directs my attention to a CATO Report that appears to close the gap here.]
In any case, I don’t contend that this is the only or even the major factor contributing to rising college costs, but only that it is likely one of the significant factors in play. Higher education is, after all, still a market. We shouldn’t be surprised when government involvement perversely affects that market’s prices or when the unintended consequence of attempting to make college affordable for some is making it less affordable for most.
William F. Buckley, also no economist, offers the following analysis:
The marketplace rule is that competition reduces prices. Well, the marketplace rule is hogwash when it comes to higher education. The explanations for this are multifarious. 1) More Americans, especially in the two decades after the war, decided to attend college, making for great rises in demand. 2) Choice colleges are hotly competed for, giving them a relative immunity to market pressures. 3) Ever since the fifties, teachers have been demanding a living wage. 4) College perquisites increased; academic offerings for students with exotic interests are understandable, but some college administrators think themselves delinquent if they do not offer a course in jujitsu.
The free marketeer is tempted to address the problem with the kind of fatalistic glibness that makes us so offensive to so many fellow citizens. He will say: So what? There is the demand — a lot of students desiring a lot of things. And there is the supply — 4,140 colleges and universities nationwide. Obviously these colleges would not survive if the money needed to operate them were not provided. So what we have arrived at is an amalgam of contributors to the students’ needs.
The rest of Buckley’s column addresses that amalgam, including the increased role of the federal government in guaranteeing and subsidizing loans since the 1960s. Though he doesn’t especially stress this factor, my instincts are that it is crucial in understanding why the cost of college, together with the cost of health care, has consistently outpaced overall inflation.
Backtracking a bit for a moment, first, it is certainly true that more Americans and more Americans as a percentage of the overall population have sought a college education in the past fifty years. But that is true of the increase in demand for all sorts of goods in the last half century, too, some of which have actually decreased in real price over the same period.
As with health care, however, higher education is labor intensive, also using lots of high capital-investment labor, at that. Still, when you look at the PhD glut in some academic fields and the increased reliance on contract instructors for many undergraduate courses, the similarity between, say, hospitals and universities begins to shrink. So, also, while some academic disciplines require heavy capital investment, especially science, engineering and medicine, by contrast, law schools (which, by the way, almost invariably run at a profit) and most of the humanities and social sciences operate much as they did fifty years ago. If anything, computer assisted legal research has diminished the need for the one major capital expense of previous generations of law schools; namely, law libraries.
Choice colleges are indeed vastly more competitive than they were decades ago, but choice colleges represent a tiny fraction of the four thousand colleges from which students can themselves choose. Okay, so maybe Yale or Stanford or other brand-name universities can set their tuition pretty much wherever they please, but does that mean No-Name College can do the same?
George Washington University in Washington, D.C. charges nearly two thousand dollars more in annual tuition than Harvard ($35,630 vs. $33,709). GWU is a good school with a good reputation, don’t get me wrong; but it certainly doesn’t carry the same cachet as an Ivy League school, let alone better. What permits it and hundreds of much less prestigious schools to charge tuition comparable to that of the nation’s most elite schools?
Buckley’s third observation, that “since the fifties, teachers have been demanding a living wage,” is especially amusing from a man who ten years ago wrote, “Mr. Carey insisted that part-time workers for United Parcel Service earned ‘too little to live on,’ which prompts the question, Why aren't they dead?” Still, we know what he means.
Collective bargaining of one sort or another plus the genuinely rising value of academic stars over the years have largely eliminated the notion of an academic career as one of genteel poverty, at least for those who successfully run the tenure gauntlet. Still, unless fifty years of higher than inflation raises in tuition can be accounted for by faculty salaries, there must be more at play than full professors now earning six-figure incomes at many universities.
Finally, there is what I would call the amenity issue. There’s something to be said about this. College dormitories weren’t air conditioned when I was an undergraduate (and, yes, air conditioning had in fact been invented back then), nor were student lounges, dining facilities and many other amenities nearly as comfortable or in some cases downright posh as they are today.
Still, not counting the one significant and comparatively inexpensive option of community colleges, it is odd that in the absence of some extrinsic factor there would not be more price competition at least among the vast majority of schools that don’t make the cut in the U.S. News rankings every year. And the most likely culprit would appear to be ready access to subsidized loans.
Universities are free to set tuition at a level that factors in the student’s ability to borrow money. Were that money not readily available to prospective students and the result was a decrease in the number of students applying for or accepting admissions offers, there would be at least that much more pressure on the schools to cut or at least contain costs. In a crude sense, it is as though car dealerships knew that young car buyers could count on Mom and Dad (or Uncle Sam) kicking in a few thousand dollars toward the negotiated purchase price. How do you think the average dealer would use such information? Is there any reason to expect universities to act differently?
One critical factor missing from my argument is whether the amount available to borrow has increased commensurately over the years. The student loan market is a hodge-podge and the sorts of loans available to students have varied over the years. Thus, I admit I haven't been able to determine whether, as I suspect, increased tuition costs have successfully put upward pressure on loan limits. I know that students may borrow more nominal dollars today than in my student days, but I don't have any clear data as to how borrowing limit increases over the years, adjusted for inflation, have tracked tuition increases. [UPDATE: Reader AC directs my attention to a CATO Report that appears to close the gap here.]
In any case, I don’t contend that this is the only or even the major factor contributing to rising college costs, but only that it is likely one of the significant factors in play. Higher education is, after all, still a market. We shouldn’t be surprised when government involvement perversely affects that market’s prices or when the unintended consequence of attempting to make college affordable for some is making it less affordable for most.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Wittgenstein's Dissertation
Okay, so I'm only writing about this as a set-up to one of my favorite academic stories. The QUICK and the ED has a post over the probably forced resignation of M.I.T. Dean of Admissions Marilee Jones, of whom it was discovered after some 28 years of service that she had fabricated her own c.v. and did not even possess an undergraduate degree. The point of the blog post (and the very different point of my writing about it) is as follows:
Well, now. However excellent at her job Ms Jones may have been, Wittgenstein's Tractatus had already been published in 1921 (how many doctoral dissertations can that be said about?), was widely influential and hailed as a masterpiece almost immediately, especially among the Vienna Circle logical positivists, and it remains one of the most important works of philosophy of the 20th century if not of the entire history of philosophy. The work had in large measure been prompted by Wittgenstein's interest, first, in the work of logician Gottlob Frege (there's a good story there, too) who, in turn, sent him to study with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. Russell's colleague at Cambridge, fellow philosopher G.E. Moore had recommended the Latin title, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, to Wittgenstein.
When Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929, bestowal of his PhD degree was itself a complete sham to enable him to get a paid position, Russell having noticed that Wittgenstein's earlier years there technically met the PhD residency requirement. In that generation at both Oxford and Cambridge, possession of a PhD was not a requirement for an academic career. Promising scholars who had taken "First" (highest honors) B.A. degrees simply continued in their studies and were (and still are) awarded M.A. degrees "in course" after several years; that is, these scholars are not required to complete any further formal course work or write a thesis. Today, as I understand it, British universities typically expect aspiring scholars to complete a PhD just like in the U.S. However, as late as the 1970s a former teacher of mine and a full professor at a major American university held only a B.A. from Oxford, having been too cheap to pay the small fee Oxford required to grant him the M.A.
Now for the story. Wittgenstein's "examining committee" was comprised of - guess who? - Bertrand Russell, whom Wittgenstein contended never did understand the Tractatus, and G.E. Moore, who had probably never even bothered to try. As the story goes, they basically met for tea one afternoon, Russell and Wittgenstein argued for a while and Moore said practically nothing. The "examiners" recommendation was a foregone conclusion, but a written recommendation nonetheless had to be submitted to the university. Moore wrote the recommendation. I have never seen the actual document and reports of its wording vary, so I will simply relate the recommendation in full as it was told to me:
This shows how rigid the credentialing mentality has become in higher education, trumping three decades of undisputed good work. It wasn't always that way. When Ludwig Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929, they simply accepted his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a doctoral thesis.
Well, now. However excellent at her job Ms Jones may have been, Wittgenstein's Tractatus had already been published in 1921 (how many doctoral dissertations can that be said about?), was widely influential and hailed as a masterpiece almost immediately, especially among the Vienna Circle logical positivists, and it remains one of the most important works of philosophy of the 20th century if not of the entire history of philosophy. The work had in large measure been prompted by Wittgenstein's interest, first, in the work of logician Gottlob Frege (there's a good story there, too) who, in turn, sent him to study with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. Russell's colleague at Cambridge, fellow philosopher G.E. Moore had recommended the Latin title, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, to Wittgenstein.
When Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929, bestowal of his PhD degree was itself a complete sham to enable him to get a paid position, Russell having noticed that Wittgenstein's earlier years there technically met the PhD residency requirement. In that generation at both Oxford and Cambridge, possession of a PhD was not a requirement for an academic career. Promising scholars who had taken "First" (highest honors) B.A. degrees simply continued in their studies and were (and still are) awarded M.A. degrees "in course" after several years; that is, these scholars are not required to complete any further formal course work or write a thesis. Today, as I understand it, British universities typically expect aspiring scholars to complete a PhD just like in the U.S. However, as late as the 1970s a former teacher of mine and a full professor at a major American university held only a B.A. from Oxford, having been too cheap to pay the small fee Oxford required to grant him the M.A.
Now for the story. Wittgenstein's "examining committee" was comprised of - guess who? - Bertrand Russell, whom Wittgenstein contended never did understand the Tractatus, and G.E. Moore, who had probably never even bothered to try. As the story goes, they basically met for tea one afternoon, Russell and Wittgenstein argued for a while and Moore said practically nothing. The "examiners" recommendation was a foregone conclusion, but a written recommendation nonetheless had to be submitted to the university. Moore wrote the recommendation. I have never seen the actual document and reports of its wording vary, so I will simply relate the recommendation in full as it was told to me:
It is my opinion that Mr. Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a work of philosophical genius. It nonetheless fully meets the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Friday, April 27, 2007
"Class, for your next assignment, write an essay about the First Amendment."
Via Drudge, the Chicago Sun-Times reports that an eighteen year old honors student at Cary-Grove High School in Cary, Illinois has been arrested and charged with two counts of disorderly conduct as a result of his submitting a creative writing class essay that "described a violent dream in which he shot people and then 'had sex with the dead bodies.'"
Arrested, mind you! Not merely sent to some sort of counseling or disciplined by the typically idiotic and hyper-reactive "zero-tolerance" mindset of your average public high school, but arrested and charged by the police!
Of course, and especially because Lee is of Asian descent, the question immediately arises whether the actions taken by both school officials and the police were influenced by the recent Virginia Tech massacre. But whether there is some such connection in the fevered imagination of local authorities or not, unless there is far more to this incident than so far reported, this is simply outrageous.
"I have no intention of harming anyone,'' said Lee, who has been transferred to an alternative school setting. "I miss school.''
Lee's father, Albert Lee, who emigrated from China 32 years ago, said his son has a clean academic and police record. He, too, insisted his son's essay was not threatening but authorities "drew a conclusion before the investigation. They didn't want to do the investigation.''
Arrested, mind you! Not merely sent to some sort of counseling or disciplined by the typically idiotic and hyper-reactive "zero-tolerance" mindset of your average public high school, but arrested and charged by the police!
Of course, and especially because Lee is of Asian descent, the question immediately arises whether the actions taken by both school officials and the police were influenced by the recent Virginia Tech massacre. But whether there is some such connection in the fevered imagination of local authorities or not, unless there is far more to this incident than so far reported, this is simply outrageous.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
"... everything that's wrong with American journalism."
The title quote fragment is from Daniel Okrent, the first public editor of the New York Times from October 2003 to May 2005, regarding the Times' coverage of the Duke lacrosse team prosecution debacle, and is taken from a Duke Chronicle article by Iza Wojciechowska. The article is well worth reading despite a lede sentence so bad even I wouldn't have written it. (As if I even knew how to write a lede!)
Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Bulldogs of War!
I think people should start thinking about other people rather than trying to feel sorry for themselves and thinking that the administration is trying to thwart their creativity.... They're not using their own intelligence.... We have to think of the people who might be affected by seeing real-life weapons.
So said Yale's Dean of Student Affairs, Betty Trachtenberg, whose opinions regarding deference to the religious or sexual sensibilities of the theater-going public I would be most interested to learn.
Still, in a reversal of Trachtenberg's earlier outright ban on realistic looking stage weapons, Yale decided instead merely to institute a "policy of announcing the use of stage weapons in advance will hold for all future campus productions." The world's once more the student thespians' oyster, which they with sword can open. Or something like that.
Speaking of how people might be affected by seeing realistic looking stage prop weapons, I worked as a stagehand one season many years ago at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. Aside from the fact that I was paid rather less than a migrant farm worker, it was a great experience, the highlight of which occurred during the first (and, I have good reason to suspect, only) American theatrical production of an Australian play that shall remain nameless in deference to maintaining good American / Australian relationships. In any case, in one scene one of the actors was supposed to pull out a revolver and brandish it wildly. Unfortunately, one night he waved it about a bit too wildly and it flew from his hand, landing some ten or twelve rows into the darkened house.
Silence. More silence. The actors on stage stood frozen in a tableau, there being no proscenium curtain to drop, and tried valiantly not to join in the titters of laughter as the audience slowly realized what had happened. Finally, some fifteen or thirty seconds later, the stage lights were lowered, the house lights were raised and the stage manager sent another stagehand into the house and announced through the PA system, "Would whoever has our gun please return it so we can continue the play?"
Ah, the magic of live theater!
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
The Big Picture
In Canada.com (via Arts & Letters Daily), The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber questions whether the phenomenal success of Steven D. Levitt’s Freakonomics has had the undesirable effect of turning especially new economists away from the serious business of, well, economics. Solving the problem of productivity growth, Scheiber suggests, is rather more pressing business than, say, cheating in Sumo Wrestling or game show racial discrimination; and he has a point, though probably not nearly as big a point as the comparison suggests.
First, however bright Levitt is (very) or successful Freakonomics has been (very, very), it surely won’t do to lay the blame (or credit) for this fairly minor and small-scale shift in the attention of some economists to his feet, alone. In terms of popular economics writing, for example, Steven E. Landsburg’s The Armchair Economist, less successful in terms of sales than Levitt’s book but in other ways superior, was published in 1993. Moreover, economists have been churning out cross-discipline academic papers for decades now, possibly the best example being the hundreds if not thousands of papers on law and economics.
Still, Levitt is the current poster child for that tiny fraction of working economists whose work is both intelligible and interesting to the average layman, and Scheiber would have a hard time making a convincing case that making economics more interesting to the general population is a bad thing. Among professional economists, on the other hand, at least the ones of my acquaintance, economics remains for the most part the mind-numbing process of mathematical analysis that justifies it being called, if not quite science, surely dismal, nonetheless.
As is the case with all academic disciplines, economics is, at bottom, simply what economists do, whatever that may be. As is also the case throughout academia, what the rest of us understand about what they do is a function of how well they teach their own discipline. Here, it must be said, economists typically do not earn high marks, at least not if the average undergraduate’s understanding of economics after an introductory course in microeconomics and macroeconomics is any indication. Such students fall into three broad categories in decreasing likelihood of results: those who don’t get it at all, those who master the rudimentary mechanics and a sort of disjunctive grasp of some of the basic concepts and those who get the Big Picture. Since it is the objective of all introductory survey courses to give the Big Picture (the myriad exceptions and qualifications are for later), these results are not very encouraging, though they do go toward explaining why, for example, so many journalists possessed of elite university diplomas write so obliviously about economic matters.
It is possible, of course, to get the Big Picture without a command of the mechanics or many of the underlying concepts of economics. That, after all, is what Adam Smith managed, though I suspect his grasp of mathematics was no better than mine and he was never once required to distinguish between a change in demand and a change in quantity demanded. It is much more likely, however, for the average undergraduate to be able to answer such questions and sketch out his little demand curve charts and explain how Gross Domestic Product or the money supply is calculated and so forth without ever once grasping how powerful and broadly applicable the underlying concepts of price theory, marginal utility and such truly are.
Which is exactly where the Landsburgs and Levitts come in. Maybe Levitt is wrong about the relationship between abortion and crime, but whether he is wrong or right in the particulars, showing that economic insights are useful in addressing such matters is, itself, enormously valuable. Are such efforts good economics? That’s none of my business; the academics can sort such questions out in their own little free market.
On a different blog several years ago I made some offhand comment about teaching philosophy to undergraduates, unintentionally suggesting that the objective was to turn them into philosophers. A professor of philosophy responded (with alacrity) that this certainly was not the objective of undergraduate instruction in philosophy but of graduate school. He was, of course, correct if and insofar as one defines a philosopher as someone possessed of a PhD who earns his living parsing philosophical concepts at the subatomic level. So, too, an undergraduate degree in economics does not a professional economist make or a B.S. in physics a physicist, etc. But what about the rest of us?
I am (old enough to be) reminded of Don Herbert and of the various teachers and writers I have encountered over the years whose ability to show me, despite my ignorance of the details of their disciplines, the Big Picture – the central insight that, once grasped, transforms forever how, for example, one looks at questions of free will and responsibility or the structure of the physical universe or a painting or piece of music or how we go about our daily lives dealing with limited resources and unlimited wants and the unintended consequences of our decisions. God is in the Big Picture, even if the Devil is in the details.
First, however bright Levitt is (very) or successful Freakonomics has been (very, very), it surely won’t do to lay the blame (or credit) for this fairly minor and small-scale shift in the attention of some economists to his feet, alone. In terms of popular economics writing, for example, Steven E. Landsburg’s The Armchair Economist, less successful in terms of sales than Levitt’s book but in other ways superior, was published in 1993. Moreover, economists have been churning out cross-discipline academic papers for decades now, possibly the best example being the hundreds if not thousands of papers on law and economics.
Still, Levitt is the current poster child for that tiny fraction of working economists whose work is both intelligible and interesting to the average layman, and Scheiber would have a hard time making a convincing case that making economics more interesting to the general population is a bad thing. Among professional economists, on the other hand, at least the ones of my acquaintance, economics remains for the most part the mind-numbing process of mathematical analysis that justifies it being called, if not quite science, surely dismal, nonetheless.
As is the case with all academic disciplines, economics is, at bottom, simply what economists do, whatever that may be. As is also the case throughout academia, what the rest of us understand about what they do is a function of how well they teach their own discipline. Here, it must be said, economists typically do not earn high marks, at least not if the average undergraduate’s understanding of economics after an introductory course in microeconomics and macroeconomics is any indication. Such students fall into three broad categories in decreasing likelihood of results: those who don’t get it at all, those who master the rudimentary mechanics and a sort of disjunctive grasp of some of the basic concepts and those who get the Big Picture. Since it is the objective of all introductory survey courses to give the Big Picture (the myriad exceptions and qualifications are for later), these results are not very encouraging, though they do go toward explaining why, for example, so many journalists possessed of elite university diplomas write so obliviously about economic matters.
It is possible, of course, to get the Big Picture without a command of the mechanics or many of the underlying concepts of economics. That, after all, is what Adam Smith managed, though I suspect his grasp of mathematics was no better than mine and he was never once required to distinguish between a change in demand and a change in quantity demanded. It is much more likely, however, for the average undergraduate to be able to answer such questions and sketch out his little demand curve charts and explain how Gross Domestic Product or the money supply is calculated and so forth without ever once grasping how powerful and broadly applicable the underlying concepts of price theory, marginal utility and such truly are.
Which is exactly where the Landsburgs and Levitts come in. Maybe Levitt is wrong about the relationship between abortion and crime, but whether he is wrong or right in the particulars, showing that economic insights are useful in addressing such matters is, itself, enormously valuable. Are such efforts good economics? That’s none of my business; the academics can sort such questions out in their own little free market.
On a different blog several years ago I made some offhand comment about teaching philosophy to undergraduates, unintentionally suggesting that the objective was to turn them into philosophers. A professor of philosophy responded (with alacrity) that this certainly was not the objective of undergraduate instruction in philosophy but of graduate school. He was, of course, correct if and insofar as one defines a philosopher as someone possessed of a PhD who earns his living parsing philosophical concepts at the subatomic level. So, too, an undergraduate degree in economics does not a professional economist make or a B.S. in physics a physicist, etc. But what about the rest of us?
I am (old enough to be) reminded of Don Herbert and of the various teachers and writers I have encountered over the years whose ability to show me, despite my ignorance of the details of their disciplines, the Big Picture – the central insight that, once grasped, transforms forever how, for example, one looks at questions of free will and responsibility or the structure of the physical universe or a painting or piece of music or how we go about our daily lives dealing with limited resources and unlimited wants and the unintended consequences of our decisions. God is in the Big Picture, even if the Devil is in the details.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
We Bombed Water Ballooned in New Haven
Oh, if only Virginia Tech had a ban on stage props, too! Or so goes the thinking at Yale, where the Dean of Student Affairs has now prohibited the use of realistic looking stage weapons in theatrical productions. One current production has thus been forced to replace metal swords with wooden ones. (Hat tip to The Volokh Conspiracy.)
So much for responsible, effective in loco parentis policies at the nation’s third oldest university. Perhaps Dean Trachtenberg is not much of a theater buff and so misunderstood such hoary stage clichés as “We killed them tonight,” “The audience was a bunch of stiffs,” and, of course, “The play bombed on opening night.” If there is any justice, however, and not least to the Virginia Tech real-life tragedy this decision trivializes, she will be “hoist with [her] owne petar” or at least with derisive roars of protest over such mindless, knee-jerk nonsense.
So much for responsible, effective in loco parentis policies at the nation’s third oldest university. Perhaps Dean Trachtenberg is not much of a theater buff and so misunderstood such hoary stage clichés as “We killed them tonight,” “The audience was a bunch of stiffs,” and, of course, “The play bombed on opening night.” If there is any justice, however, and not least to the Virginia Tech real-life tragedy this decision trivializes, she will be “hoist with [her] owne petar” or at least with derisive roars of protest over such mindless, knee-jerk nonsense.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Massacre at Virginia Tech (Updated)
This is an absolutely terrible and gut wrenching story. ABC News reports that at least 29 persons are dead, apparently including the shooter himself, and at least 17 more are injured following a horrific shooting spree at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. Blacksburg, itself, is a beautiful and remote part of Virginia and the school, officially Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, dates back to a land-grant in 1872 and is one of Virginia's premier institutions of higher education.
It is foolish to think of any place as one where "it can't happen here." But psychologically the sense of unlikelihood of such an occurrence, the biggest mass shooting on a college campus in American history, happening at Virginia Tech almost approaches the enormity of the act itself.
On a personal note and as a native Virginian, I have known dozens, perhaps hundreds of Hokies or Virginia Tech graduates over the years, my older son considered attending there, and I know at least one faculty member there who I hope and pray is unharmed and safe. This is awful, awful news and my heart goes out to the victims, the families and friends of the victims and the entire Virginia Tech community.
* * * * * * * * * *
UPDATE: The death toll has now risen to 33. Predictably, the blogosphere is awash with commentary, also predictably all over the map, some of it measured and sane, some of it not.
Over at Reason's Hit & Run, commenters are engaged in a lively but largely puerile debate over gun control, while Michelle Malkin has taken to posting reader's views on the campus weapons ban at Virginia Tech, suggesting that a well armed student body might have prevented or reduced the carnage. Maybe. So would wearing legal and readily available body armor. It is one thing to argue the right to bear arms, another to suggest that we all do so as a matter of course in our daily lives. Does anyone really want to live that way, and would it really make that much difference to a deranged murderer, or would his choice of weapons simply shift from firearms to explosives?
Meanwhile, The Nation's David Corn, writing at his own blog, notes that other societies have made other choices regarding firearms. True enough, although not self-evidently relevant. He quotes another blogger who, by way of attempting to provide some 'perspective,' writes: "Multiple body counts and explosions and shootings are the daily experience of the people of Iraq. They have been living this hell for four years. Just keep that fact in mind as you mourn the deaths of 22 American students slain in Blacksburg, Viginia." [sic]
One shouldn't need to reply, although apparently one does, that Iraq is a nation at war not only with the U.S. but with itself. Whatever the merits or failings of the war in Iraq and America's role in it, comparisons between a war zone and a killing spree on a college campus are obscene. Say what you will about firearms and gun control or, for that matter, the ugly brutality and bloodshed of any war at any place or time, firearms have always been plentiful and ready access to them has always been the case in America.
We can resume those discussions and debates tomorrow, not today. Such tragedies as today's in Blacksburg and before that at the University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere have not always been the case. This particular sort of insanity, for there is no other term for it, is of recent vintage.
It seems somehow inappropriate to quote even as respected a science fiction writer as Robert Heinlein today, and yet when events such as today's occur the first thing that comes to my mind is his calling (in 1941, no less) this modern era "the Crazy Years." Perhaps there has always been much madness in the world. Certainly today there is too much.
It is foolish to think of any place as one where "it can't happen here." But psychologically the sense of unlikelihood of such an occurrence, the biggest mass shooting on a college campus in American history, happening at Virginia Tech almost approaches the enormity of the act itself.
On a personal note and as a native Virginian, I have known dozens, perhaps hundreds of Hokies or Virginia Tech graduates over the years, my older son considered attending there, and I know at least one faculty member there who I hope and pray is unharmed and safe. This is awful, awful news and my heart goes out to the victims, the families and friends of the victims and the entire Virginia Tech community.
* * * * * * * * * *
UPDATE: The death toll has now risen to 33. Predictably, the blogosphere is awash with commentary, also predictably all over the map, some of it measured and sane, some of it not.
Over at Reason's Hit & Run, commenters are engaged in a lively but largely puerile debate over gun control, while Michelle Malkin has taken to posting reader's views on the campus weapons ban at Virginia Tech, suggesting that a well armed student body might have prevented or reduced the carnage. Maybe. So would wearing legal and readily available body armor. It is one thing to argue the right to bear arms, another to suggest that we all do so as a matter of course in our daily lives. Does anyone really want to live that way, and would it really make that much difference to a deranged murderer, or would his choice of weapons simply shift from firearms to explosives?
Meanwhile, The Nation's David Corn, writing at his own blog, notes that other societies have made other choices regarding firearms. True enough, although not self-evidently relevant. He quotes another blogger who, by way of attempting to provide some 'perspective,' writes: "Multiple body counts and explosions and shootings are the daily experience of the people of Iraq. They have been living this hell for four years. Just keep that fact in mind as you mourn the deaths of 22 American students slain in Blacksburg, Viginia." [sic]
One shouldn't need to reply, although apparently one does, that Iraq is a nation at war not only with the U.S. but with itself. Whatever the merits or failings of the war in Iraq and America's role in it, comparisons between a war zone and a killing spree on a college campus are obscene. Say what you will about firearms and gun control or, for that matter, the ugly brutality and bloodshed of any war at any place or time, firearms have always been plentiful and ready access to them has always been the case in America.
We can resume those discussions and debates tomorrow, not today. Such tragedies as today's in Blacksburg and before that at the University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere have not always been the case. This particular sort of insanity, for there is no other term for it, is of recent vintage.
It seems somehow inappropriate to quote even as respected a science fiction writer as Robert Heinlein today, and yet when events such as today's occur the first thing that comes to my mind is his calling (in 1941, no less) this modern era "the Crazy Years." Perhaps there has always been much madness in the world. Certainly today there is too much.
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Bright College Daze
Well, I thought my razor was dull until I heard his speech. And that reminds me of a story that's so dirty I'm ashamed to think of it myself. -- Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff (Groucho Marx) in Horse Feathers
Per CNN, some 200 demonstrating students peacefully protested the anticipated commencement address by Vice President Cheney at Brigham Young University. Meanwhile, counter-protesters -- and what’s a good protest without some counter-protesters to help lure the media? – quietly collected some 400 signatures on a letter of thanks to the vice president. Peacefully? Quietly? Well, BYU ain’t exactly Berkeley when it comes to protests, after all. Then again, come to think of it, neither is Berkeley these days.
Say what you will about FOX News’s conservative slant, here’s how CNN described BYU: “a conservative school owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Well, yes, in the same sense, I suppose, that Georgetown is a liberal school owned by the Roman Catholic Church. Still, one rarely reads or hears such context provided by the MSM in such cases, or is it just me? And is there anyone who didn’t know that Brigham Young is a Mormon school or, as such, a tad less left leaning than, oh, say, Michigan or Yale? (Note to Eli arson majors: next time, kids, at least have the common courtesy to burn your own damned American flags, huh?)
Anyway, commencement speech season is soon upon us and landing a big name commencement speaker is almost as prestigious and competitive among big name universities as seeing who can reject the most high school valedictorians. Ordinarily, a mere vice president isn’t considered nearly as big a catch as, say, a film star; but, hey, it’s Cheney, you know? Besides, political commencement speeches actually can be entertaining. At my own graduation many years ago, then Chief Justice Warren Burger gave a delicious “Law and Order” speech (no, not about the TV show) in the midst of the Watergate crisis of his greatest fan, Richard Nixon. Oh, the irony was dripping faster than the beads of sweat under our silly medieval robes that hot spring afternoon, I tell you.
Generally, though, aside from the rare funny ones, commencement speeches are a waste of time. The speaker is there primarily to bask in his own ego and pick up a worthless degree he didn’t earn (not unlike many of the other degree recipients, come to think of it), while the audience is comprised of gleeful parents busy thinking about not writing any more tuition checks, faculty members busy thinking about all the research and writing they hope to get done that summer and graduating seniors wondering where the best parties will be after its all over.
In fact, the best thing that can be said about the typical commencement speech is that it isn’t the most boring part of the ceremony. That dubious honor belongs to the endless procession of graduates walking up to receive what purports to be their diplomas but turns out to be their very first request from the development office for an alumni contribution. Grass grows faster than they hand those things out, and more interestingly, too.
So cheer up, unhappy BYU students. Cheney will be back to his undisclosed location before you can say Joseph Smith. To paraphrase a far better (and shorter) speech than you will hear at commencement, you will little note, nor long remember what is said that day, and before you know it you’ll be free to begin your lives. Commencement is, after all, not an ending but a beginning and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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