Black students and some professors at Duke University are up in arms over a study that shows that black students drop out of science majors disproportionally, behavior that is wholly explained by their status as the beneficiary of racial preferences, as I write about here.   That switch in majors is the reason that black and white GPA’s converge somewhat over students’ time at Duke, rather than because black students are narrowing the achievement gap with whites. 

The study belongs to a growing body of empirical work called “mismatch theory,” which argues that preferences hurt their recipients by placing them in classes for which they are underprepared, causing them to learn less than they would among their academic peers–a proposition that may seem obvious to anyone outside the mind control of a university.   I certainly wouldn’t last a minute at Cal Tech and wouldn’t regard it as a favor to be placed there. 

The incident at Duke further limns the distortions of discourse that flow from affirmative action.  As has been apparent for years, first we must pretend that it doesn’t exist.   Virtually all high school students know their classmates’ SAT’s; they can see the large discrepancies between those of so-called “underrepresented minorities” and those of whites and Asians who are admitted to comparable schools.  At Duke, the SAT and grade gap is more than one standard deviation.  Black students know the score as well, and have been reported as announcing on occasion that they don’t have to work as hard because their race will get them into schools.   And yet in college, everyone is required to act as if all students have been admitted on eqaul grounds, and any reference to the preference regime will be judged as racist and hurtful. 

But now it turns out that you also can’t refer to the consequences of the preference regime–its effect on students’  learning and academic performance–without also being labelled a racist.  Such a result is of course not surprising, since the offense necessarily includes the prior infraction of acknowledging that affirmative action exists at all.   Still, it rounds out the picture of just how all-encompassing  the unreality bubble on campus really is and how impossible it will be to eliminate it.

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Of the various Christmas sightseeing destinations offered a child in 1960s Los Angeles, the Santa Monica crèches—a series of small stage sets erected on the bluffs above the Pacific Coast Highway–were particularly alluring.   The life-sized mannequins that populated the chicken-wire enclosures had an obvious ancient provenance in the nearby J.C. Penney’s, with their heavy mascara, California tans, and stiff smiles under their Bedouin robes, yet the magic of mimesis—of reproducing human life in artificial form—worked its usual magnetic appeal. 

This year, only three of the series’ fourteen Christmas scenes have appeared in Palisades Park after a local atheist complained about the monopoly on this prime piece of real estate enjoyed by religion.  Complainant Damon Vix and some fellow non-believers applied for space in the park to broadcast their own message; Santa Monica decided to allocate the territory by lottery and the non-believers won the vast majority of spaces.  Vix says that he never intended to dominate the area, but rather simply to receive an equal opportunity to make a pitch for reason.  Many of the atheists’ spaces have deliberately remained blank, so as not to antagonize viewers, Vix told the New York Times; a photo in the Times shows a now pathetically empty chicken wire cage hung with a quote from Thomas Jefferson: “Religions are all alike—founded upon fables and mythologies.” 

My first reaction to this controversy is: What a ridiculous battle to pick.  My second is: Does every public dissent from faith, my own included, inevitably come off as equally unpleasant?  (Quick answer to the latter question: No, see Christopher Hitchens.)  Vix has merely reinforced the view of millions of believers that non-believers are—for starters–killjoy blights on the polity who are only out to destroy joy and good cheer, and who would leave a vacuum in the human spirit as ugly as the atheists’ empty cages.  Equally distressing is the tone-deafness of another skeptic, the co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, who tells the Times that the Santa Monica situation was “one of the cutest success stories of the season.”  The Wisconsin-based group erected its own manger this year in the Wisconsin State Capitol, featuring Einstein, Darwin, and—I cringe to write it–Emma Goldman.  Way to further associate religious skepticism with Godless communism, guys!  (And skeptics should avoid Seventh Day Adventist-type mimicry: If you’re going to be a vegetarian, don’t ape the meat eaters with mock salmon loaf.) 

I am not even sure that non-believers should be picking battles at all, as opposed to simply asking the questions that logically follow from religious belief—such as why anyone thinks that God cares about his prayers for relief from mortgage debt or arteriosclerosis when God tolerates the daily slaughter of innocents by natural disaster and every kind of disease under the sun. 

For me, the crèche episode raises troubling questions about how skepticism can best challenge or talk back to the ever-weakening domain of faith, without coming off as crude, thin-skinned, or anti-social.  I confess that most contemporary atheist crusades—such as Rationalist slogans on buses–strike me as lame at best.  (Is Secular Right any different?  I hope so, but I cannot be sure.)  And yet though I would not draw the line at the Santa Monica crèches, there are other public and government sponsored displays of religion that I, too, find deeply annoying and, if I controlled things, unacceptable, such as the prayer from Congress’s resident chaplain that opens every day’s legislative session, prayer in schools, Presidential prayer breakfasts, and Texas’s official gubernatorial prayers for rain (still inexplicably unanswered).  (Vix would undoubtedly say, with likely justice, that he is not proceeding out of any personal annoyance but rather to uphold a fundamental Constitutional principle.)  Every separation of Church and state that today we take for granted, such as the disestablishment of the official state churches in the early days of the Republic, undoubtedly struck many believers at the time as equally gratuitous and juvenile–not to mention deeply dangerous. 

The issue here is not just how to dissent from religion; any challenge to a widely-accepted practice will be perceived by the majority as the action of cranks who should just keep their mouths shut.  And while Christianity in the West today can play the victim of an intolerant elite culture, it was of course unapologetic about suppressing heterodoxy before the Enlightenment and the market began chipping away at its hegemony over the public sphere. 

 
I have no hard and fast rule for arriving at a socially acceptable etiquette for expressing disbelief.   Challenging Christian traditions, especially ones as innocuous and child-friendly as Christmas displays, is particularly fraught since Christianity has become so tame and is so thoroughly integrated into our culture.  (My heavily Jewish, Hollywood-dominated grammar school in West Los Angeles held an annual Christmas carol ceremony without anyone objecting.)   Perhaps the most that one can say is that anti-majoritarian principles should be applied with discretion—knowing that everyone will interpret that mandate differently.  Here, though, I would leave the crèches alone.

daily slaughter of the innocents

I fail to grasp the deep personal insult allegedly sent by the Berkeley bake sale, unlike some commenters on this site.  If you are offended by the idea of someone being offered a benefit based on his race, you should be out there with the Berkeley College Republicans protesting the likely overt reinstatement of preferences at the University of California (as opposed to their covert use through such anti-Prop 209 strategems as “holistic admissions”).

 To me, as I write here, the reaction to the bake sale exemplifies the narcissistic irrationality on the part of today’s students that university bureaucrats only pamper and amplify, thus creating a future cadre of self-engrossed adults who will continue to cry racism and sexism as they go through life:

Student Devonte Jackson told the San Francisco Chronicle that the sale was inappropriate and hurtful, “attacking underrepresented communities by reducing their communities to a cheaply priced good.” The president of Berkeley’s student government, which sponsored the pro-SB 185 phone bank, explained to CNN that the bake sale “humorized and mocked the struggles of people of color on this campus.” Another student government officer professed dismay at such a shocking insult to students of color. “We were really taken aback and, frankly, disgusted,” Joey Freeman informed the Los Angeles Times. Capping off this outpouring of what one can only hope is willful misreading, the student senate passed an emergency resolution on Sunday condemning “the use of discrimination whether it is in satire or in seriousness by any student group.”

Who could take such a reaction seriously?  Berkeley’s $194,000 vice chancellor for equity and diversity, that’s who: 

“A lot of students, especially students of color, read [the bake sale] as placing a higher value on white students,” Gibor Basri told the New York Times. Basri, in other words, obeyed the ironclad script for all such minor perturbations in the otherwise unbroken reign of campus political correctness. That script requires that the massive campus-diversity bureaucracy treat the delusional claims of hyperventilating students with utter seriousness.

Berkeley

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan provides an almost parodistic version of the  “technology will solve our education problems” meme today that is at once hilarious, depressing, and terrifying—the latter, because it heralds the arrival of another hugely expensive and wasteful taxpayer-funded boondoggle, in this case, the education-industrial complex. 

If we can just pump enough high-tech products into the classroom, America’s students will suddenly become learned, Duncan and co-author Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix, write in the Wall Street Journal: 

We are optimistic that with the right ideas the U.S. can become a leader in leveraging the power of technology to promote learning. . . . Imagine . . . an online high-school physics course that uses videogame graphics power to teach atomic interactions, or a second-grade online math curriculum that automatically adapts to individual students’ levels of knowledge. 

Reality check:  Students the world over have mastered atomic interactions without “videogame graphics” by hard mental work; if they are not willing to make an effort, no amount of scintillating “videogame graphics” will magically put that knowledge into their head while they are otherwise engaged in Facebook exchanges.  Likewise, if a second-grade student is not paying attention in class or is showing up tired because his parent(s) is loudly partying all night, an individually-tailored math curriculum is not going to overcome those deficits. 

Duncan shows the same boundless faith in technology to overcome student apathy and educational mediocrity as conservatives put into free market panaceas like vouchers.  A government initiative created by Bush II, Digital Promise, is going to feed government contracts to the growing body of ed. tech. suppliers, explain Duncan and Hastings:

Digital Promise can show leadership in areas such as helping build a more efficient market for education technology . . . Digital Promise will also support new investments in research and development . . . To spur more R&D, Digital Promise can promote the rapid testing of new products modeled after Internet companies such as Netflix, which use low-cost experimentation to improve their products.

Education is not like the market for home entertainment systems, however.  It is not a market in any sense of the word.  It is a moral enterprise.  It requires discipline on the part of students and parents, and on the part of teachers, a belief in their own educational and moral authority.  We  have lost the will, however, to speak about the need for individual effort and deferred gratification as the most important aspect of success. 
 

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If any believers want to hazard a guess as to why God decided to ignore Texans’ official three-day prayer session for rain, it would be illuminating.  Perhaps prayers are sent without any serious expectation that they will be answered (and why is that?), so that when they are not answered, the believer feels no great disappointment and no need to explain the lack of response.  Nevertheless, we are told all the time that God does answer prayers.  Indeed, Governor Rick Perry and his followers would not have appealed to God if they weren’t confident that God, in his concern for human suffering, listens to and responds to such petitions.  So why not these?  

One would have thought that the Texans presented a worthy petition for relief, since the failure to end the drought has resulted in the loss of life and massive loss of livelihood and property.   Perhaps the number of prayers sent God’s way didn’t reach a quorum.   Or were not heartfelt enough.   Or maybe Texans don’t in fact deserve to be relieved of draught. 

Catholic theologians up to the Pope himself stress that God is Reason and compatible with reason.  Presumably, therefore, the causes and meaning of his behavior are accessible to human understanding and not shrouded in capriciousness and mystery.   Still, it’s hard to come up with a reason why he couldn’t have sent some rain in response to the Texans’ request, since he does so many good things for us everyday in response to prayer, theologians like Michael Novak assure us. 

The possible suggestion that God has in fact answered the Texans’ prayers, but we can’t hope to understand how, would be a bit hard to accept here as elsewhere. 

Governor Perry seems to have given up on the divine angle for now, however, and is asking for aid from a more reliable source: the federal government.

draught relief · petitionary prayer

Amy Zegart,  a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, warns in the Los Angeles Times today that the U.S. sure as heck better not ratchet down its massive anti-terrorism efforts and its still-lingering fear rhetoric:

The fight is nowhere close to being won, and America’s most perilous times may lie ahead.

Among her evidence for the ongoing, even escalating, nature of the threat, especially from weapons of mass destruction:

In 1995, a Japanese cult released sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway, killing 12 people and injuring thousands. It was the first WMD terrorist attack in modern history, and it sparked a wave of

Wait for it . . . “Copy cat attacks?”  “Successful efforts by anti-American terrorist groups to develop stockpiles of sarin gas?”  No: the Tokyo subway attack “sparked a wave of presidential terrorism commissions years before Bin Laden became a household name.”  

There’s more: a group of terrorism experts in 2005 mostly did not believe that “the odds of a nuclear attack on the U.S. were negligible.”   Even if “not negligible” means: requiring never-wavering massive expenditures on “homeland security” throughout the land and reactionary airport screening protocols, these are presumably some of the same experts who predicted in 2005 that there would be a biological attack on the U.S. by 2010.

terror porn

Education technology does not seem to be solving our education woes.  So concludes this impressively-reported New York Times story on an Arizona school district that has spent $33 million since 2006 on the ed. establishment’s usual panaceas of “whiteboards,” laptops, and interactive computer programs.  Despite this outpouring from the taxpayer cornucopia, test scores have remained flat.  

Big surprise.  Educational technology would be the solution to mediocre academic performance only if the lack of educational technology were the cause.  Somehow, however, John Milton managed to learn Latin, Greek, and Hebrew without an Ipad, as did thousands of other children far less gifted than he; generations upon generations have mastered algebra, geometry, and the rudiments of historical knowledge just reading from—gasp!—books! 

The most important tools in the classroom are self-discipline, perseverance, and a desire to learn (or, failing that, fear of the consequences for not doing so).  Don’t expect the ed. establishment and its by now massive orbiting planetary system of consultants, foundations, and contractors to acknowledge that fact, however, since it would entail getting back to basics, restoring order, intellectual authority, and discipline in the classroom, and demanding hard work from children and commitment from parents.  All that is far too judgmental and socially divisive.  Not to mention that it would defund the highly-profitable ed. industry

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House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s on-again, off-again suggestion that federal disaster relief for Hurrican Irene victims be offset by cuts elsewhere in the federal budget is a courageous precedent to set against further deficit spending.   And yet I wonder how many of the Republicans who have backed that idea, including Cantor himself, require similar offsets for “counterinsurgency” infrastructure projects abroad–which David Petraeus, undoubtedly to great huzzahs in the Republican establishment, recently warned against cutting.    The belief that by building roads and hospitals in Afghanistan, America has the power to change that society in significant and positive ways, and to foster long-term good will towards the U.S., strikes me as no less fanciful than any Great Society faith in the ability of government social service programs to eradicate dysfunctional underclass behavior.   Restoring electricity and rebuilding bridges in New Jersey and Vermont, by contrast, is eminently doable and a service that American citizens can legitimately expect their government to provide–even if the costs of doing so should be offset during this time of spiralling deficits.

neocon war machine

Occasionally, the racial victimology and extortion complex provides some entertaining and pleasant justice.  The accusation that Columbia University President Lee Bollinger is insufficiently committed to diversity, and, by implication, is racist, is one of those moments. 

The departure of two black administrators from Columbia has provoked the racism insinuations from two black Columbia professors.  Delightfully, the New York Times saw fit to amplify their charges in a long, vacuous story on the front page of its New York section.   Frederick Harris, the director of Columbia’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies, opined:

the departures “have shaken my confidence — as well as the confidence of many others at Columbia — in the ability of Columbia to maintain diverse leadership at the top.”

June Cross, an associate professor at the university’s Graduate School of Journalism, told the Times:

 “I’m not saying race is the issue, but it is the subtext.”

Ungrounded innuendo doesn’t get any more devious than that.  What does it mean for race to be a “subtext” but not an “issue”?  This gem of obscurantism comes from a journalism professor, someone supposedly able to teach students how to write clearly. 

Neither of the two departed administrators, Michele Moody-Adams and Claude Steele,  are themselves charging racism—at least yet.   Of course, Steele is exquisitely careful to preserve the legitimacy of all such racial accusations as a general matter:

the questions about racial implications, he said, were a “rational reaction.”

Really?  “Rational” to cry racism without the slightest evidence of racial animus?  And yet even Steele denies that in this case, his “identity” had anything to do with his departure. (more…)

diversity racket · racial victimology

Michelle Bachman recently suggested that the summer’s catastrophic weather reflects God’s displeasure with the course of American politics:

“I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians . . . We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said: ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’”

Predictably, she has now retracted her theological claims and says she was just joking. 

If the earthquake and hurricane did not represent God’s will, what did they represent in a world governed by an omnipotent, omniscient God?  Screw-ups?  Things that just slipped by his attention?  Any believer who dares articulate the unavoidable implications of religious practice these days, however,  will be forced into just such a recantation as Bachmann’s, for religious faith conflicts with what, for contemporary society, is the far more important secular ethic of tolerance and inclusion. 

This spring, Texas Governor Rick Perry issued a proclamation declaring April 22 to April 24 as “Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas.”   Now what is logically entailed by such a proclamation?  The same implications regarding divine will as were behind Bachmann’s unacceptable gloss:

1.  That God has omnipotent power over earthly events.
2.  That such power exists whether the power-holder decides to change or to maintain a status quo: both action and inaction represent deliberate Godly intentions towards reality. 
3.  That if God wants to end the Texan drought, he can.
4.  That God is aware of our prayers. 
5.  That God has the capacity to act upon our prayers.
Specifically to Perry’s proclamation (and to every other such “group day of prayer”):
6.  That God employs democratic pollsters who tabulate public opinion: the more people praying to him to take a particular course of action, the more likely it is he will rouse himself to that action (this corollary of all such calls to collective prayer conflicts of course with the equally prevalent meme that all it takes is one voice crying out for help to move God to action). (more…)

daily slaughter of the innocents · Michael Novak · secularism · the lack of courage of one's convictions