Category Archives: Education

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Rot, Even At Claremont College

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Jay Nordlinger paid a visit, and made an ill-received speech:

There are simply people who want to be political, 24/7, all the year round. I’ve met plenty of them. There’s nothing you can do to stop them. Politics, for them, is like oxygen. I’ve also met plenty of people under dictatorship who are forced to be political. They would dearly like to lead a normal life — to tend their garden, so to speak. But oppressors have forced them into dissidence.

Also, I’ve discovered this: Many people are attached to what they regard as their identity — an identity of a political, even a tribal, nature. I touched on this phenomenon in a recent essay (here). I realize this is not a news flash: People are tribal. Duh. It’s just that America is less exempt than I once thought it was.

Why is America swimming in identity politics? Because so many people want it. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have it. The older I get, the more I realize that the liberal spirit is relatively rare. A universalist spirit is relatively rare. I find this on left and right. People cling to their tribes, their skin colors, their ethnicities, what have you. Go team go. E pluribus unum may be our motto, but a great many people in America reject it, I can tell you.

I never believed it before. I have come to believe it.

You could write a book — or at least a long and interesting scholarly essay — called “Balkanization by Choice.” That’s a lousy choice, in my book.

But who’s asked me? I must say, I leave the Athenaeum in a spirit of defeat. Seldom have I found an experience with students so demoralizing.

Very depressing. The left may not be currently winning at the ballot box, but they’ve taken over our educational system and the culture.

[Update a few minutes later]

Heather MacDonald responds to the totalitarian students and faculty of Claremont:

“We, few of the Black students” only pretend to be postmodern relativists. They are fully confident that they possess the truth about me and about their oppressed plight at the Claremont schools. An alternative construction of their reality—one, say, that pointed out that as members of fantastically rich, tolerant, and welcoming American colleges, they are among the most privileged human beings in history—would be immediately rejected as contrary to the truth and not worth debating. “We, few” would also reject the alternative truth that far from devaluing Black students, the administrations of the Claremont colleges have undoubtedly admitted many with levels of academic preparation far below that of their white and Asian peers, simply to fulfill the administrators’ own self-righteous desire for “diversity.”

Typical of all such censors and petty tyrants, “We, few of the Black students” now want to crush dissent. They ask the Claremont University Consortium to take action, both disciplinary and legal, against the editors of the conservative student paper, the Claremont Independent, for the open-ended sins of “continual perpetuation of hate speech, anti-Blackness, and intimidation toward students of marginalized backgrounds.” These are the demands not of relativists but of absolutists determined to solidify their power.

As for “We, few’s” gross misreading of my work, it shows that reading skills are in as short supply at the Claremont colleges as writing skills. My entire argument about the necessity of lawful, proactive policing is based on the value of black lives. I have decried the loss of black life to drive-by shootings and other forms of street violence. I have argued that the fact that blacks die of homicide at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined is a civil rights abomination. And I have tried to give voice to the thousands of law-abiding residents of high-crime areas who are desperate for more police protection so that they can enjoy the same freedom from fear that people in more wealthy areas take for granted.

As Nordlinger points out, these children have no idea what true oppression is.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Berkeley is rotten, too. Thoughts from Greg Lukianoff:

The Berkeley administration is incentivizing anyone who doesn’t want a particular speaker to be heard to threaten (or even engage in) acts of violence. This all but guarantees that speakers who are controversial on a particular campus will be silenced, and teaches a generation of students that resorting to violence will be rewarded. Students are learning deeply illiberal lessons. I can think of few things that are more corrosive to higher education or a pluralistic democracy.

Anyone who responds to speech with violence should be prosecuted. So far, to our knowledge, nobody has been charged at Middlebury College, and possibly only one person has been charged in the Berkeley riots.

When students physically block access to speeches or shout down speakers to prevent them from being heard, they should likewise be punished. Failing to address these disruptions grants an ongoing heckler’s veto to would-be censors. This is inimical to both freedom of speech and academic freedom on campus.

There is a reason nobody says, “If you want to stop a bully, give him everything he wants.” Failure to address violent responses to speech only encourages more violence, while turning great institutions like the University of California, Berkeley, into environments where what can be said — and therefore, what can be taught — is dictated by a minority of violent students and other protesters.

To put it in stark terms, not taking a stand against violent protesters is eventually going to get someone killed.

And it will be Trump’s fault.

Education, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Bill Nye, The Cognitive Dissonance Guy

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I haven’t been able to get all the way through this interview yet, but he sure is full of himself. I found this a little amazing:

Is there anything about Trump’s administration, and here I’m thinking specifically of Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, that leads you to believe the government will support the kind of innovation you’re hoping for?

I’m going to wait to see on Scott Pruitt. I want to engage you on this question, but I think maybe you’re politicizing something that doesn’t need to be politicized. I mean, the EPA was created by Richard Nixon. The EPA and the National Parks were set aside by conservatives. With respect to Scott Pruitt, I wouldn’t be surprised if the bureaucracy just sort shrugs its shoulders at his directives and says “we’re going to be here long after you’re gone. We’re going to carry on doing what we were doing.”

That reminds me of the saying, “The function of an institution is to perpetuate the institution.”

That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about laws.

No, you’re talking about a lawless agency that Pruitt was brought in to rein in and get under control. He seems to be as ignorant of how government works as he is about science and climate.

Rick Perry showed up at the Department of Energy and realized what’s involved, that he’s in over his head, and now he’s going to let the thing run the way it was being run. But in contrast, Mr. Scott Pruitt — it’s not that he’s unqualified, it’s that he thinks the EPA shouldn’t exist.

If he really believes that, he’s profoundly ignorant of Scott Pruitt. It’s frightening that so many young people pay so much attention to this ignoramus.

Education, General Science, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Race And Science

8 Comments

“Stop trying to get me fired for things I didn’t say and don’t believe“:

I thought that writing 5,000 words about what I think genes influence and don’t, how much variation is likely attributable to genetics, and discussing the predictive powers and limitations of IQ would be sufficient to prevent people from deliberately misreading my post as an endorsement of race science. Sadly, that is not the case, and so of course Twitter is accusing me of believing literally the opposite of what the very first lines of the first post said.

The vast majority of (violent) protestors against Charles Murray, who insanely believe he’s a “white nationalist,” have never read a word he’s written. I personally have no opinion about average IQ of various “races,” but I think the notion that something heritable won’t have an effect on a population is the kind of nutty thing that only a leftist could believe. I understand why some are uncomfortable with studying it, but I’ve never understood why the fact that a member of a group that has a certain characteristic must be treated as a member of that group, rather than as an individual. But since leftists hate treating people as individuals, believing only in the collective, I guess that would explain it.

Education, History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Who The People?

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Thoughts on the duty of the courts to enforce the Constitution and the law, from Glenn Reynolds. It’s based on new book by Randy Barnett.

[Late-morning update]

Actually, Neil Gorsuch is for the little guy:

It’s hard to see what Hirono, Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer and all the other Democrats are talking about when they say Gorsuch doesn’t stick up for the little guy. But if you look more closely at his cases and the Democrats’ charges, you realize what the Democrats mean.

First, in Yellowbear, Little Sisters, Makkar, Carloss and the burping case, Gorsuch was ruling against government overreach. In Kelo, he praised the ruling against the government. And there’s the issue. When Democrats talk about being for the little guy, they often mean being for government power. The two concepts are inseparable in the liberal mind-set.

And when they conflict, they go for the government power every time. That’s why they shouldn’t be called “liberals.”

Business, Economics, Education, General Science, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Science On The Hill

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The hearing has started, with Judith Curry, Roger Pielke, John Christy, and Michael Mann.

[Update about 10:32 EDT]

Mann uses the BS 97% number, and complains that he’s the only one on the panel “in the mainstream.”

[Update early afternoon]

Here is Judith Curry’s written testimony.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Here is all the written testimony. I’ll refrain from comment.

[Update a while later]

Here’s the story from Seth Borenstein:

At first Mann said he didn’t call Curry a denier. But in his written not oral testimony he called Curry “a climate science denier.” Mann said there’s a difference between denying climate change and “denying established science” on how much humans cause climate change, which he said Curry did.

But there’s this:

Former Georgia Tech climate scientist Judith Curry, who often clashes with mainstream science…

I don’t think she ever clashes with science, but I’m not sure what the hell “mainstream” is in this context.

[Monday-afternoon update]

The warm mongers’ five worst moments of that hearing.

[Bumped]

[Update a few minutes later]

Another point of view from an eyewitness:

The big obstacle: managing bodies of the NAS, formerly respected academic societies, and foreign national academies adopted statements that either outright support or do not contradict climatist pseudo-science. This is an important fact. Of course, there are two causes for that: internal corruption that has been happening over decades and pressure from the Obama administration and its counterparts in other Western countries. Democrat Congresspersons might congratulate themselves for their contribution to shutting up opposition views. But it is hard to convince Republicans that this happened in front of their eyes and under the watch of many of them.

The problem with the academia extends beyond the climate debate. My thoughts are that sometimes things are too broken for repair, and can be only replaced. A replacement should be built before the old thing is discarded.

Lawmakers should be aware that they might need to rebuild American scientific enterprise and academia almost from scratch: create new universities and national labs, extricate competent departments, teams, and individuals from the corrupt institutions, and let them to grow organically in the atmosphere free from the interference from the Leftist and hostile foreign bodies. This is where the federal research and education budgets should go, rather than on continuing support of morally, intellectually, and soon financially bankrupt institutions.

The small obstacle, limited to this panel, was a problematic panel of witnesses. From the outside, it seemed to consist of three skeptics and one “consensus scientist.” In fact, it consisted of Michael Mann, two lukewarmers, and respected Dr. John Christy who, nevertheless, shook hands with Michael Mann in front of my eyes. Thus, the climate alarmism was represented by its most extreme representative, while opposition to climate alarmism was hardly represented at all.

It’s long, but read the whole thing.

[Tuesday-morning update]

Mann destroys his own case for climate action.