Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Dear Parents

4 Comments

Things you should know about the university you’re sending your kid to, but don’t. A long, but brutal critique of modern academia:

…what remedy is there for the problems of declining student competence and increasing student illiteracy? Ability and literacy are the true deliverables of a university education, aren’t they? How is their disappearance to be managed?

The first remedy is simply to juke the stats. Over the past 14 years of teaching, my students’ grade point averages have steadily gone up while real student achievement has dropped precipitously. Papers I would have failed 10 years ago as unintelligible and failing to qualify as “university-level work” I now routinely assign grades of C or higher. Each time I do so I rub another little corner of my conscience off, cheat your daughter of an honest low grade or failure that might have been the womb of a real success, and add a little bit more unreality to an already unreal situation.

I am speaking, of course, of grade inflation. For faculty, the reasons for it range from a desire to avoid time-consuming student appeals to attempting to create a level playing field for their own students in comparison to others to securing work through high subscription rates rather than real popularity to cynical acceptance of the rule of the game. Since most degrees involve no real content, it doesn’t matter how they are assessed. Beyond questions of mere style, there are no grounds for assigning one ostensibly studious paper an A and another a B when both are illusory. So let the bottom rise to whatever height is necessary in your particular market, so long as there remains at least some type of performance arc that will maintain the appearance of merit.

For students, the motives for grade inflation are similar to those of their professors in some respects and different in others. Given the way the university game is currently played, they too desire a level playing field and understand the importance of appearing to be, if not actually being, competent in their chosen field. But as practices change so do habits of mind and expectations. As students are awarded ever-higher grades, over time they will begin to believe that they deserve such grades. If this practice begins early enough, say in middle or secondary school, it will become so entrenched that, by the time they reach university, any violation of it will be taken as a grievous and unwarranted denigration of their abilities. Perhaps somewhere deep down they know, as do we, that their degrees are worthless and their accomplishments illusory. But anyone who challenges them will very likely be hauled before an appeal board and asked to explain how she has the temerity to tell them their papers are hastily compiled and undigested piles of drivel unacceptable as university-level work. The customer is always right. As one vice president I know of states on her website, she promises to provide “one-stop shops” and “exceptional customer service” to all. Do not let the stupidity of this statement fool you into believing it is in any way benign. The sad truth of the matter is that it more accurately describes the manner in which modern universities operate than the version I am arguing for here. We no longer have “students” — only “customers.”

None of what I am describing here is ever said in so many words. It doesn’t need to be, because in this regard the university operates much like a reality television show in which overt scripting is unnecessary, because everyone — the participants (students) as much as the directors (professors and administrators) — knows the script by heart: be outrageous, stupid, vulgar, and then cloyingly sentimental to bring the whole story to a satisfactory conclusion. The university’s narrative is not quite so lowbrow but it is just as scripted and just as empty: fill your classrooms with the rhetoric of experiential learning, e-learning, student-centered learning, lifelong learning, digital literacies and so on, and then top it all off with superlative grades to confirm the truth of the rhetoric, QED. Thus you may dispense with real learning and real intelligence, just as reality television has dispensed with reality.

We really need to end the student loan program. Or at least reform it.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Cruz Versus Trump

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The National Journal seems to be afraid of Cruz. But this betrays the usual ignorance of the Left about what constitutes conservatism:

Cruz isn’t merely a toned-down version of Trump. He’s just as conservative and just as volatile, though probably a little less erratic. The thing is, Cruz isn’t merely a toned-down ver­sion of Trump. And this makes him all the more dan­ger­ous, from a pro­gress­ive point of view.

As Jonah (and others, and I) have said, here’s nothing conservative about Trump. He’s a populist, willing to say whatever he thinks people want to hear. He must also be immensely frustrated that Cruz continues to refuse to take his bait. The debate tomorrow night should be interesting.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s a perfect example. Trump willing to “look into preventing people on the No Fly List from having guns.” Constitution and due process? We don’t need no stinkin’ Constitution and due process.

[Update a while later]

Annoying the media–OK, make that making their heads explode–is the only reason I can think of to vote for Trump, but it’s not a sufficient one for me.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Is Islam A Religion?

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More thoughts on this topic, from Neoneocon:

…although in many respects Islam goes beyond what we think of as a religion, into the governmental and political (you can see some of the results in Iran), religion definitely has something to do with it. And if Islam did not call itself a religion, it would not be so difficult to rally support for fighting against jihadis, who present the added problem of masquerading as being followers of a regular religion rather than a murderous apocalyptic death cult.

Are all Muslims followers of a “murderous apocalyptic death cult”? No, but (a) they are followers of a religion that in its most fundamental form can easily become one, and often has; and (b) they are followers of a religion which, if adhered to at all strictly, is antithetical to our Western doctrines of liberty and human rights.

Yup.

[Update a few minutes later]

Ross Douthat: The Islamic Dilemma:

to any Muslim who takes the teachings of his faith seriously, it must seem that many Western ideas about how Islam ought to change just promise its eventual extinction.

This is clearly true of the idea, held by certain prominent atheists and some of my fellow conservatives and Christians, that the heart of Islam is necessarily illiberal — that because the faith was born in conquest and theocracy, it simply can’t accommodate itself to pluralism without a massive rupture, an apostasy in fact if not in name.

But it’s also true of the ideas of many secular liberal Westerners, who take a more benign view of Islam mostly because they assume that all religious ideas are arbitrary, that it doesn’t matter what Muhammad said or did because tomorrow’s Muslims can just reinterpret the Prophet’s life story and read the appropriate liberal values in.

The first idea basically offers a counsel of despair: Muslims simply cannot be at home in the liberal democratic West without becoming something else entirely: atheists, Christians, or at least post-Islamic.

The second idea seems kinder, but it arrives at a similar destination. Instead of a life-changing, obedience-demanding revelation of the Absolute, its modernized Islam would be Unitarianism with prayer rugs and Middle Eastern kitsch – one more sigil in the COEXIST bumper sticker, one more office in the multicultural student center, one more client group in the left-wing coalition.

The first idea assumes theology’s immutability; the second assumes its irrelevance. And both play into the hands of ISIS and Al Qaeda: The first by confirming their own clash-of-civilizations narrative, the second by making assimilation seem indistinguishable from the arid secularism that’s helped turn Europe into a prime jihadist recruiting ground.

The good news is that there is space between these two ideas. The bad news is that we in the West can’t seem to agree on what that space should be, or how Christianity and Judaism, let alone Islam, should fit into it.

The problem with the Left is that they don’t take religion seriously in general, so they can’t get their heads around this particular one, though it actually has some appeal to them as a potential ally against western liberal values and “imperialism.” So the multi-culties pretend or imagine that Islam is merely another quaint colorful cultural thing, with funny clothes and more prayers than most, and can’t conceive how antithetical it is to their own way of life.

[Update early afternoon]

Related: Angela Merkel is doing much more damage to the future of the West than Donald Trump:

Alas, there are two true things lying behind his idiotic policy suggestion. The first is that the problem is about Muslims. The second is that our “elected representatives” do not know what to do about it.

The above-mentioned Ayatollah Khomeini also said “Islam is politics”. He meant that Islam tells you how to rule, and therefore any unIslamic way of ruling is illegitimate. . . .

Such ideas have become powerful in the West, partly because of arithmetic: we now have a great many Muslims in our midst – far more here, proportionately, than in Mr Trump’s country, and more in France than here. The risk of violence rises with the total. Even if it is true that 99 per cent of Muslims would not hurt a fly, when you increase the numbers you inevitably get more of those who would. People are, therefore, right to worry more about mass immigration from, say, Syria, than from, say, Poland.

But, even with high numbers, the problem would be much less severe if our leaders and institutions had greater cultural confidence. If they upheld a robust belief in the Western way of life, reflected in what our schools taught, what the BBC broadcast, what rules of citizenship were insisted on, and what was considered injurious to our values, then the doctrines of Islamism would be better resisted.

But they remain willfully blind to the problem.

[Update a while later]

Speaking of willfully blind, the Merced knife attacker claimed to be an extreme Muslim, and had an ISIS flag, but the authorities still won’t call it terrorism.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!