Im-Politic: An Overlooked Reason to Rethink the Four-Year College Model

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adolescence, college, education, Financial Times, higher education, Im-Politic, Oren Cass, students

I feel hesitant to write about what is or isn’t going on on college campuses these days because it’s been quite a while since my own student days; my visits in recent decades have been limited to short trips either to give guest talks or lectures or to drop off and pick up my son when he was an undergrad or to take in an occasional basketball game at George Washington U.; and although I have some friends and acquaintances in academe, we don’t often seem to discuss campus life and how it has or hasn’t changed over time.

So sure – I’ve covered subjects like the dangerous direct and indirect Chinese government presence in American colleges and universities, and about some of the conflicts that have broken out over how to deal with historical figures with racially charged records. (See, e.g., here.)  But I can only recall one instance of even briefly mentioning the crucial matter of how well these institutions are or aren’t educating students and otherwise preparing them to be successful adults and informed citizens.

I’m focused on this matter today, however, because of two recent developments that seem amply to justify the deepest skepticism about the model of undergraduate education that’s become dominant in recent decades. The first entails the much remarked on force with which the CCP Virus has driven so much instruction on-line, and all the questions that this shift have intensified about the constantly surging costs and therefore value of a four-year degree – which of course includes the cost of campus physical plants that provide so many services that have little to do with education.

The second was the appearance last week of a Financial Times column that’s brilliantly alluded to a strong resulting suspicion of mine that keeps growing, and that surely is widely shared, if still rarely voiced explicitly. As author Oren Cass wrote in a piece covering many of higher education’s woes:

“It’s easy enough to disprove the economic claim that attending college promises them success, but much harder to refute the cultural message equating ‘not college material’ with ‘loser’. Worse, we advertise the college experience as an amusement park entitlement — a rite of passage filled with sports and parties, sex and alcohol, activities calendars overseen by cruise-ship directors called ‘campus life co-ordinators’, and, oh, classes that you should try to attend, all paid for by someone else or at some other time. Try convincing a teenager it would really be smarter to forgo that experience for a few years of hard work, an industry credential and some savings in the bank.”

And he further derides colleges today as “four-year summer camps” and “private playgrounds” for the children of the wealthy.

That second swipe unintentionally reminds us that major distinctions need to be made between private and public universities, and that therefore a latter day version of “Animal House” probably isn’t what most undergrads whatever their school are living.

But beyond the exaggeration and oversimplification, Cass points the way to a possibility that deserves full consideration, and it seems best expressed as a question. Let’s leave aside all the controversies raging today about political correctness and safe spaces and snowflakes and academic propagandizing. Let’s also table for now the serious and necessary discussion concerning whether higher education’s emphasis should be more vocational and professional and technical, or more purely academic.

The question remains – and it’s actually a series of questions: If a society wanted to transmit most effectively to its college-age youth the widest range of the knowledge and skills and experiences considered essential for later life both public and private, would it really be placing these late teens and early twenty-somethings in environments that are largely isolated physically? Where the basics of life are literally served up to them on a platter? Where none of the chores and responsibilities of independent adulthood need to be carried out or met? Where all of the adults present are products of the same cloistered set ups? Whose ideal of the community of scholars – however typically honored in the breach – is barely one step removed, at least in the West, from the medieval monastery? And would that society structure this system so as to ensure that so many of these coddled youth would be those whose talent or birth or some combination of these and other advantages tended to push them into lives of outsized power and influence?

Following on: Could such a cloistered situation reasonably be expected to engender anything deserving the term “personal growth,” or reinforce any desirable form of maturation? Isn’t it far likelier that it’s fostered the kind of entitled sensibilities that never fail to harm any human community, and in fact the kind of narcissism and extended adolescence that seems so widespread among my own Baby Boomers – the first generation during which a system once reserved for the upper classes was extended to the broad middle – and succeeding cohorts?

Of course no society in its right mind would knowingly engage in practices so described, or expect anything but counterproductive, and even perverse, results. Just as obvious, this portrait of campus life is too broadbrush and shouldn’t tar the reputations of all those students who work their way diligently through four-year colleges needing to balance the requirements of classroom and jobs, of generations before them faced with the same challenges and strapped with the often inevitable debts, and of students who have donated big chunks of time and continue to volunteer for all manner of worthy community service projects.

Yet can anyone seriously deny that a nation-wide gap dividing town and gown is exactly what’s been created and cultivated in higher education for decades now? Or that its excessive width – indeed the imperative of rethinking the very goal of immersing near-adults in an environment defining itself, however undeservedly, as higher brow than its surroundings – is becoming ever clearer from the abundant evidence that many of even the less completely pampered undergrads leave academe lacking everything from critical thinking skills to the ability to function in the workplace without time-consuming supervision? (See, e.g., here.)

I am far from knowing what model should or will replace it, though I sense that the very breadth of higher education’s failure is a glaring sign that more than one alternative is in the offing. I’d also be surprised if lots of time and trial and error weren’t needed to devise them, and if some version of the current four-year community of scholars model didn’t survive as the best match for some students – as it is now.

But for most – and even for many of the most academically inclined – higher education seems certain ultimately to much more closely integrate the classroom world and the broader world that graduates will enter. And I’m equally certain that, once this transition is well underway, most will look back and wonder why anyone thought they should have been kept so far apart to begin with.

Im-Politic: Lockdowns vs Reopening, Apples-to-Apples

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CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Democrats, domestic violence, education, Im-Politic, Kristi Noem, lockdowns, mental health, Michelle Lujan Grisholm, New Mexico, Republicans, shutdown, South Dakota, stay-at-home, substance abuse, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Worldometers.info, Wuhan virus

Truth in advertising: The more I look into CCP Virus economic restrictions and regulations on mask-wearing, the more skeptical about their anti-virus power I become. That’s not to say that I believe they have no mitigating effect at all, or even that they have only marginal impacts in absolute terms.

But when it comes to the lockdowns and shutdowns, the evidence keeps telling me that the differences in virus-related outcomes so far between states and countries that have imposed the most and the fewest contain too many inconsistencies (especially during the current second virus wave) to dismiss. And of course the case for them becomes even weaker upon considering the kinds of economic and public health costs they’ve inevitably exacted, and which I’ve been writing about since March.

In terms of mask-wearing, as I’ve explained before, my objections center not on those non-virus costs (because there seem to be none) but on what I’ve called the fetishization of this practice, and the illusions it seems to be breeding.

I’ve been hesitant to weigh in more fully on the debate over lockdowns per se because apples-to-apples comparisons are so difficult to find. Too many entries concentrate tightly on differing restrictions regimes and too few take into account crucial variables like population density and weather and median age of inhabitants After all, all else equal, localities where people are tightly packed together are obviously going to face greater spread challenges in particular than those in which they’re few and far between. Ditto, especially when it comes to the current second wave, for localities where winter begins earlier and settles in more persistently. And it’s by now well-established that the elderly are by far the most vulnerable segment of any population.

Within these United States, however, I think I’ve found two states that have taken radically different anti-virus strategies, and that are pretty similar demographically. And their experiences make a pretty convincing case for the anti-lockdown (and mask) side.

The two states are New Mexico and South Dakota – both largely rural and therefore both thinly populated. Only 17 inhabitants are found per square mile in the former and just ten in the latter. And those in percentage terms, the gap is wide, clearly both are dominated by wide open spaces. (The national average is 87.4 – all these figures come from the 2010 Census.) The median ages of their people as of 2019 is similar, too – 38.6 years for New Mexico and 37.7 years for South Dakota. (The national average was 37.7 that year.)

An initial examination indicates that New Mexico and its Democratic Governor has performed considerably better against the CCP Virus than South Dakota and its Republican Governor – who’s sometimes villified for all but fostering a death cult.

Since the pandemic’s arrival in the United States in sometime near the beginning of this year (or was it late last year?), New Mexico’s cases per million have been just over half those of South Dakota (98,386 as of today, versus 52,435, according to the reliable Worldometers.info website). And its death rate per million has been much lower, too – 837 per million versus 1,256, according to the same source.

But the biggest difference of all? New Mexico has been one of the states that has locked down and restricted most extensively, according to the New York Times‘ compilation of this information. It’s latest batch of restrictions started last month, when Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham ordered non-essential businesses to close, and put into effect a two-week stay-at-home order. There’s been some relaxation since then, but The Times reports that all but one of its counties remains in the most restrictive lockdown phase. Moreover, mask-wearing is mandatory.

In South Dakota, meanwhile, Governor Kristi Noem has never ordered a lockdown or mask mandate.

And given this striking contrast, the differences between the two states’ anti-CCP Virus approaches don’t look nearly so great.

Moreover, they look even less impressive during this second wave period. Even though the pandemic’s human toll in New Mexico has been lower than in South Dakota overall, recently the trends have tracked surprisingly closely.

South Dakota’s current case surge began October 6, when the seven-day average of daily recorded new infections was 409. This figure peaked November 14 (having risen by 256.48 percent during those five weeks), and since then has fallen by 40 percent, to 875 as of yesterday.  (These figures come from the Washington Post ‘s excellent searchable database.) 

New Mexico’s current case surge began three weeks later (November 1), at a seven-day daily average of 767 new infections. It peaked just three weeks later, on November 23, at 2,671 – and its rate of increase was only slightly slower than South Dakota’s. Since then, through yesterday, it’s down a little faster than South Dakota’s (43.69 percent).

Also undercutting the “death cult” charges: South Dakota’s weather began turning colder about two weeks before New Mexico’s, and has stayed colder since. The patterns for both states have been pretty choppy, but you can see the details at this database. (I looked up the info for Pierre, South Dakota, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, specifically.)

Over the next two weeks, the U.S. government will be releasing data that will provide a much clearer, up to date picture of the CCP Virus’ state-level economic toll (through November for employment, through the third quarter for growth) – and an indirect indication of its non-virus health (especially mental health and substance abuse-related) and social costs (e.g., domestic violence, children’s educational achievement). These figures will permit pronouncing a much more comprehensive, convincing judgment as to whether policy cures implemented for the virus have been better or worse than the disease.

Im-Politic: VP Debate Questions That Should be Asked

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1619 Project, African Americans, Barack Obama, Biden, budget deficits, CCP Virus, censorship, China, Confederate monuments, Constitution, coronavirus, COVID 19, education, election 2020, Electoral College, filibuster, Founding Fathers, free speech, healthcare, history, history wars, Im-Politic, inequality, investment, Kamala Harris, Mike Pence, national security, Obamacare, police killings, propaganda, protests, racism, riots, semiconductors, slavery, spending, Supreme Court, systemic racism, Taiwan, tariffs, tax cuts, taxes, Trade, trade war, Trump, Vice Presidential debate, Wuhan virus

Since I don’t want to set a record for longest RealityChek post ever, I’ll do my best to limit this list of questions I’d like to see asked at tonight’s Vice Presidential debate to some subjects that I believe deserve the very highest priority, and/or that have been thoroughly neglected so far during this campaign.

>For Vice President Mike Pence: If for whatever reason, President Trump couldn’t keep the CCP Virus under control within his own White House, why should Americans have any faith that any of his policies will bring it under control in the nation as a whole?

>For Democratic candidate Senator Kamala Harris: What exactly should be the near-term goal of U.S. virus policy? Eliminate it almost completely (as was done with polio)? Stop its spread? Slow its spread? Reduce deaths? Reduce hospitalizations? And for goals short of complete elimination, define “slow” and “reduce” in terms of numerical targets.

>For Pence: Given that the administration’s tax cuts and spending levels were greatly ballooning the federal budget deficit even before the virus struck, isn’t it ridiculous for Congressional Republicans to insist that total spending in the stimulus package remain below certain levels?

For Harris: Last month, the bipartisan Congressional Problem Solvers Caucus unveiled a compromise stimulus framework. President Trump has spoken favorably about it, while stopping short of a full endorsement. Does Vice President Biden endorse it? If so, has he asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to sign on? If he doesn’t endorse it, why not?

For Pence: The nation is in the middle of a major pandemic. Whatever faults the administration sees in Obamacare, is this really the time to be asking the Supreme Court to rule it un-Constitutional, and throw the entire national health care system into mass confusion?

For Harris: Would a Biden administration offer free taxpayer-financed healthcare to illegal aliens? Wouldn’t this move strongly encourage unmanageable numbers of migrants to swamp U.S. borders?

For Pence: President Trump has imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese exports headed to U.S. markets. But U.S. investors – including government workers’ pension funds – still keep sending equally large sums into Chinese government coffers. When is the Trump administration finally going to plug this enormous hole?

For Harris: Will a Biden administration lift or reduce any of the Trump China or metals tariffs. Will it do so unconditionally? If not, what will it be seeking in return?

For both: Taiwan now manufactures the world’s most advanced semiconductors, and seems sure to maintain the lead for the foreseeable future. Does the United States now need to promise to protect Taiwan militarily in order to keep this vital defense and economic knowhow out of China’s hands?

For Pence: Since the administration has complained so loudly about activist judges over-ruling elected legislators and making laws themselves, will Mr. Trump support checking this power by proposing term limits or mandatory retirement ages for Supreme Court Justices? If not, why not?

For Harris: Don’t voters deserve to know the Biden Supreme Court-packing position before Election Day? Ditto for his position on abolishing the filibuster in the Senate.

>For Pence: The Electoral College seems to violate the maxim that each votes should count equally. Does the Trump administration favor reform? If not, why not?

>For Harris: Many Democrats argue that the Electoral College gives lightly populated, conservative and Republican-leaning states outsized political power. But why, then, was Barack Obama able to win the White House not once but twice?

>For Pence: Charges that America’s police are killing unarmed African Americans at the drop of a hat are clearly wild exaggerations. But don’t you agree that police stop African-American pedestrians and drivers much more often than whites without probable cause – a problem that has victimized even South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott?

For Harris: Will Biden insist that mayors and governors in cities and states like Oregon and Washington, which have been victimized by chronic antifa violence, investigate, arrest and prosecute its members and leaders immediately? And if they don’t, will he either withhold federal law enforcement aid, or launch such investigations at the federal level?

For Pence: Why should any public places in America honor Confederate figures – who were traitors to the United States? Can’t we easily avoid the “erasing history” danger by putting these monuments in museums with appropriate background material?

For Harris: Would a Biden administration support even peacefully removing from public places statues and monuments to historic figures like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because their backgrounds included slave-holding?

For both: Shouldn’t voters know much more about the Durham Justice Department investigation of official surveillance of the Trump campaign in 2015 and 2016 before Election Day?

For both: Should the Big Tech companies be broken up on antitrust grounds?

For both: Should internet and social media platforms be permitted to censor any form of Constitutionally permitted speech?

For Pence: Doesn’t the current system of using property taxes to fund most primary and secondary public education guarantee that low-income school children will lack adequate resources?

For Harris: Aren’t such low-income students often held back educationally by non-economic factors like generations of broken families and counter-productive student behavior, as well as by inadequate school funding – as leading figures like Jesse Jackson (at least for one period) and former President Obama have claimed?

For Pence: What’s the difference between the kind of “patriotic education” the President says he supports and official propaganda?

For Harris: Would a Biden administration oppose local school districts using propagandistic material like The New York Times‘ U.S. history-focused 1619 Project for their curricula? Should federal aid to districts that keep using such materials be cut off or reduced?

Now it’s your turn, RealityChek readers! What questions would you add? And which of mine would you deep six?

Im-Politic: The Surprisingly Muddled Politics of School Reopening

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Bill De Blasio, CCP Virus, Chicago, coronavirus, COVID 19, education, Im-Politic, Jim Kenney, Larry Hogan, Lori Lightfoot, Maryland, Montgomery County, New York City, Philadelphia, reopening, schools, teachers, teachers unions, Wuhan virus

Mid-summer sure is shaping up as a bad period for The Narrative being pushed by many politicians in this pandemic and election year, and that seems predominant in those Mainstream Media news organizations still retaining enormous influence over how Americans perceive, think, and even act.

Just a few days ago, as reported on RealityChek, a Gallup poll cast doubt on whether even African Americans regard America’s police forces are systemically racist. More recently, considerable evidence has appeared – and in real life, not polls – challenging the belief that the nation’s school reopening debate pits the Trump administration and other Republicans and conservatives and their insistence that in-classroom instruction resume this fall with no regard whatever for the health of students, administrators, versus Democrats, liberals, and teachers themselves who refuse to expose anyone involved in education to a deadly disease.

Think what you will of the substance of this reopening debate and what types of school year starts strike the best balance between providing students with urgently needed education and other benefits of physical schooling on the one hand, and safeguarding their health on the other. It’s still pretty stunning to learn that in numerous American cities and other jurisdictions, the teachers and their unions – long a key Democratic Party constituency and funder – have been up in arms against the reopening plans of Never Trumper leaders that feature various mixes of virtual and in-school instruction.

Let’s start with my beloved native New York City, whose mayor, Bill de Blasio, is one of America’s most far-Left politicians (albeit one with a unique ability to antagonize folks on the Left). At the end of last month, de Blasio unveiled a reopening plan incorporating a weekly “blended approach” of in-class and virtual learning for “a vast majority of kids.” De Blasio also said that implementing the plan required that the city’s daily positive CCP Virus test rate stayed below three percent – and justified his approach by noting that it had lately been steady at one percent

The reaction of the city’s educators? Protests that included teachers (and some parents) carrying coffins and a guillotine.

Chicago is another big city with a high-profile progressive Democratic mayor – Lori Lightfoot. Unlike de Blasio, she hasn’t alienated many of her fellow progressives. But in the view of her city’s teachers, she has also committed the sin of proposing a school reopening plan entailing “a hybrid schedule combining two days of in-person instruction and three days or remote learning for kindergarten through sophomore year students….” Moreover, Chicago parents with kids in the public schools can opt for full virtual learning under the plan, which isn’t yet official policy. The school system says that it’s prepared for the return of physical classes with “large PPE investments, [a] pod system that should help with contact tracing and that it will have temperature checks at school.” Yet Chicago teachers are marching in protest, too, with the union pushing for an all virtual reopening.

Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney has a lower national profile than de Blasio or Lightfoot, and lately a more mixed claim as a progressive champion, including among progressives. (See here and here for evidence.) But he’s clearly a liberal Democrat.

His city’s school Superintendent also proposed a blended-type plan that “would have sent most children back to school in person two days a week and contained a 100% virtual option for families who wanted it.” The response of Philadelphia teachers (and also some parents)? “Don’t force one teacher or student into classrooms until you can guarantee our safety.” And the backlash was strong enough to force the school system into revision mode.

You say you aren’t confused enough? Maryland’s Governor Larry Hogan has recently muddied the narrative still further.  I know – he’s a Republican. But he’s worked hard to position himself as an anti-Trump Republican and possibility for the party’s presidential nomination in 2024. So it would be logical to expect Hogan to fall in with the hard core opponents of in-class reopenings. Yet yesterday, Hogan slapped down as “overly broad” a (liberal Democratic) Maryland county’s order to bar, at least through October 1, not only public schools from offering any in-person education, but private schools as well.

It’s entirely possible that the confused politics of school reopenings may complicate efforts to arrive at a reasonable working consensus on this vital issue.  But in these hyperpartisan times, a better outcome might be in store.  The willingness of various politicians to depart from the battle lines widely supposed to exist might become a badly needed force for pragmatism – and especially for the flexible, case-by-case solutions that will undoubtedly often be needed.      

Im-Politic: A Case for Reparations

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African Americans, education, GI Bill, higher education, housing, Im-Politic, immigrants, inequalty, mortgages, race relations, racism, reparations, wealth gap, white privilege, World War II

Here’s a RealityChek post I never thought I’d write, leading off with two ideas I never thought I’d consider: First, I’m warming a lot toward the idea of the U.S. government paying some kind of taxpayer-funded reparations to African Americans in compensation for at least one cut-and-dried historical episode of economically costly racism. Second, a main reason is that I and my family – and millions and millions of others like us – have benefited economically, and considerably, from the white privilege reinforced by this episode.

I’m still somewhat wary of a main possible result of reparations – that payment will generate an ever growing list of demands for more payments. I also remain concerned that reparations will ease much of the moral pressure felt by white and others who oppose reparations to eliminate sources of racial economic inequality ranging from lousy and inequitably funded public schools to discriminatory mortgage practices.

But the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that these worries reflect overly simplistic “slippery slope”-type arguments to which I’ve objected in the context of other issues. Specifically, they too easily become excuses for avoiding many necessary actions. For they imply that citizens and political leaders are devoid of the judgment needed to make the kinds of distinctions any complex community or society needs to be able to identify in order to remain even minimally functional.

More important, a little research I conducted the other day brought to my attention an instance of massive, systemic racism that took place many decades after emancipation. It came in the form of the discriminatory implementation of the GI Bill of 1944, which denied more than a million black World War II veterans vital most of the opportunities created by the law to establish a foothold in the nation’s middle class, and beyond.

If you’ll remember, opening unprecedented economic opportunity to the men and women that risked their lives to save their country and indeed the world was the whole point of the legislation. The means chosen were low-interest mortgages and equally generous loans for buying businesses and farms, and stipends to finance higher education expenses. Given the importance of homes and other assets in amassing significant amounts of wealth, and of college and many vocational degrees in generating middle-class-and-beyond income levels, the strategy made perfect sense. And it worked like a charm for most of the white veterans who used it.

Inexcusably, however, as this account makes clear, most black World War II veterans were excluded from these programs by a combination of state-level official and informal barriers to participation. Just as important, the effects of this discrimination also hobbled the economic prospects of the descendents of these African American servicemen and women. One major piece of evidence – the decades-old yawning racial wealth gap, which results largely from the long limited home-owning opportunities available to African Americans.

And here’s where the story gets personal – for me and others whose ancestors only came to the United States in the late-19^th and early 20^th centuries. It’s absolutely true that our grandparents or parents never owned slaves, overwhelmingly had no hand in maintaining systemic American racism, and largely arrived from their homelands with little more than the clothes on their backs. It’s also true that many and even most worked like the dickens to achieve their share of the American Dream, and that many were the victims of at least informal discrimination at some point in their lives.

This history was long the principal basis for my own insistence that, if any reparations were to be paid, I sure didn’t owe any.

Getting down to my case, my father, and his peers in the ranks of my relatives and friends, also came from economically modest backgrounds and generally worked like the dickens. My own father was blessed with the most powerful mind I’ve ever encountered, and owed much of his success to this brainpower as well (as did so many others of course).

He didn’t buy his first home until 1963, and so just missed the chance for GI Bill mortgage assistance. But there’s an excellent chance that, despite his intellect and other talents, he’d have never gone to college without the financial aid provided by the legislation – which enabled him to attend full-time and not have to worry about helping to pay the family bills. Certainly, my grandparents never encouraged him to continue his education beyond high school. Without college, of course, there would have been no law school (at night, on top of working full-time), and without his law degree, my own upbringing mightn’t have been so comfortable, and my own higher education opportunities might have been very different.

Again, my father was so brilliant, and so driven, that I’m sure he would have achieved considerable professional success without the GI Bill. I’m similarly confident that the same applies to any number of his peers. But it’s entirely possible that they wouldn’t overall have achieved as much success. And on the whole nowhere near as quickly. More important, their GI Bill benefits relieved or at least partly relieved my father and millions of other white veterans of having to make the kinds of often difficult choices and accept the kinds of often family-straining tradeoffs that confronted black veterans denied these benefits.

As a result, some amount of reparations based on the economic impact of GI Bill discrimination seems justified to me, along with including GI Bill beneficiaries like me as payers.

Obviously, critical details would need to be worked out, along with the question of what other kinds of reparations should be considered and paid. But the GI Bill’s history amounts to a clear instance of the federal government, and many sub-federal governments, systematically awarding to one group of Americans benefits whose effects have lasted many generations, and just as systematically excluding another class of Americans with equally valid claims. And even though subsequent veterans aid programs have been put into effect much more admirably, this clearcut discrimination, moreover, has had lasting, damaging effects.

What could be more fair and ethical than openly acknowledging this inequity, and providing compensation to the victims? And seriously discussing other cmparaable wrongs that might be at least partly righted in this way?  

Im-Politic: Have Americans Got Family Policy All Wrong?

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David Brooks, education, extended family, families, globalization, Im-Politic, Immigration, nuclear family, social policy, The Atlantic, women

David Brooks has scored a four-bagger with his new Atlantic article on whether the recent American focus on maintaining and fortifying the nuclear family has been such a hot idea. He’s powerfully challenged the conventional wisdom about a long-time social and cultural institution and public policy goal. He’s taught readers fascinating and important lessons about American social history. He’s spotlighted a host of recent developments and trends on this crucial front. And (I guess this is just my own personal bag) in the process, he’s reminded me of what a clueless snob I can be in jumping to conclusions.

To continue momentarily on a personal note, I was staring in disbelief as I wrote most of the above, for Brooks, a New York Times columnist, has never struck me as much more than the kind of establishment conservative who long dominated the Republican Party and the right half of the mainstream media, and who’s spent the last three years bitterly inveighing against the rise of Trump-ian populism – without offering any useful suggestions as to what might replace it.

It’s true that Brooks had also made quite a name for himself as a social and cultural commentator, but I never paid much attention to these writings. If his new Atlantic article is any indication, that was a major mistake.

I’m not entirely sure I agree with Brooks’ main policy argument – that it’s no longer possible to restore the nuclear family’s primacy in American society, because that prominence only emerged because of overall national conditions in the post-World War II United States that simply can’t be replicated. In particular, I still strongly doubt that the developments that have weakened the nuclear family were inevitable, or were all inevitable, and are therefore irreversible.

I’m thinking of indiscriminate economic globalization and Open Borders-friendly mass immigration policies that have destroyed generations of middle class jobs and the incomes and economic opportunity they create; welfare policies that surely discouraged to some degree the maintenance, especially in the African-American community, of traditional two-parent families; the ever-mounting incompetence of the nation’s public primary and secondary schools; and a values transition that (thankfully) fostered greater social and cultural freedom and diversity, but that also unmistakably encouraged individualism, pointless exhibitionism, and the insistence on instant gratification to run riot, and all but scorned the idea of commonly accepted norms, self-restraint, and short-term sacrifice for long-term gain.

In other words, maybe the dominance of the nuclear family nurtured much of the economic progress and prosperity in particular that characterized the 1950s and 1960s, rather than the other way around.

But what I’m thinking mainly about today aren’t those big policy and (inevitably politicized) questions, but about some of the forms of extended families that Brooks mentioned prominently, and that I had completely forgotten about. Not that I’m the only one. But this blind spot recently led me in particular to ridicule someone and his outlook on life (not to his face, but to friends and relatives) who deserved much better.

It came at a wedding during which at one point, the father of the groom stood up to give his toast to the happy couple, and began waxing nostalgic (as parents at these moments understandably do) about the good old days of his son’s youth. He was anything but silver-tongued, but one point he made struck me at the time as especially absurd and revealingly parochial. Back then, he pointed out, so many of the aunts and uncles and cousins lived on the same block, and we saw each other all the time. But now, most of the family has spread out as far as – and he named a town a whole two towns, and only a few miles, away.

I found this hilariously small-minded, and missed few opportunities to bring up his remarks and what the volumes they allegedly and unflatteringly spoke about this kind of crimped perspective (which also characterized many attendees at the affair).

But as Brooks’ article pointed out, these types of extended families have been the norm for much of American history, and boasted and nurtured many virtues that sadly are in short supply today – like community and mutual support and the spread of constructive social and personal norms and values.

So as I was reading his piece, I began to think that yes, there’s a big difference between being able to spontaneously run into relatives just by stepping out the front door and seeing them on the front porch across the street, or at the supermarket, and needing to take a short drive two towns over in order to visit.

And I began thinking about the history of both sides of my own childhood nuclear family. My father’s father came to America from Lithuania and was aided almost as soon as he stepped off the boat not only by various Jewish-American charities, but by relatives that preceded him and by an organization comprised of other immigrants from the same town. He remained active in their affairs for the next five or six decades.

My mother’s parents lived in a small apartment building in the south-ish Bronx that was full of related families. I spent the first nine years of my own life in a small apartment building in Flushing, Queens (New York City) that was dominated by two or three closely-related families. They not only socialized constantly; they took summer vacations with each other at the same bungalow colony a little ways upstate.

So most of my playmates were each other’s cousins. Moreover, I also went to grade school with and hung out with a bunch of Irish-American kids from across the street who were related as well. Meanwhile, when we were very young, the various mothers took their turns walking us the six blocks to and from P.S. 20. And at about the same time, when my brother was born, we moved upstairs to a larger apartment in the same building and my mother’s mother moved into our old place. I.e., instant babysitter!

These networks, by the way, didn’t vanish even in the suburban north shore of Long Island to which my family moved in the early 1960s. Even though single family houses had replaced apartment buildings, lots of our neighbors in our community were very chummy, and have remained so. Ditto for their kids. (My father was kind of standoffish for various reasons, but the sheer number of chuldren for my brother and I to play with and the advantages of car-pooling kept us at least in the outer reaches of these circles.)

Nor, apparently, was this community unique. I was very moved about a year ago to read a Facebook post from an alum of my high school (who I didn’t know but have connected with since) to another alum (who I didn’t know either and haven’t connected with) fondly remembering the days when all the families on their block held cookouts and other backyard parties together and went on outings and looked after each other’s kids.

And according to Brooks, these patterns and structures were common during the 1950s and 1960s:

“[N]uclear families in this era were much more connected to other nuclear families than they are today—constituting a “modified extended family,” as the sociologist Eugene Litwak calls it, ‘a coalition of nuclear families in a state of mutual dependence.’ Even as late as the 1950s, before television and air-conditioning had fully caught on, people continued to live on one another’s front porches and were part of one another’s lives. Friends felt free to discipline one another’s children.”

Brooks isn’t indiscriminately nostalgic for extended families, and rightly notes major drawbacks:

“[T]hey can…be exhausting and stifling. They allow little privacy; you are forced to be in daily intimate contact with people you didn’t choose. There’s more stability but less mobility. Family bonds are thicker, but individual choice is diminished. You have less space to make your own way in life.”

And no small matter: “[M]ost women were relegated to the home. Many corporations, well into the mid-20th century, barred married women from employment: Companies would hire single women, but if those women got married, they would have to quit. Demeaning and disempowering treatment of women was rampant. Women spent enormous numbers of hours trapped inside the home under the headship of their husband, raising children.”

Further, these extended families do tend to encourage parochialism that can too easily degenerate into outright ignorance of, indifference to, and even hostility toward the outside world, or certain major portions of it.

Is some kind of middle ground possible? Brooks insists that that train has left the station:

“Today, only a minority of American households are traditional two-parent nuclear families and only one-third of American individuals live in this kind of family. That 1950–65 window was not normal.”

Again, I’m skeptical about abject pessimism – just as I am about Brooks’ (cautious) optimism about the possibility of building a healthy society with many more non-nuclear families and many fewer nuclear families than even exist today. More important for now, though, is recognizing Brooks’ stunning achievement – which will force any but the completely closed-minded to start thinking.

Following Up: Why Many of America’s Widest Divides Aren’t What You Think

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college-educated, Democrats, education, Following Up, Gallup, healthcare, inequality, minorities, non-college, opportunity, partisanship, polling, polls, race relations, Republicans, whites

“An anxious and divided nation cast its first votes,” the headline in the Washington Post moaned this morning.

As yesterday’s RealityChek post reported, though, some impressive evidence came out last week showing that the nation isn’t all that anxious, or fatally divided in the most general terms, after all. At the same time, diving into that evidence’s internals shows no shortage of divisions – only many of the dividing lines are pretty surprising.  (See the PDF linked at the bottom where it says “View complete question responses and trends.”)

For not only is the most important division by far the partisan split between Democrats and Republicans. It’s a gap that tends to be considerably wider than those between groups where divides in the last few years are supposed to have been especially and worrisomely gaping – between blacks and whites, between rich and poor, between the better educated and the less well educated.

For me, the big takeaway is that when Americans are in political moods, they get carried away by their emotions, with Republicans feeling awfully chipper about the state of the nation, and Democrats correspondingly gloomy. When they’re not preoccupied with politics, Americans seem more level-headed – and their outlooks are sunnier. But the unexpected findings scarcely stop there!

For example, let’s look at the internals of the headline satisfaction finding, which shows Americans’ feelings about the quality of their lives. A lofty 84 percent of all Americans told Gallup that they’re satisfied on this score, and 37 percent said they were “very satisfied.”

Republicans were the most satisfied Americans by a wide margin – an astonishing 96 percent called themselves satisfied, and 60 percent considered themselves “very satisfied.” The least satisfied group? Democrats. Their satisfaction levels were 77 percent satisfied and only 25 percent very satisfied.

But here’s what really grabbed my attention – and should grab yours. Keep in mind that the various groups of respondents overlap considerably (for example, both Democrats and Republicans include the wealthy and the poor, and the college-educated and the high school grads; and the both the wealthy and the poor include those identifying with both political parties).

The Democrats’ satisfaction levels were lower than those for non-whites (79 percent) and for Americans with a high school education or less (84 percent). That doesn’t sound very consistent with the notion that non-whites and those with relatively modest education levels are feeling especially downtrodden lately. But these readings definitely point to special degrees of unhappiness among Democrats. So does the fact that the “very satisfied” results for both these groups (31 percent and 34 percent, respectively) topped those for Democrats as well.

The partisan divide is even bigger, in both absolute and relative terms, for satisfaction levels regarding whether working hard can get a person ahead in America these days. In toto, 72 percent of respondents were satisfied and 43 percent were very satisfied with this situation. Non-whites’ overall satisfaction and very satisfied levels weren’t too far off those figures (71 percent and 37 percent, respectively). And the figures for those holding a high school degree at most were notably higher (77 percent and 51 percent, respectively).

But the Democrats’ results were completely in the dumps (only 47 percent and 19 percent, respectively).

Also interesting – non-whites, and Americans lacking college degrees are all more convinced than the college grads (68 percent) about the payoff of working hard, with respondents with a high school degree or less expressing the highest (77 percent) satisfaction level.

Satisfaction levels are much lower in absolute terms (43 percent overall) over the distribution of income and wealth in America – which should surprise no one. But again, those lacking a high school degree were more satisfied, and by a wide margin (49 percent), while the least satisfied (also by a wide margin) were the Democrats (21 percent).

The least educated were also more satisfied with the current rich-poor gap than college graduates (40 percent). But on this issue, non-white satisfaction levels were lower than the average (38 percent).

Gallup respondents were even less satisfied with the availability of healthcare in the United States, with only 37 percent expressing such views. Yet a familiar pattern emerges from the internals. The biggest gap was between Republicans (53 percent satisfied) and Democrats (27 percent). These also represented the highest and lowest levels of all the groups examined.

In addition, non-whites (41 percent) were more satisfied than whites the overall total (37 percent), and much more satisfied not only than the Democrats but than college grads (31 percent). The same held for Americans without high school diplomas (also 41 percent satisfied).

Finally, let’s look at a particularly explosive issue – race relations. Or at least it’s supposed to be particularly explosive. But according to the Gallup survey, there’s much more dissatisfaction than polarization – except among Democrats and Republicans.

Overall satisfaction levels are low – coming in at 36 percent. But the widest gap by far is between followers of the two parties, with 51 percent of Republican identifiers declaring themselves to be satisfied compared with only 24 percent of their Democratic counterparts. (Actually, Gallup also measured satisfaction levels according to political ideology – liberals, moderates, and conservatives. I’ve left these findings out due to the assumption because these results closely track the political parties’ results – which include independent voters. But according to this gauge, the conservative-liberal gap is somewhat wider, at 52 percent-17 percent.)

Most significantly, this partisan divide is far wider than the racial divide, with 35 percent of whites expressing satisfaction with the state of race relations and 39 percent of nonwhites so stating. Also doubtless significant: The next-least-satisfied group is college graduates, of whom only 28 percent expressed satisfaction. Further, their “very satisfied” levels (3 percent) were by far the lowest along with the Democrats’. And they were only one-third the nine percent “very satisfied” levels of non-whites.

Is the country indeed anxious?  To some extent, sure.  Is it divided?  That’s where the answer gets especially complicated.  And this complex picture indicates that, especially in this presidential campaign year, all Americans should beware of pundits and others bearing sweeping generalizations. 

Following Up: The New York Times’ Fake History of the U.S. is Spreading

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1619 Project, African Americans, education, Following Up, history, journalism, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, racism, Sean Wilentz, slavery, The Atlantic, The New York Times

Since Americans’ mistrust of the news media keeps getting stronger, it’s a safe bet that they’d be pretty upset to find out that one major news organization is playing a bigger and bigger role in shaping their childen’s education. And they could well become livid if they learned that this media influence in the schools is growing even as scholars in the relevant field are concluding that much of the material being propagated is bunk.

Yet that’s exactly what’s been happening with The New York Times‘ 1619 Project. As I reported in a post last year, the project, named after the year the first black African slaves were brought to North America, seeks to [its words] “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” The Times‘ reason for undertaking this effort? Its conclusion that “our story” as a nation hasn’t been told “truthfully.”

As I explained last year, the big problem with the 1619 Project isn’t that reconsideration of any aspect of U.S. history (or any history) should be beyond the pale, but that a news organization like The Times has no qualifications to undertake this task. Even more troubling: The Times lately has endorsed the view that it should act like a news organization with a substantive agenda, or several of them. And one of them is writing “about race and class in a deeper way than we have in years” because “America [has] become so divided by Donald Trump.”

Now confirmation has just emerged making clear that this bias has significantly infected the 1619 Project, and it comes not only from the ranks of America’s academic historians, but from historians with decidedly progressive views. Their case was summarized (at length) by Sean Wilentz of Princeton University, who concluded in a piece in The Atlantic (itself a pretty progressive publication) that although the role of slavery and racism in American history “remains too little understood by the general public,” The Times in many cases sought to fill the gap “through falsehoods, distortions, and significant omissions.”

What’s arguably worse, as Wilentz’ account makes clear, The Times not only blithely brushed off all of the historians’ critique. It doubled down on its propagandizing.

And here’s what’s clearly worse: The paper’s efforts to introduce this shoddy excuse for scholarship into school curricula have been succeeding. According to this report, 1619 Project materials are now being used or will soon in school systems in Chicago; Newark, New Jersey; Washington, D.C.; and Buffalo, New York. A New York City school is teaching with the Project as well, And The Times is working with an important ally – the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which has produced a variety of “curricular resources,” including “a reading guide for the issue, activities to engage students, and more.

It’s bad enough that American journalism keeps spewing out Fake News. It now needs to be spreading Fake History? And the nation’s schools need to be swallowing it?

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Amazon’s Fishy HQ Decision

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Alexandria, Amazon, D.C., education, Long Island City, New York City, STEM workers, tech, The Partnership for New York City, Washington, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Everyone who’s followed Amazon’s highly publicized search for a second headquarters site (which wound up choosing second and third headquarters sites) knows that New York City and the Washington, D.C. suburb of Arlington, Virginia were selected because of their abundant supply of world-class tech workers. Or at least that’s what the on-line retail behemoth said.

Except a leading business group from New York – which has applauded the city’s win – has just come out with some projections completely belying this claim.

According to The Partnership for New York City, “Amazon is the first tech mega-company headquarters to locate in New York City, a breakthrough that will solidify the city’s future as a leader in the world’s fastest-growing industry.”

But in its latest quarterly Dashboard NYC, which tracks leading indicators of the city’s economic performance, The Partnership also forecast that, of the 25,000 net new jobs likely to be created directly by the new Amazon facilities in Long Island City, Queens, and the nearly 90,000 increase in the region’s payrolls that will be generated indirectly, 68 percent won’t require a high school education. In fact, 18 percent won’t even require any formal schooling. And another ten percent will be fill-able by folks with only some post-high school education.

As a result, fewer than one-third of these jobs (some 32,000) will require a bachelor’s degree of some kind. It’s true that a relevant college or graduate degree isn’t needed for success in technology (as most dramatically demonstrated by the founding of Microsoft by Harvard dropout Bill Gates, and the creation of Apple by Reed College dropout Steve Jobs). Indeed, a recent analysis of Census Bureau data reports that fully 35 percent of the country’s science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) workforce lacks a bachelor’s degree, and that 80 percent of this subgroup have had only some college courses.

But it’s also true that far from all of the 32,000 total Amazon-created jobs that will require completing an undergraduate college education will be science and tech positions. For instance, many will certainly come in managerial or administrative positions at Amazon itself, and in all non-Amazon companies that add new hires because of Amazon, or that are created because of Amazon, that won’t require a special tech background.

I’m certainly not qualified to second-guess Amazon’s decisions. And maybe the situation in the Washington, D.C. area is significantly different (though this article indicates that it’s not – albeit not in the way you may think). What does seem clear, though, is that the company hasn’t been leveling with the rest of the country (or the world) about its new headquarters decision. And when the dissembler is the world’s second largest U.S.-based publicly traded non-government employer (behind WalMart), that should raise a question or two.

Im-Politic: Why Prioritizing Dead White Guys’ Literature Isn’t Bigoted

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academia, critical thinking, culture wars, education, higher education, identity politics, Im-Politic, literature, racism, scholarship, The Washington Post, Trump, Viet Thanh Nguyen

One of the most dispiriting findings in recent years about the state of the nation concerns evidence that colleges are failing to achieve a fundamental goal: improving students’ critical thinking skills. (Click here, here, and here, for some leading studies showing that these institutions have failed to teach undergraduates “how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument or objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event,” in the words of a typical description of the conclusions. Here’s a dissenting view.)

And if Viet Thanh Nguyen, a University of Southern California professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist to boot, is the slightest bit typical, then it’s painfully obvious that a main reason for this sorry record is that way too many college faculty lack these skills themselves.

As presented in a Washington Post article yesterday, Nguyen’s argument is…well, it’s actually hard to tell what his argument is. As best as I can surmise, he’s upset that, in too many instances, American college students are discouraged from reading non-western literature, and that young literary scholars are discouraged (by continuing bleak job prospects stemming from intolerant appointment committees) from researching and writing on these works.

He cites his own experiences trying to climb the academic career ladder, as well as a controversy that’s just broken out at Barnard College in New York City over the demands of “some English majors” for “greater diversity in their curriculum.”

At the same time, Nguyen makes clear that since such issues became a bone of contention in the late-1980s and 1990s, reformers who “demanded more space for works by women, people of color, the working class, the queer and the non-white” have “triumphed.” In fact, their victory had taken place by the late-1990s.

The author’s belief that these “culture wars” are flaring anew on campuses, and that a Donald Trump-fueled revival of “white identity politics” is mainly responsible, is also puzzling – to say the least. After all, neither the President nor his more extreme, racially motivated supporters seem to have many supporters in the ranks of U.S. professors or higher education administrators. Nor does there seem to be any scarcity of courses and degree programs in non-western literature and culture in American academia.

So Nguyen’s article flunks three basic texts of critical thinking – advancing a coherent argument, providing serious evidence on its behalf, and refuting major evidence-based counter-arguments.

Nguyen’s real beef seems to be somewhat narrower, but no less important:  A charge that higher ed’s English and American literature curricula, especially in courses covering their seminal works (i.e., their canon), don’t make enough room for non-white and female writers. But here he falls short of meeting another important critical thinking challenge: placing objects or ideas in their proper categories. Here’s what I mean.

The study of literature obviously has to include a study of the entire environment in which that literature is created – including its history, economy, social structure, other aspects of its culture, etc. But first and foremost the study of literature is the study of an art form (which can be both fictional and non-fictional in nature). Therefore, it’s primarily concerned with how and why and how this literature’s aesthetic features have evolved; how successfully and skillfully, and creatively or derivatively, various authors achieved their goals and sent their messages; what the artistry of these works can tell us about how their creators perceived and interpreted, both knowingly and unwittingly, the various elements of their environments, characteristics of human psychology, and the crucial ideas that have molded the human experience; how these factors in turn influenced these authors; what their works reveal about these circumstances; and what, if anything, they can teach us today.

To apply Nguyen’s complaint and this definition of literature to the American canon, there can be no doubt that throughout its history, the nation’s population has consisted of many racial and ethnic groups (and more than one gender). There’s no doubt also that the various forms of contact these groups and genders have had with each other have influenced the worldviews, and therefore the literary output generated by each.

But there’s also no doubt that the influence of white males of European descent has been dominant, and that this dominance was especially pronounced in the nation’s formative years and decades – when the ideas and values and perspectives that have (so far) contributed the most to American culture (and other elements of its environment) began crystallizing. And the degree of injustice in part responsible for this group’s dominance has no intrinsic bearing on its role and its lasting influence. Nor does the inarguable fact that the influence of these white European-descended men itself consists both of admirable and shameful aspects.

So it makes perfect sense that American literature courses, especially at the more general level, to date have emphasized the works of these white males. By extension, it makes perfect sense that much less emphasis has been placed on the works of authors from other groups. Indeed, Nguyen himself explains why: In his words, these authors have been “submerged, overlooked and forgotten.”

Now, if the aim is the entirely worthy objective of learning more about these marginalized groups as such, then of course exposure of their literature is essential. But the greatest responsibility for achieving this goal logically belongs with other academic disciplines – which focus on the histories, social structures, broader cultures, etc. of these groups. Acquaintance with their literature is also needed to understand how these groups have influenced the dominant culture.

And of course, as greater opportunities have opened up for marginalized groups, their output inevitably has become more influential as well, and requires more attention in order for purely literary studies to remain truly representative and accurate. For example, it’s clearly not now legitimate to study American literature as a whole since the early or mid-twentieth century without recognizing the substantial role played by female, African-American, and Jewish authors.

More recently, writers from other groups have gained significant audiences and critical acclaim. Their works will surely wind up making lasting notable and lasting contributions to the nation’s culture. As a result, they should surely be spotlighted prominently in future curricula, and in particular in survey-type as opposed to more specialized courses. In addition, scholars right now should by all means be debating which works should qualify for this status. But it’s far too early for academia to reach an intellectually respectable consensus on the matter.

Moreover, this more recent prominence of previously marginalized groups creates no valid reason for concluding that their contributions to the national canon have so far been comparable with the contributions of the dominant group for most of U.S. history. Think of it this way: As stated above, Jewish authors have played an important role in American literature since roughly the middle of the twentieth century. But it would be utterly misleading to argue that Jewish authors played an important role in American literature before then.

One interesting wrinkle here – how to handle the likelihood that any number of overlooked works by submerged American groups fully measure up in artistic terms to the acknowledged classics. These works need to be found because, by definition, they would contain major insights into all the crucial issues addressed by great literature. Scholars should be searching for them and describing their virtues, and their discovery should be deeply appreciated by everyone who appreciates the value of great literature.

But because prologue cannot be past, even in these cases (and if readers have any examples or candidates, feel free to let me know about them), it would be essential — and intellectually honest — to specify that their effect on the nation’s literary and broader cultural life would need to be potential and prospective. Claiming a marked effect on the American story to date would amount to speculation or wishful thinking at best, and cheerleading at worst – none of which should have any place in genuine scholarship.