At the University of Michigan, DEI Satisfies No One

By some measures, the University of Michigan has the most comprehensive program for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the US. But even though the school has spent, by its own reckoning, $250 million on DEI efforts, NY Times reporter Nicholas Confessore found that nobody is satisfied. 

Princess-J’Maria Mboup, the speaker of the university’s Black Student Union, told me that “the students that are most affected by D.E.I. — meaning marginalized communities — are invested in the work, but not in D.E.I. itself.” Mboup called Michigan’s efforts “superficial.” For all their spread and reach, she told me, the school’s D.E.I. programs betrayed “a general discomfort with naming Blackness explicitly.”

Her discontent reflected a tension I found threaded throughout D.E.I. at Michigan, a pervasive uncertainty around whom — and what — D.E.I. is really for. Like most schools, Michigan officially celebrates diversity of every kind and inclusion for all; the school’s own definition of D.E.I., which cites 13 distinct kinds of identity, is as sprawling as the university itself. On campus, I met students with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. Not one expressed any particular enthusiasm for Michigan’s D.E.I. initiative. Where some found it shallow, others found it stifling. They rolled their eyes at the profusion of course offerings that revolve around identity and oppression, the D.E.I.-themed emails they frequently received but rarely read.

Michigan’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive: In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster.

Instead, Michigan’s D.E.I. efforts have created a powerful conceptual framework for student and faculty grievances — and formidable bureaucratic mechanisms to pursue them. Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements, professors and students told me, were now cast as crises of inclusion and harm, each demanding some further administrative intervention or expansion. On a campus consumed with institutional self-criticism, seemingly the only thing to avoid a true reckoning was D.E.I. itself.

Professors and administrators who spoke critically of the program insisted on anonymity, because, as one administrator (a “woman of color”) put it, “no one can criticize the D.E.&I. program — not its scale, its dominance.”

The one measurable outcome of the program has been a rise in disputes:

The conflicts over inclusion were not limited to petitions and tweets. Increasingly, students and professors were turning to more formal remedies. In 2015, the university office charged with enforcing federal civil rights mandates like Title IX received about 200 complaints of sex- or gender-based misconduct on Michigan’s campus. By 2020, that number had more than doubled. Last year, it surpassed 500. Complaints involving race, religion or national origin increased to almost 400 from a few dozen during roughly the same period. (The office itself has nearly quadrupled in size in recent years.)

Then came October 7 and campus disputes in which both sides accused the other of racism and the DEI bureaucracy did exactly nothing to smooth things over or promote dialogue.

It's a sad tale of bureaucratic overreach and the deep truth that sometimes “fighting” what you hate is pointless or worse.

MIT Admissions after the End of Affirmative Action

Asian: up from 40% to 47%

White: down from 38% to 37%

Black: down from 15% to 5%

Hispanic: down from to 16% to 11%

American Indian and Native Hawaiian: down, but still 1%

Note that all ethnicities are self-reported by students, and they could check more than one box.

Sources: last year, this year

Glenn Loury on University Education

Interesting interview with Glenn Loury, economist best known for being a black conservative and for his spectacular mid-career crack-up involving drugs and affairs, from which he seems to have recovered. I appreciated this:

There's too much focus on race and sex and sexuality as identities in the context of the university environment, where our main goal is to acquaint our students with the cultural inheritance of civilization. Their narrow focus on being this particular thing and chopping up the curriculum to make sure that it gets representative treatment feels stifling to me, especially if you let that spill over into what can be said.

The therapeutic sentiment. The kids have these sensibilities. We have to be mindful of them. We don't want to offend. We don't want anyone to be uncomfortable. No, the whole point is to make you uncomfortable. You came thinking something that was really a very superficial and undeveloped framework for thinking; I'm going to expose you to some ideas that run against that grain, and you're going to have to learn how to grapple with them. And in your maturity, you may well return to some of these, but you will do so with a much firmer sense of exactly what it is that you're affirming. I want to educate you. I don't want to placate you. I'm not here to make you feel better.

Classical Education, or, the Fearless Pursuit of Which Truths?

The New Yorker has a story this week about "classical education", focusing on middle and high schools, which reminded me that I had something to say about the "classical" curriculum being offered at the new University of Austin. 

In middle and high schools, "classical" education doesn't have much to do with the Greek and Roman classics. Instead it is about a vision of order: uniforms, quiet hallways, classrooms where respectful students memorize poems, diagram sentences, and learn facts about history rather than, I don't know, composing raps about slave revolts. On the one hand this is almost the perfect expression of one of contemporary conservatism's main themes, the fear of disorder; nothing speeds around conservative Twitter/X faster than a story about students assaulting their teacher. But on the other, some schools of this type do very well in poor neighborhoods, because it turns out that what many kids raised in very disorderly environments need is more order.

Besides, I loved memorizing poems, diagramming sentences, and participating in spelling bees.

Of course some of the current interest in education based on old books and old methods is just a reaction to various progressive foibles, and what some parents who send their children to such schools want is for them not to read stories about gay and trans people. But I have been doing my best to ignore that kind of trivia for fifty years now and propose to keep ignoring it, because I find it so peripheral to what education should be about. Education is too important to be left to people who want to fight about Heather's Two Mommies.

When we move to a higher level, whether that is college or the sort of elite prep school where kids really do read the Iliad, there is much more going on. At this level, one goal of a "classical" education is to get students away from their own lives and worlds and induce them to think in a more abstract, generalized way. Once they learn to do that, the theory goes, they can then apply their generalized reasoning skills and broad understanding of themes like justice and liberty to their own situations. There is a great deal of evidence from both the European and Chinese traditions that this can work. We have seen many, many people who were educated by reading 2,000-year-old books and went on to careers as political reformers and even revolutionaries (Jefferson, Robespierre, Talleyrand, Gladstone, Lenin, Yau Lit).

The classical model of education was always opposed, at least in the west (and after 1840 in China) by people who thought it was a gigantic waste of time. Better, the competing theory went, to immerse yourself in actual contemporary problems. This was related to the growing importance of science and engineering, which to many people seemed more useful subjects of study than Plato's ethics.

Which brings me to the University of Austin, a new university that is being opened with the expressed goal of fighting the takeover of American higher education by woke leftists. Their vision of education is "classical" in the sense of trying to get students away from contemporary concerns and toward a higher, more theoretical plane. From their description of the freshman curriculum:

Seminars will examine (among other subjects) the foundations of civilization and political life; the importance of law, virtue, order, beauty, meaningful work and leisure, and the sacred; the unique vibrancy of the American form of government and way of life; and the character and consequences of ideological tyranny. What is knowledge, and how does it differ from wisdom? What does it mean to say that we are modern? What is technology, and what are its intellectual presuppositions, social conditions, benefits, and dangers? Why do we suffer? Does death negate the meaning of life? Works studied will range from Homer, Euclid, Genesis, the Gospel of John, Ibn Tufayl, and Confucius to Descartes, Tocqueville, Orwell, Douglass, and O’Connor.

What I wanted to say when I first read this paragraph is that it is riven with contradictions at the deepest level. Other than being famous, what do these authors have in common? Consider the work from this list I happen to have looked into most recently, Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, which translates as something like "Alive, Son of Awake." This medieval Arab work tells the story of a feral boy raised by a gazelle on a desert island, who teaches himself the language of birds and discovers the truths of philosophy by reasoning. In particular, he reasons his way to belief in one supreme god. He also becomes humankind's greatest astrologer, although I got lost in that part and skipped most of it. One might be tempted to call this mysticism, since it implies that an uneducated child, removed from the corruption of society, can work his way to divine understanding more readily than a scholar with a library full of old books. On the other hand, it is full of old philsophical ideas, especially Plato's.

Taken literally, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, is not an argument in favor of "classical" education. It is closer to the opposite, a sort of hippie faith in the innate creativity and goodness of children. It is also ridiculous. One assumes, then, that it is not being taught as a text the students are supposed to believe. 

So why is it being taught? Why are any of these books taught? Once upon a time people said that we assigned them because you needed some familiarity with them to be considered educated, but that is certainly not true now. Is it because they are good texts for introducing students to big ideas? Because the impressive names get students to pay attention in a way that books by Bill Smith and Ralph Jones would not? Because they make for good discussions? 

Do any of them contain some sort of truth that we want students to absorb?

Consider that the U. of Austin offers these two mottoes in parallel:

WE FEARLESSLY PURSUE THE TRUTH
At UATX, we recognize the existence of truth. We seek truth so that we may flourish.

WE CHAMPION ACADEMIC FREEDOM
At UATX, students, faculty and scholars have the right to pursue their academic interests and deliberate freely, without fear of censorship or retribution.

It seems to me that these two statements directly contradict one another. If you believe in the truth, and think that having it leads to flourishing, why do you tolerate falseness? And why do you assign classic works that nobody agrees with any more? Ibn Tufayl may be ridiculous (as I think), but he is far from the worst author in the "Great Books" curriculum. From Aristotle's defense of slavery to Lenin's preaching of violence as a sacred calling, the western tradition is really pretty awful. The Iliad is about how great it is to kill people. If the Gospel of John is true and promotes flourishing, what possible reason could there be to read the Iliad?

What if some student, professor or scholar thinks that the "American form of government and way of life" are not "uniquely vibrant," but monstrous and horrific? What if some student, professor, or scholar thinks contemporary America is a Satan-besotted doomscape due for righteous cleansing by God any day now? What if somebody is a woke Marxist?

Two contradictory visions of education are on offer here and, I think, two contradictory visions of America. In one there is the Truth, and we struggle to understand it and align our lives to it so that we may flourish. Everything else is, by definintion, false. This is the way Jesuit education used to work: yes, a fair amount of intellectual exploration, but always in the service of Catholicism. Some of the conservative intellectuals who have been in the news lately seem to share this perspective, like Sohrab Ahmari, who has argued that since freedom and democracy have made America a godless wasteland, we should discard them. 

You cannot, in a deep, philosophical sense, be for both unfettered debate and a nation that flourishes because it adheres to a certain truth. And you cannot, I submit, simultaneously value the western canon, believe fervently in free inquiry, and operate a university that has any real connection to modern conservatism.

To the extent that the UATX curriculum tries to straddle this divide, it is incoherent. Of course, it might still function ok; the whole program of American higher education is incoherent. But I wonder if UATX can maintain the enthusiasm of its supporters while pursuing both academic freedom and conservatism.

Which gets me back to the two visions of America I alluded to back in November. One kind of American patriotism maintains that there are good and bad Americans. The good ones stand for God, Country, Military Sacrifice, the Constitution, football, barbecue, driving big cars, and Standing On Your Own Feet. The bad ones, well, you know who they are.

I adhere to a different model of patriotism. I think America is great because it holds all kinds of people who agree about nothing. I like the country the way it is, and I would hate to see it evolve into anyone's idea of perfection. This extends to how I feel about education. I like assigning old books partly because they are full of ideas I find horrific. My own educational plan would include subjecting my students to Aquinas on why masturbation is worse than rape, Lenin on revolution, the Iliad or the Hagakure on war, and so on. I think education should shake people up.

But I would be the first to admit that I don't know the truth about the Big Questions, and that my way of teaching probably doesn't help anyone else work that out, either.

I have met various conservatives, going all the way back to Party of the Right guys at Yale, who told me that they celebrate unfettered debate because it inevitably leads to conservatism. I think that's nuts. So far as I can see, unfettered debate inevitably leads to disagreement. If UATX really pursues a policy of complete academic freedom, they are going to end up with Marxists, Maoists, Woke Liberals, Race theorists, Libertarians, and probably Holocaust deniers.

I submit that you cannot simultaneously value the western canon, believe fervently in free inquiry, and operate a university that has any real connection to modern conservatism. I mean, hardly any of the authors in either the UATX list or the similar list at St. Johns believed in democracy; most of them would have been frankly horrified by America. (On the other hand the curriculum for Directed Studies at Yale includes more democrats.)

I suspect that what the rich people backing UATX want is the middle school model, education that is orderly, patriotic, anti-hippie, anti-woke. Some of the professors involved probably do want genuine free inquiry, including taking Marxism or polyamory seriously as ideas. As I said, it is certainly possible that UATX can come into being and thrive despite this contradiction.

But to the extent that UATX really promotes the Fearless Pursuit of the Truth, it will promote, not order or conservatism, but violent disagreement.

Tranforming New College

One of the more dramatic elements of Ron DeSantis' program to eliminate wokeness from education in Florida is an attempt to transform New College. New College was founded in the 70s as a small, quirky liberal arts college and mostly remained one down to last year, with no sports teams, a strong gay community and a fair number of trans people. Some of the parents who were interviewed last year said that New College was the first place their "weird" children ever felt really comfortable.

DeSantis has said quite openly that his plan is to turn New College into a bastion of conservative, liberal arts studies modeled on Hillsdale, a private college in Michigan. He wants, he has said, to show conservative Floridians that at least one state college "reflects their values."

For the details of how this has transpired, you can read this report just issued by the American Association of University Professors and this older article in the NY Times. The basic story is that DeSantis packed the governing board with six new conservative appointees, one of whom is a dean at Hillsdale (and none of whom live in Florida). The board proceeded to deny tenure to all the liberal arts professors up for tenure last year (obviously, whatever they said, to free up those slots for conservative hires), dismiss several faculty who were on one-year contracts, and get rid of a slew of administrators.

Like everything Ron DeSantis does, it was ham-handed and sleazy, and probably broke Florida law by setting obvious ideological tests for state employees. But let's ignore that for a moment and take a broader look at the politics of university education.

The AAUP report blasts DeSantis and his board for repeatedly attacking academic freedom. Which they undoubtedly have, in a sleazy and ham-handed way. It is a violation of all the rules of the American academic world to fire professors because of the work they do or the way they teach is too liberal, and the New College board undoubtedly has done so.

Plus, all professors at Florida state universities are now subject to the bizarre dictates of the Stop WOKE Act, which forbids, among others things, "indoctrination." Nobody really knows what this means, since it has not been tested in court, but as written it might include any attempt to persuade students of any point of view. AAUP: "It is, of course, difficult to imagine how one could teach any subject without seeking somehow to persuade students of something." The AAUP also points out something I did not notice when I read the law, that it explicitly forbids teaching that any race is "morally superior" to any other but says nothing about any other way in which a race might be superior.

But the wackiest provision of the law is that students are explicitly allowed to surreptitiously record their professors' lectures to monitor their compliance with its dictates. Not to be cynical or anything, but I find it hard to believe that in Florida today any professor is going to be sanctioned for taking a conservative point of vew, so this just hangs out there as a way to harass leftists.

It's pretty awful. What I keep thinking, though, is that American academics have brought this on themselves. I think left wing activist professors are a minority, but they are a large and noisy one. I recently read the official faculty bio of an anthropology professor that listed her research interests as "destroying capitalism" and "practicing revolution." This sort of thing is common, and to the AAUP it is protected under the rubric of "academic freedom." But why should conservative voters, legislators, and governors support it? Why should taxpayers pay for it?

I am not arguing that right-wing extremists and left-wing extremists are equally bad and we should silence both and have some kind of neutral, non-ideological educational system. I consider myself a pragmatic centrist, but that does not mean I don't have an ideology; pragmatic centrism is an ideology, and it is no more inherently correct than Marxism or Objectivism. 

I do not think there is such a thing as non-ideological education; in fact I think valuing higher education is itself an ideology. "Academic freedom" is an ideological construct. (Shouldn't Marxists, at least, understand this?) It is a construct I approve of, but that doesn't make it some high truth that ought to be exempt from political debate.

Reading the AAUP report I keep thinking, yes, that is pretty disgusting. But what, in the modern academic world, does academic freedom really mean? If you tried to be a conservative anthropology professor, you would simply fail; nobody would take you on as a student, nobody would serve as your thesis advisor, and you would certainly never get a job, because about 98 percent of the anthropology professors in the US are leftists. If you asked anthropologists why they would not support a conservative colleague, many of them would be happy to tell you that American conservatism is too evil for them to tolerate it in any way. It would be nearly as hard to be a non-feminist professor of women's history, or a professor of black history who thinks there was some value in segregation. In many fields the system as it exists already imposes a great deal of control over what professors think, study and teach, much of it through simple peer pressure.

But none of that is what really matters here, at least not to me. Say what you will about Ron DeSantis, at least he thinks that university education is important enough to fight about. He thinks that how Florida's colleges teach history matters. He is also putting his money where his mouth is, showering New College with millions in new funding. This concern makes him, so far as I can see, part of a small minority of Americans. The real danger to university education is that it will fade away because not enough people care about it one way or the other.

I predict that the attempt to remake New College into a conservative liberal arts college will fail. It will fail because Ron DeSantis won't be governor forever and his replacement is unlikely to make it a priority; it takes decades to change a university, and the long-term commitment won't be there. But mainly it will fail because students aren't interested. Several reporters have prowled New College this Fall, interviewing students, but I have not read about a single student who is excited by the college's new focus. Richard Corcoran, the new President (at a salary of $1 million a year) wrote an op-ed saying that all new freshmen will have to take a course about The Odyssey, but so far that course hasn't even appeared in the catalog. And why would it? What, really, would be gained by forcing every student to take a whole course on one poem? Sometimes I think that these conservative reformers have never met an actual freshman.

The thing that is most salient in the "conservative" takeover of New College is not the curriculum; it is the new emphasis on sports. AAUP:

At the same time, New College has moved to recruit a large number of student athletes, although until now the school had had no intercollegiate athletics program. Spending lavishly on new “presidential honors scholarships,” New College recruited its largest ever first-year class. As of July, New College had 328 incoming students, of whom 115 were athletes. Among that group were seventy freshman baseball players supported by scholarships. By comparison, the University of Florida, an NCAA Division I university with a student body ninety times larger than that of New College, has just thirty-seven baseball players on scholarships. New College also does not yet have a baseball field, or for that matter any other intercollegiate athletic facility, although the parking lot, this committee was told, now has batting cages. As faculty members were quick to point out, moreover, these student-athletes tend to have little interest in either New College’s existing liberal arts programs or any proposed “classical” curriculum.

I've seen this before; seeking to recruit conservative students, and especially conservative male students, the only thing administrators can think of is sports. Most of the reporters who have been to New College recently have commented on this, e.g., Michelle Goldberg in the NY Times:  At a College Targeted by DeSantis, Gender Studies Is Out, Jocks Are In. It also strikes me that all the names that I have ever seen come up as part of the effort to change New College are male, which is downright weird for academia; conservative educational reform seems to be a thoroughly male-dominated endeavor. I suspect the sports business is related to this.

Here, I believe, is where conservative educational reform efforts will go to die: the batting cages. If "liberal arts" colleges can only recruit students by offering them athletic scholarships, they have already failed.

I can't bring myself to get particularly angry about the takeover of New College because it is a petty thing compared to the overall collapse of liberal studies across America. If some of that collapse is happening because people perceive liberal arts professors as leftists peddling ideology, then maybe having some colleges with a conservative tone might help. I'm willing to try it. I mean, academic freedom will be cold comfort for all the professors who lose their jobs because their departments have no students. I can't take Ron DeSantis and his crew seriously, so I have no particular hopes for New College, but I would be curious to see somebody else with less hammy hands give it a try. I want to see liberal arts education survive, because I loved it and still feel every day like it changed me for the better. I am willing to work with almost anybody who has a plan to save it. But, as I said, I think what is happening at New College is doomed to go nowhere, so it will only screw up a lot of people's lives for no good end.

Consider the Photocopier

From Mary Beard's review of the memoirs of historian Peter Brown, in the September 22 TLS:

Brown has a sharp eye too for how the practical everyday details of academic life have changed over his career and with what result. One unexpected hero in the book is the humble photocopier, a novelty which landed in Oxford in the late 1960s. As Brown explains, it had a transforming impact on teaching and learning. Lengthy notes and bibliogrphies could now be distributed to large lecture audiences (this was the origin of the "handout"). But, more important, group discussions of a whole new range of texts became possible. Even if there was only one printed copy of some little-known saint's life in town (penned up in some remote corner of the Bodleian Library), you could for the first time discuss it, face to face, with colleagues and students in a seminar, wherever you wanted, simply by photocopying it. This was a new intellectual world. Like the internet later (or the printing press before), the photocopier was instrumental in expanding the historical agenda.

How about an MA in Magical Studies?

NY Times:

In the ancient city of Exeter, three women were hanged for practicing witchcraft in the late 17th century, the last of such executions in England. Now, merely a short walk from where the hangings occurred, the University of Exeter will offer a postgraduate degree in magic and occult science, which the school says is the first of its kind at a British university.

Prof. Emily Selove, the head of the new program and an associate professor in medieval Arabic literature, said the idea for the degree, which will be offered starting in September 2024, came out of the recent surge in interest in the history of witchcraft and a desire to create a space where research on magic could be studied across academic fields.

Coursework will include the study of Western dragons in lore, literature and art; archaeology theory; the depiction of women in the Middle Ages; the practice of deception and illusion; and the philosophy of psychedelics. Through the lenses of Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, lecturers will explore how magic has influenced society and science.

People are enrolling, says one British wiccan,

Not because they’re idiots and think it’s going to teach them how to wave a magic wand and do a spell. They’re people who have just a huge curiosity about the world and the way we perceive the seen and the unseen worlds.

But, I mean, if they're not going to teach us how to do it, what's the point? Seriously, I foresee a program not rigorous enough to satisfy grim academics like me and not woo enough to satisfy most of the people who might enroll. 

Let's consider, for example, "Western dragons in lore, literature and art," a subject once dear to my young heart. Dragons are not common in the western tradition until the late 19th century, and so far as I can tell they do not mean anything in particular. As I wrote here about the Roman magical tradition, what stands out to me most about the western lore of magic is its complete absence of any kind of theoretical framework beyond a vague notion of spiritual powers and a desire that emotions (hate, envy, desire) have a real impact on things that are. Dragons sometimes represent ill-gotten wealth – in some German witch trials, witnesses said they knew the accused had sold their souls for gain because they were seen riding in the air on dragons – but mainly they are just scary monsters for heroes to slay and be slain by and things for 14th-century manuscript illustrators to doodle in the margins.

The sad truth is that what comes down to us from the western lore of magic is, for the most part, neither particularly deep nor particularly interesting. There are a couple of fine fairy tales – East of the Sun and West of the Moon, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, The Yew Tree – but those were not recorded until the nineteenth century and so far as we can tell the people who told them did not understand the memories of ancient shamanism they encode. Yes, there are few hints that some medieval people had a practice based on ancient religious lore, but three-quarters of them are in one book, Carlo Ginzburg's The Night Battles. Otherwise the best books about witchcraft focus, not on the magical acts, but on the petty village rivalries and obscure hatreds acted out in the trials. 

To extract any kind of religion or philosophy from our magical lore requires a great act of imagination, spinning those hints into something which is not really there but which you can glimpse if you read by moonlight in the Ember Days. I think I understand something about Druidism, but I freely admit that the leap from the meager sources to the thinking behind them is half imaginative. And that is why I loaded what I know about our magical tradition into a novel (The Raven and the Crown) rather than a monograph. To me, the magical sources work best as springboards for the imagination of storytellers, whether that is Irish talesmen or J.R.R Tolkien. And that is why modern Wicca is only very loosely based on any kind of tradition, filled out with modern ecological sensibilities, feminism, and the Romantic cult of feeling. 

You could fill a course with facts about our old lore, I guess, but I think I could lay out everything I know about what they might mean in an hour. How one might turn that into an MA program I have no idea.

The Best American Schools for Working Class Children are Run by the Military

The US military's school system has long been a high performer among US school systems, but according to data published by the NY Times, pandemic declines in the test scores at all of the high performing state systems have left the military's schools the best in the country. This is despite having some unusual problems, such as students who move from school to school more frequently than those in any state and parents who are often away from home for long periods.

Their schools had the highest outcomes in the country for Black and Hispanic students, whose eighth-grade reading scores outpaced national averages for white students.

Eighth graders whose parents only graduated from high school — suggesting lower family incomes, on average — performed as well in reading as students nationally whose parents were college graduates.

Etc.; lots more numbers at the Times.

How do they do it? The Times offers these suggestions:

1. The schools are well-funded. The costs are hard to compare, because the military spends a lot supporting schools in places like Okinawa and Germany, but it looks like military funding is on par with the top spending districts in big cities and rich suburbs. I know two teachers who switched from DC suburban schools to military schools because the pay was better, and the difference is even bigger in the rural areas where many military schools are located. A place like Fort Moore in Alabama has their pick of local teachers.
2. All of the parents are employed. Not that military families don't have their share of dysfunction, including a high divorce rate, but by definition at least one of the parents has a career. 
3. Everyone has a home and medical care.
4. Mixing of social classes; in military schools the children of privates sit side-by-side with the children of major generals.
5. Mixing of races with less racism than in the rest of America.

I would add another factor that I think is important:

1. A bedrock belief that with the right kind of disciplined environment even very troubled young people can achieve stability and success.

Liberals often find it baffling or irritating when conservatives hold up the military as the model for solving our social problems. But there are ways in which the military does better than the rest of the country in dealing with issues, especially poverty and racism. But, and this is a big qualifier, the military brings a lot of very trouble young people in line by 1) offering tangible rewards in terms of pay, job security, and opprotunities for advancement, and 2) being able to throw out those who won't toe the line. Hard for a country to throw people out.

Sexual Assault on Campus, the Ongoing Saga

At Yale, the latest blow-up in the ongoing war over sexual assault on campus and what universities can do about it. NY Times:

In a 2018 disciplinary hearing at Yale University, Saifullah Khan listened as a woman accused him of raping her after a Halloween party.

The woman, who had graduated, gave a statement by teleconference to a university panel, but Mr. Khan and his lawyer were not allowed in the room with the panel. Nor could his lawyer, under the rules of the hearing, cross-examine her.

Instead, they were cloistered in a separate room, as her testimony piped in by speakerphone. He felt, he said, “there is absolutely nothing I can do to change my situation.” As he feared, Yale expelled him.

Mr. Khan’s criminal trial, months earlier, was markedly different. His lawyer cross-examined the woman in ways that horrified women’s rights advocates: How were you dressed? How much did you drink? Did you send flirty texts? And unlike the Yale hearing, the prosecutors had to prove his guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The difference between those two hearings — in process and outcome — led Mr. Khan to make an unusual move: He sued his accuser for defamation for statements she had made during the Yale hearing. That lawsuit, filed in 2019, is challenging the way universities across the country have adjudicated such sexual assault hearings.

It is not some patriarchal plot that makes rape cases difficult to try. It is a very old principle of Common Law, originating in the Statute of Treasons enacted under Edward III, that no one can be convicted of a felony on the basis of one witness's unsubstantiated testimony. Since in most rape cases there is only one witness, the victim, the desire to get justice for rape victims runs smack against one of the pillars of legal fairness in our system. 

One of the compromises we make in America is to allow prosecutions to proceed based only on the victim's testimony, but only if the victim submits to wide-ranging cross-examination that will establish to the jury (on this theory) whether the witness is credible. Of course this is a sham, in that juries are no better than anyone else at recognizing who is lying. As a basic matter of epistemology it is, I think, all but impossible for us to ever really know what happened in case where the only evidence is the testimony of two witnesses who disagree. But that is how we do it.

Of course university disciplinary hearings are not criminal trials but civil proceedings, so they are not bound by the standards of evidence in the criminal law. Among other things, they do not allow the cross-examination of witnesses. But this introduced another twist into the Yale case. It is another old matter of common law that you cannot file a suit for defamation because of testimony given under oath in a trial; perjury is a criminal matter that only the state can prosecute. But since the Yale hearing was not a trial, well:

Normally, such a lawsuit would not have much of a chance. In Connecticut and other states, witnesses in such “quasi-judicial” hearings carry absolute immunity against defamation lawsuits.

But the Connecticut Supreme Court in June gave Mr. Khan’s suit the greenlight to proceed. It ruled that the Yale hearing was not quasi-judicial because it lacked due process, including the ability to cross-examine witnesses.

“For absolute immunity to apply under Connecticut law,” the justices wrote, “fundamental fairness requires meaningful cross-examination in proceedings like the one at issue.”

Since cross-examination was not allowed, said the court, the Yale hearing was not even “quasi judicial” and thus merits no real respect from the law.

If you want the details of the original incident, the Yale Daily News has them here. This story also mentions that Khan is suing the university for $110 million and the grounds that he was expelled without being allowed to properly defend himself against the rape accusation. This is what his lawyer said after he was acquitted in his criminal trial:

We’re grateful to six courageous jurors who were able to understand that campus life isn’t the real world. Kids experiment with identity and sexuality. When an experiment goes awry, it’s not a crime.

Here again we run into the problem that university disciplinary hearings for sexual assault feel to the people involved like trials. The victim is seeking justice, the accused is trying to defend his life and reputation. But because they are not trials, they are not protected by any of the sacred aura that surrounds actual criminal courtrooms. Hence, at least in Connecticut, the witnesses can be sued for defamation. According to the Times story, university lawyers across the country are now trying to figure out if witnesses in their Title IX proceedings might be subject to defamation lawsuits and what they might do about it.

The root cause of this mess is having universities carry out what are in effect trials for rape. On the one hand this seems to be required by Title IX, the federal law that guarantees women equal access to education; it's hard to get an education if you're constantly worried about getting raped, and it would be bizarre for universities to sanction people for, say, verbal harassment while throwing up their hands at actual sexual assault. On the other hand, by holding what look and feel like rape trials in a setting outside a proper courtroom we enter into a netherworld where nobody seems to know what rules actually apply and what justice actually looks like.

We are nowhere near to resolving any of this.

The Dream Student

Robert Oppenheimer's high school Latin teacher on her star student:

He received every new idea with perfect joy.

Now there's a compliment I would love to receive. From American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, 2005.

What's Happening to the "College Premium"?

American economists call the wage gap between college graduates and others the "college premium." If you go back to the 1960s, the premium was about 30%; college graduates earned, on average, 30% more than high school grads. In the 1980s the gap grew to 60%, where it has remained ever since. 

But a recent study by some Federal Reserve economists asked a different question: what about wealth? (NY Times) If you look at the wealth accummulated by college grads vs. others, there isn't much difference at all. Nobody has looked in detail at why that is, but one obvious factor is student loan debt. The average debt for people who graduate from four-year colleges right now is around $30,000, and many owe much more. I suspect another factor might be housing costs, because a larger percentage of college grads live in big, expensive cities.

Anyway this complicates the picture of whether college is worth it financially. Polls show that this reality is already changing how people think about college. The percentage of young Americans who think college is very important for getting ahead has falled from 74% in 2010 to 41% now. The percentage of high school graduates going straight to college has also fallen, from nearly 70% to 62%.

The Times found somebody who has done some interesting math:

If your tuition is free and you can be absolutely certain that you’re going to graduate within six years, then you enter college with a 96 percent chance that your gamble is going to pay off, meaning that your lifetime earnings will be greater than those of a typical high school graduate.

The problem, though, is that many students who start college don’t graduate — about 40 percent of them, by one estimate. When Webber factors in that risk, your chances of coming out ahead of the typical high school grad start to shrink. If tuition is still free, you now have about a 3 in 4 chance of winning the bet.

The second problem is that going to college isn’t free. If you’re paying $25,000 a year in tuition and expenses, Webber calculated, your chance of coming out ahead drops to about 2 in 3. At $50,000 a year in college costs, your odds are no better than a coin flip: Maybe you’ll wind up with more than the typical high school grad, but you’re just as likely to wind up with less.

Webber next considered the impact of a student’s major. If you choose a business or STEM degree, your chance of winning the college bet goes back up to 3 in 4, even if you’re paying $50,000 a year in tuition and expenses while you’re in college. But if you’re majoring in anything else — arts, humanities or social sciences — your odds turn negative at that price; worse than a coin flip. In fact, if your degree is in the arts or humanities, you’re likely to lose the bet even if your annual college expenses are just $25,000.

According to this arithmetic, the average humanities major loses money by going to college, although much of what drives that is the 40% who never finish.

Right now, the economics of higher education are just abysmal. I don't, though, know what to do about it. Spending more government money appeals to me, but we are running a Federal budget deficit that makes even me nervous and raising taxes seems close to impossible. I think there are ways to reduce the cost of college, but they would involve making it a lot less pleasant for everyone, including all the adjuncts who would be teaching at these bare-bones colleges I imagine.

Of course, some of the turn against education has to do with ideology; in fact most of the people who have changed their minds about whether college is a good thing are conservatives. I think that is foolish, but it is only what you would expect when liberal college professors outnumber conservatives 5 to 1; among administrators, it's 12 to 1. That also strikes me as a very hard thing to change, since the pool of graduate students is probably even more skewed toward liberals. In the past defenders of the universities simply told conservatives, "Who cares about ideology? If you want to be successful you have to go to college." But if the headline economic numbers really are shifting, what will the defense be?

Here is my plan, such as it is: reduce the number of places in four-year colleges and use the savings to cut tuition. Send everyone else to community college, which is a lot cheaper, but insure that anyone who graduates from community college with a good GPA gets automatic admission to a four-year state school. (That is already the case in Maryland.) Drastically limit student loan debt, which will force most colleges to cut costs. And hope for the best.

Indian Boarding Schools and the Modern Tragedy

What is the purpose of elementary and high school education as we practice it in the US? I would say, to make children full members of our society, able to navigate its systems and support themselves within its economy. And this, I would say, has been the purpose of our educational system since at least the Civil War.

Many, many children have hated this, and many parents have hated seeing their children trained in a different way of speaking, acting and thinking than their own. That way, the Tao of the modern west, is the path of middle class discipline we have discussed here many times before: regulate your days by the clock, do your assigned tasks in a timely fasion, keep yourself and your home neat, brush your teeth, never act crazy in public. The central purpose of schooling, beyond reading and writing, is to shape children into this mold.

There is a vague notion on the left that we could have education that is not coercive in this way, that would somehow empower children and give them agency within our world without forcing them into a particular model of being and acting. I don't believe it. I think learning this way of life as self-discipline and self-esteem is the only way most people will ever thrive in our age.

Which brings me to Indian boarding schools. The first of these schools was opened in 1801, and some still exist, although most are now under the control of Indian nations. They have always been controversial, attacked as abusive and coercive from at least the 1840s, well before the great wave of schools opened after 1880. They always saw their goal as "civilizing" Indians, that is, inculcating the habits of middle class western life. These schools loved before and after pictures like the ones included in the poster at the top, and they don't show their students learning to read; they show them changed from wild Indian children into properly behaved scions of the middle class. There is of course a racial angle to this; most of the Indians sent to these schools saw these as White ways, and some of their teachers seem to have hated Indians. But the people who ran these schools would have been just as happy to print photographs showing the transformation of poor white kids from Appalachia or formerly enslaved blacks into well-dressed young gentlemen and ladies. They were aiming at a certain sort of person, of whatever race.

How were children treated in these schools? I'm sure it varied enormously. A small, isolated boarding school seems like a good way to empower sadists to work their way on vulnerable victims. But then education was abusive and regimented for everybody in those days; it was a rare student who got a high school degree without a litany of beatings and other punishments. Right now there is a lot of attention focused on the graveyards of those schools, but they weren't killing students on purpose; students died because lots of children died everywhere in those days, and because children who grew up in low-density rural environments still had a lot of infectious diseases to be exposed to. Quite likely the problem was made worse at some schools by poor diets, frequent beatings or other harsh punishments, etc. But the cause of death was almost always disease.

Some Indians who were sent to these schools complained about the hard work, that is, raising their own food, sewing their own clothes, cleaning the buildings, and so on. But the "industrial school" model was common all over the world back then, and millions of students of every ethnicity found themselves learning new skills by having to make their own clothes, raise and cook their own food, and so on. Again, I am sure that at some schools sadistic schoolmasters made this a lot worse than it had to be, but there was nothing racist about the model.

There is also a lot of complaint about the ways children were forced into these schools; in a few cases parents were jailed until they signed papers handing over all parental responsibility to the schools. It is easy to forget, though, that education is mandatory for every American child; this is a massive coercion of ourselves, not something we just do to Indians. Plus, not all Indians opposed it; as I mentioned a while back, when some of the Osage got rich off oil money they sent their kids to expensive boarding schools in the East. It seemed to many Indians at the time that however much their children hated these schools they were the only way forward for their people.

The more serious charge against the schools, to my mind, is cultural genocide. Because this was, quite explicitly, their mission: "kill the Indian and free the man," as one advocate put it. Most of the schools insisted that their students speak English all the time, and some of them beat anyone who lapsed into Lakota. They forced all the students to practice Christianity and forbade native rites as "devil worship." Their goal, quite explicitly, was to replace Native culture with the culture of middle class Christian Americans.

How should we feel about that?

Consider, for a moment, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a full member of the Laguna Pueblo and the first Native American to hold her job. She has made it part of her mission to focus attention on the Indian boarding schools. NY Times:

In an effort to lift the veil on abuses within the system, Secretary Haaland has been traveling around the country for more than a year, conducting listening sessions with Indigenous communities still dealing with the fallout from the boarding school system. In the Senate, a bill has been introduced to establish a truth and healing commission to address the legacy of Native boarding schools, similar to one undertaken by the Canadian government in 2007.

“Federal Indian boarding school policies have impacted every Indigenous person I know,” Ms. Haaland said in a statement. “Some are survivors, some are descendants, but we all carry this painful legacy in our hearts and the trauma that these policies and these places have inflicted.” 

But I have a feeling that all those Methodist and Catholic school teachers who went out to Indian Country would be very proud of Deb Haaland. This was exactly their goal: to raise Indians who would thrive so well within American society that they would one day be cabinet secretaries. And Senators, generals, Congressmen, CEOs, engineers, tenured professors, and all the other nice job slots nobody can get without a full commitment to the middle class Tao.

The Indian boarding school system did what it was intended to do: radically accelerate the assimilation of Native Americans into the Amercan mainstream, so that they could compete and succeed within this system. 

Of course, this was a horrific blow to Native cultures. Many were destroyed, and those that survived were weakened. Much has been lost: languages, faiths, stories, ways of standing and walking and feeling.

Even more important, to my mind, is the psychological harm this did to generations of Native children, who ended up feeling neither one thing nor the other, no longer fully Indian but also never feeling really at home in the broader American world. I follow several Indian writers, and this is a huge point of emphasis for all of them. Paul Chaat Smith:

I felt persecuted by history, tortured by fate. I wanted it all to be one thing or the other. I hated being half-white and half-Indian. . . . The truth is that I longed to be a stereotype. Mainly I wanted to be the full-blooded Comanche, secure in his own Comancheness, raised on the stories of his people. (Somehow the full-blooded Comanches whom I had known my whole life, who had never moved away from southwest Oklahoma, who almost always married other Comanches, would not suffice. They were Christians and not traditional enough. I think over the next rise I imagined more suitable Comanches.)

But, confused as he is, Paul Chaat Smith has a nice job as a curator of Native art at the Museum of the American Indian. Would it really have better for him to have been born fully Comanche and raised on the plains? Who knows?

The Indian boarding schools certainly represent a tragedy. They represent the tragedy that unfolded when Native American cultures encountered the vastly richer and more powerful cultures of Europe and experienced a massive die-off, ten or fifteen Holocausts, from diseases to which they had no resistance. Once that encounter had taken place, I do not think there was a good path into modernity for Indians. They could either have remained outside western civilization, living in a violent, Neolithic world, or they could join and endure double consciousness and outsider, minority status. Taking on this transformation voluntarily did not necessarily make it easy; consider what happened to Japan.

I see modernity as a gigantic machine that has ground up the whole world and spit it out in a different form, like one of those road-building machines that chews up the old, bumpy road surface and simultaneously lays down new, smooth blacktop behind. There is a sense in which the new road is better: smoother, safer, faster. And there are powerful ways in which modernity has made our lives better: we live longer, healthier lives, have greater material comfort, have great freedom to choose where we work and live and whom to have as our friends. We can learn far more about the world than anyone ever could before. We can watch spaceships and astronauts soar into the heavens and imagine living on other worlds. But there are also great costs. The symbols of those costs are all the traditional cultures that have been ground up and spit out by the modern machine, from Scottish Highlanders to Korean rice farmers, Norwegian fisherman to Kazakh herders, Algonquin farmers to Comanche buffalo hunters. Many people raised entirely within this world feel great anguish about the losses: of community, continuity, certainty, religious faith. Many born outside it, or with one foot in this culture and one in another, are bewildered and torn, wanting some kind of truth and healing commission to find out what happened to them and their world.

What happened to them is what has not happened to almost everyone in the world. We have all been caught up in the machine of modernity and ground into nicely rounded pieces that fit smoothly into the racing engine of an ever-accelerating history. School is at the heart of how this happens, for everyone. Whether the process is worth it is a very deep and hard question.

Richard Rodriguez, Transformed by Education

From a review of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez in the April 7 TLS:

In 1976, as a young academic, Richard Rodriguez received job offers from several prestigious universities in the US, then turned them all down and left academia for good. It was an act of protest. Rodriguez, the child of Mexican immigrant parents, had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the affirmative action policies being adopted by US higher education institutions, which saw him become a "highly rewarded minority student". . . . As a graduate student of Renaissance literature he feels his social position is closer to that of his white classmates than that of "the Mexican American janitors and gardeners working on campus." In his eyes affirmative action is "a parody of social reform" whereby "the least disadvantaged were helped first, advanced because many others of their race were more disadvantaged."

Rodriguez's misgivings about affirmative action arise from his sense that education has transformed him irrevocably, distancing him from his family, his childhood and his Hispanic heritage, and awarding him the privileges of the gringo elite. His memoir, first published in 1982, describes the lonely process of transformation. . .  Rodriguez is unequivocal about the price of such an education for a so-called "minority student" like himself: at every stage the student moves further from the person they used to be, and there can be no going back.

The TLS reviewer wants this to be about race, but it is not; somewhere on this blog I have a similar post about another memoir, that one by a white, working class Englishwoman who felt the same process happening to her. Plus her parents were actively hostile to her educational aspirations, which they felt as a rejection of their whole way of life, which was an issue Rodgriguez did not have.

Taken seriously, education changes you, so if you don't want to be changed, serious higher education is something you must absolutely avoid.

Algebra II, Data Science, Race, Equity, and Education

In California, the university system experimented for a few years with allowing high school students to take something called Data Science instead of Algebra II, but they have now ended the experiment, saying too many Data Science courses were "not rigorous." (NY Times, Chronicle) 

This move was made in response to a widespread protest by STEM educators that included an open letter signed by more than 400 California-based faculty.

We write to emphasize that for students to be prepared for STEM and other quantitative majors in 4-year colleges, including data science, learning the Algebra II curriculum in high school is essential. This cannot be replaced with a high school statistics or data science course, due to the cumulative nature of mathematics. 

In other words, students who take a data science course as an alternative to Algebra II in high school will be substantially underprepared for any STEM major in college, including data science, computer science, statistics, and engineering. Such students will need remedial math classes in college before they can even begin such majors, putting them at a considerable disadvantage.

The point seems to be that calculus is required most STEM majors, and you can't take calculus without Algebra II.

Which is kind of weird, because I honestly can't remember Algebra II at all, and I have never been sure that the sequential way we teach math in America is all that important. I suspect that something else is going on, which I will get back to.

People have been pushing statistics or "data science" as an alternative to algebra in high school for a long time now. For one thing, very few adults do algebra; I don't. But I sometimes do use statistics in my work, and I think I am not unusual. I suspect statistics is the most widely used kind of "higher" math in our world. For another, the existing math curriculum generates racial disparities at an extreme level. NY Times:

The push for data science is also complicated by the wide racial disparities in advanced math, especially in calculus, which is a prerequisite for most science and math majors. In 2019, 46 percent of Asian high school graduates nationally had completed calculus, compared with 18 percent of white students, 9 percent of Hispanic students and 6 percent of Black students, according to a 2022 study by the National Center for Education Statistics.

The numbers for who fails algebra are also pretty dire, and inability to pass algebra is one of the main academic reasons students can't finish high school. Algebra also regularly shows up as the thing students hate the most about high school.

So why not substitute a different kind of math class, one much more relevant to many people?

People have tried. But "data science" classes have been dogged from the beginning by accusations that they are "dumbed down," that they avoid any real math, that they are designed to enable people to graduate from high school rather than to teach them statistics. This is part of the complaint made by the California educators, that a perfectly valid concept is being misused to prop up graduation rates rather than to teach people mathematics.

But I think the real problem is somewhere else. People hate algebra because it is so abstract and seems arbitrary and useless. So maybe what algebra really teaches students is how to focus on complex mental work that is abstract and has no obvious utility. Maybe what students really learn by grinding through the traditional high school math sequence is a different way of thinking, one that is more abstract and less verbal than anything else one does in school, and completely without immediate relevance to your life.

I strongly suspect that what underprepared college students lack is not any particular concept they would have been taught in Algebra II, but practice in mathematical reasoning.

And this is not, to me, an isolated case. The kind of education practiced in American liberal arts colleges was all about developing higher order skills in contexts completely divorced from anything remotely practical. Sure, some students might end up in branches of science where they used math, but that was not really why they studied it and certainly not how it was taught. It was taught for its own sake. Why prepare people who would work in publishing by studying English literature, rather than focusing on contemporary bestsellers? Why let people who want to work in the State Department write theses on Renaissance history?

Because of the idea that a truly refined and educated mind understands things in a deeper and higher way, which anyone capable of such understanding can readily apply to whatever industry he or she ends up in. This kind of education is fading from prominence in most fields. But not, it seems, from math. Math educators still believe that understanding math, having a feel for math, being able to speak in the language of math is a deep thing that one should grasp in the abstract before trying to apply it to thermodynamics or population biology.

It may be that the math educators are right, and people who don't understand math are doomed to misuse it. It may also be that training in abstract systems like algebra really does shape minds in a way that can promote good thinking in many contexts. Hey, maybe there's something to the whole notion that a liberal education trains people to think in deeper and more interesting ways. 

Where this leaves us I don't really know. If grinding your way through four years of high school math is the only way to be ready for college science or engineering, then millions of American kids will just never have that option, and this will be especially true for poor kids. We have tried changing our approach to teaching math half a dozen times in my lifetime – New Math, Common Core, Data Science, etc. – and nothing seems to work. This just seems to be a kind of stratification we are stuck with.

Ivy League Education as "Laundering Privilege"

One of the Chapo Trap House guys – the podcast at the heart of the "Dirtbag Left" – recently said this about Harvard:

I mean, the entire Ivy League exists as a perpetuator of privilege, obviously, but also as a perpetuator of the fantasy of meritocracy, which is what justifies the privilege. All of these kids who are so brilliant just happened to be children of people who are in a similar social situation, but they went to Harvard — like Jared Kushner, for example!

Scott Sikind explains what he ment like this:

That is: Harvard accepts (let’s say) 75% smart/talented people, and 25% rich/powerful people. This is a good deal for both sides. The smart people get to network with elites, which is the first step to becoming elite themselves. And the rich people get mixed in so thoroughly with a pool of smart/talented people that everyone assumes they must be smart/talented themselves. After all, they have a degree from Harvard!

This intrigues me because it corresponds pretty closely to some things I saw at Yale. Most of the students were earnest, hard-studying children of doctors and professors, but there was a sprinkling of very wealthy scions of privilege; Georges Saint Laurent was in my class, as was Jodie Foster, and a guy they called Carr whose name was Carrington something the Fourth. I was told that another classmate met with her financial advisor every Tuesday, her stockbroker every Thursday, and flew to Paris on the Concored every other weekend. I had minimal interaction with such people, although I did once have a long, fascinating conversation with a Mexican millionaire who had been to Andover. I wonder what happened to him?

Anyway it's funny but when I think about diversity in college admissions what I actually think about is those people. I mean, I had met black people before, but until I went to Yale I had only the vaguest concept that really rich people existed. What did they think of being thrown into classes with people like my friends, earnest bourgois who thought getting A's was the most important thing in the universe?

There is a movement now that aims to demolish every sort of admission criteria except academic potential. From the right this movement takes hatred of racial quotas and from the left it takes hatred of legacy admissions and other perpetuations of hereditary privilege. And the goal is what, exactly? For elite schools to be filled entirely by hard-working middle class kids who think getting A's is the most important thing in the universe? Why?

Why does it matter so much to some people who goes to Harvard or Stanford? I suppose this is partly because a lot of journalists and so on went to those schools, and partly because they stand at some kind of pinacle of American something. Or are people like the Chapo Trap House guys really angry that somebody like Jared Kushner can go to Harvard? What difference does that make? If you are thinking that Kushner's minor role in American politics has anything to do with his Harvard degree, as opposed to his money and family connections, I suggest you reconsider. Has anyone ever heard Ron DeSantis mention that he went to Yale?

If you care about justice in America you should care about almost anything else more than who goes to Harvard: better elementary education for everyone, better high school education for everyone, better career preparation in community colleges, better remedial courses at state universities so more students can thrive there, more investment in the second- and third-tier state universities that take in lots of kids from working class families.

To get back to laundering privilege: one of the interesting things about the college admissions debate is that nobody, so far as I know, is out there defending legacy admissions and explaining why elite colleges actually like to admit millionaires' kids, which means that we don't really know what their plan is. Is it all about money? Maybe, but since Harvard in particular really doesn't need the money, I have to wonder. Is there maybe a social theory behind it? Like, millionaires are going to be prominent and powerful in America whether you like it or not, so part of our mission should be to shape them? That besides allowing smart kids to meet the rich, our model allows rich kids to meet smart kids and learn from them about hard work and excellence? 

I suppose this is what differentiates me from the Chapo Trap House guys: they see something weird and get mad about evil rich people; I see something weird and wonder what is going on that I don't understand.

Educational Opportunity

One good result of the Supreme Court's ruling striking down affirmative action in college admissions has been some real talk about how little affirmative action ever meant to most students. In the NY Times, Richard Arum and Mitchell L. Stevens have a piece pointing out that only a small fraction of college students attend colleges that admit fewer than 25% of their applications. The vast majority attend non-selective schools.

If we really want to talk about equality of opportunity for all Americans, these authors say, we should focus not on who gets into elite schools but how to make college better for the majority of students. So, this:

Less selective schools and the millions of students they serve each year deserve the same resources and attention to program quality found in selective institutions. Affirmative action never went far enough. Winning the admissions lottery to Harvard or a selective University of California campus must not be the only path to upward mobility through higher education. All colleges, especially those serving the most diverse student bodies, should be capable of providing outcomes of similar quality.

Ok. But how much would that cost? Arum and Stevens have some numbers: 

In our state, California, U.C.L.A. and the private liberal-arts college Pomona report spending richly per student at $60,528 and $40,275, respectively. Meanwhile, less selective and more diverse institutions like San Francisco State ($8,087) and California State University, Los Angeles ($6,631), report expenditures that are less than a quarter of those amounts.

So all we have to do is find $30,000 or so for each of the 15 million college students in the US. Hey, $450 billion a year, just small change, right? (If you're curious, the most authoritative-seeming number I could find for total higher education spending in the US is around $675 billion, about half of which comes from state and local governments.)

Oy. 

One reason I have long advocated for reducing the number of college students in the US is that I think that is the only way to improve the quality of instruction for the rest. But I have never been sure that it would work. It might instead lead to a spending death spiral, with legislators slashing spending because enrollments are decling and so on. 

I am also not sure that quality of instruction matters as much as Arum and Stevens want it to. I have a strong sense that the main reason students don't learn more in college is that they don't try very hard, and part of my plan has been that making it harder to get into college might motivate people a little.

But I am not optimistic about any of it. Societies get more of what they care about, and in America we just don't care enough about education to get high quality results for everyone.

Simon Saris Asks What We Should Do with Children

In "The Most Precious Resource is Agency", 2021, Simon Saris notes that Leonardo was working in Verrocchio's studio at 14, Andrew Carnegie in a telegraph office at 13.

Do children today have useful childhoods?

For a 13 year old today, what is the equivalent of being a telegraph office boy, where he can learn technology while contributing? What about for a 16 year old? 21 year old? What is today’s equivalent to being a studio apprentice of Verrocchio?

Where are the studios, anyway?

The world until recently was overflowing with onramps of opportunity, even for children, and we seem to do poorly at producing new ones. Thirteen-year-old Steve Jobs called Bill Hewlett and received a summer job at HP, which would be unsurprising in Carnegie’s time, was certainly surprising for 1968, and is obviously verboten today.

I suppose this fits in with the Peter Thiel-led attack on schooling. But it does make me wonder. My readers know I spend a lot of time wondering why the mental health of young Americans is so bad. Could part of the problem be that many young people spend too much time in school, and would be better off working, or doing some kind of directly job-related skills training? Saris thinks so:

Instead of an adolescence full of rites of passage, where one attempts to master something and accept responsibility, we have made it full of waiting, and doing work—for school is work—that nearly everyone knows is fake. . . . Who could blame young adults for thinking that work is fake and meaningless if we prescribe fake and meaningless work for the first two decades of their existence? By confining meaningful work to an adult-only activity, it is little wonder that adolescence is a period of great depression. It would be surprising if it was not.

But against all attacks on school we have to set the massive data showing that schooling transforms lives and communities everywhere in the world it is introduced.

But then again, that doesn't mean everyone should go to college or take lots of academic subjects in high school.

Anyway I am intrigued by the notion that the problems of young people might have something to do with our insisting that they stay in school so long and our refusal to let them take on work that feels meaningful to them.

Ada Palmer on the Absolute Victory of the Enlightenment

Ada Palmer has read too many student papers on Plato's Republic:

“Totalitarianism!” is an accusation that appears in almost every student Plato paper, “Dystopia! Oppression! It would be unendurable! evil! for people to have their jobs dictated to them by the state! Assigned to fixed ranks for their whole lives! With no say in government unless they’re one of these supposed philosopher kings!” It’s a reaction which always makes a wave of awe wash over me at the absolute victory of Enlightenment concepts of equality. Because such students genuinely and reflexively think of equality and self-determination as the human default. People. Are. Equal. And. Free. (is the thought process), and if Plato’s “ideal” city imposes assigned jobs and class differences, those impositions are tyrannical. This gut reaction completely misses the fact that Plato’s city, which extends equal education to all and then assigns tasks and ranks based on exams and personal disposition, is radically more free than the reality Plato lived in. . . . 

Now, the students who write these papers accusing Plato of “totalitarianism” are perfectly aware that the pre-modern world was full of rigid class systems, feudalism, and slavery. They know that Plato lived in a culture with far less self-determination than his Republic, but there are different levels of knowing a fact. You can know perfectly well that the water is off in your apartment for plumbing repairs, but, after unthinkingly turning the tap on five occasions, you still find yourself turning it a sixth time, because instinct hasn’t caught up with intellectual knowledge. The tap makes water come out! Just so, human beings have self-determination, and my students know that on a more basic level than they know that legal and social equality are modern innovations. One level of knowing is engrained, reflexive; the other requires conscious awareness. And this is how my students can know intellectually that Plato’s world was full of unfreedom, but still feel instinctively that a Republic which offers universal, equal education to all children, of all parents, all races, and both sexes, then gives you an exam to determine the job that will make you most happy in life, is a step toward totalitarianism. So, well done, Enlightenment, you made a society of young people who really think with freedom and equality as defaults.

Some Interesting Educational Experiments

Here's a UPenn professor with ideas about how to shake up education (NY Times). First, a class based on monastic practice:

On the first day of class — officially called “Living Deliberately” — Justin McDaniel, a professor of Southeast Asian and religious studies, reviewed the rules. Each week, students would read about a different monastic tradition and adopt some of its practices. Later in the semester, they would observe a one-month vow of silence (except for discussions during Living Deliberately) and fast from technology, handing over their phones to him. . . .

The class eased into the vow of silence, first restricting speech to 100 words a day. Other rules began on Day 1: no jewelry or makeup in class. Men and women sat separately and wore different “habits”: white shirts for the men; women in black. (Nonbinary and transgender students sat with the gender of their choice.) Dr. McDaniel discouraged them from sharing personal information; they should get to know one another only through ideas. “He gave us new names, based on our birth time and day, using a Thai birth chart,” Sophie Ouyang, who also took the class and just graduated with a major in nursing, said. “We were practicing living a monastic life. We had to wake up at 5 a.m. and journal every 30 minutes.”

And then this, which really intrigues me:

Dr. McDaniel also teaches a course called Existential Despair: Students meet once a week from 5 p.m. to midnight in a building with comfy couches, turn over their phones and curl up to read an assigned novel (cover to cover) in one sitting — books like James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and José Saramago’s Blindness. Then they stay up late discussing it. “The course is not about hope, overcoming things, heroic stories,” Dr. McDaniel said. Many of the books “start sad; in the middle they’re sad; they stay sad.”

As this article notes, many more professors are trying to reach students through their phones, with class Discord channels and what not. But McDaniel's anti-tech classes both have long waiting lists.

There is among some students a hunger for old-fasioned education, cut off from the world, intensely diving into intellectual activity. I don't know how many students would want a whole college like that, but I think many more would sign up for a taste of it if it were offered. Those one-month short winter terms some schools offfer seem like perfect opportunities for this; what about a one-month philosophy retreat focusing on one topic like personal ethics? Or, following McDaniel, a one-month immersion in difficult novels? Or poetry? Or how about a six week monastic retreat over the summer? I see a lot of possibilities here.

New York Goes Big for Phonics

After decades of experimenting with other methods for teaching reading, New York goes back to the tried and true: phonics (NY Times). That is, sounding out words based on what each letter sounds like, then deriving the meaning from the sound.

As the school superintendant says, there is now a lot of data showing that a highly structured curriculum based on phonics drill gets more children reading faster than any other. If you're wondering why there is so much resistance to phonics, consider:

1)  Fluent readers don't read this way. They just recognize words, and in fact often intuit whole phrases without all the words even being present. So if you learn to read phonetically, you then have to learn a completely different method to read with real fluency. This seems like a problem, but I have never seen any evidence that it actually is. It does, though, raise the question: why do we want children to learn to read in a way that nobody who can read actually does it? Doesn't that seem like a huge waste of effort? Shouldn't there be a way to cut that out?

2)  It's boring. A majority of children learn to read easily no matter what method you use, and beyond the first few months phonics is tedious for both teachers and students. So if you use the sort of structured curriculum that has been shown to help poor readers, you are inflicting misery on the kids who don't need that kind of drill and would be a lot happier just reading stories and talking about them. This enters the discouse in terms of "children's passion for books," which some teachers are afraid will be lost in a structured, phonics-based system. Which might be an argument for tracked classes, but that gets us into another big political fight.

3)  While, as I said, there is a lot of evidence that a structured phonics curriculum gets more students reading, there are plenty of studies that show the opposite. Also, there has been a movement back toward phonics over the past 15 years and where these curricula have been introduced, the gains have been modest. 

Incidentally I taught my eldest son to read, or to read well, after word came from the school that he was not meeting the key reading benchmarks for 9-year-olds. (He is a pretty severe ADHD case.) So I made him sit down every night with me while we and also my 7-year-old daughter (who insisted on joining) took turns reading out loud to each other from a story book. After three or four months of that he was back on track, and my daughter was vaulting ahead.

Which gets me to the thing that studies show most helps children learn: one on one attention from people who care.