SkolarzBlog

Racist Admissions: Beyond the Grandfather Clause

Paul Moreno, Hillsdale College

One has to give Justice Ginsburg credit for candor. She noted in her dissent in the University of Michigan Law School case that overt racial quotas were “preferable to achieving similar numbers through winks, nods, and disguises.”

In the aftermath of the Michigan affirmative action cases, overt racial point-systems like the UM undergraduate scheme will no longer do. Similarly, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down “grandfather clauses” in 1915 -- voter registration laws that required applicants to pass a literacy test unless they had an ancestor who was able to vote before Reconstruction. But the race-obsessed university administrators of today are not rolling over any more than the white supremacists of the Jim Crow South did. There are plenty of ways to find convenient proxies for race. The question is: which ones of them will five of the nine of our Platonic Guardians accept?

Though the Wallaceite hysteria of Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s “affirmative action forever” has passed, a barrage of news stories indicate that massive resistance to successful ballot initiatives forbidding racial preferences is undaunted by recent referenda and court decisions. The University of Wisconsin regents just approved an overt race-based admissions system despite its conflict with state law. Tamar Lewin reports in the New York Times that, while not overtly asking if an applicant is an Indian or black, the Wayne State University Law School will “consider factors like living on an Indian reservation or in mostly black Detroit, or overcoming discrimination or prejudice.”

Twelve years ago, the University of Maryland was compelled by a court to stop limiting scholarships to black students. Instead, it made one formerly black-only scholarship now “available to students of any race who are committed to the advancement of minorities in science.”

The “percentage plans,” which admit the top x percent of all state high school graduates, accomplish the same purpose. They make a virtue of the vice of de facto residential segregation, guaranteeing admission to the “best blacks,” though by national criteria the top graduates of predominantly minority schools do not compete with average graduates of schools with mostly white and Asian populations.

The Bush administration favored this kind of wink-and-nod affirmative action in its brief in the Michigan cases, complaining only that the Wolverine State had not considered “race-neutral alternatives that have proven effective in meeting the important and laudable goals of educational openness, accessibility, and diversity in other states.”

The Ivies did this a century ago, seeking “geographical diversity” and lowering the bar for applicants from North Dakota, which had fewer Jews than New York or Pennsylvania.

Bureaucrats have also retooled. Heather Macdonald reports that San Jose State University’s affirmative action office “rechristened itself the ‘Office of Equality Assurance.’” In keeping with the tradition of curricular balkanization, UCLA hoped to attract more racial minorities by a new program in “critical race studies.” “In 2002,” she reports, “UCLA rejected all white applicants to the program, even though their average LSAT score was higher than the average score of blacks who were admitted.”

California has a long tradition of such

devices to keep out Asians. In the 1880s, San Francisco enacted an ordinance that required all the owners of wood-constructed laundries to secure permits from the board of supervisors. Of 300 laundries in the city, 240 were owned by Chinese subjects, and 210 were constructed of wood. All but one of them were denied permits, while all but one of the white operators were granted permits. The Supreme Court, in the Yick Wo case, overturned the ordinance. With Ginsburgesque candor, Justice Stanley Matthews wrote, “Though the law itself be fair on its face and impartial in appearance, yet, if it is applied and administered by public authority with an evil eye and an unequal hand, so as practically to make unjust and illegal discriminations between persons in similar circumstances, material to their rights, the denial of equal justice is still within the protection of the Constitution.”

In today’s California, Asians are the Jews of yesteryear. By merit standards, they compose about half of those at elite UC campuses, though only 12 percent of the general population. Moreover, the New York Times reports, most are first-generation Asian-Americans—i.e., not even remotely associated with Yick Wo, Chinese exclusion acts, or Japanese internment. And this, after all, is what affirmative action is really about: how to target racial classifications so that they benefit victims of historic American discrimination?

Thus, the Chronicle reports that “At selective colleges, more than a quarter of black students are immigrants.” As the late historian Hugh Davis Graham pointed out in his book, Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy, employers have been able to fill their quotas with immigrants.

Alas, neither the Fourteenth Amendment nor the Civil Rights Act makes any provision for historical victim status or “diversity” as an exception to equal-protection or nondiscrimination requirements.

The Chronicle quotes a Penn sociologist on the African-immigrant study: “If you’re a ‘purist’ -- that is, if you view affirmative action as restitution for the harm done by American slavery and segregation -- then you’ll think that this is not in the spirit of affirmative action. But if you’re a diversity purist, and your idea is to expose everybody to as many different kinds of people as possible, then you’ll think this is great.” She claims that the problems arise out of “two moral visions—the moral imperative to right past wrongs versus the ethical need to represent the diversity of contemporary society as it now stands.”

In fact that there is nothing morally imperative about the diversity rationale, which was a makeshift tactic to weasel out of the moral imperative of the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act.

For all the lamentations about the advantages that African-born blacks possess -- parent with advanced degrees, high incomes, private schools, higher SAT scores -- the critics do not consider that traditional affirmative action conferred the same benefits on the least-disadvantaged American-born blacks.

Thomas Sowell has long called attention to the “mismatch” problem -- blacks who would feel comfortable and graduate from second-tier schools instead self-segregate, stew in racial resentment, and drop out of first-tier institutions. A law school study shows that, by admitting blacks who drop out or do not pass the bar exam, law school affirmative action programs actually reduce the number of black lawyers. So what happens to the black students who, not ready for Berkeley, might actually graduate from UC-Davis? Stanford is taking them. As a private institution, it is not bound by Proposition 209 and has greater latitude to adopt Bakke-style preferences. Is it so tragic that underqualified blacks drop out of Stanford rather than out of Berkeley? As Macdonald puts it, “the game is not about the students but about the self-image of the institution that so beneficently extends its largesse to them.”

No longer asserting white supremacy, we now have grandfather clauses to assuage white guilt.

The long history of racial discrimination in America attests that discrimination on the basis of race is difficult to isolate and prove. Thus, while the Supreme Court could strike down ham-handed devices like grandfather clauses or San Francisco laundry ordinances, those states were able to find more facially-neutral devices with the same effect.

But what do you think?  Please click below to leave a comment.

Definitive Junk Science

I don't know about you, but I have a tendency to avoid wasting my time on points of view that I have already concluded are nonsensical.  This makes sense from the point of view of saving time.  But it also makes you less likely to discover shortcomings in your own thinking.   It makes sense to look at what the other side is reading, writing, and thinking.

That's why I had a look at one of the "end of the world" global warming books.  I couldn't bring myself to read Al Gore's execrable  Inconvenient Truth.  But I did have a look at Tim Flannery's book,  The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What it Means for Life on Earthy.

This is almost certainly the best book on global warming ever written by a paleontologist.  This is -- with one exception -- the most truly definitive junk science book, written by someone with zero scientific background in climatology.  Only Al Gore could have done it worse, not even counting the pious posturing that permeates all that he does.  Everything the author knows on the topic, he picked up through self-study driven by his fear that the sky was falling.   In other words, the author already had his mind made up that the world was going to be fried to a crisp before he did any serious scientific study out of his field. This seems to be a defining characteristic of liberal thought: first learn the politically correct conclusion, then master talking points to justify it.

So perhaps we should not be too amazed that the author found everything he was looking for: all the evidence needed to verify his worst fears.

He begins his book with an apocalyptic observation: “ Sometime this century, the day will arrive when the human influence on the climate will overwhelm all other natural factors.”  This would be truly amazing, as, right now, humans have almost nothing to do with global warming.  A few good belches from a sizable volcano and you've more than duplicated a year's worth of human air pollution.

But these are mere facts.  In one of the most astounding displays of blended junk science and naivete, Flannery stresses the need for “good information and careful thinking.” 

If only!

But the reason for "good information and careful thinking" is not to assess the reality of global warming, but because “in the years to come this issue will dwarf all others combined. It will become the only issue; we need to reexamine it in a truly skeptical spirit, to see how big it is and how fast it is moving so that we can prioritize our efforts and resources in ways that matter.” 

If we buy Flannery's point of view, global warming is to become a greater issue than war, poverty, disease, ignorance, and tyranny.  He has seen the future and it is global warming and nothing but global warming.  Clearly, this is an author so dominated by his cause that he is unable to escape the power of his own pre-determined conclusion.

He cites the usual observations that convince the unsophisticated and uninformed that we’re all riding around on an overheating boiler that will blow up any minute: “Over the past decade, the world has seen the most powerful El Nino ever recorded, the most devastating hurricane in 200 years,
the hottest European summer on record, and one of the worst storm seasons ever experienced in Florida.”

But if you look at each of those claims, they evaporate.  As for the “most powerful El Nino ever,” the first flow of this southerly warm current along the coast of Peru has been flowing for billions of years and was first recorded in the early 1500's.  It has been happening every four years around Christmas and no one knows that today’s are any more “powerful” than those of a few hundred million years ago or merely a thousand years ago.

His claim that we’re experienced the most devastating hurricane in 200 years, acknowledges implicitly that 200 years ago there were hurricanes just as devastating as those we experience today – and that was before the Industrial Revolution with its fossil fuel burning and supposed impact on global temperature.

He calls for good information and careful thinking because "in the years to come this issue will dwarf all others combined. It will become the only issue; we need to reexamine it in a truly skeptical spirit, to see how big it is and how fast it is moving so that we can prioritize our efforts and resources in ways that matter.”  In other words, he wants better information and analysis not to evaluate the reality of any threat but to deal with the threat whose reality is a matter of near religious faith to him.  No religious bigot was ever more confident in his beliefs – or accepted them less critically – than Flannery.

His biggest blunder is the usual one: assuming that the current trend will continue forever.  It’s the same sort of classic mistake that Paul Ehrlich made in The Population Bomb, the eco-disaster de jour back in the 70's.  According to Ehrlich,  we have all starved to death by now.   He was colossally wrong for the same reasons the doom-sayers are usually wrong: he overlooks change.  He sees a trend and projects it to continue forever.  Noticing that the sun disappears at sunset, it’s a wonder such thinkers haven’t committed suicide during the night as projecting the trend’s continuance, clearly the sun is gone forever!

Anyone can project a current trend into the future and speculate intelligently on what the consequences of this unbroken trend would be.  The problem with this is not identifying the trend but knowing when and if the trend is going to change.   If the market has gone up every day for the last two weeks, chances are it’s going to go up tomorrow and we may well make money
betting on this.  But one of these days the trend will change and no one knows when that will be.

Most of the global warming believers put their faith in computer models.  The earliest versions have already been proven to be way off base, and there can be no reason to have more confidence in newer programs.  All of them make assumptions that are fundamentally without bases in reality.  The one thing we know for sure is that the earth’s ecology is dynamic, always changing.  Sometimes it gets warmer, sometimes it gets cooler.  Looking over the past, some scientists have identified a 1500 year cycle of heating and cooling and this certainly seems more established than the garbage-in/garbage-out computer models based on an assumption of straight line thermal increase.

Right now, the earth’s temperature does seem to be increasing slowly.  But the evidence that carbon dioxide -- which accounts for only 3 particles out of every 10,000 molecules of the atmosphere -- is a key variable is far from convincing.  And the evidence that human activity is an important component of the supposed increase in CO2 is even less certain.   The earth’s temperature has
always demonstrated large variation; change seems likely to continue.

The plain truth is that we simply do not know enough to be able to see far into the future. We barely have a decent idea about what the weather is going to be next week.  No one on the planet knows what the climate is going to be like in 50 years.  Because we happen to be in a period when the average temperature is going up a degree or so every fifty years, the Chicken Littles of global
warming assume that this rise in temperature is going to continue unabated until the seas are boiling.

As a phenomenon, global warming is real, but it is a political reality, not a scientific one.  Follow the money.  Whose nest gets lined if the prophets of worldwide sauna whip up enough fear to justify government grants?  You have no excuse to shove your face into the government trough if what you are predicting is an untroubled future for the environment.

I did learn something from Tim Flannery.  I now understand a great deal about the link between junk science and the liberal mind. In reading The Weathermakers, you learn as much about Flannery’s feelings as you do about his views on climate change.  (I always had this idea that a scientist's feelings should be irrelevant, but Tim wants to share.) For example, he tells about flying over a large city and seeing lights from horizon to horizon.  When he saw all these  fossil-fuel powered lights blazing into the night sky he “became alarmed.  He reported a near religious experience of perceiving the atmosphere at 30,000 feet as so "thin and fragile," that it was  “with a jolt” that he realized that the world is full of such cities and the world in grave danger.

By late 2004, his interest in global warming had “turned to anxiety.”   I’m afraid he was panicked by articles in the science journals claiming that the world’s ice was melting ten times faster than before.

What these articles don’t tell you is that most of the ice in the northern hemisphere is sea ice.  True, since 1970, the sea ice covering the polar sea has shrunk some 20%.  Plus it’s only about 60% as thick as it was forty years ago.  The radical environmentalists point to this melting as a threat to our coastal cities.

But what they don’t seem to understand is that all this melting has absolutely no effect on sea levels.  The time to start worrying about the ice cap’s melting and drowning the Statue of Liberty is the next time that melting ice cubes in your full glass of whiskey make it overflow.  The point is that the Arctic ice cap is sea ice, nine-tenths of it underwater and when it melts it has zero effect on
sea level.

He claims that the “atmosphere has reached CO2  levels not seen for millions of years.”  What is interesting about this assertion is that it implicitly acknowledges that the supposed increase in CO2 is nothing new.  The earth has experienced many times CO2  levels just as high as today’s when human beings weren’t even around.   There was no wealth and pollution producing capitalism to blame then.  It must have been dinosaur flatulence.

Personally, I am much more worried about new ice ages than global warming. The evidence for global cooling is much more compelling.  We are still just emerging from the last ice age, and I, for one, am happy to see the earth warmer.  It would let me spend less on costly fossil fuels to heat my house. And I imagine the residents of Siberia wouldn’t mind things warming up a bit.

His unexamined assumption that the earth is going to get steadily hotter over the next century or so leads him into making statements like this one: “With one out of every five living things on this planet committed to extinction by the levels of green house gases that will accumulate in the next few decades, we are reaching a global  climactic tipping point, how can lawmakers and individuals take action to prevent what seems to be an impending cataclysmic change to our environment?”

Frankly, I do not believe that one out of five living things are going to be dead within the next few decades because I want an automobile with an air conditioner in it.  The other notable thing about this quote is that Flannery makes clear that the government is the first choice of a way to solve this
supposed problem.  In fact, his great hope for the future is that most of the developed nation’s leaders have signed the Kyoto accord.

His initial concern about the climate came while climbing mountain in New Guinea in 1980's and finding that the forest was expanding at a rate greater than anticipated. He was troubled by this excessively healthy natural reforestation.  (At the same time, one of his favorite ecological concerns is the disappearance of the rain forest!)

Flannery suffers from a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientific method.  He says that a  theory remains true only as long as not disproved, but this is a wrong view of science.  A theory is not true just because it has not been disproved.  A theory is true only when there is real evidence of its validity, and the theory of global disaster lurking around the corner from the earth’s slowly getting warmer is NOT true; that is, it remains an unproven theory and a good way to sell junk science books to the easily panicked.

The global warming phenomenon is primarily a political reality.  It reveals the strong link between liberalism and fear.  Liberals lack confidence in their ability to cope with life on this world; they are always on the lookout for something to be afraid of, something to justify their anxiety.  Liberalism is a lack of maturity.  They see the earth warming as a terrible threat when there is just as much reason to see that it means a better place to live.

Many communists, no longer having the Soviet Union available to believe in, have put their faith in the environmental movement as a way to attack capitalism.   They join the liberals who are looking for someone to blame for climate change, looking for a justification for bigger government to take care of them.   Much of the junk science they promote derives from junk economics.  They simply do not understand that free enterprise is the one way to create the wealth needed to deal with the world’s problems.

Flannery’s book is just another instance of the proliferation of misleading articles and books as special interests -- primarily scientists looking for grants to support their research -- promote their agenda.  Thirty years ago, the experts were agitated about global cooling.  Reality shows that in the past, they had things badly wrong, and there is no reason to think they have it right now.

The first computer models suggested that a doubling of CO2 would raise the temperature 5 degrees Fahrenheit.  Those turned out to be completely off base.  The fact is that for the last 10,000 years, the earth’s thermostat has kept the average surface temperature at about 57 Fahrenheit.  But the weather and the climate are highly dynamic.  Things change and change changes. 

The claim that human beings have the capability to destroy the balance that the earth has maintained for hundreds of millions of years is the height of hubris. 

Flannery sees carbon dioxide as a waste product of the fossil fuels we use for heat, transport, and other requirements.  He seems not to understand that the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is a natural process that has been going on for millennia.  If a tree falls into the forest and gradually disintegrates, returning its minerals to the earth, it “pollutes” the atmosphere
with precisely the same amount of carbon dioxide as if the tree were cut down and burned as fuel.

Flannery does not seem to understand carbon dioxide’s role in the natural cycle of life, or he would not make statements like this: “Because we produce CO2   whenever we drive a car, cook a meal, or turn on a light,  and because CO2 lasts for a century in the atmosphere, the proportion
of  CO2 in the air we breathe is rapidly increasing.”   

Flannery evidently does not realize that we also produce CO2 when we breathe.  Every animal produces the deadly odorless colorless gas.  Should we kill off all the animals and maybe a few billion people to see if we can’t take the CO2 level from 3 parts per 10,000 down to 2 parts?

Like other environmentalist whackos, Flannery wildly overestimates the impact of human beings.  While he was panicked by how thin and fragile the atmosphere seemed at 30,000 feet, what he needs is a trip in orbit to see how huge the earth is and how little of it human beings have impacted.  Perhaps then he would be less troubled when those he “loved and respected continued
to buy large cars with air conditioners.” 

Flannery thinks that to keep from wiping out life on this planet, we need to reduce by 70% our CO2  emissions by 2050.  He does not understand the law of unforeseen consequences.  The way the enviro -mental cases want to do this is by shackling the one economic system with the power to produce the wealth needed to eliminate poverty, ignorance, and disease.  It is really all about the
liberal hatred of capitalism, a fear and distrust based on ignorance of basic economics.  Liberals like Flannery look to government to save us.  He pleads: “If you vote for a politician who has a deep commitment to reducing CO2 emissions, you might change the world.”  I think leftist politicians are a much greater threat to the world than global warming.

Sadly, but inevitably, liberal politicians are exploiting the widespread ignorance of the public to call for bigger government programs that waste the resources needed to end ignorance and poverty.  It’s a case of the cynical exploiting the ignorant, the blind leading the blind.

Flannery has a good heart but a weak mind.  He has done the cause of science a disservice with his book, contributed to the lack of understanding and confusion, providing support for the special interest groups who have seized on global warming as a way to boost their own power, perks, and prestige.

Flannery is no doubt a kind, caring and sensitive person.  But he needs to stick to paleontology where he can do some good and abandon climatology where he is doing only harm.

Islam: Religion of Hate

The greatest danger to America and civilization is a lack of courageous honesty.  Our leaders turn a blind eye to the true nature of political reality today, because no one wants to confront this unpleasant and indeed frightening truth.

No one wants to be honest about the true nature of Islam.  Academic leaders, political leaders, true believers in multiculturalism, all  proclaim that Islam is a peaceful religion.  In their view, those who commit unspeakable acts of terror in its name are extremists: insane zealots, wild-eyed fanatics who fail to understand the loving kindness of their own religion. 

While this view of Islam is widely circulated, it is as false as it is popular. The creation and propagation of this myth was and is a deliberate political act of propaganda, an effort to mislead non-Muslims about the real nature of the most intolerant and dangerous political philosophy in existence.

A fair and objective review of the fundamental teachings of Islam reveal that it is hardly accurate to call it a religion at all.  In truth, Islam is a political ideology seeking world domination.  Islam is a system of thought that seeks to destroy everything that is not Islam.  This is not a polemical statement but a simple and accurate characterization of Islam based on a study of the Koran,
the life of its prophet Muhammad, and documents based on his teachings.

Our dangerous failure to properly understand what Islam is comes from two sources.  First, the idea that the religion of Muhammad is peaceful comes from an ethnocentric and naive assumption that Islam is like the great religions of the west, fundamentally a  celebration of a loving relationship between the individual and divinity.  This belief is a fundamental academic error, a clear
instance of a failure to read and think clearly, the planet’s deadliest instance of cultural bigotry, liberal bias, an ignorant judging of other culture by one’s own standards. 

It is not a loving religion of peace.  By the most fair minded analysis, Islam is hardly a religion at all.  It is closer to the truth to regard it as a political movement bent on destroying all opposition to its universal implementation.

The second main cause of the misunderstanding of Islam is that we have been indoctrinated by the jihadis themselves.  It is clearly useful in seeking to conquer the world to win the cooperation of victims.  This strategy parallels their use of our own technology to attack us  – sending our own airplanes into our towers.  Islam has two major weapons: one is the sword, which history
shows they are not reluctant to use.  The other is deceit.  According to Islamic law, it is a virtue to deceive and mislead non-Muslims in the effort to spread Islam.  The Koran shows that Allah favors the use of guile and deception and specifically encourages lies and misinformation.  Muslim leaders are skilled at exploiting the media and taking full advantage of the open nature of western
society to disguise their mission to destroy everything that is holy to us.

Read the Koran and your eyes will be opened.  If you want to confirm for yourself Allah’s hatred of non-believers, his instructions to kill or capture them, check out Islam’s fundamental document.  (To save time, use the following link which gives access to a complete Koran but with its dark sayings
highlighted.  You can then examine the context to confirm its full meaning.) http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/quran/

In case you don’t have time to invest in reading the Koran, here’s a couple of quotes at random:

“Those who disbelieve Our revelations ... Fire will be an awning over them.”--90:19-20

“Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush.” 9:5

One of Allah’s essential messages is that while one must be honest and kind and compassionate.  But only with fellow Muslims; anyone else can be exploited ruthlessly.  Those who resists the full truth of
Islam or turns from the one true religion of all men should be beheaded. 

The jihadis, whom we have been indoctrinated to believe are extremists, actually represent mainstream Islam.  All it takes to understand this is to read dispassionately the words of the Koran and other Muslim sources.  The program laid out by Muhammad is as clearly revealed there as was Adolph Hitler’s in Mein Kampf.

An objective study of Islam's own sources as in  Religion of Peace? Islam's War Against the World shows that Islam is a ferocious, expansionary system of thought whose goal is to destroy or subjugate all other faiths, all other cultures, all other systems of government – anything that is not Islam.

What we most need to understand about Islam is that its blood-thirsty violence is not the acts of a deviant minority but those of mainstream Muslims.  The difference between the blood-soaked terrorist and the Muslim next door is that the former practices his true religion openly.  The latter either does not practice openly the dictates of the Koran, deludes himself about its true nature,
or is following Allah’s instruction to delude the non-believer, part of a fifth column that deliberately encourages the myth that Islam is a slightly different version of a great, peaceful, and tolerant religion.  This myth is a purposeful creation, propaganda by those who seek our destruction.
The deceptive myth of Muslim tolerance provides protective coloration, a cloak of invisibility hiding an evil system intent on destroying our society.

Consider the following text:

“Like Christians, Muslims respect and revere Jesus.  Islam teaches what Jesus
is one of the greatest of God’s prophets and messengers to humankind.  Like
Christians, every day, over 1.3 billion Muslims strive to live by his teachings of
love, peace, and forgiveness..  These teachings, which ave become universal
values, remind us that all of us, Christians, Muslims, Jews, and all others have
more in comma than we think.”

That’s the text of an ad run in California newspapers in 2004 by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).  Its leaders take great care to maintain its reputation as a neutral civil rights organization dedicated to helping Muslims fit into American secular society.

But three of those same officials were arrested for terrorist related charges.   CAIR is a chief propaganda arm for Islam in America.  This newspaper campaign was just part of a larger Muslim effort in Western countries to present a positive and false vision of Islam   Their PR efforts have been successful in ruling out of polite society any idea of Islam except one of a peaceful, tolerant and benign religion.  It is taboo to even question if the public face of Islam is consistent with its true nature.

This presentation of Islam as one of the world’s great and peaceful religions, closely akin to Judaism and Christianity is accepted by most Americans.  All acts of violence done in the name of Islam is explained away by its being “hijacked by extremists.”   To do otherwise is to be guilty of the cardinal
American sin of “racism,” despite the fact that Islam is not a race and most Muslims are not Arabs. 

Thus millions of Americans including many in the media and government believe in Islam.  They may be atheists, but they have abiding religious faith in an idea of Islam.  This faith consists of assumptions that have emanated from academia, the media, the State Depart, groups like CAIR and even the president of the US, who -- a few days after 9/11 -- called Islam a "religion of peace." That it is a peaceful religion is an unquestioned assumption of millions.

A cornerstone of this secular faith in Islam is that it is a tolerant faith.  Jews and Christians – we are told -- lived in harmony with Muslims during the past great Islamic eras. (But a study of history shows that they lived as pathetic, intimidated second class citizens.) When Muslims bombed Madrid, we were reminded that when Muslim ruled Spain it was a beacon of tolerance and the envy of Europe.
When they bombed synagogues in Istanbul in 2003, we were told that such bombings took place in a city that long had known peace and harmony among Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

But this dogma of Islamic tolerance is dangerous, because it hides the truth and discourages genuine inquiry.  Investigators are discouraged form monitoring activity in mosques.  After all, terrorism isn’t an Islamic problem.  Islamic is supremely tolerant.  No, terrorism is a problem of political grievances of socioeconomic imbalances.  If Islam has anything at all to do with it, it is only as a tool of unscrupulous religious leaders.  Politicians and religious leaders make careful overtures to growing Islamic community which they assume will assimilate to the extent of becoming peaceful and active
participant in the political process.  Why not?  Islam is a tolerant faith.

The dogma of Islamic tolerance must be challenged.  This falsehood is a potent weapon in the hands of those who hate our civilization.  If we do not challenge it, we will find ourselves having encouraged millions of Muslim to live among us only to find that we have allowed evil into our midst.  Our tolerance of the intolerable if continued will prove to be an act of national suicide. 

The time is past for a reality check by those who still cling to a belief that there is actually a dichotomy between the "real" Islam and an imagined violent fringe.  The reality-avoiding delusion that Islam is a religion of peace has cost thousands of lives, will cost millions more if we don’t open our eyes, and realize that it actually threatens the very existence of modern civilization.

The refusal of the ruling elite to look upon the true face of Islam and act decisively to defend Western civilization from its greatest threat is one of history’s greatest betrayals and a monumental act of cultural suicide. This cowardice reveals a fundamental defect -- cultural and spiritual decay -- that threatens to end the reign of freedom and peace on earth.  If we have lost confidence in America's role as special defender of a free and open society, champions of great God-given human rights, there will be none to safeguard freedom and the noblest social experiment in all of history shall pass away.  If we have lost our faith, we are doomed.  Where God retreats, Allah advances.

This is how I see things based on my study of the Koran, the hadith, (traditions about the words and deeds of Muhammad) and other documents.  What do you think?  Please click on “comment” below and let’s talk.

<iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=draperunivers-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=097789844X&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>

Education today: the cowardly professor

Here is my latest rant on higher education.  After you read it, please share your thoughts and feelings.  Just click on “comment” on the lower right and keyboard in your comment.

As a young undergraduate at Stanford, I nearly worshiped my professors. They seemed like gods to me, so brilliant, so erudite, so wise and compassionate, an awesome combination of selfless servants and bold intellectual warriors willing to follow the truth through the jaws of hell if need be.

Now, rather closer to the end of my academic career than I prefer, I cannot say that I have changed my mind.  I still love academia.  I still worship in the temple of truth.

But how can I explain the failure I cannot deny of the university to live up to its high principles?  Somehow, somewhere, there has been an appalling failure of leadership, an abandonment of principle, some dereliction, a loss of moral confidence, a reluctance to confront falsehood boldly.

I still cannot understand how anyone can abandon so noble a cause.  To me, the entire fate of humanity rests in the hands of our educational enterprise.  After a lifetime of study and scholarship, I am convinced that good, practical, satisfying answers exist to virtually every human problem, from disease to poverty to fear-driven hatred.  It’s not that these answers are not known but that they are not used, not celebrated, not shared, not applied. 

The fulcrum for extraordinary change is education.  If we were to actually exploit fully the true potential of existing technology, everything, -- literally everything -- would change. 

Much of the blame for academia's loss of direction, its failure to execute, has to be on the trustees of the university for they have ultimate legal responsibility.  Legally, the university is theirs.  But their dereliction is not hard to understand; they were not chosen for leadership but for their wealth or connections to wealth.  The foxes put the title to the chicken house in the hands of some genial but altered dogs.  Generally, they are both clueless and gutless.

Much of the blame has to be on the administrators.  But one cannot marvel that they are self-serving; it is nearly bred into them.  You expect a mouse to be a mouse and a rat to act like a rat. 

I blame most of all the professoriate.  This is who has let me and the world’s entire educational enterprise down.  They are supposed to be intelligent and wise and to know better.  In the classroom, they act like they know it all, so why aren’t they actualizing that comprehensive vision outside the classroom?

Why have they chosen to be more concerned about perks and privilege, power and prestige, than transforming the lives of their students?  Were they just after an easy, well paying, part time job with a full time salary and access to coeds?

The thing about the professoriate that most disgusts me is their failure to master technology in service of higher education.  I can forgive them their moral cowardice.  I know it takes courage to speak up in defense of an unpopular and unpleasant truth.  Unfortunately, by the time they get tenure, they lose their passion for defending the unpleasant truth. 

But how explain their failure simply to adopt the latest technology?  It can be explained only by intellectual sloth, the one unforgivable betrayal of all that should be holy to a teacher.

If you have no love for learning, how do you call yourself a teacher?  Rather than charging to the front to help lead the most exciting and promising era in the entire history of education, they have hidden behind the podium and trembled about the possible loss of their position.

Ironically, while these technophobes  quake about the demise of the classroom teacher, their fears are entirely misplaced.  The information revolution will not eliminate the teacher, merely liberate him to become a better teacher.  The only cost to the teacher will be preparation.  She must become fit to teach, able to use the wonderful new tools that are transforming our discipline.

The classroom teacher will never disappear.  People need high touch as much as they do high tech.  They always will.  While computers will continue to get better and better at freeing the classroom teacher from the routine elements of instruction, they will never be able to inspire.  They will never be able to show a compelling personal interest in someone.  They will never be able to care and
to demonstrate that they care.

No computer will ever have a personal story of striving against adversity and rising up the challenges of life.  No computer will ever laugh or cry.  No computer will ever care about and comfort someone with a skinned knee or a bruised ego.  None will ever rejoice at the signs of visible personal growth.

As much good as educational technology can do us, no computer will ever love us.  But they can allow us to do a better job of being human.  They can relieve an overworked teacher from much of the monotonous and unrewarding routine of her craft. 

It is obvious that in order to make the most of the power of educational technology, we must employ it to do everything except the intrinsically human.  Humans must be freed to do what they alone can do. 

Teachers must abandon their role as the definitive source of information and become facilitators instead.  Their new role is not to instruct but to guide discovery.

They need to get over being the expert, the final source of truth and justice.  Their expertise has been trumped by the digital invasion of the classroom.  Everyone in the classroom now has access to an entire universe of information, a staggering panoply that makes any individual's wealth of knowledge seem modest.

The loss of the power experience by the teacher is balanced by an increase of power in the hands of the student.

But this is only as it should be.  The whole purpose of the teacher is not to posture as an authority but to share knowledge and understanding, to empower students.

Teachers need to embrace the new technology and the wonderful new change it is bringing to the world of education.  This is without a doubt the greatest era in all of education’s history.  As vital as the invention of writing was, as crucial as the development of the printing press, today’s technology is more important, because it takes everything known and makes it everywhere available to all.

The invention of writing led to the development of a priesthood of scribes. The invention of the printing press led to the development of schools serving the wealthy and privileged.  The development of educational technology is leading to the complete democratization of education. 

All knowledge wants to be free and freely dispersed.  Everyone on earth has a God given right to learn.  The great and wonderful U.S. Constitution failed to even mention education, because at that time it was simply unthinkable that all humanity would ultimately have a right to an education.

Today’s technology makes that possible.   It must be the goal of the university to advance that cause, to put all the education that anyone could ever want into the hands of those willing to study
and learn.

Our students are all the children of the world, everyone who dreams of a better life and is willing to work to achieve it.

It doesn’t take a prophet to see that educational technology is transforming teaching. 

American  education faces its greatest challenge today.  Either our teachers will rise to meet this challenge or abandon the future of education to others.  The ivy covered campanile is on the verge of becoming another iteration of a rusted steel mill, a symbol of a bygone and irrelevant age, bypassed by a dynamic flow of energy and information.  I don't know.  Perhaps the death of the university as it exists today is just a necessary step in the overall progression of learning, a part of the creative destruction that seems a necessary part of advancement.

I do know that education technology in American education is largely a failed enterprise.   Almost none of the true potential of technology has been realized.

The problem has been the half-hearted halfway measures thus far employed. The system has tried to adapt to the new technology by grafting it onto a primitive system, one that has changed little in the past 300 years.  We have had computers in classrooms for decades but they are hardly utilized.

All organizations, all humans , are resistant to change.  Our teachers teach the way they are taught, because that is what they know.  We cling to what is safe and familiar.

Teachers use outmoded practices not because they are a great deal dumber than the average college graduate but because the system discourages doing anything different.   Like all bureaucracies, the system exists to serve the interests of those who operate the system instead of those it is supposed to serve.

The system is corrupt and monstrously inefficient, wasting most of the endless dollars pumped into it.  Billions of dollars are wasted on textbooks.  Textbooks should be banned, made as illegal as any life wasting hard drug.

Only total systemic change can succeed.  The answer is not more teacher training.  The answer is complete system redesign. We need an entirely new educational system, one engineered around
technology

The biggest barrier to educational progress today is the educational system itself, the stakeholders heavily invested in the past, the teachers afraid of change, more worried about their own future than that of their students.

Having worked in this system for years, I have become convinced that it cannot be reformed.  It simply needs to be left alone to wither and die. It is totally resistant to change.  I remember over a decade ago that it took me two years pushing hard at the largest private university in the state just to get our writing classes moved into the computer lab.  Here we had rooms full of computers sitting idle while next door college students were writing essays by hand.

Another example: While my own discipline is English literature, I’ve always been fascinated by math – and probably would have made a career in it had I not been so mistaught  – so when on my own time I came up with an entirely new math curriculum that would have transformed the teaching of the subject, it was dead on delivery, because I was treading on someone else’s turf.

The new university

There is good news for modern man.  A new kind of institution of higher education is coming into being, one capable of transforming not only the world of higher education, but the world itself.  A number of marvelous features make this exquisite and powerful engine of positive change different
from every school that ever went before.

Probably the most significant difference is that this great new temple of learning exists primarily to provide a truly excellent college education to every person on earth willing to study and learn.  It will provide a college education equivalent to the best of the Ivy League schools in the golden era of education -- the 1950's -- and it will do this for a price that everyone on earth can afford.

One of the best thing about the new instructional paradigm this school offers is that all learning will be totally  individualized.  The programs with which students interact will simply build a profile, notice what the student knows and does not know.  Based on such things as their vocabulary, grammar, interests, demonstration of general knowledge, etc. the system will design a personalized
course of instruction.

The learning program will provide an easy and transparent way to automatically create a personalized homepage.  It will personalize and automatically present homepage features related to the student’s interests and abilities from a huge library of existing homepage modules.  It will function as
a tool of lifelong learning.  It will not merely archive the student’s academic achievements in an electronic portfolio, it will constitute a lifelong means of support in acquiring new knowledge and skill.

Prior universities prepared students for a future; the new university shares that future with them, helping to create it.  The few years spent acquiring a high-quality academic degree represent merely the start of a lifelong relationship.

The new university is not so much a place as a community, a community of practice, a worldwide community of learners and teachers and workers.

To carry out the personalization process, a program will analyze the way students interact with their computer before recommending a modification. For example, the program can track your favorite sites, frequently viewed news and variety sites, and more. The program will base its suggestions on the prior web sites you have visited, the features you use most, your preferred news sources, the articles you read, the books you read, and the applications you run.

Probably the bulk of the assessment will be done informally with the program simply noticing how you use and don’t use the computer.  It will notice the vocabulary you use, the words you use and don’t use.  It will track the books and articles you read – and don’t read.

It functions as a lifelong intellectual companion, making suggestions about new skills and interests and developments in fields that seem to interest you.  It will notice who within the community shares interests with you and bring the two of your together.

Students will no longer be forced to study what they already know.  This probably means at least a 20% leap in efficiency, because in today’s – or more accurately,  yesterday’s factory model -- huge redundancies are built in. Instruction is aimed at the lowest common denominator and everyone takes the same standard course.  The most likely to be bored: the brightest and most
able students.

Using the best of educational technology means that we will no longer hold back the brightest and best students. Some students will earn a BA degree in two years or less.  Others might take ten years, or if they never get there, will at least engage in lifelong learning along with their more brilliant fellows.

Second, teaching will become more fun and exciting.  All the routine chores of teaching – grading homework, tests, essays – will be automated.  Teachers will now be able to focus on teaching, giving personal attention to students who need help and those ready for new opportunities and challenges.

A new sense of collegiality -- largely missing in today’s schools in which teachers rarely confer or collaborate -- will improve instruction and the teacher’s enjoyment of teaching.  Technology will increase opportunities for communication and make it easier to share one’s thoughts and work.

Online interaction among teachers offers many of the characteristics research has shown to be associated with high quality professional development: collaboration among colleagues; adequate time for inquiry, reflection, and mentoring; and a focus on improving student learning.

Third, assessment and instruction will combine.

Fourth, learning will become fun, education and entertainment commingle.  Making learning fun will mean a higher success rate, because people do what they enjoy doing.

Some of that time would be spent in a new kind of classroom, some would be spent in front of a computer or a television, some would be spent in private study, some would be spent in team or individual problem solving, and some would be spent in conversation with faculty or other students. To make this new model work, education has to come to better agreement about what kinds
and levels of capacities it expects for each level of credential, and it has to become more sophisticated about measuring them.

The new classroom

The new classroom will be a learning center.  Its design will facilitate interaction, communication, collaboration, as well as private study.  It will have desks, comfortable chairs arranged for small group discussion, round tables where team interaction can take place.  Obviously, the entire arsenal of educational technology will be available. 

Fifth, learning efficiency accelerates.  Traditional instruction is highly wasteful of valuable resources.  The old format of one teacher lecturing to a classroom of thirty students is inherently inefficient.  That same lecture digitized and podcast could instruct thousands or tens of thousands delivered right when and where they want to hear it and without the student having to drive to
campus, find a parking space, walk to class.  Plus the recorded lecture produces better understanding and retention, because the listener can take better notes.

She can easily pause the recording to catch up on notes or reflect, or click back a few minutes to re-listen to something.  The student can listen while exercising or walking or driving.

Podcasting revolutionizes the learning of languages.  Just ten minutes a day listening to a native speaker as one carries out the routine tasks of everyday life will produce a mastery of a foreign tongue rarely obtained by students who spend two years in a conventional college language course.  Language students of the past may have learned the intricacies of the subjunctive voice and the
subtleties of the nominative case, but they never achieved fluency in the language.

I’m now learning Italian while I walk my dog.  While I stroll along the woodland path, native speakers let me share a dialogue at a speed I can comprehend and they are happy to pause when I wish and repeat endlessly.  They never get tired and are even happy to accompany me into the bathroom
or crawl into bed with me for a few minutes of late night instruction.

Not only does my $80 MP3 player the size of a business card teach me Italian, it is an FM tuner, a voice recorder and stores some 30 hours of audio books.  I'm listening to a book on leadership, an account of the Reagan White House years, Proust's "Remembrance," and "War and Peace."  And this is just the start.

You are invited to post a response.  Just click on "comment" below and keyboard in some positive or negative feedback.

The Arab World: Save it or Nuke it?

The world has a major problem.  It’s called the Middle East.  In this blog, I am going to propose a bold first step to coping with this problem.  I hope that you will share your thoughts, especially if you disagree with me.  To respond, all you have to do is to go to the bottom of this post, click on "Comment" and then simply keyboard in your thoughts.

The purpose of this blog is to create frank and open discussion.  None of us knows as much as all of us.  My opinion follows, and I hope yours will follow that.

This geopolitical sinkhole is ground zero for the world’s most pressing problems: privation, ignorance, violence, and hatred.  It is the breeding ground for the greatest enemies of civilization.  The origin and center of Islam, here is where those who hate us and want us dead are indoctrinated and trained for deadly attacks on the “Great Satan.”

I believe that humanity’s greatest achievement is western civilization.  It needs to be defended against those who want to kill us and destroy our culture.  There are really only two solutions.

One is to make the entire Arab world glow, fuse its desert sands into a nice glassy surface.  This is what would happen if it were the Islamic world who possessed nuclear might.  A straightforward, objective reading of the Koran makes clear Allah’s hatred of those who refuse to honor such a god.  Other than the worship of Allah, the main purpose of Islam is to destroy anything that is not Islamic.   If Islam had nuclear weapons and we did not, western civilization would be gone as soon as the first devout Muslim could reach the nuclear trigger.

Read the Koran and you will see for yourself that Allah never tires of cursing the unbeliever and promising a terrible fate for Jews and Christians.   In contrast, the religious traditions of the civilized world stress love.  Jesus taught that we should love even our enemies and return good for evil.  If we are to be true to our own highest and best traditions and deepest religious beliefs, as just as it might seem to do so, we must strike Islam with the nuclear sword only as a supreme last resort.

The one undoubted right thing to do is to take bold and decisive action to avoid a war with the Arab world.  If it is unacceptable to eliminate our enemies through nuclear annihilation, we must eliminate them by making them our friends.

It is hard to think of a greater challenge.  It means that we must transform the Arab world, for as it is now there is no possibility of their learning to love us.  We are in a battle for the hearts and minds of the people.  We must help solve the profound problems that make theirs a sick and corrupt society.

Our two great weapons are education and the power of prosperity.  Anyone who seeks profound change must know two essential things about the contemporary Middle East.

First, it is enormously overpopulated.  Cairo was desperately overcrowded thirty years ago with some 3 million people living there. Today there are 15-million people in Greater Cairo.

Second, population is young. The average age of the population is about sixteen.  That is half the average age in the United States. That one fact tells volumes about the intractable problems confronting the governments of the region, and why their record in solving these problems is so bad.

These two facts have huge implications. To begin with, it means you have an overwhelming number of people who are simply incapable of caring for themselves.  It means that the majority of the population -- counting both the very young and the aged – are consumers instead of producers.  They require an unlimited number of expensive services, especially education, housing, food, and medical care, while producing very little wealth.  As half of all Arabs are age 15 or younger, they lack education, skills, and experience.  This means that the majority of the Arabian population has almost nothing to contribute to society but instead represent a colossal burden and an immense problem.

The labor markets are flooded with young people all dressed up with nowhere to go. These young people are ready to begin to participate in a modern economy, but theh problem is that there is no modern economy to enter.  As a result, they are frustrated in their efforts to get even a low-paying entry-level job.

There is vast unemployment.  You find university graduates working as night hotel clerks, tourist guides and cab drivers -- not as temporary jobs, as in our country -- but as permanent long-term jobs without hope of advancement. In short, you have in the Arab world a society made up largely of young, frustrated, angry, hopeless people.  You find throughout the Middle East young people desperate for meaning in their lives.  They are easy victims of radical clerics who can point to chapter and verse of the Koran calling for holy war against non-Muslims. 

The fundamental problem in the Middle East is economic. Economies there have failed to provide jobs and opportunity for their young people.  This is what we need to change.

We must give the young and angry people of the Arab world a new alternative. More than freedom, they need capitalism.  Initially, the chance to create a decent life matters more than theoretical political freedoms.  It’s great to be able to vote; it’s even better to be able to feed your family.

In the Middle East as everywhere else, the key concern of those in power is to remain in power.  Because these governments are intent on staying in power, they divert much of their revenues into programs that deal with the social turmoil provoked by intense frustration.  First and foremost, the governments want security. For the past half-century, almost every country in the region has
made extraordinary military expenditures.

It’s an extreme case of guns instead of butter; it’s security measures instead of roads, telephones, and factories. Despite all the oil, the long-term capital needed for economic growth has not been available.  Military expenditures do the economy no good as they do not offer new capital investment that can fuel future growth. Military goods are either stockpiled or destroyed.

No Middle Eastern country except Israel has adopted the one growth strategy that works: high-value-added manufacturing. This model is what made fueled the growth of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and more currently, China. We drive Japanese cars, watch DVD on players from Taiwan and wear Chinese clothing.

But, in contrast, not one single manufactured item from the Middle East can be sold competitively on world markets.  This is why Middle Eastern states must sell commodities to finance their imports, obtain foreign exchange, and accumulate investment capital.

The problem with Middle Eastern commodities is that there is no domestic market for them. This means their price is set by external forces that they cannot control. While these governments complain about the crippling limits of commodities-based economies, they are unable to make the big adjustments needed to modernize their economies.

The adjustments required to place their economies on firm new foundations have been too overwhelming to do anything about.  In other words, the Middle Eastern economies are locked in a desperate impasse. The camel has plodded into a quagmire and the more it thrashes around trying to escape, the further it is drawn into the sinkhole.

The only hope for these sick economies is some very harsh medicine, a total and radical overhaul of the bases of their economy. This will never happen without outside intervention.

It is surely not obvious right now, but I’m convinced that the invasion of Iraq is the greatest possible thing that could possibly have happened to the Iraqi people. It’s not just getting rid of a brutal dictator who ruthlessly exterminated millions.  The greatest benefit is not the fall of Saddam Hussein but the rise of opportunity.

The only path out of the wilderness for the Arab world is the one that leads to a modern free enterprise economy.

This, of course, is precisely what Dr. Bush is prescribing for Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. aid currently pouring into these two countries represents the only real hope for the Middle East that anyone has seen on the horizon since World War II.

U.S. dollars constitute the capital needed to produce a robust market-oriented economy. Poured into in potential growth and export sectors, this will not only raise the standard of living, generate new jobs, and build long-term development

It has never been a mystery what economic policy has been needed to transform the Middle East economy and with it. The solution for Middle Eastern social problems is prosperity. George Bush has the vision thing down pat. He is providing the fuel to drive the economy that will create the opportunities that will absorb the youthful drive and energy currently being poured into perverted causes.

Rebuilding Iraq under initial American control is an opportunity to institute economic rationality.  It represents a chance to introduce a robust new form of capitalism that is capable of transforming first Iraq and then the Middle East. 

That's how I see things.  How about you?  To post a response, click on "comment" below, keyboard in your point of view, then click on "post" to publish your comment on the blog.

Al Gore, Global Warming and the Triumph of Junk Science

It doesn’t matter if leftist politics and junk science has so overwhelmed and polluted the Nobel Prize  that they nominate a ridiculous figure like Al Gore; he is still is totally full of it.  His documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth” is total nonsense, a biased and unthinking compendium of politically correct eco-nonsense.  You’d think the inventor of the Internet would capable of genuine insight, but his screed on global warming is just as bogus as his claim to contributing anything significant to the Internet’s development.

So, forget about Al Gore and the rest of the Chicken Littles running around flapping their wings and clucking about falling skies and rising temperatures. They don’t know greenhouse gas from a hole in the ozone.

The whole thing is a worldwide conspiracy by hate-filled, racist, homophilic, testosterone-deficient, estrogen poisoned, left wing extremists.  Secret plots in hidden places really do control our lives or at least the media component.  Or maybe it's just the triumph of the absurd in human affairs.

You'd think you'd get used to it or that the liberal press and leftist politicians would finally hit total bottom.  But, no, they keep finding new depths.  So, it is still amazing that on the same day, Al Gore gets nominated for a Nobel Prize and the UN panel publishes one of the most preposterous documents to ever masquerade as scientific findings.

Knowing the real facts about global warming makes it almost unbelievable that The United Nations climate panel blames human activities for global warming that is supposed to bring droughts, heat waves and rising seas.  What all this really demonstrates is the triumph of junk science over genuine research and responsible analysis.  It is a sad day when a sorry mixture of leftist politics
and sublime ignorance combine to besmirch the Nobel Prize with a preposterous nomination and the United Nations by the release of an equally preposterous report.

If you want the whole global warming story in a nutshell, there are four simple things you should understand and take to heart.

First, an honest, objective scrutiny of available scientific evidence shows that in all probability global temperatures are actually rising.  Second, they are not rising enough to represent any kind of risk to the planet.  Third, human beings and their merry burning of fossil fuels have almost nothing to do with the increase in temperature.  Fourth, global warming is almost entirely the result
of a completely natural cycle.

True, you can hardly pick up a newspaper or magazine, listen to public radio, or watch the Discovery channel without hearing that you’re soon going to need sunscreen on your next North Pole excursion or that New York is about to be drowned.

But despite all the junk science in the media, facts are stubborn things.  And the fact is that global warming is just the latest end of the earth scenario cooked up by the cozy combination of scientists looking for federal grant money and journalists looking for sensational stories.

In today’s blog, we’re going to share the facts that the media and the scientific leeches don’t tell you.  We’ll give you the highlights from two new books that argue convincingly based on hard core scientific evidence that you don’t need to work up a sweat about global warming

Unless you really want to acquire a thorough understand of global warming, you don’t really need to buy these books.   A reasonably close reading of this blog will give you all the intellectual ammunition you need to shoot down a frantic member of the Birkenstock community.

Dennis T. Avery and S. Fred Singer give a good clear rundown in easy-to-understand language in their book, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years.  The title of this excellent paperback tells the whole story.  Global warming is just part of a natural and inevitable cycle.

The scientific facts presented by Avery and Singer are entirely consistent with those documented by Patrick J. Michaels in his book Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming.  But Shattered Consensus also explains the how and why of the huge difference between what we read on the topic of global warming and what is really going on in the real world.

This book explains the huge problems with the computer simulations used by world leaders to justify the radical, expensive, wasteful, and useless policies they propose.  Read Shattered Consensus and you really will acquire a clear appreciation of the true state of global warming.  You’ll see that the climate issue is enormously complex.  And you will also acquire serious doubts about the wisdom of the expensive policies that liberal politicians propose -- measure unlikely to have any detectable impact on our planet's future temperature.

While he is one of the best known of skeptics on global warming, Patrick J. Michaels is far from alone. His book comprises ten chapters by ten scientists who examine different factors in global warming: forecasts of temperature and precipitation, weather pattern volatility, the effect of El Nino, the impact of climbing temperature on our health, and the effect of carbon dioxide
concentration on temperature.  All of them are as skeptical of the risk of global warning as they are of Gore’s invention of the Internet.

One of the more interesting revelations is the story of how one unethical scientist played games with underlying variables to produce the famous "hockey stick" chart that displays supposedly rapidly climbing temperature levels over the last millennium.   While this chart seems to imply we are rapidly racing out of control towards doomsday , this scientist declined to share his data or explain his methodology when other scientists asked. 

The data strongly suggests that this scientist purposely a variable to create the hockey stick effect.  But the really important lesson to be learned here is that the current model of our scientific peer review process is totally bankrupt.   Only a peer review process as out of balance as the picture politically motivated scientists paint of a wildly unstable ecosystem could have allowed the publication of such junk science. 

This nearly useless peer review system allowed the publication of a totally false picture of the world’s temperature.  It essentially permitted the publication of the work of a scientist who distorted his data to get the effect he wanted: the creation of a fictitious “hockey stick” chart that other headline seeking “scientists” have used as a foundation for the frightening paradigm of runaway global warming that threatens the future of humanity.

It is all balderdash.  If this happened in industry instead of science, such manipulation of records
would send a CFO to prison.   

The book Shattered Consensus reveals the real truth behind the numbers.  It shows that poor record keeping of temperatures during the first half of the century exaggerated the evident increase in temperature during the latter half of the 20th century.   Global temperature has increased by 0.7 degree Celsius in the last 100 years.  But, almost half of this supposed increase is probably not real, but was exaggerated by significant underestimation of temperatures  during the first half of the last century.  This error in temperature records was due to shortcomings in thermometer technology.  (Essentially, the physical casing of earlier thermometers captured ambient heat in a way that made the thermometer show a lower reading than the actual temperature.   The significance of this error is that if you make an allowance for it, the claimed correlation between industrial growth and global warming disappears.  In other words, virtually none of global warming has anything to do with human
causes.

One of the facts that the prophets of an overheated earth cannot explain away is the cooling of the stratosphere.  This is completely inconsistent with their key hypothesis that greater amounts of CO2 is causing the rise of temperature we are currently experiencing.   In fact, there are vast inconsistencies in the supposed relationship between CO2 concentration and the earth’s rise in
temperature. 

As other scientists have reported, earth has experienced recent periods with much higher temperatures -- 6 degrees Celsius higher than now -- but the CO2 concentration during those periods of higher temperature was 20% below the current levels.  Carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures marched in different directions.

This history was counterbalanced by periods during which we had significant global cooling with rising levels of carbon dioxide -- a similar effect in a different direction.  In short, you can tell your liberal friends to relax, that there is at this point no scientific reason to conclude that a reliable relationship exists between temperature and CO2 levels.  They can throw some carrots on the grill and light up the charcoal guilt free.

There is little doubt that our climatic system is highly sensitive, so sensitive that it is impossible with current knowledge  to model it accurately.  For example, if projected precipitation is off only 0.1 of an inch, it would mean that temperature measurement would be off by nearly two degrees – 1.77 degree Fahrenheit.

Yet, the models that scientists exhibit large variation in their predictions of precipitation.  Another variable that makes accurate prediction impossible is cloud cover.  If there were merely a 4% increase in the formation of stratus clouds, this would offset any effect whatsoever from doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.  Yet, at this point, scientists are totally unable to
model cloud formation.  Such limitations make all global circulation models (GCM) incredibly unreliable, but scientists overheated by their dash for grant dollars use such models as if they really meant something.

But somehow as nuanced and uncertain as things are in the scientific picture, you can’t find anything about this in the media.  It is impossible given the current state of the art to make certain predictions.  But the press, politicians, and agenda-driven pseudo-scientists give precisely the opposite suggestion.  The picture they draw is of a certain and deadly fate is certain and we are all
doomed unless we drastically alter our civilization.  This always seems to be where the liberals end up.  Regardless of the problem, it’s all the fault of free market capitalism or America or Republicans or patriots or those who believe in the individual more than big government to solve the world’s
problems. 

To make sense out of the global warming picture drawn by fear-mongering bogus scientists and posturing politicians, you need to understand not only the science but also the biased anti-capitalism and anti-American politics behind the distorting and obfuscating static from the daily media.   

Just remember this rule of thumb: if it seems too bad to be true and it’s a liberal saying it,  it’s almost certainly false.

The Campus War Against Religion

According to its president of William & Mary,  everyone is welcome on campus Except Jesus Christ.

Diversity is a key shibboleth on campus today.  Anything goes from organizations espousing hatred of America to those celebrating orgiastic sexual perversion.  The only unwelcome form of diversity is Christianity.

The one value that leftists universally embrace is tolerance.  In the liberal world view, tolerance reigns supreme, trumping both freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion.

The one thing that cannot be tolerated is the open expression of religion.  War has been declared against religion.  Its enemies seek to destroy the right of the faithful to worship freely.  So intent are they on suppressing religious symbols that they even want to kill off poor old Santa Claus, replace the Christmas holidays with a generic Winter Celebration, and ban the cross from the chapel.

Their latest coup is to banish Jesus Christ from the campus of William & Mary College.  The symbol of Jesus’ sacrifice for humanity is no longer allowed in the chapel at the heart of the campus.

The Wren Chapel itself still stands at the center of the College of William & Mary campus, but it is now an empty building without a soul.  On order of the college president, the one religious symbol in the chapel – a simple brass cross  – has been removed.

Although this brass cross has stood on the simple altar since shortly after the chapel was named, to avoid making any non-religious visitors feel unwelcome, the president of the school ordered the altar to be stripped of the cross. 

The president banished the cross in order to make the chapel “equally open and welcoming to all.” 

College President Gene R. Nichol evidently did not count the cost to Christians of robbing them of the chapel’s one religious symbol.  By denying worshipers at the chapel the right to a symbol of their faith on the altar, he may have made the chapel more welcoming to atheists but he made those who
come here to worship feel unwelcome.

The naked altar stripped of the symbol of Jesus’ sacrifice and triumph over death is a stark reminder that they have been denied the right to worship freely.  No longer are they permitted to kneel before the cross, the central and most enduring symbol of the Christian faith.  The bare altar sends a clear and compelling message to every visitor to this “equally open and welcoming”
chapel.  The Wrench Chapel is no longer a special place of worship.

In what is considered one of the greatest tragedies in Christian history, the Muslims converted one of the greatest buildings in history, the Hagia Sophia or Church of Holy Wisdom, first into a mosque and then into a museum.  Emptying the Wrench Chapel of its one religious symbol is a sad echo of this historic tragedy.  This open act of blasphemy by the president of William & Mary disgraces a great school.

The message it sends is that this chapel is not a house of God.  It is no longer a sacred place where believers are safe to gather and rejoice in the goodness of the Lord.  He has turned a sacred place into just another building, robbed it of the original purpose that alumni like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson gave it.

I wonder what the author of Virginia’s Statute for Religious Freedom would say about this attack on the right of Christians to be left alone to worship as they choose?

If you are outraged by this assault on the free practice of religion, you might want to let the college president know.  You can write an email to President Gene R. Nichol at: http://www.wm.edu/contact/index.php

Better still, call him at (757) 221-1693.

Even better, look up the phone number of the college's Board of Visitors and let them know what you think of President Nichol's attack on religious freedom.  You can find their name and home city at:

http://www.wm.edu/administration/bov.php

Stupid People = Bad Teachers. Duh!

Here is some amazing and breakthrough news from the field of education.  The Department of Education has actually managed to figure out that stupid people make bad teachers and that smart people make good teachers!

The dimmest bulb in the class ought to have been able to figure that out all by himself.

The most superficial educational research on what it takes to create great learning should quickly confirm the common sense idea that the essential factor is teacher quality.  I remember ten years ago looking at this topic and finding an exhaustive study of quality of teaching outcome in Tennessee that made it clear what the one factor that enhanced student learning was.

It wasn’t the size of the gym or class size or how much you paid the teacher or how many guidance counselors you had caring for the psychological welfare of the little darlings.  It wasn’t how many levels of educational bureaucrats you had or how new the fleet of school buses was or how much money you dumped into the black hole of "reforming education."  It wasn’t how many years of experience the teachers had or how many brain-numbing courses on pedagogy she had taken. 

The one thing that made all the difference was how good the teacher was.  Just like a great football coach can create a winning team out of mediocre talent, a great teacher can inspire average pupils with a love of learning.  This is a fact that should be obvious to the dumbest student, but only recently has the educational establishment gotten around to recognizing and admitting it.

I have grave misgivings about the “Leave No Child Behind” movement, but I have to admit that one good thing came out of it.  The act required the Secretary of Education to make an annual report on teacher quality. 

Despite the mealy-mouthed bobbing and weaving, buried in the second annual report is an admission that “teacher quality is a key component of school quality-perhaps the key component.”  The report
cited Tennessee's annual student achievement data to demonstrate that individual teachers make an enormous difference in student achievement. (Sanders and Rivers, 1996).

Who knew that smart people make great teachers and stupid people make bad teachers?  Anyone ever inspired by a thrilling teacher and anyone who ever sat through the stultifying agony of an endless course by a stupid one.

Of course, the Secretary of Education falls all over himself denying that it is trivial to identify a high-quality teacher.  In the report, he asks rhetorically:

                        “How would you know a high-quality teacher if you saw one (other than
                        looking at the achievement of his or her students)? What traits or credentials
                        are related to increases in student achievement? The teacher's general
                        intelligence? The teacher's subject matter knowledge? Full certification?
                        Experience? Master's degrees?”

While the Secretary is evidently unaware of it, the answer to his rhetorical question is actually quite clear.  The research shows that of the five traits he asks about, three of them – certification, experience, and Master’s degrees – have nothing to do with how good a teacher is.  The only two traits that make a real difference are the teacher’s intelligence and subject knowledge mastery. 

Obviously, these two traits – intelligence and knowledge – are strongly related.  Any honest observer must admit that smart students learn more, learn it faster, retain it longer, use the knowledge better.  So it's really only a single trait that counts.

Teachers' general cognitive ability is the one attribute that is strongly correlated with effectiveness.  Nothing else matters.  Put a great teacher at one end of the log and a willing student at the other and you have a wonderful educational system.

Massive amounts of research show that  training in pedagogy -- the primary thing that schools of education waste time and money doing -- has zero to do with increases in student achievement.  And research also reveals that that certification requirements have no relationship to teacher effectiveness.

In short, what schools of education do and what educational bureaucrats do does nothing at all to improve teacher quality and in fact does real harm to our educational system.  The schools of education are a complete waste of time. I know whereof I speak.

I have had a recent unmatched opportunity to observe closely precisely what goes on in schools of education.  The answer is: NOTHING! I held my wife’s hand as she recently completed the requirements for a Master’s degree in education from one of the most prestigious educational schools in the world: Johns Hopkins.  I didn’t sit in on her classes, but I did observe closely all her assignments, even helped polish final drafts, studied all the online interactions.

I cannot say that this was a total waste of time for her  I can say that it was nearly a total waste of time.  What she learned in two years could have been -- and should have been -- taught in two weeks.

Burn down the schools!

Training in pedagogy has essentially no value. There is no evidence linking such training to increases in student achievement.  The single best educational reform would be to burn down all the schools of education.  In the interest of compassion, you should first empty the buildings of professors of education so long as they agreed nevermore to enter a classroom.

Not only are these schools a waste of time and money, they represent a significant barrier that keeps more qualified people out of the field of education.  Most of the smarter people that you want to be teaching your children are too smart to waste two years of their life plodding through the useless charade of pedagogy presented in schools of education.  As much as they might yearn to share their light with the nation's youth, they are unwilling to experience death by useless pedagogy.

The current educational system is specifically designed to discourage high-achieving college students and mid-career professionals from entering the teaching profession by places unnecessary, boring, useless obstacles in their path.  It is a system designed with the collusion and support of the teacher
unions to protect the boobs currently teaching our kids.

Don’t get me wrong.  Not all teachers are stupid.  But many of them are.  Face it, the teaching profession does not currently attract the best and brightest.  The last time I checked, the average education major ranked below the top twenty percent in student performance.

The system operates to safeguard the jobs of people who do not deserve to be teaching our children.  It should be just the other way around.  The system should identify and toss out of the schools the dolts, the burnouts, those who don’t care or can’t do it.

Instead, the academic standards for teachers are designedly low.  A major reason for this is to avoid dealing with the fact that high academic standards will filter out a disproportionate number of black teachers.  In order to maintain a quota of diversely colored teachers, we are sacrificing the education that our children desperately need.

Once we bulldoze down the schools of education, the next thing we need to do is to throw open the doors of the teaching profession to qualified, talented individuals.  We need to lower the barriers that bar many talented individuals from teaching.

A teaching certificate should be issued to anyone with a college degree who has:

* taken a one-semester course on pedagogy
* passed a reading and writing test
* passed a subject matter test

The states need to radically alter their certification systems, dramatically streamlining the process and create alternative routes to full state certification.  We need to attract into the educational field, the talented and intelligent people who are currently turned off by the useless bureaucratic nonsense that masquerades as preparation for certification programs.   The states need
to knock down the useless barriers to teaching that currently keep the very people we want most to teach our kids.

Schools of education have demonstrated that they are incapable of delivering high-quality teachers.  This is because they attract low-quality candidates and do nothing to qualify them to teach.  They are worse than useless.  Far from being a potential solution to the problems that education face, they ARE the problem, or at least a huge part of it.

There is absolutely no reason to have schools of education.  They have nothing to teach.  Everything that they could teach can be better taught by a master teacher supervising a student teacher. 

We need to eliminate all arbitrary barriers to entry.  Right now, an ex-president of the United
States could not legally teach a course in our public schools on political science.  A Nobel prize winning writer who failed to waste a few years in a college of education could not teach writing. 

Although few are courageous enough to admit it, racial politics is another part of the problem.  We need to abandon affirmative action and consider only merit.  Any good that artificially created “diversity” does is more than offset by the damage it does to intellectual standards.

Throw the bums out!

The jury is in.  Smart people make better teachers, create superior learning for their students.  If you want better schools, you need better teachers.  If you want better teachers you need to knock down the obstacles that keep smart people from careers in teaching and you need to eliminate the barriers that keep you from dumping bad teachers.  A major cause of our poor schools is
the teachers union, which protects incompetents.  Merely a  dramatic example is the recent case of the convicted sex offender that took New York six years to get rid of.  Not just sexual perverts, the tenure system allows countless incompetent stooges to pretend to be teachers, visiting their stultifying ignorance on our children for years.

If we love our children, if we want the best for them, if we want to prepare them for the challenges of the future, we need to give them the great teachers they deserve.  The greatest problem with our educational system is that its high purpose has been perverted.  Instead of serving the youth, it serves the educrats who operate it.  The main purpose of the system is to protect the power, privileges, and cushy part time jobs of the unionized drones who spend time there pretending to teach while posturing as someone who genuinely cares about our children.

Education is our only hope.  It is too important to leave to the pseudo-teachers we have allowed to infiltrate and sabotage the system.  Our children will have the education they need and deserve only if we have the courage to demand the total transformation of our schools that will come about if we but insist that the system open the doors to let the smartest and best teachers in and the drones and dolts out.

Unprotected!

Everyone within the university has a responsibility for the welfare and safety of students.  After all, the university exists primarily to serve students.

The concept of "in loco parentis" seems to have faded away, but even the most leftist administrator must admit that the university community as a whole bears a special responsibility to seek to safeguard those we seek to prepare for successful lives and careers.

Most of us would agree that the student counselors bear a special responsibility to students.  But, in fact, in the name of sexual equality, they are doing their charges harm.  They encourage their students to engage in a harmful form of freedom.

Just how free really is the liberated college woman?  Just maybe the right to be a guilt-free slut is not the best thing for her.

The so-called “value neutrality” found on most college campuses has left many young women rudderless.  Over the past few decades, our educational leaders have abdicated their responsibility to shape the values of our youth.

They have shown a form of moral cowardice.  They proved themselves not up to the task of confronting those who sought to undermine traditional American values by advancing the gospel of moral relativism. 

The result is widespread promiscuity and a resulting plague of sexual diseases.  Nearly half of college women -- 43% -- have been infected with the virus that causes cervical cancer.  This sexually transmitted disease, human papillomavirus (HPV) is a cancer-causing malady whose most easily
recognized sign is genital warts. At least 20 million people in this country are
already infected. 

It is distressing to me to walk across campus and think that nearly half of those lovely young women I see have genital warts.  It's like seeing a canker on a rose.

But the high risk of life-threatening and fertility-threatening disease is only part of the hazard.  The psychological and emotional welfare of our precious daughters is in jeopardy as well.   Yet this is a fact of life on campus that health professionals do not feel safe to even discuss. 

One sign of just how far the atmosphere on campus has sunk is that one of such professional in a position allowing her to be most knowledgeable about what is happening with our college women was so afraid to speak out about it frankly that she felt it necessary to publish her book anonymously.

Since publication of her book "Unprotected," the author has been revealed as Dr. Miriam Grossman, a psychiatrist at the student health service at UCLA.

How ironic it is that the same people who started the “free speech” movement at Berkeley in the 60's have created such a strict orthodoxy within academia that those who question it put their jobs at risk.

In her book, Dr. Grossman provides compelling evidence that the easy promiscuity promoted today is actually bad for many women.

The popular politically correct myth is that men and women are identical.  Despite countless generations of observation that males are much more capable of casual sex, those who argue against a “double standard” deny that sex has a different emotional meaning for women.  No one can deny that consequences of promiscuity are visited more heavily on women.  To the brutish half of the race that I belong to,  having sex can be the end of a relationship.  To fertile women, it can be the beginning of a lifelong commitment to a child.

 

I believe that males are naturally promiscuous for a sound biological reasons.  Spreading your semen is a sensible reproductive strategy.  But for the half of the race potentially burdened with pregnancy and child care, it makes more sense to be more selective, to reproduce only with males who are a good bet for hanging around and helping to rear the child.

Dr. Grossman cites evidence that indeed women are hard-wired to bond with sexual partners, citing the effects of higher levels of the hormone oxytocin on women.  (In one experiment, subjects playing a risky investment game, thosegiven oxytocin displayed "the highest level of trust" twice as often as the control group.)

She reports that she has observed among her female patients a huge number of students reporting chronic stress, eating disorders, and depression.  The ethic encouraged on campus is that sex is purely recreational,  that the casual "hook-up" culture is completely natural and that sex and love have little to do one another.

But Dr. Grossman finds that her patients’ experiences are otherwise.  They feel depressed and exploited; many suffer a loss of self esteem when they discover that they have been infected with genital warts.  This is especially true of those who acquire a strain of the virus that leads to cancer so that they must be tested every six months for the rest of their lives.

On most campuses, students can easily get a free abortion.  But if they grieve afterward – as some 20% do – their emotional distress is ignored, this medical reality denied.  That's because this fact of genuine differences between the sexes does not fit into the leftist world view .  This prevailing Weltanshaung insists that all races, both sexes, all human beings, all ages, all sizes, all shapes are equal and identical.

I wonder if the human race will ever figure out that there are some constants in human events, that the different roles played by the sexes are there for a good reason?  Males are males and women are women, and they are different.  They will never fully understand one another, and that is a good thing.  I love women.  I like it that they are so different.  I like it that I can always find something new, mysterious, baffling about them. 

My type of human being is bigger and stronger, smarter in some ways, stupider and less sensitive in other probably more important ways.  I am built to take care of them, to lay down my life to defend them if necessary, and I like it like that.  Some women seem built to hate males, and that's OK too.  I am often not too fond of males myself.   I want to preserve the differences between the sexes.  I want to protect  women who  welcome it and I want to defend the  right  of women to decide for themselves  what is best for them.

(A fuller discussion of “Unprotected” can be found at Mona Charen's blog at

http://www.townhall.com

The Case for Hate Speech

I am an apostle of total academic freedom.  This stems from my perception of the true nature of the genuine university.  A real university to me is a temple of total truth.  It is a place where scholars and students come together to contemplate and worship truth, to seek absolute truth.

I believe that absolute truth exists, but I must confess, this is largely a matter of faith.  Philosophically, I believe that something must be true, even if we are not at all sure what it is.  I do not believe that truth is relative, although it seems that our mental grasp of it must be.  At least, I know that truth perception has been a progressive affair for me.  Many things I was sure of, I now see as error or only partially true.

The deadliest philosophical error is grasping some beautiful and wonderful fragment of truth and declaring it to be total truth.  Creatures such as we, granted only partiality of perspective, are highly prone to this dangerous mistake.  Its worst result is that it renders us blind to further truth.  When we think we know everything, we perceive no need to quest for greater knowledge.

One of the odd things about my concept of the university as a temple of truth is that this lofty and noble appreciation of truth must necessarily be built on discord.  The search for knowledge, wisdom, and truth is necessarily disputatious.  We discover truth by peeling away error.  Truth is what remains after we subject ideas and ideals to the fiercest scrutiny.  Truth is what stands the test of total examination.  The search for truth is like the purification of gold.

Perhaps because truth, like gold, is so hard won, we cling to the results of our search earnestly.  What we have learned seems so valuable to us that we resist the clarity of certainty it gives us.  This means, in practice, that it is not easy for us to simply sit down and calmly see our most precious beliefs and attitudes and convictions attacked.  Our deepest ideas are so important to us that we have a strong tendency to resist giving them up or changing them.

This is why it requires great intellectual courage to be a true student and great teacher.  If we become unwilling to change our ideas -- to learn -- then we sacrifice the intellectual integrity which is an essential character trait of every true teacher.

While man might be the only animal that reasons, he is not very good at it.  It is almost impossible to remain totally unbiased.  Our ideas are accompanied by feelings.  Things that matter greatly to us arouse our passions.

Recognizing this, it is not hard to understand why some people want to establish speech codes, force people to show respect.   

Intellectually, I do not see any alternative to radical "anything goes" free speech.  It seems to me that tolerance must be total. The situation is something like that in

Evidently, I am trying to incorporate into my academic values two conflicting elements.  One is a firm conviction that an essential condition for the untrammeled pursuit of truth is complete freedom of expression.  Everyone needs to feel free to express the unallowable, the forbidden.

The other conviction is that the pursuit of truth depends on civil discourse.  I believe that reasoned discussion and debate, the free and open examination of beliefs, opinions, assertions in a robust and dynamic marketplace of ideas is the best possible way to discover and share truth.

"Come now and let us reason together."

It's worth noting that this familiar scripture is a quote from God himself.  God probably has little difficulty in calm and serene reasoning, but his creatures find the process more challenging.  True, in theory, we are capable of reasoning.

But, in practice, discussion can easily degenerate.  Argumentation becomes altercation.  Disagreement become disagreeable.  To maintain civil discourse, there seems to need to be some limits on what we say and how we say it.

 

The conflict is clear.  If everyone is completely free to say whatever they want, then the collegial climate of sincere disagreement and respectful dialogue is at risk when passions run high.  If all speech is protected speech, then fighting words and name calling can quickly make disagreement disagreeable.

But if we limit speech in order to protect the climate of community, we hamper the free exchange of ideas.  Resolving this issue is as difficult as defining pornography. 

Words can hurt

Some years ago, a student at Brown University was expelled under their "hate-speech" prohibitions for shouting racial and homophobic epithets on campus.  Yet the president of Brown University claimed that the university had "never expelled anyone for free speech, nor will it ever do so!"   The conflict between the school's commitment to free speech and the condemnation of racism was, unsurprisingly if illogically, resolved by re-defining "speech" so as to exclude racial epithets.

In short, all free speech at Brown University is sacred except words like "nigger" and "faggot" or any terms that might offend someone.  But it's not your speech that gets you kicked out of the university, it's the racist outlook that such speech reveals that earns you the boot.  All free speech is protected at Brown so long as it is <i>approved </i>free speech.  But, of course, there's the rub.  What is "approved" depends on who's in charge.  A century ago, Democratic party leaders nearly had a Duke professor's head, because he dared to suggest that a black man, Booker T. Washington, was second only to Robert E. Lee as a great son of the South. 

Things change.  Today, you can hardly find a film that does not employ frequent use of the once-forbidden "f" word.  Its status as the ultimate taboo term has been taken over by the "n" word.  Things change, but principles of free thought and expression do not.

Snigger is OK but watch that "s"

 

Snigger,snigger,snigger,snigger,snigger,snigger,snigger,snigger,snigger, snigger.

Funny thing, if you move the "s" from one end to the other a synonym for "snicker" or "titter"
becomes the plural of the primary prohibited racial slur.

Evidently, black people have been so brutalized by their great great grandparents having been slaves a century and a half ago that someone using using a derogatory term completely destroys them.  Frankly, I don't get it.  There is no one on the planet who does not have a forebear who was a slave.  Somehow knowing that some of my ancestors some hundreds or thousands of years ago were enslaved does not weigh heavily on my psyche.  It doesn't keep me from getting through the day or discourage me from trying to make my life and that of my family better.  It doesn't make me want to try to collect reparations or blame others for my own failure.

Slavery is nearly universal throughout all history and pre-history.  Freedom from slavery is what is exceptional and rare.  A society free of slavery was the invention of white men.  Slavery existed in Africa for thousands of years.  Black men captured, bought and sold and enslaved other black men for many centuries before they ever sold a black slave to a white man.  Today, Africa is the only continent where slavery still exists.

I believe that all men are brothers, children of a loving Heavenly Father.  I believe that all men are equal in the eyes of God and should be treated equally before the law.  That doesn't mean that I believe that all men are equal in intelligence, talent, strength, beauty, or character or any other human attribute.  God loves us all, but that doesn't make us identical.

It was wrong of Brown University to expel a student for shouting racial epithets.  It was NOT wrong for university administrators to decry this offensive behavior.  The way to deal with unacceptable free speech is with more free speech.  The light of truth needed to shine on this instance of hurtful speech.  Kicking this student out of the university did nothing to change his racist attitude.  In fact, it probably only hardened it.  Expelling the student did nothing to change the attitude of others on campus who felt the resentment or frustration that made this student shout out insulting terms for blacks and homosexuals.  All they learned was that they must hide their real feelings and that some thoughts, some feelings and some ideas were not safe to express on campus.

Brown University administrators missed a real opportunity.  Instead of ejecting the student for saying out loud what other students may have thought and felt, the university should have sponsored an open forum where everyone and anyone part of the university community could have spoken openly and freely on the topic.  Sunshine is indeed the best disinfectant.