SkolarzBlog

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.