We Should Live - Ben Bateman

After decades of openly hating all things masculine, American universities are shocked to discover that young men have become less enthusiastic about higher education. Actually, the academicians haven’t yet figured out that enthusiasm might be the problem. In their view, it’s just that young men are slacker sexist pigs who are inferior to young women in every way—and that’s not the fault of the universities. Time.com reports:

[A] gender gap has reopened: if girls were once excluded because they somehow weren’t good enough, they now are rejected because they’re too good. Or at least they are so good, compared with boys, that admissions committees at some private colleges have problems managing a balanced freshman class. Roughly 58% of undergraduates nationally are female, and the girl-boy ratio will probably tip past 60-40 in a few years. The divide is even worse for black males, who are outnumbered on campus by black females 2 to 1.

While educators debate whether there is a “boy crisis” that warrants a wholesale change in how to teach, colleges are quietly stripping the pastels from brochures and launching Xbox tournaments to try to close the gap in the quality and quantity of boys applying. “It’s a gross generalization that slacker boys get in over high-performing girls,” says Jennifer Delahunty, dean of admissions at Kenyon College, “but developmentally, girls bring more to the table than boys, and the disparity has gotten greater in recent years.”

Ms. Delahunty has special experience with this issue. After working on admissions committees that favored boys over girls for the sake of class balance, she experienced a moment of moral clarity after her own daughter was wait-listed. So she wrote an article about it for the New York Times in which she apologized for this unfair treatment of girls. The article generated many responses from a wide range of viewpoints. She heard from misogynists and, uh, what’s the opposite of a misogynist?

“It pissed off the feminists and the misogynists–I got both sides of the spectrum,” she told me. “The misogynists said women already have too many advantages. And the feminists said, How dare you not treat women like men.” But what most amazed her was the reaction of young women: by and large, they assumed this is just how things work. “Why aren’t they marching in the streets? That’s the part that slays me,” Delahunty says. “It isn’t fair, and young women should be saying something about it not being fair.”

And this is apparently the attitude of many college administrators: Sex discrimination against girls is a profound tragedy. Everybody knows that sex discrimination should only disadvantage boys.

Maybe they can find some solace in the thought that they aren’t really trying to help out boys. God, no! They’re really just trying to indirectly help the girls. As an admissions director for the College of William and Mary told US News & World Report: “even women who enroll … expect to see men on campus. It’s not the College of Mary and Mary; it’s the College of William and Mary.”

Memo to higher education: The boys know that you hate them. You haven’t exactly kept it a secret, even before the Duke rape case. And since you hate them so much, they have done both you and themselves a favor by not attending your schools.

(For readers who are not familiar with the problems that I’m describing with an admittedly broad brush, Glenn Sacks has a recent article that describes them more specifically.)

It started as a liberal fairy tale: At George Washington University, fliers were distributed around campus declaring “Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week” under the headline: “Hate Muslims? So do we!!!” The flier purported to come from the local chapter of the Young America’s Foundation.
The university’s response was swift and merciless. University president Steven Knapp said, “[W]e will not tolerate the dissemination of fliers or other documents that vilify any religious, racial, or ethnic group.” A student association vice president said that the fliers were heinous and supported expulsion. Campus liberals’ long-hoped-for manifestation of pure evil had finally appeared, and they savored the chance to demonstrate their moral purity.

But then the story began to fall apart. While it’s true that the Young America’s Foundation was sponsoring an Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week, they weren’t involved with the flier. A group calling itself Students for Conservito-Fascism Awareness confessed to the hoax, pretending that they expected the flier to be understood as satire. Their non-apology apology declared that “Campuses allied in their commitment to a hate-free environment and critical thinking should not allow Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week to take place.”

Then the strangest thing happened when the liberal fairy tale about hate on the right turned into a conservative cliche about fraud and slander from the left. Nobody seemed to care. The university’s spokesman has no comment.

Now the Young America’s Foundation has formally asked the university’s president to keep his word and punish hatred on campus—the hatred incited by the perpetrators of the fraud. So far, there are no news reports of the university punishing or even denouncing the hoax. It seems that all hatreds are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Update: Ann Coulter’s column today tells this story and other hate-crime hoaxes over the past few years. Her closing paragraph:

Liberals love nothing more than these constant self-righteous-athons — as if they would ever have the courage to stand up for any cause not universally supported by everyone around them.

Professor Volokh links to a study that finds no effect from abstinence education.  This sparks a predictable argument in his comments section over sexual morality and public education, with both sides assuming that this study “proves” that abstinence education doesn’t work.  It makes me wish that more people had a basic statistics education.

I’m always confused by a study that loudly announces “no difference” as the result of an experiment, as if that were a meaningful result.  In the experimental design class that I had to take to major in Psychology, I learned that the point of an experiment is to disprove the null hypothesis, which assumes that there is no meaningful difference between the groups.

If you disprove the null hypothesis, then you really have something.  You’ve demonstrated that the differences between the groups are probably due to something more than random noise.  But if you fail to disprove the null hypothesis, then you’ve failed to prove anything.  It’s really, really easy to fail to disprove the null hypothesis: Just run a lousy experiment.  If you have a lousy design or a lousy method, then you’re almost guaranteed to fail to reject the null hypothesis.

I saw this firsthand in that Experimental Design class, because it required us to design and conduct our own experiment.  Well over half the class could not disprove the null hypothesis, and it usually wasn’t because there was no difference between the groups.  It was because they allowed too much random noise to seep into their results.

Suppose that you want to determine whether noise A is different from noise B.  So you line up some subjects and have them listen to the noises.  And none of the subjects can tell a difference.  Does that prove that there’s no difference between A and B?  No!  There are plenty of alternative explanations: 1) Your subjects are deaf.  2) You conducted your experiment outside in a windstorm.  3) You unconsciously pressured your subjects not to notice the difference because that’s the result you wanted.

To summarize, as my Psych prof loved to repeat: Failing to disprove the null hypothesis does not prove the null hypothesis.

Michelle Malkin points to a story about liberal intolerance on college campuses. It’s a sadly typical story, but bears telling:

At the University of Rhode Island they have a chapter of the College Republicans, as do most college campuses. These Republicans oppose racial discrimination by government, especially of the sort that passes under the name “affirmative action”. To tweak the opposition on the nose, this chapter decided to offer its own discriminatory scholarship, which would be available only to white heterosexual American males. Read the scholarship application here. The value of the scholarship was a nominal $100, and many of the applications were satirical in keeping with the project’s overall purpose. I can only imagine the fun that the college students would have had with the essay question:

In 100 words or less, what does being a White Heterosexual American Male mean to you? As a White Heterosexual American Male, what adversities have you had to deal with and overcome?

The university’s student senate didn’t appreciate the humor, and prevented the College Republicans from disbursing the funds. And the College Republicans were fine with that. They had made their point. But the student senate wasn’t satisfied. A senate committee also demanded that the College Republicans publish an apology in the campus newspaper.

Enter the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a group devoted to protecting the rights of individuals on college campuses. FIRE wrote to the senate president and pointed out that the proposed punishment would be unconstitutional. Freedom of speech includes freedom not to speak, that is, freedom from coerced statements.

The student senate ignored FIRE’s letter and upheld its committee’s decision, and in this memo reiterated the demand for a public apology. Not just any public apology, mind you, but a specific apology to be submitted to a student senate representative and subject to the senate committee’s editorial control.

Having tried to be polite, FIRE next went to the university president with this letter, which points out that the student senate receives a large portion of a student activity fee that every University of Rhode Island student must pay as part of tuition. The university president is no dummy. He figured out that FIRE was right, and he pointedly instructed the student senate: “you may not impose any sanctions on the College Republicans, or any other student group, that requires them to make public statements which are not their own.”

So rather than demand a public apology, the senate committee has decided to de-recognize the College Republicans. The full senate will consider the matter next Tuesday.

Here maybe we can see a generation gap within the left. The baby boomer liberals were mostly true believers. They really wanted to buy the world a Coke and usher in the Age of Aquarius. If only you could increase your awareness and raise your consciousness, then you, too, could come to understand the profound truths of hippie philosophy. They were fools, but I would like to believe that most of them were at least honest fools, that most of them really believed the nonsense they were spouting.
It’s harder to believe that with the modern young leftists. If they really believed that their mishmash of trendy liberal beliefs carried any transcendental truth or power, then they would expect their beliefs to prevail on their own, absent compulsion. Coerced confessions of heresy and statements of loyalty toward the state religion may stroke the egos of the high priests, but they also amount to an admission by the high priests that their religion lacks appeal and can only be spread at the point of a sword. And in the long run, such a religion is unlikely to survive.

UPDATE: Anchor Rising provides some historical perspective, and links to this page on the URI web site, which lists various private scholarships available to URI students, including many that directly state a race or sex preference. My favorite is the Artacky and Elese Berberian Scholarship, which states a preference for Armenians. Given that Armenia is located squarely in the actual Caucasus, which makes them about as caucasian as you can get, maybe the student senate should next take aim at this scholarship.

Another far-left academician has self-destructed in a partcularly spectacular way: by advocating the rape and murder of a conservative blogger’s two-year-old son. Michelle Malkin has excerpts here. The nutcase, Deborah Frisch, has resigned from her teaching post at the University of Arizona, and it seems unlikely that she’ll find another. But the conservative blogosphere isn’t nearly done with her yet.

The story has spread across the conservative blogosphere like wildfire. The victim blogger, Jeff Goldstein, is here, though he hasn’t really put all the pieces of the story together yet; he’s just come out from under a big denial-of-service attack. Michelle Malkin’s most recent post on it is here. She always links back to earlier posts on the same subject, which is nice.

The liberal’s blog is here, and by now is full of various non-apology apologies. She’s sorry for certain specific things that she wrote, and for their consequences. But she apparently still isn’t sorry for her unbounded hatred of Jeff Goldstein and others like him. From what I can tell, she still feels that Mr. Goldstein isn’t “human” to her. (Gosh, that sentiment sounds familiar. And dangerous.)

Here’s the story presented from a liberal perspective, with as much sympathy for Frisch as any responsible person can reasonably muster. Ace was apparently in the lead on this story here.

And my thanks to RightWingSparkle for pointing me to the story. I’m having a busy summer, and can’t keep up with the blogosphere hour by hour any more.

NRO contributor Carrie Lukas has a piece today on her five-year reunion with her class at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University:

In addition to the usual cash-bar receptions and class dinner, the school offered panel discussions with names like “The UN’s Footsoldiers,” “Mobilizing Adaptive Work,” and “What We Can Learn From Non-Profits.”

Now that’s the self-important, government-celebrating, liberal elitism that I remember! These titles brought back memories of countless lectures celebrating the nobility of “public service.” The message was always the same: While businesspeople are fueled by an ugly desire for dollars, government officials are servants of the people. Self-sacrificing and motivated by the public good, those toiling in agencies and public offices deserve a special kind of reverence.

Ms. Lukas is no mere conservative undergraduate seething at the stifling liberal orthodoxy of academia. She’s five years out into the real world and has had time for her youthful rage to cool and congeal into a more durable contempt. Her former school’s continuing liberal antics at the reunion don’t make angry; she sees it all as foolish and pitiful.

I’ve long wondered how academia imagines that it will survive in its current form. All universities rely to some extent on private donations, and they rely even more on their public images as prestigious institutions of higher learning. So alumni loyalty and public image are assets to a university, just as much as its endowment. All three produce income, if managed correctly. Yet today’s universities seem bent on destroying their intangible assets. They seem determined to alienate and offend about half of their students (that is, their future alumni) in their ham-fisted imposition of liberal orthodoxy. And incidents like Ward Churchill’s non-punishment or Larry Summers’ resignation, impose a similar cost on the intangible asset of public prestige.

Political correctness is far more expensive than most universities seem to understand. The cost is high, but the bill hasn’t come due yet. In twenty years, alumni such as myself and Ms. Lukas will be in middle age and near our peak earning capacity. Twenty years beyond that we’ll be the wealthy seniors with more money than we can ever spend, with wills to write. Our phones will ring with eager undergraduates working the fund-raising phone banks in an on-campus job, asking us to contribute our alma mater.

How many of us will write those checks? How many will think back to the halcyon days of political speech codes, kangaroo date-rape courts, and raw liberal hatred from the podium—and feel an eager desire to donate?

And how many of us will be serving in legislatures? How many of us will have megaphones with which to ask pointed questions about public funding of higher education? David Horowitz is already laying the foundation for legislativel pressure with his Academic Bill of Rights, and many politicians already understand that defending kook-run universities is not a politically safe position.
I don’t understand how anyone could fail to see the problem. Universities cannot indefinitely afford to be perceived and remembered as intellectual gulags. And the problem carries momentum, like a demographic crisis: By the time the damage is easy to see, then the trend will be nearly impossible to reverse. No one can prevent the younger generation from becoming the older generation, and we are not likely to forget what we learned when we were young.

That’s a shame, in sense. Most academicians are nice, honest, hardworking people who do a good job in their chosen field. The kooks aren’t a majority, or even a plurality. They’re a relatively small group compared to the overall number of professors. But they have far more power than their numbers, because their goals are political rather than intellectual, and there is no depth to which they will not sink. It’s like Lenin’s party in the short-lived Russian legislature under the Czar: It was a minor political party that never received many votes, but its members were well organized and willing to go to extreme lengths to seize power. And they did.

So it’ll be a shame when so many honest academicians cease to enjoy the funding and prestige that they deserve because a small group of kooks has tarnished their image in the minds of alumni and the public at large. But don’t blame the alumni, and don’t blame the public. We didn’t cause the problem, and we can’t fix it. We can only keep our wallets closed until the universities convince us that they’re no longer run by kooks. Only the remaining moderates can save academia, and their numbers are steadily dwindling relative to the kooks. Maybe they could organize and fight back to save the institutions that they love. But it’s probably too late.

Entering college in 1988, I vividly remember the unbearable smugness with which we were lectured about the new cardinal virtues of academia: tolerance and diversity.

‘Tolerance’ in their lexicon turned out to mean tolerance of liberalism, no matter how extreme. It did not mean tolerance by liberals of anything they didn’t like. Diversity worked the same way: If you didn’t like their opinions, then you weren’t respecting diversity, and could be punished for that sin. If they didn’t like your opinions, then your opinions were always so extreme and unconscionable that they weren’t protected by the halo of diversity, and you could be punished or ostracized for having such horrible opinions.

It bears noting that very few of the students and professors actually agreed with this not-so-subtle thought-control program. Probably only five to ten percent were really gung-ho about it. But five to ten percent is all you need, if the rest are sheep. And they were. Most professors are content to study and teach in their chosen fields. They don’t want any trouble with politics; they have too much at risk. So they keep their heads down, their mouths closed, and their thoughts to themselves. I don’t blame them. I would do the same if my job, reputation, and career depended on not being smeared by left-wing lunatics.

Vandalism as Free Speech

Dr. Sally Jacobsen, interim director of Women’s Studies at Northern Kentucky University, was upset. Some pro-life students had erected an anti-abortion display on campus consisting of about 400 white crosses to represent aborted fetuses. (That’s about two-and-a-half hours’ worth of abortions nationally.) Dr. Jacobsen didn’t like those crosses. She felt that they were a “slap in the face” to women who might be making “the agonizing and very private decision to have an abortion.”

So she invited some of her students (all female) to help her vandalize the display. The campus newspaper reports that “The group knocked the crosses down and piled them in trashcans around the plaza, and removed the “Cemetery of Innocents” sign.” They did this in broad daylight, apparently convinced that they were exercising their right to free speech.

The pro-life group is pressing charges. The Dean of Students is making appropriate noises about how maybe vandalism isn’t free speech. But don’t hold your breath waiting to find out whether Dr. Jacobsen will suffer any professional repercussions.

The Renegade Librarian

This story really upset me. I’m not sure why. I guess it’s that the harm that people suffer from academic bias is real and specific, not just general poor education. Real people—nice people—go into academia with intellectual curiosity, thinking that they’ll get a fair shake. But they won’t. They may think that they’re safe, because politics doesn’t interest them. So they spend years of their lives training for academic careers, and then it’s all wasted in a matter of days if they express a politically incorrect opinion.

Scott Savage is Head of Reference and Instructional Services at Ohio State University, Mansfield campus. Just two months ago he agreed to server on the university’s First Year Reading Experience Committee. The committee’s task was to select books to be assigned in a required freshman reading course. Other committee members suggested predictably liberal books. Mr. Savage criticized many of their choices as too polarizing, and proposed something more neutral.

His fellow committee members didn’t appreciate the criticism. Some said that the books weren’t polarizing. Others said that they were polarizing—and that was the point. Mr. Savage responded to the latter criticism this way:

In my view it would be good for students who tend not to read to be given the choice of a book that actually interests them. But if we are decided that we want to engage our students in the kind of exchange of ideas on which the “secular” university is founded, then let’s choose something that confronts the accepted wisdom of Ohio State University! Like students and young profs did in the ’60s, man!

He then went on to recommend four very conservative books, one of which is sharply criticial of the movement to normalize homosexuality. He closed with: “I haven’t read all of these, but I would like to, and I am sure they would spark significant discussion on campus.”

We can’t quite tell what happened next, as we only have this cease-and-desist letter from the Alliance Defense Fund. It gives a narrative of events, the original email, and responses further into the discussion. The committee members didn’t get his point about orthodoxy, and they were horrified by the anti-gay book. Mr. Savage dug in his heels and fought back.

The email responses to Mr. Savage bring back memories of my college days. On the one hand, there is no liberal campus orthodoxy, and you’re delusional for thinking so. Associate Professor Hannibal Hamlin wrote to Mr. Savage:

Selecting one book does not imply that all others are neglected or suppressed, so it seems perverse to suggest that there is some active attempt to promote some notional “OSU” orthodoxy, against which you are valiantly struggling. . . . It is no stifling of free speech to point out that an author is a quack, if the author is clearly basing an argument on bigotry rather than actual fact. And while such a book might make for an interesting focus of discussion, this freshman program seems not the place for it, unless we are prepared to spend the time (and give the freshmen the supplementary reading required) to debunk the falsehood.

It only seems like academia is in the iron grip of political conformity. But that’s just a big misunderstanding. Yes, they only assign books by liberals, but that’s just because the liberal books are true, while the conservative books are full of lies and bigotry. There’s no political bias here at all! If the conservatives want their books to be read on campuses, then they should quit spouting such outrageous ideas and come up with more interesting and acceptable ideas, instead of complaining about some imaginary political orthodoxy.

On the other hand, in the next paragraph, and without missing a beat, Hamlin warns Savage that there is an orthodoxy, and an anti-discrimination policy, about which he should be careful:

On the matter of homophobia, I think you should be rather careful, Scott. OSU’s policy on discrimination is not simply a matter of academic orthodoxy, but a matter of human rights.

The real opportunist is Associate Professor of English JF Buckley. I think that he has a very promising career in modern academia, and I mean that in the worst possible way. First, he’s openly gay, which is obviously a big plus. Second, he has good political instincts. He smells an opportunity for advancement, and jumps on it. He wasn’t even on this committee, yet within hours of receiving Savage’s (unpublished) second email, he goes on the attack. In an email, he criticizes the book for about a page, and then goes for the jugular:

As a gay man I have long ago realized that the world is full of homophobic, hate-mongers who, of course, say that they are not. So, I am not shocked, only deeply saddened—and THREATENED–that such mindless folks are on this great campus. I am ending now, with the hope that I have seriously challenged you Scott, and anyone who “thinks” as you purport to do. You have made me fearful and uneasy being a gay man on this campus. I am, in fact, notifying the OSU-M campus, and Ohio State University in general, that I no longer feel safe doing my job. I am being harassed.

You might imagine that an English professor capable of writing phrases such as “I have long ago realized” might want to publish his prose only in the most obscure of academic journals. But Mr. Buckley isn’t a scholar; he’s a politician, which is why he has such a promising future in academia. So he sent that email to all@mansfield.ohio-state.edu. That might have been only all the faculty on the Mansfield campus, but more likely it was everyone with a Mansfield campus email account. In politics, as in war, you must be bold.

Mr. Buckley then joined with another openly gay professor in filing a sexual harassment complaint against Mr. Savage. Scroll on down to the last two pages of the linked document. It appears that neither Mrs. Savage, nor anyone else involved in this affair, has actually read the anti-gay book. This was all based on the Amazon.com summary, and some online columns by the author.

Regardless of how the complaint is officially resolved, I predict that Mr. Savage will soon lose his job, and he will then be unemployable at all but a handful of universities. That’s how liberal tolerance works.

HT: Clayton Cramer