The Conscience of a Conman

Something to keep in mind

The United States unemployment rate is currently 7.9%, worse than any but two periods in recent history (1975-76 & 1982-84 or so). Median household income in the US after inflation is 8% lower than it was before the crash, and 20% of American children live in poverty. The pain just isn't newsworthy anymore.

Quoting myself

I told a story this weekend about learning the economic theories and equations supporting the willful destruction of perfectly good crops, and how much that messed with my notions of intuition of right and wrong. That with all of my ideas of how things should be, I could be completely off.

That being honest and open with the world sometimes makes it more difficult to enact change. That being honest about my faith is about embracing uncertainty, and giving up part of the rationality that governs the rest of my life. That my utopias aren't and cannot be true utopias. But there I go talking about me.

Life is hard, and it sometimes sucks. The burdens placed on us are not equal, neither in terms of geography, time, or all sorts of other statuses. Sometimes we are at the high place looking down trying to see if there's a net, and sometimes we are holding the net. Sometimes we are looking and holding at the same time, in different contexts. Sometimes we can't just find our glasses, and sometimes we realize that we carelessly knocked someone else's glasses off a few days ago, as I did on Friday.

And maybe, just maybe, we can hold the net a little stronger if we grappled more with the high place. Perhaps, in staying, we can discover what our limits truly are. Sometimes we are fearful of discovering our own potential. At least I am.

Let's get one thing straight

"Internal deliberations of the executive branch" do not constitute due process. Particularly when it comes to ordering someone killed. Shame on Obama.

The argument for college.

One argument about the usefulness of college is that studying history, racism, the US after 9/11, plants, chemistry, and so on gives us a strong basis as workers, as citizens, in a way that is "objectively" useful. But that seems to cheapen the other argument - that experiencing the liberal arts is, in itself, the good - the endpoint.

That we might have a collegiate experience that embraces the earth, sky, and the vast ranges of humanity between.

Thoughts on the value of higher education

Written originally for a friend, on the subject of the usefulness of analysis:

I'd suggest this metaphor: On the Sing-Off, groups perform, sometimes well, and sometimes poorly. One of the best groups, Afro-Blue, does lots of complicated jazzy stuff that is AWESOME to listen to, but I have to read online review to understand how they constructed all of the crazy chords in the arrangement. There's a lot of difficult-to-learn theory in what they do. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHmjR1-vUpU&feature=related)

On the other hand, anyone can tell when a performance works - its obvious, and the talent that leads the base in that performance to be so awesome at improvising isn't learned - its grown.

So there's a triad here: everyone can tell if the song works or not; talent (and practice) determines if you can sing it, but education is required to understand what's going on in a communicative way.

Your talent to theorize is different than having real interactions, and different than being able to make rational judgments about the world around you. You can have a constructive voice with just those two, it's true: but there's no learning without the other third; no ability to see, long-term, how things have changed and shifted, and to predict from there the lessons that the first two talents can apply in the future.

Do we need music, or musical training to survive? Nope. Do we need voyeuristic operas? Not really. But are they worth doing, by someone? I'd say so.

And in choosing our leaders, within our own communities and within the wider cities and states and countries we identify with, pragmatic ability and common values might be the most important, but scholarship and study make for valuable components as well. The more stuff our leaders know, the less time they need to spend understanding the complex issues that reach their attention and the more time they can spend leading.

Continued, on the split between educating to do "stuff" or to understand stuff."

The academy is the only professional group in America that gets to take a crack at "everyone" (at least, those who want access to the wide opportunities that a college degree provides in terms of credentials). Ministers used to be the same way - everyone was supposed to go to church, but that role has disappeared. Coaches also only serve a portion of the populace. Only our professors remain.

Out of that comes a dual responsibility - to train and equip *everyone,* and to train and equip those who will join the academy. In a real sense there are two brands of success: the "actual" (and I mean that word in terms of "acting") and the theoretical. Williams has, perhaps inadvertently, promoted both separately: the JA variety for raw social effectiveness (in theory), and the Oxford variety for ass-kicking thinking.

In that way, Williams facilitates both the networking that some of our peers seek and the thinking that we're all "supposed" to be studying, even if its only a true priority for some of us. A lot of me is in the former category - I loved doing things at Williams, and discussions like this, but sticking to established formulae was hardly enjoyable; my largest conflicts were with history books that didn't do what I thought was useful. I picked a fight with the discipline and lost.

But that was fine, for me, because I still learned and grew from the course. I don't want to be a professional historian.

So Williams the institution celebrates its "successful" alumni, and invites Cory Booker to speak at graduation. Williams the faculty DOES NOT approve of the trustees' honorary degrees (and has told me), and celebrates research and so forth.

It's the same fight other D1 schools with big athletic programs have with underfunded classrooms - our professors own the classroom, but the classroom is hardly the whole of the campus.

Some professors engage in the real; they come on Mountain Day and advise Dodd Neighborhood; they bring their children to Shabbat dinner so that I can chase the kiddos around. They step out of math and sociology into this world.

Others choose not to.

Likewise, some at Williams cared a lot about their GPA and others phoned it in. We were a meeting place between the doers, the consultants and leaders and organizers, and the learners. In some occasions, we have individuals that fit both categories, and they (you) can feel the split you describe. 

David Brooks is Right

David Brooks is absolutely correct here:

I’ll be writing a lot about the presidential election over the next 16 months, but at the outset I would just like to remark that I’m opining on this whole campaign under protest. I’m registering a protest because for someone of my Hamiltonian/National Greatness perspective, the two parties contesting this election are unusually pathetic. Their programs are unusually unimaginative. Their policies are unusually incommensurate to the problem at hand.

This election is about how to avert national decline. All other issues flow from that anxiety.

The election is happening during a downturn in the economic cycle, but the core issue is the accumulation of deeper structural problems that this recession has exposed — unsustainable levels of debt, an inability to generate middle-class incomes, a dysfunctional political system, the steady growth of special-interest sinecures and the gradual loss of national vitality.

Certainly many of these issues can be traced to the various causes of wage inequality, among them skill-bias technical change, and they aren't the government's "fault" in the way the massive deficits from the Bush Tax Cuts are the government's "fault." Moreover, life now is much better than it was a few decades ago in many ways - we have cell phones, open communication, and longer life expectancy. But we could do better - much better.

And that's why Brooks is right. Both Bush and Obama had opportunities to be transformative in '01 and '09, and both rejected those - Bush asked us to go shopping, and Obama failed to capture the national imagination as he struggled with the recession and passing a healthcare bill, in addition to a dismal record of whistleblowers and civil liberties. Obama got away with these things because he was shrewd enough to know that he wouldn't get burned for them - and he hasn't. Our government is more and more inaccessible to the people, even as data and information comes at us via a multitude of forms and ways - Twitter and Facebook among them.

The thing about living beyond our means is that its easy to say but EXTREMELY hard to stop, because voters stop caring about deficits the moment their social security check or medicare payment is at risk. We absolutely must do some belt tightening - I am no Keynesian, and stimulus on top of stimulus won't correct the underlying issues of gluttony that weaken us. But we must fix entitlements, the tax code, and the ridiculous idea that the US can or should hold up the world. Our desire to do everything is causing us to fail in our own self-investment, and those chickens will come home to roost in coming decades.

Mark Hopkins & The Constitution

From Patheos:

Reverend Mark Hopkins, the former president of Williams College, urged the federal government to pass laws protecting the observance of the Christian Sabbath (Sunday). Hopkins argued that the Fourth Commandment ("Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy") should be embedded in American law in much the same way that commandments prohibiting murder, stealing, and "bearing false witness" were staples of the legal system. If that was not enough to convince naysayers, Hopkins emphasized Jesus' words in Mark 2:27—"The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath"—to argue that the human body was created by God in such a way that it required a day of rest. "Men and animals," Hopkins wrote, "will have a better health and live longer; will do more work, and do it better, if they rest one day in seven, than if they work continuously." Since rest was a human right endowed by God, how could a nation with Christian roots not endorse the Sabbath?

We embrace what we like from our past and ignore the very unconstitutional thoughts of Williams's celebrated President. I am left wondering, to an extent, about how "correct" my current constitutional thoughts will seem in 50 years. Perhaps anyone who thinks the government should regulate marriage will be ostracized?

Tone, Truth, and the Democratic Party

Obama wrote this blog post in 2005. I will provide excerpts and commentary.

There is one way, over the long haul, to guarantee the appointment of judges that are sensitive to issues of social justice, and that is to win the right to appoint them by recapturing the presidency and the Senate.  And I don't believe we get there by vilifying good allies, with a lifetime record of battling for progressive causes, over one vote or position.    I am convinced that, our mutual frustrations and strongly-held beliefs notwithstanding, the strategy driving much of Democratic advocacy, and the tone of much of our rhetoric, is an impediment to creating a workable progressive majority in this country.  

Obama is saying here that. Elections matter, and they matter more than specific policy wins. This post was in the context of John Roberts's confirmation hearings. Obama was writing to convince bloggers not to go after Democrats supporting Roberts, because he felt demanding purity was unwise.

According to the storyline that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists - a storyline often reflected in comments on this blog - we are up against a sharply partisan, radically conservative, take-no-prisoners Republican party.  They have beaten us twice by energizing their base with red meat rhetoric and single-minded devotion and discipline to their agenda.  In order to beat them, it is necessary for Democrats to get some backbone, give as good as they get, brook no compromise, drive out Democrats who are interested in "appeasing" the right wing, and enforce a more clearly progressive agenda.  The country, finally knowing what we stand for and seeing a sharp contrast, will rally to our side and thereby usher in a new progressive era.

I think this perspective misreads the American people.  From traveling throughout Illinois and more recently around the country, I can tell you that Americans are suspicious of labels and suspicious of jargon

Obama knows that this path is available - and he is specifically rejecting it. The Healthcare and Tax Cut deals are a part of his political DNA, one reason I supported him, and what he's saying with the bolded sentence is that the Public isn't going to catch on to the great policy goals. Because we won't get it, he shouldn't try it. Cynical.

It's this non-ideological lens through which much of the country viewed Judge Roberts' confirmation hearings.   A majority of folks, including a number of Democrats and Independents, don't think that John Roberts is an ideologue bent on overturning every vestige of civil rights and civil liberties protections in our possession.  Instead, they have good reason to believe he is a conservative judge who is (like it or not) within the mainstream of American jurisprudence, a judge appointed by a conservative president who could have done much worse (and probably, I fear, may do worse with the next nominee).  While they hope Roberts doesn't swing the court too sharply to the right, a majority of Americans think that the President should probably get the benefit of the doubt on a clearly qualified nominee.

This is Obama being aware that he's outside the mainstream in some ways, and aware that leading from the left is hard.

Or to make the point differently: How can we ask Republican senators to resist pressure from their right wing and vote against flawed appointees like John Bolton, if we engage in similar rhetoric against Democrats who dissent from our own party line?  How can we expect Republican moderates who are concerned about the nation's fiscal meltdown to ignore Grover Norquist's threats if we make similar threats to those who buck our party orthodoxy?   

I am not drawing a facile equivalence here between progressive advocacy groups and right-wing advocacy groups.  The consequences of their ideas are vastly different. Fighting on behalf of the poor and the vulnerable is not the same as fighting for homophobia and Halliburton.  But to the degree that we brook no dissent within the Democratic Party, and demand fealty to the one, "true" progressive vision for the country, we risk the very thoughtfulness and openness to new ideas that are required to move this country forward.  When we lash out at those who share our fundamental values because they have not met the criteria of every single item on our progressive "checklist," then we are essentially preventing them from thinking in new ways about problems.  We are tying them up in a straightjacket and forcing them into a conversation only with the converted.

Beyond that, by applying such tests, we are hamstringing our ability to build a majority.  We won't be able to transform the country with such a polarized electorate.  Because the truth of the matter is this: Most of the issues this country faces are hard.  They require tough choices, and they require sacrifice.  The Bush Administration and the Republican Congress may have made the problems worse, but they won't go away after President Bush is gone.  Unless we are open to new ideas, and not just new packaging, we won't change enough hearts and minds to initiate a serious energy or fiscal policy that calls for serious sacrifice.  We won't have the popular support to craft a foreign policy that meets the challenges of globalization or terrorism while avoiding isolationism and protecting civil liberties.  We certainly won't have a mandate to overhaul a health care policy that overcomes all the entrenched interests that are the legacy of a jerry-rigged health care system.  And we won't have the broad political support, or the effective strategies, required to lift large numbers of our fellow citizens out of numbing poverty.

The bottom line is that our job is harder than the conservatives' job.  After all, it's easy to articulate a belligerent foreign policy based solely on unilateral military action, a policy that sounds tough and acts dumb; it's harder to craft a foreign policy that's tough and smart.  It's easy to dismantle government safety nets; it's harder to transform those safety nets so that they work for people and can be paid for.  It's easy to embrace a theological absolutism; it's harder to find the right balance between the legitimate role of faith in our lives and the demands of our civic religion.  But that's our job.  And I firmly believe that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, or oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose.  Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose.  A polarized electorate that is turned off of politics, and easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate, works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government because, in the end, a cynical electorate is a selfish electorate.

Let me be clear: I am not arguing that the Democrats should trim their sails and be more "centrist."  In fact, I think the whole "centrist" versus "liberal" labels that continue to characterize the debate within the Democratic Party misses the mark.  Too often, the "centrist" label seems to mean compromise for compromise sake, whereas on issues like health care, energy, education and tackling poverty, I don't think Democrats have been bold enough.  But I do think that being bold involves more than just putting more money into existing programs and will instead require us to admit that some existing programs and policies don't work very well.  And further, it will require us to innovate and experiment with whatever ideas hold promise (including market- or faith-based ideas that originate from Republicans).

Our goal should be to stick to our guns on those core values that make this country great, show a spirit of flexibility and sustained attention that can achieve those goals, and try to create the sort of serious, adult, consensus around our problems that can admit Democrats, Republicans and Independents of good will.  This is more than just a matter of "framing," although clarity of language, thought, and heart are required.  It's a matter of actually having faith in the American people's ability to hear a real and authentic debate about the issues that matter.

Finally, I am not arguing that we "unilaterally disarm" in the face of Republican attacks, or bite our tongue when this Administration screws up.  Whenever they are wrong, inept, or dishonest, we should say so clearly and repeatedly; and whenever they gear up their attack machine, we should respond quickly and forcefully.  I am suggesting that the tone we take matters, and that truth, as best we know it, be the hallmark of our response. 

This is our President. Time has made him more realist, as I noted in the previous post, but this is what he wants to believe, and why I'm glad he has the job. He gets it.

On the leaked cables

In response to a request for comment on Facebook:

The leak is bad, for the same reason the Presidential Records Act is bad, as currently written and construed, because it doesn't change the thoughts, opinions, or actions of those who write cables, but DOES change what gets written down.

The Obama Team thrives before entering the White House on Instant Messaging - now, since all communications must be archived, they must rely on face-to-face conversations, which causes inefficiency, among other problems. In the same way, the leak of these cables will cause inefficiency in three ways.

First, diplomatic cables will irrevocably be written with a fear of possible public consumption, meaning that true nuance will be sacrificed for political considerations, and that those writing them will have to use language that is less explosive when explosive language is required. Second, the leaks will cause more reports to go back to the State Department in verbal phone calls, or at levels of classification (Top Secret) that aren't fitting of the situation. This, and most worrying, is that this will make it harder for someone in Uzbekistan to look up State Dept info on another country that's relevant to his work in Uzbekistan - we need information to be able to flow freely in the classified system, and because of this leak, it won't flow nearly as freely.

As for the content, I find them interesting, but there are no revelations that justify the problems caused by the release - most all of this stuff was easily guessed without official confirmation, and the private stances of foreign officials are PRIVATE for a reason - making them public won't change their public stances at all.

A comment elsewhere

One of the first things I learned when working in Washington my sophomore year is that I couldn't understand what it was like to be a minority until I was one. I lived in a majority-black neighborhood, and was the only white on my bus until we crossed the Potomac. (I also dealt with the poor infrastructure of DC every day, with roads so clogged I could often get out of one bus and walk down the street for 15 minutes to catch the one ahead.)

But in any case, there was something unique in walking every day to the bus knowing that I would be the only white person at the stop, and something unique feeling "different" each day in that bus. But that was an hour-long commute each day, and the moment I got to Eastern Market in DC, other white people appeared everywhere.

My point is that I noticed it - it was a part of my experience - and that I could not have understood that feeling from a description, because it was new. I am sure that if I felt something for an hour a day on a bus, that black Williams students feel something 24/7 on campus, where they are often the only black students in a room or around a table.

But I can't tell you what that is, because I'm not a 11% minority here. I can't understand or really describe to you what it feels like to be black, and why my classmates can get so fed up with Williams that they head back to the BSU to regroup. I don't understand, and I can't help you to understand.

So to your question:

I don't know. My guess is yes, but not having been in that situation, I can't tell you, because I know how hard it is to communicate that sort of feeling from my experiences elsewhere. There are black students at Williams who do fine, and black students that do not.

But let's take a look at the historic policies. We know that blacks in this country (and especially in my native south) suffered discrimination through Brown vs. Board and for some years thereafter. We also know that blacks were denied many of the benefits of the G.I. Bill, and I have heard other students state (but haven't looked at the sourcing myself) that national policies were destructive to the black family in the 50s and 60s. Those were our parents.

The result today is that where I went to school in Decatur, there were three black and four white elementary schools, which some black kids were bused to. The black schools had chronic issues and two were closed down during consolidation. The white schools became the administrative offices, the 4/5 academy, and two others remained open as elementary schools.

In my school system, blacks were generally not prepared at the same level as whites, with an "achievement gap" that started at birth. This meant that the Honors and AP classes at my high school were accordingly white dominated. The best and brightest blacks from my school, who took AP Calculus, went to Florida State.

Williams has a hard time finding qualified minorities because of the structural achievement gap. Part of that gap's effect is cultural - blacks who studied in my school were called "oreos" and often bullied. I never had to deal with that. Additionally, the public schools I went to were improved if you could eat breakfast at home and had a good dinner ready, something many blacks didn't have because of the different socio-economics. So there's a mixture of factors, some of them tied to money, and others tied to skin, that work against black students.

I would argue that the issues about money and class are more problematic, because blacks of means can find private environments for their children to learn, but both are aspects that would have made my life more difficult in Decatur had I been black. Not because Decatur was a bad school district - indeed, its one of the best - but because of a wide variety of factors that made stereotypes into reality within my high school's cafeteria.

So when you take the top 1% of white students and the top 1% of black students, they are probably going to look different. Add various factors that make being aware of one's blackness a liability in standardized testing and you make that 1% look worse than it relatively should.

One of the problems with our current policies (we being society) is that we pluck out that top 1% or 5% of minorty populations, and provide lots of resources - the national achievement scholarship for one - but there are two structural issues here. First, when you take that top percentage out, you are ignoring the greater mass, which is where the momentum needs to be shifted. Second, when you create special programs, you give an implicit message that "you aren't good enough for the *real* program so we have this special one." That doesn't mean such programs are bad, but rather that there is no perfect bullet to resolving the legacy of discrimination that my homestate and others unleashed on minorities.

So when a black student comes to Williams, I'm willing to state that they run a risk of being less prepared. Their school might not have had the same high standards; other factors can underlie this issue. But Williams throws them in, having recruited them, and expects them to sink or swim in a brand-new environment where they are, often for the first time, a minority. Unsurprisingly, it can be difficult, and they might have a lower GPA their freshman year.

I know this narrative because it also applies to me. Deprived of my friend group, I languished a bit in my freshman fall, and my freshman GPA was significantly lower than my other years at Williams. That one year can doom you from achieving PBK when going against others who walk into Williams intending Med School or Grad school.

So yes, I think there are issues at Williams that relate to people's backgrounds, and please note that the issues raised in Stand With Us aren't even a piece of this post. I'm only telling part of the story, whatever it is. There are issues relating to class (poor white kids are very underrepresented here relative to the country), and issues relating to race. Both are not positive, and Williams isn't on top of these issues yet.

Bob Schieffer's America

I just finished Bob Schieffer's America, a great book of his CBS commentaries that's wrapping up the tail end of my summer of reading. Among many interesting anecdotes, such as early video bootlegging, where reporters got a movie into a cassette form while in the middle of nowhere then watched it on their editing equipment, or the time he formed an "exploratory committee" for the hell of it and was sent $200, including a dollar with strings literally attached, was something I had never thought of before.

Before the equality of the sexes was any sort of value in this country, when women lacked legal protections against harassment and unfair hiring practices, there were two viable career paths that allowed for independence: nursing and teaching. Thus all of the women most interested in working were competition for a limited set of jobs, which meant that nurses and teachers came from the elite of half the country's population. And, because of wage inequities, the hospitals and schools didn't cost too much either.

It doesn't justify what happened, but perhaps the hale we find ourselves in in regards to education and healthcare is based more on expectations than reality. (which is not to say that we can and should *really* improve on these fronts.)

From the links: Bush Campaign Chief and Former RNC Chair Ken Mehlman comes out

My feeling is that the "responsible" side of the GOP is getting very close to a tipping point where they know they can't use anti-gay rage to get votes without being fundamentally dishonest and hurtful to people they know. The DC establishment knew (or suspected) his guy was gay for a while, but he's not going to be like Cheney and stay silent on the issue - he's coming out now in prep for helping national advocacy groups.

I know and love members of my family who do not feel that acting on the "wrong" sexual orientation is ok, and I don't think they are bad people for thinking so. Good people do bad things, and this is an easy bias, because all it requires is that we assume everyone to have our own orientation, which is different than assuming a false difference in status because of race or sex. I am attracted to women exclusively; pretending and acting otherwise would be a sin. I await the day that the Christian establishment (though there shouldn't be one, at least not for baptists) comes to its senses and realizes that the Bible isn't in conflict with natural homosexuality (which I believe), or just ignores those passages (which is more likely, as was the case with slavery).

Forcing people to live a fake life is wrong. The web is replete with stories of gays who have suffered from their own inborn prejudices as they discover their "unnatural" sexual orientation, and who have gone through hell trying to "right" themselves. Forcing people to actions that God doesn't want for them is horrible.

Stand With Us: my memory and regret

I was a leader in the Williams "Stand With Us" movement, which seemed to be a coalescing of opinions and feelings that had been long-felt but not acted upon. The group formed at Williams in the February of my freshman year, and successfully put on a rally/march + a day called "Claiming Williams" the next year. I was a leader of the third subgroup of SwU, which unsuccessfully sought to create student-generated community standards instead of relying on the Dean's Office for those rules. However, fears about thought crime and harsh punishments for un-PC speech stifled my groups efforts, which taught me a huge deal about leadership and communication.

The events were catalyzed by what was written on the door of a frosh in Willy E, next door, but were much more tied to long-standing patterns and emotions that provided the impetus for the organization. One of Stand With Us's biggest issues, as I saw it, was that the larger campus never heard much (or realized much) about the long-standing emotions, and only saw a bunch of students and faculty getting riled up about a word written by some drunk dude on a door.

So from the start, Stand With Us was understood very differently by those inside and outside of it. The meeting that established the shared feelings of those within the movement was on a Wednesday night. I had conflicts, but ultimately chose not to go because I didn't think much would come of the meeting. Instead, I heard the next day that students had talked and shared for over three hours about their pain and feelings about how this college treated some of them as second-class, in a way. These feelings were sometimes caused subtlety - a look of suspension, a dismissive comment, or a bothersome policy for financial aid kids, but also had occasional and rare explicit causes: words shouted in a dining hall, graffiti on a door, and other thing documented by the MCC.

That first meeting was more than enough to establish intra-group legitimacy: there was never a question after that that Stand With Us wasn't responding to a real, tangible problem affecting many students. The problem was that that legitimacy didn't extend to outside of the group, and to an extent, didn't a extend to me. I saw first hand the passion of so many student leaders, and I knew that whatever was causing them to act, their feelings weren't shallow or opportunistic - this was a real passion.

The problem was that after that first meeting, there really wasn't much said about what had caused those feelings. I spent hours on WSO arguing for Stand With Us on faith - faith that these feelings had real causes based in our dynamics on campus, even though I didn't see the causes for such frustration for myself. I heard a few things, sure, about a time when some Ephs crossed the street to avoid walking by another student wearing "gangster" clothing, but nothing that really justified what was going on around me. Yet, I knew it was justified, and treated it as such. And through all of the Stand With Us saga, continued to assume the justification. I don't think I ever really understood all of the causes for the feelings and emotions. Perhaps that was impossible.

But Stand With Us acted as if it was easy - as if anyone with a modestly functioning brain could see a culture of "hatred and indifference," and that those who didn't were negligently ignorant as "indifferent." That turned a lot of people off, and was part of a "with us or against us" dynamic that caused me to choose not to follow the march. After it, students spoke to me about how uncomfortable they had felt as marchers came into their common rooms and study spaces, inviting them to make a statement they couldn't identify with, but with an implicit judgment on those who were "indifferent." People don't like being identified as bad, and reacted defensively, turning what should have been a universal stance against bigotry into a divisive campus issue with two sides arguing over WSO and dinner tables alike.

Even worse, some reacted by saying that the feelings and emotions of SwU members were flawed or false, an attack on validity that caused more heightened emotions as people felt attacked for an emotion they didn't want to have in the first place. SwU members were described as "looking for a battlefield" and choosing Williams to fight national issues that supposedly weren't present here. In focusing on the overreaction's illegitimacy, many forgot that there had to be some reason, somewhere, for so many to care so much. But there wasn't a lot of talking about this - just an assumption on one side that the justifications were obvious and on the other that they were invented.

And so the fracture continued, and never healed. Those of both perspectives continue to this day, I think, with the same feelings on the group and what it did, and I find that to be unfortunate. Stand With Us was a huge learning opportunity - I found out how much names matter in defining what a policy proposal is - but we squandered this chance to understand each other, and instead assumed that those with opposite opinions were deficient. I don't know how I could have fixed this, or even if it should or could have been fixed by me, but I do regret it deeply.

Rankings in detail: arbitary comparisons

After a long day returning to the office from a fabulous Eph vacation, little could have warmed my heart more than the kind complement from ShuffStuff @ Tumblr, and hope that these musing manage to satisfy. I also wrote a shortened version of the below a few days ago when the Forbes rankings came out.

Let's start by taking a look at what US News says about their rankings:

• Do use the rankings as one tool to select and compare schools.
• Don't rely solely on rankings to choose a college.
• Do use the search and sort capabilities of this site to learn more about schools. Visit schools, if possible.
• Don't wait until the last minute. College matters. Take your time, and choose carefully.
• Do think long and hard about the right place for you.

The problem, of course, is that the text above is two clicks away from the main rankings page, which lacks any sort of guidance about how to use the rankings. Why? Because the entire point of the rankings is to be a big deal, which makes US News a big deal. I can't think of a time that the magazine is in the news except for these annual rankings, which might be why Forbes just started its own rankings. Any sort of equivocation (a la "these rankings are part of balanced breakfast of high school counselors, visits, research, etc") would only hurt the impact of the rankings.

Because, let's face it: they're sexy. The world of higher ed is a heck of a lot easier to understand when you have a clear numerical order of every single US college. Far from adding any doubt, US News puts the top three in each category on a pedestal as if to say: these are the best places to get a good education because..... why? Let's see (subpoint percentages are the fraction they represent of that subsection:

• Undergraduate academic reputation (22.5 percent of total ranking)
• 66% peer assessment (48% survey response rate)
• 33% high school counselor assessment (21% survey response rate)
• Graduation and Freshman retention (20 percent of total ranking)
• 80% 6-year graduation rate
• 20% freshman retention rate
• Faculty resources (20 percent of total ranking)
• 30% proportion of classes with fewer than 20 students 
• 10% proportion with 50 or more students
• 30% Faculty salary (adjusted based on cost-of-living differences)
• 15% proportion of profs with highest degrees in their field
• 5% student-faculty ratio
• 5% proportion of faculty that are full-time
• Student selectivity (15 percent of total ranking)
• 50% entering classes SAT Math/Verbal & ACT composite scores
• 40% proportion of students from top 10% of their high school (GPA)
• 10% acceptance rate
• Financial resources (10 percent of total ranking)
• Spending per student on "instruction, research, student services, and related educational expenditures."
• Graduation rate performance (7.5 percent of total ranking)
• Performance of the class of 2003 relative to an "expected graduation rate" based on Pell Grants, SAT Scores, etc.
• Alumni giving rate (5 percent of total ranking)
• Percentage of alums who gave to Williams two years

The above isn't quite as sexy as "Williams is the #1 college in the US," is it? In fact, it makes damn little sense, if for no other reason than that all of these ranking tools are based on different variables. Even if test scores are 1.25 times as high school performance, how do you compare school A (with avg SAT of 1400 and 50% of frosh who were top-ten percent in high school) to school B (with avg SAT of 1350 and 60% frosh who were in top-ten percent in high school). You can't!

In order to do so, you have to state some sort of equivalency between them: that every 10 points in SAT is worth some percentage of high performing students in high school. How do you set this?  How do you compare differences in faculty salary (crudely adjusted on regional indexes that have little to do with the cost of living (COI) in a college town with percentage of classes with under 50 students?

I see seven different and incomparable variables up there (reputation survey score, percentages, money, student-faculty ratio, SAT score, ACT score, "graduation rate performance.) These variables cannot be compared without an arbitrary relative weight of . No such formula is dependable unless you use statistics to make a z-score that depends on the distribution of each of the variables, but this incredibly unsexy method is still arbitrary, albeit mathematically.

So to sum up: Arbitrary comparisons of unrelated variables are arbitrarily weighted within subcategories, which are then arbitrarily rated together to produce a composite score such as "100," for Williams. And since Williams's 100 is almost certianly based on a curve, that means that every other score is also curved according to a formula that isn't disclosed.

In short: These sexy rankings aren't quite so nice looking when you strip them down.

Image source

Palin's Tweets

A moment of partisanship:

Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refute the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real 12:58 PM Jul 18th via Twitter for BlackBerry®

"Refute?" What? Yes, the pain at the Twin Towers site is probably raw, but that has very little to do with the rights of Americans to worship. Furthermore, the "Ground Zero Mosque" is a community center that's a block or two away - not even visible.

Peace-seeking Muslims, pls understand, Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. Pls reject it in interest of healing 1:57 PM Jul 18th via Twitter for BlackBerry®

The subtext is that Americans (who happen to be Muslim) as responsble for America's "healing," and should accommodate people who are scared of their fellow citizens' right to worship. Building a church is not provocation in foreign countries where Christians killed people, right? This is the same way. It's xenophobic & wrong. I will acknowledge that there are Americans who equate all of Islam with 9/11, but Gov. Palin's role should be showing people what freedom of religion is all about.

"Refudiate," "misunderestimate," "wee-wee'd up." English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it! ! 3:38 PM Jul 18th via web

New words are cool when we don't have words that already mean the same thing. Switching out an f for a p does not a decent new word make.

Rant over.

What happened to studying?

From the Boston Globe:

They come with polished resumes and perfect SAT scores. Their grades are often impeccable. Some elite universities will deny thousands of high school seniors with 4.0 grade point averages in search of an elusive quality that one provost called “intellectual vitality.” The perception is that today’s over-achieving, college-driven kids have it — whatever it is. They’re not just groomed; they’re ready. There’s just one problem.

Once on campus, the students aren’t studying.

It is a fundamental part of college education: the idea that young people don’t just learn from lectures, but on their own, holed up in the library with books and, perhaps, a trusty yellow highlighter. But new research, conducted by two California economics professors, shows that over the past five decades, the number of hours that the average college student studies each week has been steadily dropping. According to time-use surveys analyzed by professors Philip Babcock, at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks, at the University of California Riverside, the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. Today’s average student hits the books for just 14 hours....

The article goes on to state that the specific numbers (which I would like to see) show a decline across fields, college types, and various other demographics.

I'd say, though, that in my case, the issue is the accessibility of distractions or other ways to spend my time. I know, cognitively, that I should spend 3 hours reading a book passage, but those 3 hours get filled with a phone call, an e-mail, and other distractions such that my time (and more importantly, comprehension) is more limited. For the most part, I still learn what I need to learn, and oftentimes, more of the "aha" moments occur outside of the classroom. Yet I don't study as much as I should - I feel a lesser need to memorize who said what when it is so easily Googleable.

I don't have a solution, but I have been working for the past few months on building a personal set of memorized information, like the various philosophers whose ideas supported the American government construction of rights, and placing that where no power outage can threaten it.

A comment on Israel

Posted without a link to the original post (about standing up for Israel), since I don't have permission to link to it.

Nearly all of my exposure to Jewdom has come at Williams. I had a single Jewish friend growing up, but he went to a different high school and I never really talked to him about faith.

So in the Williams world of political apathy and happy dinners at the JRC where I get tastes of Jewish culture, I'm always a little surprised when someone steps out of the apoltical box and defends Israel, or when I learn that Jewishness is a prerequisite for any sort of romantic relationship. The friction comes, I think, because I thought of Jews as a religious group akin to my Baptists, but I think posts like this reflect a deeper Jewishness that I certainly don't understand. I still remember when someone was surprised I didn't automatically know who was Jewish on College Council; there's a common knowledge or culture that I certainly never tapped into growing up. It feels like Jews are acting like a race, weirdly enough, and that doesn't compute for me.

So that means that I'm surprised by these seemingly hidden bonds of Jewdom, and I can feel an internal reaction of bias against you since a line that I grew up thinking to be fairly weak has suddenly risen strongly between us. There's suddenly a club I can't join, and my ego doesn't like it.

Hopefully, that bias is nullified by the fact that it is recognized, but I think it's a factor in what you observed - people don't like the idea of what can sometimes appear to be a global network of people with more than friendly loyalty to a country not their own. It might also reak a little of the Jewish banker stereotype, but I'm not talking about power, but rather allegiance.

Now to your piece. I'm going to post reactions as I read through.

The surprise you expressed at seeing the flyer seemed a little surprising to me. Your wording suggests that you think the flotilla tragedy was the cause of this meeting; I would strongly suggest otherwise. The issues that I have with Israel aren't part of the raid; while I think the loss of life was sad, it was a confusing situation and stuff happens. I find it interesting that Israel got so much flack when the US has killed many more civilians with bombs in Afghanistan.

My issues with Israel, off the top of my head so that I show a gut reaction, are essentially these:

There seems to be an element within Israel that believes the country should be expanded to include the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip. This group violates international agreements by constructing "settlements" that are actually fortified outposts, and takes homes away from Palestinians who have lived in them for generations. There is no justification for ignoring these treaties, since the reciprocal would be someone taking over Jewish land.

What's interesting about this is that the anti-settlement faction within Israel is just about invisible to me, and because of this, I perceive the country as expantionist: going beyond the borders that it agreed to by treaty.

Israel continues to receive a large amount of American aid that I have never seen reason for. That doesn't mean such a reason doesn't exist, but instead that all I hear about is X billions going over to Israel while people I know here are not going to get unemployment because the Senate scuttled it for fiscal reasons. That's another strike.

Lastly, there's a strong feeling that AIPAC is supoer-powerful and controlling; that to speak against is Israel in any way, shape, or form is to commit a sacrilege. If I was interning on the Hill, I would be sufficient scared about AIPAC not to post this for fear of what it might do to my boss. In my mind, AIPAC = Rush Limbaugh; you can't go against it/him without paying a heavy price.

So the three things above combine for me to think that Israel is a state expanding with American dollars that I can't speak against because of it's domestic power. That's a pretty awful perception, and all of the good I know Israel does from visiting its embassy, reading Alan Dershowitz, and reading the news doesn't change the fact that Israel feels like an unjust state.

I'm an advocate for soft power; I think Bush hurts our horribly with his actions regarding rendition and torture, and I think our security was damaged by those perceptions, which I would seek to reverse. The problem for Israel is that for most of its neighbors, those perceptions will never be reversed; without agreement on the right to exist (which I would say is real), so Israel focuses more on hard power than soft power. After all, the perceptions of the people where you are are ultimately much less important than stopping another suicide bomber.

There's a bias in the world to sympathize with the person/group who lacks hard power, and so you end up more vilified than the idiot (I use the term in the classical sense) bombers who imagine their actions to be doing good. That's sad, but Israel seems to have chosen safety at home while neglecting, to some extent, soft power abroad.

So that's how you end up standing in front of a hostile crowd, and I'm sorry that the situation was so uncomfortable. You seem to have conducted yourself quite well, and I commend you for sticking around to talk, and to build bridges of trust over this polarized chasm.

I would also say that generic anti-Jewish bias still exists, and that sucks a huge deal. Holocaust denial amazes me.

But the more you do to argue your point politely and rationally, the more people will see you as the face of Israel, as opposed to the racist Jews who end up on youtube or blogs for spitting on, beating up, and being cruel to Palestinians.

What confuses me about the healthcare debate

We know that healthcare costs are rising faster than incomes/GDP. We can further predict that they will continue to rise.

Insurance companies make profits, yes, but they primarily raise prices because healthcare costs more.

In other words, our pie of healthcare spending is growing, so insurance companies, which spread the costs of the pie evenly, are going to be raising prices for everyone.

And there's no way to avoid that until we can control costs.

Right?

Williams heavy feature in AP story on loans

From the AP (Washington Post):

The move comes a week after Williams College, a private liberal arts school in Williamstown, Mass., became the first school to announce it would rescind a no-loans policy, starting in fall 2011. Williams has said the neediest students will not be required to take out any loans, but it has not announced details.

"Our financial aid program will continue to be one of the most generous anywhere, as it should be, and we are convinced that Williams will remain financially attractive to aided students at all levels of income," interim President Bill Wagner wrote in a Jan. 31 letter.

I can't imagine this will be good, but everyone already applied, and it won't affect those who matriculate, soooo.....

who knows.