The Kenyon Observer is pleased to accept the Thrill‘s challenge to a game of kickball. We look forward to arranging a time and place in the near future so we can publicize the heinous beat-down that the campus news organization has brought upon itself.
In short:
Game on.
In conjunction with his visit to Kenyon, American Enterprise Institute scholar in residence Charles Murray took some time to answer some of our editors’ questions relating to academic and political pursuits, rigor and debate.
TKO: It is possible for two people to view the same data and come up with very different causal stories to explain them. When you see data showing class separation, what are some of the possible causal stories that can be derived from said data, what is your interpretation and why do you consider it preferable to the interpretations of others?
CM: It’s not only possible, it happens all the time, and the reasons for the different causal interpretations are usually related to the analyst’s assumptions about human nature and often also related to the analyst’s first principles about human flourishing. That’s why it ought to be standard operating procedure for social scientists to do two things in every journal article and book they write. First, explicitly segregate the statement of the data from the interpretation of causes. And second, tell the reader where you’re coming from. So if you look at the opening of Part 3 of Coming Apart, you’ll see me saying to the reader, “I’m a libertarian, so I think these data constitute a call for limited government. If you’re a social democrat, you’ll think they’re a call for an expanded welfare state.” If you go back to Losing Ground or The Bell Curve, you’ll see the same kind of thing: chapters explicitly devoted to the presentation of data with no causal analysis, then a section of causal analysis accompanied by an explanation of the frame of mind I bring to that analysis. What gripes me is that you never see the same kind of straightforward statement in social science from the Left: “By the way, you should understand as you read me that I’m a passionately committed social democrat.” I explicitly avoided causal analyses for the formation of the new lower class in Coming Apart because I wanted the book to be one that people of the left could read. And it seems to have worked. For example, Nicholas Kristof felt free to write a column in the New York Times saying that I was talking about a real problem, even though my politics are nuts. For the record, I stand by the analysis of causes from Losing Ground. Answering your question more fully would take several thousand words of the Observer, so I’ll pass.
TKO: You have said before that too many people are going to college. Why?
First, genuine college-level material makes cognitive demands, even in the humanities and social sciences, that mean only about 10 to 15 percent of high school graduates can do well in college – not just struggle through, but flourish. About half of all high school graduates enter college. Something’s wrong with that picture. Second, the BA has become a credential of first class citizenship at the same time that it has become substantively meaningless. If the only thing you know about a person is that he has a BA, you don’t even know if he can write a coherent sentence. In effect, we’re saying to 17-year-olds, “You have a choice between a respectable white collar job or working at Wal-Mart.” We sneer at training in all the other ways of making a living that can be satisfying, absorbing, and yield a damn good income as “vocational training.” We’re saying that you have to go to a residential institution, stay there four years and spend a fortune so you can get a piece of paper that doesn’t say a thing about what you know. It’s idiotic and punishing to a huge proportion of young people.
TKO: Do the members of the “cognitive elite,” as you call them, have social obligations extending beyond utilizing their cognitive and economic potential to the fullest?
CM: Yes. And they’re failing in those obligations miserably.
TKO: Can you speak a bit about the “cognitive sorting” you described in Chapter 5 of Coming Apart? In educational discourse in this country, this feature is usually viewed as an unmitigated virtue; we want our schools to evaluate applicants only based on intelligence, to the extent possible. Do we need to give up this ideal, or is it possible to have meritocratic schools while bridging the gap between students in other ways?
CM: It’s one of those cases where a good thing – giving kids with talent a chance to realize their talent no matter what their backgrounds may be – has long-term collateral consequences that are problematic. The feminist revolution is another classic case. It doesn’t mean that we should stop sending the most intellectually talented students to good schools or that women shouldn’t have gotten a chance to realize their talents. Sometimes positive social trends have negative side-effects. That’s just a fact, and it’s important to ponder what might be done to mitigate them.
TKO: Some critics and reviewers, even those sympathetic to the book’s claims, have called your policy proposals implausible and idealistic. What are a few politically viable and practically feasible policies that can start to bridge the gap between the classes? Or, are these critics mistaken?
CM: I don’t think I’ve ever offered a politically viable policy recommendation. It’s almost become a point of pride, but the underlying reason is pretty simple: I can never think of any politically viable policy recommendations that would do any good.
TKO: You’ve heavily criticized the conventional wisdom that increased funding for pre-kindergarten programs would greatly improve outcomes. Why?
CM: Because the conventional wisdom is wrong. The data for long-term effects of pre-K from a program that could be implemented nationwide are terribly weak. Even the data from the most intensive interventions aren’t nearly as solid or as impressive as the advocates make them out to be. If the quantity and quality of data being used to justify universal pre-K were evidence for any less politically fashionable venture, they would be dismissed out of hand.
TKO: There was a bit of debate in Kenyon’s community in anticipation of your talk. Some were concerned that hosting you at Kenyon signaled some kind of approval of ideas which they found to be beyond the pale of reasonable discourse; others saw these complaints as inhibiting free intellectual exchange, and as not befitting an academic institution. As you’ve spoken at college campuses throughout the country and during your career, what is your sense of the attitudes of elite students (and their professors) to ideas which they find objectionable or offensive? Have you found changes in these attitudes over the years?
CM: With a handful of exceptions right after the publication of The Bell Curve, I’ve had a good time speaking on elite campuses. The interactions with the students in the Q&A have been serious and mutually respectful. The campus newspaper coverage the next day usually is to the effect that this kind of intellectual interchange is what universities are supposed to be all about. I would have thought that this kind of track record would eventually make me a hot ticket on the college speaking circuit, but it hasn’t happened. I don’t think it is students who think I am beyond the pale, but college administrators.
The Kenyon Observer welcomes back former contributor Jacob Smith ’12, who is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This post originally appeared on Margin of Error on Tuesday, February 12th, 2013. The original article can be found here.
This evening, a strong contender for the Republican nomination in 2016 will give a response to President Obama’s State of the Union Address. His Name is Rand Paul.
To some, this statement may seem surprising; after all the media has already crowded Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) the GOP frontrunner for 2016. Rubio appears on this week’s cover of Time Magazine as the “Republican Savior” and has also been crowned the new leader of the GOP by the Washington Post’s Chris Cilizza. However, for the five reasons I explain below, Rubio faces long odds at winning the Republican nomination in 2016, much less the White House.
This piece will focus on why Rubio is an unlikely nominee in 2016, but will also briefly contend that another “outsider” such as Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) would have a better chance at overcoming past trends and winning the GOP nomination than Rubio (although neither candidate would have much chance of winning the general election). (Note: Harry Enten makes a similar argument as to why Mr. Rubio won’t be elected president in 2016 here.)
As there is no indication that America is lurching to the right (indeed, the opposite may be true), it seems unlikely America would elect its most conservative (and indeed most ideologically extreme) president in modern history in 2016. Of course, Rubio likely will not even make it past the considerable obstacles he faces in the primaries. So while Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) may be the media’s flavor of the month, his (non-existent) candidacy may well have reached its high point on February 12, 2013, as he delivers the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union Address.
In conjunction with last week’s campus issue, the Observer is honored to publish a state of the college address from Kenyon President S. Georgia Nugent.
It is no exaggeration to say that Kenyon today is the strongest it has ever been. Continue reading
Our latest print issue is now online for you to read.
Our writers take on a host of hot topics at Kenyon in our last publication of the semester, from the endowment to the housing lottery and all points in between.
As of tonight, you can access the TKO blog at http://kenyonobserver.com/ without including “wordpress” in the URL (don’t worry, kenyonobserver.wordpress.com still redirects to the new domain).
Thanks to the Business & Finance Committee for allocating the funds to claim our rightful domain.
Remember to like TKO on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and read previous print editions online at Issuu.
Ariana Chomitz is a junior anthropology major from Bethesda, Maryland. She writes from Fortaleza, Brazil, where she is researching development studies.
“Frustration finally boiled over in the form of the Occupy Various Random Spaces movement, wherein people who were sick and tired of a lot of stuff finally got off their butts and started working for meaningful change via direct action in the form of sitting around and forming multiple committees and drumming and not directly issuing any specific demands but definitely having a lot of strongly held views for and against a wide variety of things.” –Dave Barry’s Year in Review: 2011
The rise and subsequent stall of the Occupy Movement in less than a year shows that it will not change American policy in a fundamental way. As thunderous as the original roar was, I would be surprised if Occupy lasts two more years, let alone twenty.
But in Brazil, a truer Occupy movement has been quietly sustained by occasional victories in a long struggle since the 1980s. Continue reading
Simon Hoellerbauer is a sophomore MLL major born in Austria. He has lived in Ohio since 1998.
A member of the audience, along with Dr. Jim Zogby, criticized John Agresto at yesterday morning’s panel on the Arab Spring, both for implying that Arab culture is incompatible with democracy and for using language that bordered on being offensive. This criticism may not be wholly undeserved, as the language Agresto employed could have been considered rather denigrating. The criticism, however, only served to obscure and push into the background the point that Agresto was trying to make, namely that one of the factors necessary for a successful democracy is a desire for one’s neighbors to be free, a desire to see the “other” be granted rights. Continue reading
Read a PDF version of this week’s Observer, a special edition covering the current conference hosted by Kenyon’s own Center for the Study of American Democracy: “Should America Promote Democracy Abroad?”
Find more information about the conference here, and follow the Observer on Twitter.
The Kenyon Observer is pleased to announce that it will be providing reactions to each of the talks taking place over the course of the next three days as part of the Center for the Study of American Democracy’s conference on American promotion of democracy. Keep an eye out for forthcoming commentary!
