Why Admitting Women Raised Test Scores

Several men's colleges found that their test scores went up significantly when they admitted women. The readiest explanation is that women are just better students than men. In many respects this is true.

Joseph Soares, in The Power of Privilege: Yale and America's Elite Colleges, treats the story of the supposed displacement of the old boys' network by meritocracy at Yale and other elite colleges. I will consider the major conclusion of his work tomorrow. Today I want to lift up an illuminating detail of that process.

Yale has always admitted men of the northeastern Protestant establishment who showed promise of turning into leaders. In the early 20th century increasing numbers of smart, promising men who were not of the northeastern Protestant establishment also wanted in. Most challenging to Yale and the other elite colleges were the Jews, known in Yale euphemism of the '30s as "Brooklyn boys." The Ivies and other elite colleges invented the College Board and its standardized tests as a way of screening all applicants in a common way. At first they expected that the northeastern Protestant rich boys would win on that test, too, as they had on other selection criteria. It soon became clear that non-WASPs, especially Jews, were doing quite well on the standardized tests. It also became clear that the SAT and other standardized tests didn't predict school performance very well, anyway.

Thus, Yale and the other elite colleges scaled back the weight they put on standardized tests in the '50s and '60s. They developed many other measures of leadership potential for the young men they considered for admission. Test scores counted to some extent, but the "character" and "culture" measures, though less quantitative, counted for a great deal.

When Yale decided, in a hurry, in the late '60s to admit women, the men who had always run admissions felt at a loss to know how to weigh the character, culture, and leadership potential of women. So for the pioneering classes of "co-eds," Yale relied almost exclusively on test scores. As a result, 1970, the first full year of women's admission to Yale College, Yale posted its highest average test scores.

The median SAT verbal score for the class admitted
in 1952: 634
in 1970: 699
in 1992: 660

By the end of the '70s Yale had figured out how to weigh women's character, too -- which meant they admitted women with lower average test scores, just as they had always done for men.

Admitting women to Yale -- and probably at other former men's colleges -- temporarily raised standardized test scores significantly because that was all they had to go on. When the rudiments of an old girls' network began to be constructed, Yale women could have lower test scores, "gentlewoman's Cs," and leadership potential. Just like the men.

Gross Happiness 3

Arthur Brooks is an economist, so it is not surprising that the latter half of Gross National Happiness is devoted to the correlation of different economic conditions with happiness.

His main finding is that happiness correlates most with your view of mobility, not with actual inequality.

The United States has a high level of income inequality compared to other industrialized nations. However, how happy people are does not correlate well with what income they have. Instead, the happiest people are the ones who believe that you can change your income if you want to - regardless of what your income is now or of how much it has actually changed. Likewise, the least happy people are the ones who believe that it is hard to change your income - regardless of what your income is now or how much it has actually changed.

Brooks is a free marketeer, though not an all-out libertarian (he is, after all, a practicing Catholic). He thinks that free markets promote mobility, and they promote the belief in mobility. Both of these things -- actual mobility, and the belief in mobility -- add to gross national happiness.

Mrs. G. thinks Brooks should have made a much stronger case for the Catholic social teaching that promotes property ownership for all. I agree, though I think this is more a difference of emphasis in Brooks' argument than of his actually rejecting Catholic social teaching.

The summary number that Brooks gives us is a comparison of two measures of inequality (the Gini coefficient). On a scale from 0 to 1, with 0 meaning everyone is the same and 1 means they are all different, the income inequality measure for the United States is .44, which is fairly high. On the other hand, when we compare how people think about mobility, the difference among Americans is only .18. The gloomy end of the distribution, who think that it is hard to change class position, is a pretty small -- and unhappy - minority.

Gross Happiness 2

I wrote earlier about Arthur Brooks' Gross National Happiness. There I was reporting his headline finding that conservatives are happier than liberals. We read the whole book in our summer study group, so now I can report a bit more fully.

The first part of the book looks at marriage, parenthood, religion, and political ideology as they affect long-term happiness. Here is the summary contrast:

Married, conservative, religious parents who say they are very happy: 52%

Single, liberal, secular, childless people who say they are very happy: 14%

Form of Government is Still The Most Important Issue at the General Assembly

All this week I have been blogging on the Presbyterian General Assembly.

The FOG has been somewhat overshadowed in the last few days of the Assembly by the usual sex fights. In the long run, though, the proposed revisions of the Form of Government are a better way to deal with divisive issues, such as sex. The genius of the presbyterian, connectional system is that we trust our own presbyteries to justly discern the essential tenets of the Reformed faith and our constitution. This has always meant that some presbyteries are more liberal, and some presbyteries are more conservative, and most are in the middle. This has always meant that if a minister moved from one presbytery to another, he or she ran the risk of a tough examination and a no vote.

The Peace, Unity, and Purity report adopted at the last GA started the process by restoring the Adopting Act of 1729. The intent of the nFOG is to return the Book of Order to a framework guiding the detail work of presbyteries, rather than a rulebook through which one end of the church punishes another. We can complete the process with Book of Confessions revision to restore one authoritative confessional standard to the church, which would also be a framework for the detail work of the presbyteries.

Now, more than ever, we need to discuss the new Form of Government, modifying it if necessary, and adopt it at the next Assembly. Our current plan of division, dilution, and schism is clearly not working.

My Advice to Conservative Presbyterians: Stay and Compete

All this week I will be blogging on the Presbyterian General Assembly.

The General Assembly approved three out of four liberal measures on sex. They voted to amend the constitution to drop the "chastity and fidelity" requirement of church officers. They voted to replace the previous "authoritative interpretations" of the constitution that prohibited acknowledged, active homosexuals from being officers of the church. They voted to retranslate one of the confessions so that it no longer condemns "the homosexual perversion." Late last night they stopped short of redefining marriage away from "one man and one woman."

The coalition of conservative groups sent out a very disheartened message. A dozen congregations were dismissed to other denominations last year, mostly to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, and there were some harsh words about the EPC at the Assembly. One of the last things that happened at the end of last night's grueling session was a proposal to deal with pastoral kindness with congregations that want to leave the denomination. It passed overwhelmingly. "Good bye and good luck," seems to be the liberal strategy, which is matched by the conservative mood.

I say to conservatives: stay and compete. The vast majority of Presbyterians do themselves believe the essential tenets of the Reformed faith. Almost all the growing congregations in the PC(USA) are conservative. Conservatives are more likely to marry, have kids, and be optimistic about the future. There aren't really many liberals in the church. What we see in the Assembly year after year are majorities of commissioners who personally have a traditional faith, but also believe in tolerating deviants (in both directions from the center). The future is actually pretty bright for traditional Presbyterian faith. It is just the rules that are getting loosened, not so many of the people.

So stay and compete. How people vote with their feet matters the most in the end.

FOG Goes to the Hustings

All this week I will be blogging on the Presbyterian General Assembly.

As expected, the General Assembly sent the new Form of Government to the presbyteries for discussion. They fended off several attempts to mess with it, including an anarchic proposal to let everyone suggest their own new FOG.

I have volunteered to my General Presbyter to help organize our presbytery's discussion. I think that a concerted effort should be made to get the ministers and elders most involved in the life of the presbytery to get together at a special meeting to hash it out. I am hoping for food, serious homework, and an outcome.

I urge all readers of this blog in a position to do so to volunteer for similar service. By my estimate, perhaps two dozen people really understand what nFOG says, and I am not counting myself in that number. The only way to get informed enough to have a real opinion is to read the thing and talk it over with other informed, concerned people.

That, I believe, is to build up the denomination from the grass tops.

Belhar: Good Confession, Bad Constitution

All this week I will be blogging on the Presbyterian General Assembly.

The Theological Issues and Institutions Committee recommended that the Belhar Confession be studied for possible inclusion in the Book of Confessions. The Belhar Confession is one of the great anti-apartheid documents in South Africa. It should be read and studied by Reformed Christians.

But it does not belong in the Book of Confessions.

My concern is not with the specific substance of the confession. It makes as much sense to put Belhar in the compendium of great confessions as it does Barmen. They should be understood and honored.

The Book of Confessions is supposed to be the first part of the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). It is supposed to be the answer to the question "what do Presbyterians believe?" For ministers and elders, it is supposed to be the legal standard of belief in the church.

Instead, the Book of Confessions has become The Museum of Pretty Words That We Honor Whenever it is Convenient. We don't confess the confessions. We have literally turned them into banners. Their names function as symbols, but their contents are not in any way binding. Indeed, most officers of the church could not even name all the confessions -- go ahead, ask some.

Adding the Belhar Confession to the Book of Confessions will just add to the erosion of the confessions from working rule to wallpaper.

Schism Acceleration Act of 2008 Passes Committee

All this week I will be blogging the Presbyterian General Assembly.

The Church Orders Committee voted to delete the "chastity and fidelity" amendment from the Book of Order.

In its place the committee proposes this new standard:

Those who are called to ordained service in the church, by their assent to the constitutional questions for ordination and installation (W-4.4003), pledge themselves to live lives obedient to Jesus Christ the Head of the Church, striving to follow where he leads through the witness of the Scriptures, and to understand the Scriptures through the instruction of the Confessions. In so doing, they declare their fidelity to the standards of the church. Each governing body charged with examination for ordination and/or installation (G-14.0240 and G-14.0450) establishes the candidate’s sincere efforts to adhere to these standards.

The vote was 41 - 11. Many on the losing conservative side did not return after dinner for the voting.

Liberals have tried to delete the chastity and fidelity standard twice before. One of the liberal proponents of this current deletion attempt, Rev. Sue Fisher, said “One day this will be deleted,if not today then some day and I want to give the Assembly the opportunity to determine if this is the day.”

I have found that many liberals have a sense that history is on their side. At the same time, they are more pessimistic about the future of the church than the conservatives tend to be.

There may come a time when the presbyteries trust one another to judge justly enough, without having to spell out a national standard. That time has clearly not come. I think the only effect of yet another attempt to delete the sexual behavior standard from the constitution will be to drive out more congregations that are sick of having to re-fight this fight.

Heidelberg Revisions

All this week I will be blogging on the Presbyterian General Assembly.

Last night the Committee on Theological Issues and Institutions voted 33 - 26 to change the Heidelberg Catechism in our Book of Confessions so that it no longer would condemn "homosexual perversion."

Question 87 now reads:

Q. 87. Can those who do not turn to God from their ungrateful,
impenitent life be saved?
A. Certainly not! Scripture says, “Surely you know that the unjust will never come into possession of the kingdom of God. Make no mistake: no fornicator or idolater, none who are guilty either of adultery or of homosexual perversion, no thieves or grabbers or drunkards or slanderers or swindlers, will possess the kingdom of God.”

This translation from German was made in 1962, and was adopted along with many other documents into the Book of Confessions in 1967. It is the only place in the church's constitution in which homosexuality is mentioned. People who want to change the translation (that is, the winning side in last night's committee vote) say it is a bad translation. People who want to leave it the way it is say it is a better representation of the intent of the catechism, and of current church understanding, since it more directly quotes scripture. Specifically, in the King James Version, I Cor. 6: 9-10 reads:

9Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,

10Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.

I don't know enough German to speak to the merits of the translation question.

I can say, though, that the only time I have ever heard this passage discussed is in debates like this one. That is, in all the debates about homosexual orientation, homosexual practice, gay ordination, and same-sex marriage in the Presbyterian Church -- a debate I have followed pretty closely -- I cannot recall anyone saying that their position on this issue was swayed by what the Heidelberg Catechism said. All discussions about Question 87 have been pre-emptive attempts to change/preserve the wording of the current translation in case someone wanted to make something of it later.

And yet, no one does make anything serious of what the Heidelberg Catechism says, or pretty much what anything in the Book of Confessions says. We have made all the confessions merely advisory, and ignore them at will. That is, we do not confess the confessions.

The whole Heidelberg translation issue is not really about changing a serious or effective part of the Presbyterian constitution. It is a symbolic feint in the ideological struggle over normalizing homosexual practice.

What the church really needs is a confession it actually confesses. Then we can have a serious discussion of how, exactly, it is worded.

Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment

On this slow day of the GA, let me introduce my latest contribution to building up the Presbyterian Church. My pamphlet, Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment, has just been published by the Re-Forming Ministry project of the church. You can download the pamphlet here, or order a hardcopy (with a nice, stained-glass cover) from the same site. There is also a Facebook group to sponsor discussion of the pamphlet here.

In a nutshell, I think that the Presbyterian Church used to have an establishment of leading pastors and elders who we honored and trusted. This was a great asset in times of conflict. The Special Commission of 1925 was such an establishment group. The church turned to them to settle the fundamentalist/modernist controversy of the 1920s. However, in "the Sixties," we deliberately unmade our establishment in the church, as in society at large, and made structural changes to prevent a new establishment from arising. And now when we need one, we don't have one.

I expect that most of the people most interested in my analysis are tied up with the General Assembly now. I had thought that the discussion of the Presbyterian Establishment idea will begin in earnest after the dust settles from the GA.

I was gratified to see, though, that there are two commissioner's resolutions that seem to promote two structural changes I also support. One would grant presbytery staff advisory vote. This has been referred to committee. Another would phase out the advisory committees. This one was declined. Still, I believe in incremental change, and these proposals seem a step in the right direction.

"Presbyterian 2.0 has been seriously unleashed"

These are the words of Bruce Reyes-Chow, the newly elected Moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA). He won on the second ballot. He almost won outright on the first ballot, in which he had 48% in a field of four. Bill Teng, the most conservative candidate, showed a respectable second with 36%. (As an aside, it is a great day for a church when the serious race is between a Reyes-Chow and a Teng. Come on, honey-colored nation!)

I do not read this election as primarily liberal vs. conservative, though Reyes-Chow is clearly left of center in the church. What he really is is a full-on Gen-X. And what I really like about Gen-X is that they like to get things done. Boomers tend to talk about "I'll fight for you" or "I'll push for change." Xers just do it. Reyes-Chow is actually building a new church in San Francisco, one of the most secular cities in America, and he is doing it with other under-40s.

He pushes my buttons on a personal level too. He blogs everything. He and his wife have three little kids, who figure prominently in the narrative. He describes himself on his personal blog as "pastor/geek/dad/follower of Christ." He describes his blog as "Just an idiot with a Mac." The disclaimer frees his church, family, pet, imaginary friend, and "Rufus, the thirteenth disciple" from responsibility (the Gruntleds are big "Dogma" fans). My kind of guy.

Several years ago, when some well-meaning but ineffectual Boomer was gassing on about our good intentions in church, I turned to Mrs. G. and asked (quietly), "Can't we just pay the Xers to take over now?"

I believe the General Assembly has answered that question in the affirmative.

GA: Form of Government is the Primary Issue

The proposed new Form of Government (FOG) is the single most important issue before the Presbyterian General Assembly. The idea behind the proposed revision is to make the government section of the Book of Order less of a regulatory manual and more of a constitution made of basic principles. More choice and responsibility would be shifted to the presbyteries and congregations, less set by the church's central bodies. The main motivation, I think, was to keep the General Assembly from becoming a continuous constitutional convention, with each Assembly producing new constitutional amendments.

I applaud the idea behind the new FOG and most of their suggested revisions. However, I am a polity wonk. Few other people are, nor should they be. So it is normal for most commissioners to the Assembly to feel unprepared to decide about a whole new form of government.

It is possible that the committee charged with FOG will feel that they are masters of the situation after a few days of testimony and discussion. It is possible that the Assembly will trust the committee's judgment. But it is not likely.

The more likely outcome is delay for study. This would not be terrible, but it increases the odds that Nothing Will Happen.

One interesting idea on the table is a proposal from Detroit Presbytery to authorize six presbyteries to try out the new FOG for two years and report back to the next GA. This proposal is the brainchild of Ed Koster, the most serious challenger for the Stated Clerk's job. I would favor this over sheer delay.

One of the main reasons for the general ambivalence about the new FOG is sheer distrust of all the central institutions of the denomination. The nFOG Task Force did not, I think, deserve this mistrust, and it isn't really directed at then. Even critics of the proposal have generally praised the task force. The mistrust comes from a fear that if presbyteries and congregations are given more freedom, more local option in applying general church principles, some of them (especially the most liberal) will use this freedom as license to evade the standards of the church's majority.

Some safeguards have been built in to prevent local option on the most contentious issues. The property trust and chastity and fidelity provisions of the current Book of Order were specifically preserved by order of the previous GA. And there is good reason for this mistrust, as the recent PJC decision in the Spahr case demonstrates.

Still, I think the revised Form of Government proposal is a good one. I hope the Assembly gives it the attention it deserves, and that it is not overshadowed by lesser issues.

10 Days of G.A.

The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) begins on Saturday in San Jose. In our house, though, GA began today. Gruntled Child #2, the wonderful Endub, is a Youth Advisory Delegate, a YAD. YADs represent each of the 175 or so presbyteries. They have pretty big job -- they have voice and vote in committees, and voice in the plenary sessions of the Assembly, where they also give an advisory vote.

I have been on record for some time that YADs are a bad idea, a '70s democratization that should be undone as soon as possible. Nonetheless, I believe that if we are going to have YADs, we should have good ones. Thus, Endub, a well-informed daughter of the church, flew off to California early this morning. The YADs get a few days of intensive training before the Assembly.

I will be blogging on the Assembly each day for the next week and a half. I know this is not everyone's cup of tea, so if you have already had your fill of internal Presbyterian politics, enjoy your summer vacation :-)

Obama's Fathers' Day Sermon

Barack Obama gave a great sermon on Fathers' Day calling fathers to responsibility for their children. He aimed at black fathers especially, for whom this problem is particularly acute. All fathers, though, were the subject of his comments. Some have read this argument, and his calls for personal responsibility along with government programs, as an attempt to appeal to white religious conservatives.

I hope Obama does appeal to religious people, conservative and otherwise, of all races. I believe that the message that fathers should be responsible for their children is not especially conservative. Parental responsibility is about as centrist a message as they come, being a subset of "mom, the flag, and apple pie."

What I would like to see is for Sen. Obama, and others promoting responsible fatherhood, to ground that message in the larger understanding that marriage is the most effective, most natural, happiest, and easiest way for fathers to be responsible for and to their children.

Not Selfish Genes

Bodies are not just instruments for carrying genes around; genes are recipes for making bodies. Bodies are the point. Genes are the tools.

This is the upshot of a fine lecture by Oxford theologian Keith Ward. I have thought something like this as a rebuttal to the "selfish genes" view, but he put it much better. This lecture is available from the Gresham College online service. (For that matter, I highly commend Gresham College, an ancient adult education foundation in London.)

Golf Is Gone

Senator McCain has apparently given up his attempt to prove that he is a country club Republican. Last week his website looked like this:


Now on his website, "Golf Gear" has given way to the more prosaic "Strategy."


(Thanks to Talking Points Memo for the screen capture of the old website.)

Hurrah! Habeas Corpus is Back!

The Supreme Court made a very welcome and long-overdue decision yesterday restoring the most fundamental legal right to all American prisoners. I have felt that the worst scandal of the lawlessness of the past few years has been the way our government has imprisoned people they don't like without charge or trial for years and years. These prisons were deliberately placed where American lawyers could not get, to prevent them from even meeting with their clients or petitioning for a charge. And U.S. citizens were tossed in along with foreigners, with no more protection than Soviet prisoners used to have.

To my mind this is a disgrace worse than our tortures, and that is saying a great deal.

A majority of the court had the legal sense and the courage to make the right call. The fact that the Supreme Court of the United States has to have courage to defend habeas corpus is a sorry commentary on how low things have sunk.

Let the healing begin.

Evangelical Centrists

Michael Luo's politics blog The Caucus carried an interesting story about a new group, Matthew 25, working to connect Obama to evangelicals. This is an interesting and, I think, very worthwhile effort. The official Democratic Party tends to be a bit paranoid about doing anything official with evangelicals, so it makes sense to have a semi-independent group making the connections.

What interested me especially in this story was a report from John Green, one of the best quantitative religion-and-politics scholars in the country, on the specific kind of evangelical that the Obama campaign could reach.

Green estimates that of the quarter of Americans who are evangelicals, perhaps 10% are on the left, and about 40% are of the Religious Right that has been tied to the Republican Party for a generation. In the middle, though, are a centrist group making up about half the total. This is a group that has often been politically uninvolved in the past. Now, though, centrist evangelicals have been becoming more active in a new range of social issues, especially AIDS, global warming, and, most importantly, global poverty. These issues are a natural path to Democratic candidates.

Green says the centrist evangelical group is growing.

The Core Business of Social Science

C. Wright Mills, in his classic introduction to sociology, The Sociological Imagination, makes this fascinating aside: The social science movement was born in the mid-19th century to “turn the troubles of lower-class people into issues for middle-class publics” (84).

Social science was invented by middle class reformers as a tool to convince other middle class people of the need for reform. The problems they wanted to reform were not primarily middle class problems, and definitely not upper class problems. The middle class wanted to reform the lower class. The instruments of social science were devised to give a name and a number to these problems, and to give reformers tools to fix them.

Each of the social sciences had developed more general theories, general tools, and some capacity to examine other classes and facts that are just facts without being problems.

The bread and butter of the social sciences, especially sociology, though, remains finding middle-class solutions to poor-peoples' problems.

Upper-Middle-Brow Television Show

Fareed Zakaria is a pretty smart guy. His new show, "Global Public Square" on CNN, brings together a pretty smart bunch of people who know about the rest of the world. In the second half, he interviews someone who makes things happen in the rest of the world. This is very encouraging. On the first show he interview Tony Blair. Today, on the second, he had Henry Kissenger. The panel this week consisted of CNN foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour, former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castañeda, former Israeli deputy prime minister Natan Sharansky, and a Muslim woman working in Canada whose name I missed (help here would be welcome).

I have argued before that TV is a middle-brow medium at best. This show pushes the bar up a bit. I predict that it will have only a tiny American audience, even among political junkies. Nonetheless, if CNN can stick with it, I think they will be performing a public service.