Teen Pregnancies, Births, and Abortions Reach All-Time Low

This is a good-news story that writes itself. 

Do Professors Even Want to Help Students Develop a 'Meaningful Philosophy of Life'?

David Brooks has a decent column on this year's UCLA study of college freshmen. He notes this change from the first time that study was done:

In 1966, 86 percent of college freshmen said that developing a meaningful philosophy of life was essential or very important. Today, less than half say a meaningful philosophy of life is that important.

My first thought was that today's faculty are much less likely to believe that they are supposed to help students develop a meaningful philosophy of life than were the '60s faculty.  True, there are particular egalitarian and environmental values which are often presumed by many faculty members. But it has been my experience that most professor balk at the idea of articulating a meaningful philosophy of life for themselves, much less seeing their job as helping students do the same.

I can't speak for the the faculty norms of the '60s. I do infer from the fact that the question seemed intelligible when the survey was created that it seemed like a sensible idea at the time.

Brooks cautiously concludes from the above facts that "I’m not sure if students really are ... less interested in having meaning in their lives, but it has become more socially acceptable to present yourself that way."

I think it likely that a big part of this change is that college faculty are less likely today to see "helping students find a meaningful philosophy of life" as their job, or even within their competence.

The 'Princeton White Privilege Guy' Shouldn't Be Silenced, But He Doesn't Understand What White Privilege Means

Tal Fortgang wrote "Checking My White Privilege" for the campus conservative publication the Princeton Tory. 

I am not familiar with the expression 'check your privilege' with which he frames the piece.  He says it is used to silence him as a white male from contributing his opinions in general.  He does not provide any specifics, so it is hard to know the context in which the phrase is actually used.  The closest he comes to an account of how it is used is not, he allows, meant to silence him.  Rather, he says, the charge "teeters between" urging him to examine the roots of his opinion to see if they are framed by privilege, and to suggest that he apologize for having those privileges.

If that is what 'check your privilege' means, then examining the roots of his opinions seems like a reasonable call to critical thinking.  If they do, in fact, mean that he should apologize for his privileges, that would seem to go over the line.  But he does not say they do, so it is hard to know what his actual complaint boils down to.

The bulk of the essay, though, is not really about checking his white or male privilege at all.  It is an account of hard and heroic things done in his family. He checked his family's story of surviving persecution and working hard, and concluded that he does not have any privilege, but only a legacy of good values.

Which means that in his essay on 'white male privilege' he never actually addresses white male privilege.  He is right that his whiteness and maleness is not the whole story of his life.  But neither does he say anyone else said it was.  He does not acknowledge, though, that there have been untold small advantages of whiteness and maleness in his path thus far, which, indeed, is some of the story of his life.

In fact, in this short essay, he does not show any understanding of what his unnamed interlocutors are talking about when they urge him to 'check his privilege'.  That work is still undone.

Are Zombies a Racial Formation?

In my "Macrosociological Theory" class we are reading Omi and Winant's Racial Formation in the United States. They argue that races are constructed when physical differences can be made to coincide with differences in group interest.  In particular, when one group can economically and/or politically subordinate another, they are likely to try to justify that domination on the basis of supposed or slight physical differences.

I have been puzzled by the resurgence of interest in zombies.  I think the main reason is that dramas have run out of groups that can be villains without nuance or redeeming features.  Zombies work well as villains because they are sub-rational, endlessly malevolent, and, conveniently already dead.  Permanently kill-worthy.

So I have been thinking about how well the enterprise of elaborating on the idea of zombies fits Omi and Winant's vision of a 'racial project'.  On the one hand, the physical difference between zombies and humans has been readily adapted to justify treating the whole group as worthy of domination - corralling, caging, experimenting on, even killing.  On the other hand, the zombie stories I know of do not show humans trying to get work out of zombies.

Perhaps that is the next screenplay.

I would say that the construction of zombies is mostly an example of what Omi and Winant mean by a 'racial formation' - but not entirely.

Maybe robots fill the bill better?

Malaria Deaths in Africa Down by More Than Half in a Decade

One big reason:  half the households have anti-malaria bed nets, and about a third of the population sleep under them each night.

This is great news, one of the best in all of public health today.

Trapeze Careers

My wife addressed my "Family Life" and "Social Structure" classes, as she does each year, on how women can 'have it all.'

The readings we have studied leading up to this talk address the fact that men are likely to have a definite plan of how they want their careers to develop.  They identify a ladder, and make a plan to climb it.  Since life rarely turns out just the way we expect it to, men are more prone to have a mid-life crisis when they realize that the narrative of their life is going to turn out differently than they imagined it would.

Women, by contrast, are more likely to have a big picture of a life with career, family, and public duties in some kind of balance.  They often have a less specific plan of climbing one ladder.  Instead, they are more likely to pursue one path, then make choices at the time that lead them in a different direction.  When they look back on their lives, they are likely to discern the thread of continuity that ties this zig-zag path together, though it would have been hard to predict ahead of time.

My wife offered the students, especially the women, the advice that they would be able to achieve a balanced life if they were OK with having a 'trapeze career' rather than climbing a ladder.  And sometimes on the trapeze you let go of one bar before you have a clear grasp on the next one.

I think 'trapeze career' is a wonderful metaphor and a fine counterpart to the career 'ladder'.

A Critique of Davis and Moore on the 'Functional Necessity' of High Pay for Some Jobs

One of the staples of sociological discussions of social stratification is the Davis-Moore hypothesis.  This idea, advanced in 1945 by two then-famous sociologists, Kingsley David and Wilbert Moore, argued that some jobs were so 'functionally necessary' to society that we needed to pay people more to get them to do them.  This also implied that many jobs were not so functionally necessary, and therefore we could pay people less.

While giving a guest lecture for a colleague, I had occasion to read this hypothesis again for the first time in years.

In the intervening years, I have often had occasion to answer student objections about unfair pay.  Their argument is usually something like 'the work teachers do is more valuable that what professional athletes do - we should pay teachers more.' (And, presumably, pay athletes less).

The answer I have given to students was that, for the most part, wages are a measure of market value, not social value. What we get paid is determined much more by the supply of people who can do what we do, compared to the demand from people willing to pay for what we do.  The super-skill of the very best professional athletes is in great demand for a handful of positions.  There are millions of teachers, but even greater millions who are willing and able to do the job demanded at the pay offered.

Which brings us back to Davis and Moore.  The more I think about it, the less I think pay is offered as an incentive to do socially valuable jobs with rare skills.  That is, the pay is not the motivation.  The job is the motivation, for many mysterious reasons.  The pay is what you have to offer to get enough people with the relevant skills to do that job, given the supply and demand. Change either supply or demand, and the pay changes, without any change in the social value of the job.

One of the reasons we honor some jobs more than others is that social status is something that most people want, apart from and in addition to pay.  And status goes both ways - we honor jobs that are worthwhile, but we also honor people who do worthwhile jobs for low pay because they are willing to work for low pay. 

Teach for America, Like the Peace Corps, is a Worthwhile Program of Bourgeois Missionary Work

Teach for America is sometimes criticized because the young people who do it are well-meaning amateurs who do not stick with teaching.  They come from good schools, but were not trained in education.  There is a high rate of leaving teaching after a few years.

I have taken comfort from the fact that the same is true of the Peace Corps.  Indeed, we always expected that Peace Corps volunteers would return to the US after their tour and go into some other field.  The idea was that they would learn more about some other place in the world, which would infuse their future work in any field.

Both Teach for America and the Peace Corps are, in other words, missionary programs.  I think this is a good thing.  I am for bourgeois missionaries to impoverished schools and impoverished countries. I am also for religious missionaries spreading the faith, whether they are there for the long term or not.

Another gripe about Teach for America is that amateur short-time teachers are bad for their students, even if the teachers get a great deal out of the experience. There is something to this. I don't think the amateur issue is that big a deal, but the short time is a problem. However, many education majors also leave the profession quickly, too.  Teaching in poor schools is a hard job, and a hard adjustment.

I have rarely heard people complain that the Peace Corps is bad because sending amateur short-timers hurts the people they were meant to help.  I think one of the reasons we rarely hear this gripe is because if the Peace Corps volunteers didn't go, no one would.  Someone helping for a short time is better than no one helping at all.

In America's poor schools, by contrast, someone would get hired to teach each year.

Still, I think that investing in getting liberally educated young people from the best schools - most of whom have no real experience of poverty - to wrestle seriously with the realities of poor life while trying to help, is worth the investment.  What I would add would be a stronger supportive community to help them weather the first hard years of teaching, so more of them stay.  A model for this kind of support is provided by our Teach Kentucky program.

Suffering Turned to Holiness is the Highest Happiness

Another good one from David Brooks, "What Suffering Does."  His main point:

The right response to this sort of pain is not pleasure. It’s holiness. ... It means seeing life as a moral drama, placing the hard experiences in a moral context and trying to redeem something bad by turning it into something sacred.

Amen.  And this is a conclusion that you have to choose for yourself.  It is a hard choice. I don't think those who do not get there are to be blamed.

But there is a further step, which takes us back to happiness. At the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that the highest happiness comes from contemplation.  This comes as a bit of a surprise, after the first nine books talk about how to achieve happiness through action. 

I believe, though, that Aristotle is right.  It is only in contemplating the fruits of a life of active virtue that we can have a deeper understanding of what happiness is.  And the deepest understanding comes from contemplating suffering turned into holiness.

The Less You Know, The More You Want to Invade Ukraine

"The further our respondents thought that Ukraine was from its actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene militarily."

That is the scary conclusion of a study that compared which policy position people favored toward Ukraine with their actual knowledge of where Ukraine is on a map.

This supports my view that knowledge tends to mitigate violence.   

Cohabitation Practice

I asked the "Family Life" class to talk with their friends about what they thought of cohabitation vs. marriage.  Since many of my students effectively live together on campus, I thought that many had already voted with their feet in favor of cohabitation.  To my surprise, they did not regard living together on campus as real cohabitation, because the couple was not cooking together, or splitting the rent, or responsible for most of the things involved in living in the 'real world' yet.

This is a fair enough distinction.  It did give me an idea, though: encourage the couple who are living together to conduct experiments simulating, as realistically as possible, what real cohabitation would be like.  They could, say, make all their meals together for a week.  They could spend another week really pooling their finances, and facing together what sharing all their costs would look like.  They could start interacting with one another's families in a routine way.

Such an experiment might be eye opening.

An important point that we make in the "Family Life" class is that cohabiting is not really the same as marriage.

We could go back one step earlier in the chain to get students to come to grips with the ways in which sharing a dorm room is not the same as cohabiting.

And all of this is in the interest of 'deciding not sliding' into the biggest decision of your life.

7.1 Million Newly Insured Under Obamacare

This is a great day for our nation.  We are making progress toward health insurance for everyone, despite massive resistance by political opponents of the president.

And this number does not include the further millions of young people who continue to be covered by their parents' insurance, including some of our own children.

Not to mention ending the injustice of denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions.

In a few years, Obamacare will be part of the fabric of the American safety net.  And those who oppose it now will deny they were ever against it.

Spouses Can Calm Each Other's Brains in a Way Cohabitors Can't

Holding your spouse's hand when you are expecting a shock calms your brain.

Holding your cohabitor's hand in the same situation does not.

Trust comes from the permanence of the commitment.

All Parents Can Talk to Their Kids

Kids from professionals' families have heard 30 million more words from adults by the time they get to school than kids from poor families.

This is a gap that families of any class can close.

One of the saddest footnotes I know is early on in Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods. She writes that by the age of three, middle class kids have a bigger vocabulary than welfare parents do.  So the poor parents will have to work on their own language skills to help their kids.

They should.  Win-win.

Things Are Getting Better: Child Mortality

Bill Gates says this is his favorite chart.

This is, indeed, one of the best arguments that things are getting better.

Go sanitation!

The Beginning of the End for Big-Time "College" Sports

Football players at Northwestern University have won the right to unionize.  The National Labor Relations Board has recognized that players in the Division I money sports are, in effect, full-time employees of the university.

It is true that, as the commercials run by the National Collegiate Athletic Association say, nearly all college athletes will go pro in something other than sports. At Centre College's level, in Division III, all the students are truly scholar-athletes.

The money sports in Division I, on the other hand - especially football and basketball - are minor league professional teams located near universities.  The scandal recently documented at the University of North Carolina is only the tip of vast empire of fraudulent academics to sustain the myth of "scholarship" athletes.  The genius of the Division I sports teams is that they run a professional league where everyone gets paid like a professional - except the athletes.  In most states, the highest paid public employee in the entire state is the football or basketball coach at the flagship state university, making millions more than the governor.

I appreciate the role of local teams in creating a collective effervescence and promoting social solidarity.  Allegiances to athletic teams is one of the few things that binds people in a region across class and race lines. Sharing in the fortunes of 'our' team is an important part of the American civil religion.  However, it is only a happenstance of our history that two of our leading sports at the moment have their farm system located in universities.  Baseball had the good fortune to develop its minor leagues before the era of big-time college sports.  This is a model that would be more appropriate for football and basketball, as well.

Then the universities could concentrate on teaching and research, without the massive distortion to their mission that comes when the big sports tail wags the entire university dog.

More power to the players union.

Some Sexual Distinctions I Had Not Heard Before

My "Family Life" class is reading Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker's excellent Premarital Sex in America. I have sent the class out to interview their peers about their own experiences of, and attitudes toward, premarital sex.

One of the interesting results of this assignment is that I learn some of the true, on-the-ground moral distinctions that young people use in regulating and judging sexual practice.

In general, Regnerus and Uecker found that most young people think that sex is best and most appropriate within a committed relationship.  However, many young people, especially young men, have some experience of casual sex.  How do they explain this? 

One young man distinguished between a few 'sexual experiments' that he undertook in casual relationships, which he thought were useful learning experiences, and 'habitual hookups' undertaken by some of his peers, who sought casual sex regularly and for its own sake.

Regnerus and Uecker also found that alcohol was involved in many young people's sexual relations, especially (almost universally) in the casual ones.  So how to distinguish between moral and immoral drunken sex?  One interview subject distinguished between drinking a bit to foster intimacy, which was good, and a 'blackout hookup', which was not.

More dispatches from the front of 'emerging adult' sexual ethics as I receive them.

Childhood Obesity is Down 40%

That is great news.  I didn't see that coming.

Obesity is one vice that is a side-effect of our virtues - in this case, the virtue of plentiful food.  That we still have plentiful food and are combating the side effects is excellent news in itself, and about our problem-solving abilities.

Riots Against an Elected Government Are Not the Same as Riots Against a Dictator

The ongoing occupations, street battles, and riots by mobs of protesters in Thailand, Ukraine, and Venezuela are not justified.

I don't care for any of those governments.  And I supported the ouster of the dictatorships in each of those countries.  But using the same tactics against an elected government - which plans to hold the next elections on schedule, in the usual way - is wrong.

Parliamentary systems are a little different than ours, in that public protest could force an early election.  But the protests themselves need to remain peaceful, or they lose their moral claim.

Speaker Boehner Leads the Way in Congressional Comity

... if a little grudgingly.

Still, I applaud his decision to bring a bill to raise the debt ceiling without other strings on it. 

This will allow for Republicans and Democrats to work together, which I opens the way to more normal political compromise on other things.