Valuable New Federal Agency

A student reported this to me this week:

"I have a very close friend who after graduation is going into an AmeriCorpse job in Montana."

The Windsors Drop a Badly Needed Middle-Class Upgrade Due to Class Prejudice

Ok, I don't really care who the heir-apparent to the British throne marries. And I don't really know anything about Kate Middleton other than that she is quite pretty. Still, she was described as a sensible middle class girl with a good education. One can only hope that such a person might be able to elevate the tone of the aristocracy through a sensible marriage. But according the British press, the young couple broke up because young William and his friends thought her speech too middle class and her mother made too much of an effort.

Still, I wouldn't wish the horrible pursuit and exposure that marrying into a royal family imposes on any nice person. I don't wish it on the Windsors, either, but there isn't much they can do about it. But it is likely that William and Harry will each marry, and one of those young ladies will likely have to put up with being married to a king.

We can only hope that she has some starch, and can keep it intact.

Black Man in the Klan

Last night Centre College hosted a great convocation by Daryl Davis under the title above. Davis, a professional musician, got to know a number of leading klansmen in the course of writing a book about them. Some of these encounters were fights. But what he spoke of last night were some great triumphs. Davis interviewed a Grand Dragon (state leader) of one Klan group under the eye of an armed bodyguard. He listened respectfully, and the other guy treated Davis respectfully. Afterwards, Davis decided to keep in touch with the Grand Dragon, who becomes in the story a guy named Roger Kelly. The two men meet in one another's homes to eat and talk. Kelly and his friends go to hear Davis play. Davis goes to Klan rallies to hear Kelly, now an Imperial Wizard (national leader) preach.

After years of civil encounter, what Kelly described as the "cement" in which his racial views were embedded crumbled. He quit the Klan. He gave Davis his Imperial Wizard costume, complete with pointy hood and mask. Daryl Davis brought these items out on the stage at Centre College last night.

This was only one of Davis' powerful stories of civility, mutual respect, and redemption.

Daryl Davis showed the power of respectful civility across lines of conflict. That is good gruntling.

Kids From Religious Families Are Better Behaved

Sociologist John Bartkowski asked the parents and teachers of 16,000 kids how well behaved they were. They wanted to know which kids showed the best self-control, were most skilled in relating to other people, and had the best approach to learning. The verdict: if the whole family went to religious services regularly and talked about their faith, the kids were best behaved.

This makes sense to me. If the whole family shares a moral order together, and with a larger community, and regularly renews their commitment by what they do and what they talk about, the kids have a meaningful world to behave within. The researchers did not know why religious institutions had this effect more strongly than other organizations that involve whole families. I think it is because religious faith offers the widest vision of the meaningful order, but I would be interested in argument on this point.

In any case, though, sociology confirms what most religious people could show examples of. IF the whole family really practices their faith with the kids and without ambivalence, the kids will find it makes sense to relate well with other people, too.

What Does Work For Teen Abstinence?

A new study came out from Mathematica, commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services, testing the effects of sexual abstinence education courses aimed at middle schoolers. As previous studies have shown, abstinence-only curricula don't have an effect. One new element in this study: unlike previous studies, taking a "true love waits" pledge or the like had no effect, either.

Most of these programs in this study were targeted at high-risk populations, so the overall results are not representative of all kids. It is good news, therefore, that even in this high-risk population, half were still virgins late in high school.

One section of the study profiled the kids who were abstinent. Of the many factors that the original curricula included, such as improving knowledge of which contraceptives worked best, and what the risks of sexually transmitted diseases were, none made any difference in whether kids would actually avoid sex as teens. Only two factors were significant predictors of teen abstinence:
1) If the middle schoolers supported abstinence themselves; and
2) If their friends did, too.

This study could not take the question back one step further: why do some middle schoolers believe in abstinence, and why do they find friends who agree? I think the heart of the answer to that question is that those kids are more likely to have parents who clearly support waiting for sex, make a credible example in their own lives, protect the kids from some temptations, and know who their kids' friends are.

There is no magic bullet to assure teen abstinence, but there is much to give us hope – most especially, the fact that most kids are smart.

Durkheimian Antidotes to School Shootings

A week after the Virginia Tech shootings, I want to commend columnist Clarence Page for the most sensible response I have read. The conclusion of his April 18 column was

"What our schools need is more people who can serve as antibodies, watching out for troubled students and offering them help."

Social institutions are like organisms. This is the fundamental metaphor of the great sociologist Emile Durkheim's vision of society. In the case of schools, teachers have to be on the lookout for troubled students. The English teachers were on the job at Virginia Tech. The ball was dropped at the next stage, and the law prevented Cho's parents from being notified – something I wrote about last week.

Page also notes that students do tell teachers about scary students. They are even more likely, though, to go to trustworthy outsiders who are in the same "cultural zip code" as the students. Page promoted the idea of adult volunteers in the schools to be the antibodies to violence, to be the response system to distress.

Each of us sometimes runs across people who are sending out warning signals. It is our duty to them to notify the authorities, and an even greater duty to the social whole.

A Loyalist Thought About "Missional Polity"

The Presbyterian Church (USA) has an important task force working on a new "form of government" document. They are guided by the idea that the church has a “missional polity.” The idea is that the church does not have a mission, but that its very essence is mission. The church is part of God's mission to engage the world.

I can almost grasp what it means to say that being is doing -- that the church is what it does. This is akin to my colleagues who talk about "doing theology," a concept (a metaphor, really) that I can almost grasp. I could be convinced to embrace the idea, I think, with more understanding.

But the sociological insight about the church that most of my work has been based on is that the loyalists at the center of the church are loyal to the institution as it actually is. They like the specific congregation they go to, the familiar ways that their presbytery works, and (most of the time) the lumbering steps and counter-steps of the General Assembly. The first mission that the loyalist is committed to is making sure that the actual church is still there tomorrow to do whatever other work it does. For loyalists, the church is an institution with a mission, even if in some larger sense it "is" a mission.

Virtual Infidelity

The MSNBC survey on infidelity that I wrote about yesterday has a companion piece on people who have affairs in virtual worlds, especially Second Life. The opening story is about a torrid lesbian romance between two avatars of people who in real life are married to someone else. More interesting, one of the "lesbians" is the avatar of a man, and perhaps the other one is, too. The man behind one of the characters thinks it isn't really cheating because, while he is in love with the other character, the sex is not real. This brings us back to yesterday's pie chart -- men don't mind the straying love as much as the straying sex. The odds are good, though, that the Second Life player's real wife would resent the love (if she knew about it) even is the sex isn't physically consumated in the material plane.

Very dangerous stuff, affairs. Even the virtual ones are real.

Men Hate Sexual Cheating, Women Hate Emotional Cheating

MSNBC is reporting an interesting survey of infidelity. I can't tell if this is a scientific survey, but its main findings are consistent with scientific surveys. They have a nifty graphic, shown here, that starkly demonstrates the difference between most men and women over just what is wrong with infidelity:

Amend FERPA – Tell Parents if Their Kid is Sick

One good thing that might come of the Virginia Tech tragedy is the momentum to amend the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to let the family in on some crucial information that schools are now obliged to keep private. If a college student like shooter Seung Cho is deemed by the college psychologists to be seriously mentally ill, even a "danger to himself and others," the university is forbidden by federal law to tell his parents. This should change.

Maybe nothing could have been done to keep Seung Cho from hurting someone. His parents, who appear to be quiet immigrants with a limited command of English, have said nothing publicly, so it is hard to even guess what they might have been able to do. Still, parents are more likely to be able to reach a disturbed kid than a university that is hamstrung by bureaucratic regulations. Teachers and students did bring Cho to the attention of university mental health authorities, and they did what they could. But the university could not compel Cho to seek help. And they were forbidden from contacting his parents, the people most likely to get their son into care and out of the way of harming others.

Yeah, sure, there will be some cases in which the parents are the cause of the kid's mental problems. Notifying them might make it worse. So give the college mental health folks the discretion to decide when the family should be notified. But Congress should not prejudge that parents should never be notified that their kids need help. Privacy should not prevent help when it is most needed.

Liviu Librescu, Heroic Professor

A heroic moment within the Virginia Tech tragedy was the way in which Prof. Liviu Librescu held the door shut against the killer so his students could escape out the window. Librescu was killed by a shot through the door, but his class was saved.

Prof. Librescu had survived the Nazis in Romania during the Second World War, and then the communists who succeeded them. Ironically, he was killed, in effect, by the libertarians in his adopted land of the free.

Among the 30 people murdered in Norris Hall, five were professors. None abandoned their posts. At least one, Liviu Librescu, sacrificed all for his students. As a professor myself and a member of the academic community, I honor them.

The First Virginia Tech Murders Would Have Shut Down a College to Grieve

The tragedy at Virginia Tech is unfolding as I write. The first incident seemed to involve a girlfriend and her RA being shot by an irate boyfriend. Then, two hours later, another sixty or so students were shot in a classroom building, about 30 of whom died. I don't want to second guess the administration on what they should have done to stop the classroom shooting rampage.

I am surprised, though, that a murder of two students was not reason to stop classes and bring everyone together to tell the facts and console the many grieving. I am sure that that is what would happen at Centre. Perhaps Virginia Tech is so large and anonymous that it does not shut down when one or two of their number are murdered.

Twice as Many Cuban Immigrants are Secular as Mexican Immigrants

About 14% of Cuban immigrants report that they are not religious, compared to 7% of immigrants from Mexico.

The general story in the New York Times argues that America makes people more materialistic. This is likely to be true. Still, that doesn't explain why the Cubans and Mexicans would respond to the new environment so differently.

Two ideas seem likely to me. First, Cubans are less religious to begin with, from decades of socialism. Second, Cuban immigrants are more likely to be middle class to begin with than Mexicans, and therefore start further on the road to irreligion. I incline to the latter view.

Peeps

Danny and Clara are my four-year-old nephew and niece.


"Danny, why did Clara eat only the heads off all her Peeps?"
"Maybe they were looking at her."

Choose Responsibility: License 18 – 20-Year-Old Drinkers

John McCardell was president of Middlebury College. He dealt with quite a bit of binge drinking and stupid drinking by underage students. Because drinking was both widespread and illegal for most students, the college was in the worst-of-both-worlds bind. They could not successfully prevent all youth drinking, but only drive it more or less underground. And they could not legally teach students how to drink responsibly.

When McCardell retired as president, he decided to do something about it. He has created an organization, Choose Responsibility, to teach and license 18, 19, and 20 year olds to drink alcohol.

I think Choose Responsibility has a great idea, and I support it wholeheartedly.

I am a teetotaler. I will have a sip of champagne in a toast if my mom asks me to, but that is about it. I don't care for alcohol, and am Irish enough not to want to develop a taste for it. I don't think alcohol is immoral – Jesus made wine, so it can't be all bad – but I don't want to have it in my life.

Nonetheless, most of the people I know and respect do drink alcohol in moderation. Most students will try alcohol in college. Most young people will drink as a rite of passage as well as a social good in its own right.

What I worry about is binge drinking and drinking to get drunk. This is a problem on my campus, and just about every campus in America. For the non-collegiate young adults, drunken drinking is probably an even bigger problem, with fewer institutional controls.

I want those students who do drink to learn how to do it in moderation. I think the best resource that an educational institution has to achieve any goal with students is to teach about it. Moreover, I think that the faculty are, on the whole, an excellent source of examples of how to drink responsibly and moderately. Colleges miss a vital teachable moment when we do not teach students how to drink the right way.

The initial debate has been tangled up with the drunk driving debate, which is not really relevant. Student drunkenness is still a problem even if they don't drive. Leaving students to pick up their alcohol education in the gutter makes no more sense than leaving them to learn to drive covertly and by trial-and-error.

At this moment, the Choose Responsibility movement seems quixotic, but it is a good idea. Its time will come, and soon.

HPV Vaccine is a Centrist Issue

I have two teenage daughters. This summer, they will get the Human Papillomavirus vaccine. They are good girls, and I expect they will stay that way. Still, I don't know what will happen in the future, including the whole sexual history of their future (and now entirely hypothetical) husbands. The idea that there is a vaccine to prevent cancer and other lesser horribles seems like a wholly good thing to me. I am as grateful for the existence of the HPV vaccine as I am for the polio vaccine. If they ever invent a male version of the HPV vaccine, my son will get it, too.

So why is this an issue? Some people want to make the vaccine mandatory. Others opposed giving it at all. That is exactly the situation that begs for a centrist solution.

The argument for making it mandatory is the same as the argument for other mandatory vaccinations. This is a contagious disease that we can prevent, so let's prevent it. The vaccination cost is much smaller than the treatment cost. The whole society would be better off if we could wipe out this virus by giving it no hosts to live in.

I do think it would a good thing if all people who could benefit from the vaccine get vaccinated. I will leave it to the doctors to specify that population. Right now the CDC is saying girls and women from 11 to 26 should be vaccinated. I am not sure why they set that upper bound, but I will assume there is a good medical reason.

The argument against using the vaccine at all is that making sex safer encourages extramarital sex. This negative argument is advanced by pro-family Christians, but it is based on fear – if kids fear sex, they won't have any. I am a pro-family Christian, but I am against fear mongering. As I have argued before, fighting the culture of fear is the gruntled centrist issue. I try to dissuade people from extra-marital sex because it isn't good for their marriages and for the culture of marriage – not because it might kill them. We should try to prevent disease even if the people who get it in some way deserve it. Moreover, the sex diseases can easily spread to people who really don't deserve it.

Still, HPV, though very widespread, is not quite as contagious as, say, the polio virus. If some people opted out it would be a loss, but it wouldn't defeat the purpose of mass vaccination. They might opt out on moral grounds, or on sheer civil liberty grounds, both of which, I think, a free society should accommodate whenever possible.

So where does this leave us? I favor state-mandated vaccination of all girls, with the state paying the bill for poor people. If some people want to opt out, they should be permitted to. The rest of us can try to persuade them not to – as I am trying to do now – but that is a freedom that a free country can allow. Besides, a few years later, those "opted out" girls can make their own decision to get vaccinated if they want to.

What Should Classy Women Do With Don Imus, Woolly-Headed Fool?

One of my favorite interlocutors asked me a pointed question this morning:

"Am I the only one wondering why on earth Rutgers University or its coaches would be willing to have their women basketball players give Don Imus an audience, be in the same room with him or participate in his repentance-and-redemption dog and pony show?

I think that they should issue a terse statement that Mr. Imus is not welcome on their campus.

It’s like some fundamental law has been forgotten in all the media drama. Nobody is so important that they get to call a group of young women 'nappy headed ho’s' and then get to be in the same room with them."

I agree entirely with the main point here: no one is so important that they deserve an audience with people they have insulted.

I also have thought Don Imus was a fool throughout his career. I don't understand what his audience is. At least Rush Limbaugh has "dittoheads" who agree with his views. The "shock jock" audience, on the other hand, seems to listen for nothing more than that something shocking be said, whether they agree with it or not. It is no surprise to me that he said something shockingly stupid about the Rutgers women's basketball team. He says something shockingly stupid every day. That is his job.

If I were the president of Rutgers I would have blasted Imus and asked other responsible persons in the university to publicly help make him and all his works unwelcome at Rutgers.

Still, I am glad that coach Vivian Stringer and the young ladies who play for her responded to Imus as they did. They were so classy that they raised the tone of sports discussion in general, if only for a moment.

Which brings us to the question of why and whether the team should meet with Imus. If I were the coach, I would not meet with Imus, and I certainly wouldn't go to his studio. On the other hand, the women of the team seem to be considerate young ladies. They don't want to just leave Imus in the gutter, precisely because he is in the gutter. They are giving him a chance to redeem himself. Given the mealy-mouthed apologies that he has given already, I think he will probably make it worse.

Nonetheless, I think the Lady Scarlet Knights continue to show class. I look forward to their return to the tournament next year.

Emotional Moodreading Drug For Men

Women are better at reading emotions from other people's facial expressions than men are. A new study suggests that oxytocin, the sociability-inducing hormone that women get by the bucketload from childbirth, boosts mood-reading. Researchers in Zurich found that men could also read moods from faces much better after they were sprayed with synthetic oxytocin -- but only for a short time.

So, gentlemen, if you ever find yourself caught in an "if you really loved me you'd read my mind" loop, carry a discrete supply of oxytocin in a nasal sprayer and give yourself an edge. Think of it as leveling the playing field.

Who knows, maybe someday they will put the stuff in the water supply, like fluoride, to improve social life.

R.I.P Johnny Hart: He Put the A.D. in B.C.

Johnny Hart, the cartoonist who drew the "Wizard of Id" and "B.C." comic strips, died over the weekend. As the most explicitly Christian major cartoonist, it was appropriate that he died at the drawing board on Easter weekend.

I have thought it happily peculiar that the pre-historic cartoon called "B.C." was the one most likely to talk about Christ. In recent years Hart even added a character named "Anno Domini" to make ingenuously Christian observations to the cavemen and cavewomen who populated the strip.

Thank you, Johnny Hart, for adding to the wonderful weirdness of life.

A Joyous Easter to You All!