Speak Freely

George Leef of the James Martin Center has an excellent review of Princeton University's Keith Whittingon's new book Speak Freely. The analogy between the treatment of liberal, Jewish law professor Ernst Cohn by Nazi students at the University of Breslau in 1933 and the treatment of conservative faculty at elite American universities in 2018 is apt.

Reinvigorating the Contract Clause

George Leef has a great piece in Forbes this week on the effect of erosion of the contract clause on individual liberty. George discusses a case that will soon come before the Supreme Court, Sveen v. Melin, in which a husband who had divorced his wife but wanted to keep her as his life insurance beneficiary died. The state of Minnesota had declared that spousal beneficiary designations are to be revoked upon divorce, so the state has deprived his wife and their children of insurance money. The capriciousness of state and federal law undermines the ability to do business. The current judicial rule given to courts is vague and expansive, and since the New Deal courts have served as a rubber stamp to every dictatorial decision big-government advocates favor. Although I gag every time I think about President Trump's tariff decision, this kind of case is a reason to continue to support the Republican Party. It's hard, though.

Congress Should Defund Colleges with Diversity Oaths

My good friend George Leef wrote a piece about a new trend in higher education:  Some universities now require professors to take diversity oaths, loyalty oaths about their commitment to diversity ideology. That is neofascism. I contacted Republican congressman John Faso, who represents my district. I am going to a breakfast with him on April 13 in Kingston, NY, and I am hoping to bring this up if I have the opportunity.

American universities have been indoctrinating college students in far-left ideologies for decades. I have been reviewing websites of leading liberal arts colleges for the past few weeks, and the absurdity of the course offerings at places like Amherst has gotten me to thinking that it is time that tax exemption for liberal arts was brought to an end. I do not see a good reason for subsidization of the blatant ideology that masquerades as education at many of the leading liberal arts colleges. They are engaging in fraud and indoctrination--not education.

Meanwhile, I have written the following letter to President Donald Trump.

Dear President Trump:

The James G. Martin Center has this morning published an article by George Leef concerning the recent adoption of diversity oaths, similar to loyalty oaths of the 1940s, at Carnegie Mellon, the University of California, and Virginia Tech. Whereas the campus left objected to loyalty oaths to the United States, they have no trouble with ideological loyalty oaths. Leef’s article is based on a piece that was written by a member of the Oregon Association of Scholars.

According to Leef:

In 2015, Oregon State instituted a required statement from faculty on their “contributions to equity, inclusion, and diversity.” Among other things, individuals are expected to discuss their plans to spend time “advocating for normative and policy change.” The message delivered is quite clear: show that you are an enthusiastic diversity supporter if you value your job.

At Portland State, the school’s Diversity Action Council has a list of 44 questions that are to be asked of faculty applicants including “the role of diversity in shaping your social style,” and how he or she will combat “the pervasive belief that diversity and excellence are somehow in conflict.” Obviously, any candidate who answers that diversity and excellence actually can conflict has painted a target on his back.

The purpose of these statements is to exclude from university faculties Republican scholars and anyone else who is unwilling to conform to left-wing ideologies. I’m certain that these are only the beginning, and eventually the amorphous supposed ethical dimension in the diversity oaths will evolve into oaths of loyalty to procrustean principles of equality. These institutions aim to ban from teaching any of your supporters, any Republican, any libertarian, and anyone who believes in liberalism.

Isn’t it time to end the anti-intellectual intolerance at Carnegie Mellon, UC, Portland State, Oregon State, and Virginia Tech?

Leef suggests an idea that I have advocated since the election of the Republican Congress: The National Association of Scholars, led by Peter Wood, has proposed freedom-to-learn amendments to the Higher Education Act, which require that the First Amendment apply to all universities that sup at the federal trough. The bill requires universities to file First Amendment reports. They also require that rights of invited speakers must be respected. I have personally witnessed the violation of such rights.

I do not see how students taught to be intolerant of those with whom they disagree can participate in democratic processes. Funding to Carnegie Mellon, UC, Virginia Tech, Portland State, Oregon State, and all other institutions with ideological oaths should be brought to a screeching halt.

The full text of the proposals of NAS is at  https://www.nas.org/articles/the_freedom_to_learn_amendments_2.0





Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

Liberalism Unrelinquished

George Leef wrote about the Liberalism Unrelinquished site a few weeks ago, and I signed my name to its declaration, which reads

We the undersigned affirm the original arc of liberalism, and the intention not to relinquish the term liberal to the trends, semantic and institutional, toward the governmentalization of social affairs.

The signers are academics and journalists.

The word liberal meant of or pertaining to freedom until collectivists began to misuse it during the late 19th century.  Over the past 130 years the word, in Orwellian fashion, has been transformed from its root Latin meaning to of or pertaining to collectivism and authority.

The reason it was necessary for collectivists to claim that they are for freedom was that freedom, which lasted a few centuries here, increased the standard of living and quality of life.  Millions of immigrants flocked here for a reason that they did not understand: the opportunities here due to liberalism.   In contrast, the effects of the policies of the Democratic Party and its copycat sister, the Republican Party, has been increasing government, increasing control, and declining wealth.

Instead of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, today's America watches bleak futuristic films like The Congress, which sees technological advance as escapism attendant upon widespread decline and impoverishment.  Liberalism in its true meaning requires the opposite world view: Freedom results in innovation that makes us wealthier and frees us from oppression.

My wife just told me about Elizabeth Warren's 2011 statement:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for.

Obama picked it up when he said, "Look, if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own... If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help...Somebody else made that happen."

Of course, if you're unsuccessful you didn't get their on your own either.  If you're unsuccessful it's because of violent thieves like Obama and Warren.

In any case, when I think of all the Americans who died fighting for freedom, and I realize that their descendants elected the people whom they were fighting against, people like Hitler, Stalin, Obama, and Warren,  I was reminded of the importance of language.

Calling authoritarians liberal leads to authoritarianism, and I thank Kevin Frei and Daniel Klein, who started the Liberalism Unrelinquished site, for reminding us to use the word in the right way.

Supreme Court Finds That Illinois' Public Employees Lack Free Collective Bargaining

George Leef posts in Forbes about the case of Harris v. Quinn, which was recently decided in favor of the workers and against the union.  The case involved home health care workers who own their own tools, or whose employers own their own tools, but receive healthcare dollars from the USSA. The Service Employees' International Union struck a deal with now criminally convicted Governor  Rod Blagojevich and later Governor Pat Quinn of Illinois to force the private sector healthcare workers to join the SEIU.  The SEIU, Governor Quinn, and Illinois had no interest in whether or not the employees wanted to join a union; they were happy to sign a law to compel them to join, undoubtedly in exchange for the SEIU's contributing to Blagojevich's, Quinn's or some other Democrat's campaign coffers.

The court overturned this authoritarian arrangement.  In deciding the case, the court addressed Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, which held that public sector employees who do not wish to join a union can be compelled to pay an agency fee although they must be refunded monies spent for political and ideological purposes unrelated to the union's workplace responsibilities.

The Supreme Court seems to have brought that entire approach to public sector union dues paying into question. Under the union contract at CUNY, for example, nonmembers of the union are compelled to pay an agency fee equal to the dues. Since the dues are 1.05% (1% for part-timers), there would be a significant reason not to join the union if the agency fee were to be eliminated. The court seems to say that the agency-fee arrangement is a First Amendment issue:

Preventing nonmembers from free-riding on the union's efforts is a rationale generally insufficient
to overcome First Amendment objections...and in this respect Abood is something of an anomaly. The Abood court also failed to appreciate the distinction between core union speech in the public sector and core union speech in the private sector, as well as the conceptual difficult in public-sector cases of distinguishing union expenditures for collective bargaining from those designed for political purposes. Nor does the Abood Court seem to have anticipated the administrative problems that would result in attempting to classify union expenditures as either chargeable or nonchargeable. 

The time may be ripe to reopen the question of compulsory agency fees in the public sector.

More College Does Not Beget More Economic Prosperity

In a recent Forbes column George Leef of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy points out that, contrary to President Obama's claim, higher education does not improve economic performance.  The claim that it does improve the economy arises from an error: the belief that correlation implies causation.  Countries with more wealth have more college graduates because they can afford to send more students to college.  They are not more wealthy because they have more graduates, for college attendance is a consumption good.  My guess is that the number of automobiles per capita contributes more to national wealth than do college degrees.

The claim that education leads to wealth is based on human capital theory. Human capital theory goes back to Adam Smith''s 1776 Wealth of Nations and Alfred Marshall's 1890 Principles of Economics.  The economist most closely associated with the human capital theory is Gary Becker, who won the Nobel Prize in economics.

Labor economists contrast the human capital theory with  Michael Spence's signaling theory, to which Leef alludes in his article.  Spence also won a Nobel Prize in economics.  Signaling theory suggests that ability is correlated with education, so years of education signal underlying ability.  A difference between human capital theory and signaling theory is that the former suggests that the material learned in school is relevant to economic performance while signaling theory does not.  Completion of a course in abstract mathematics suggests a high level of underlying ability even if the graduate ends up working in an unrelated field.  If signaling theory is right, then a simple IQ test and completion of a US Marines or Navy Seals boot camp training will predict as much as a college degree, maybe more.

I prefer a third alternative:  institutionalist theory.  Institutionalist  thinking places weight on mimesis in the creation of cultural patterns that are often irrational.  College is popular because of imitation.  In his 1978 book Culture of Professionalism, Burton Bledenstein shows that the impulse toward professionalism was a crucial foundation of the Progressive movement and that Americans have had a preference for professional status over and above wealth, fame, and learning.  Education is a sign of professionalism, so it is desired as a consumer good.  Likewise, American firms have preferred college graduates because degrees imbue their managements with professional status.  There is no evidence that higher education has contributed to firms' economic success.  To the contrary, the rise in the number of college graduates in America after World War II paralleled the ascendance of Japanese industry and the decline of Detroit.  

In his important work on productivity differences around the world, William Lewis of the McKinsey consulting firm showed, in the early 1990s, that production workers in the third world could be made to be about as productive as American workers through improvement in the organization of work and workplace training.  Third world workers can produce economic results that equal those of high school and college graduates.  Producing them requires insight as to the organization of work.  This was achieved in postwar Japan through innovative thinking at Toyota.  More generally, the individuals most responsible for workplace innovation have been Frederick Winslow Taylor, who chose not to attend college, Henry Ford, who did not go to college, W Edwards Deming, who held a Ph.D. in physics but never got a job related to his degree, and Taiichi Ohno, the inventor of lean manufacturing and the Toyota production system.  Ohno held a degree from Nagoya Technical High School. An exception is Sam Walton, who held a BA from the University of Missouri.

The chief contributions of business schools to business practice have been through the human relations movement, job redesign, the marketing concept, the capital asset pricing model, and other financial theories.  These are minor contributions.  The human relations school, for example, has contributed to Japanese management practice, but it has been ignored in the US as the Marxist critic (and Brooklyn College dropout) Harry Braverman points out in his Labor and Monopoly Capital.  The finance field, which is the one to which academics have made the most contributions, has been a canker sore on the American economy, requiring a multitrillion dollar bailout and ongoing subsidization from the Federal Reserve Bank; it has produced little of value in return.  Without college education Henry Ford invented the assembly line; Taiichi Ohno reinvented it.

In After Virtue, a classic work on ethics, Alisdair MacIntyre claims that there are three fraudulent figures of the modern world:  the aesthete, the psychiatrist, and the manager.  There is a fourth: the business professor who claims to raise productivity but knows nothing about the substance of management.  I am not the first to make this claim:  Abraham Zaleznik, in his Managerial Mystique, argues that business schools have lost touch with the substance of business.  As a critique of business education, Zaleznik's point is right, but its implications go further.  If business schools do not teach students how to succeed in business, why do they exist?

During America's period of most innovative and rapid economic growth, from 1840 to 1920, only about five percent of Americans attended college.  There is no evidence that much of the innovation of that period, chronicled in David Ames Wells's 1889 Recent Economic Changes, came from people with college degrees.  During that period college degrees were associated with professional careers, notably law, although doctors and lawyers often lacked undergraduate degrees. College was mostly associated with careers in the clergy until the 20th century.  It wasn't until well into the Progressive era that the claim that college education had anything to do with business success gained traction.  By then, most of the innovation associated with the modern world had occurred; even television and radio had been invented, by Nikola Tesla, in the 19th century.   Tesla, incidentally, had thought of AC electricity before attending a technological college in Europe, and his professor discouraged his pursuit of the AC motor, which created the modern world.

Barack Obama has done much harm to the nation through his  ill-conceived health reform and common core.  His claims about higher education, as Leef points out, will contribute to American economic decline.