College Students Denounce "Trump" Immigration Quotes Until Realizing Democrats Said Them

Fox News in Nashville quotes my research in the context of a story about students  at American University.  Cabot Phillips of Campuswatch read statements that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had made about the need for border security. When the students thought that President Trump had made the statements, they called the statements "divisive." When they learned that President Obama and Senator Clinton had made the statments, they laughed nervously, were at a loss for words, or said "that's interesting." The piece notes that intolerance and pressure to conform shape many college students' political views.  The article cites Pew research that finds that 61 percent of Americans believe that college education is going in the wrong direction.

The current milieu suggests the need for policymakers to begin to think about restructuring higher education.  The concept of validation in psychology and human resource management should be brought to bear on higher education.  There is limited evidence that controlling for IQ all college programs contribute to finding a job or provide any education. Many likely do not.  A study done seven years ago found that half of students make no gains in college. These are likely concentrated in the social sciences and cultural studies fields. 

Leading GOP Politicians Oppose Campus Due Process

In the Weekly Standard, KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr. describe how the overwhelming majority of GOP senators, governors, and congressmen have failed to support Education Secretary Betsy DeVos's revised regulations under Title IX of the Education Amendments. The revisions undo much of the skewness in procedures concerning sexual harassment cases on campus.  

Among the abuses that have occurred, and that some GOP politicians appear to support, are, according to Johnson and Taylor: 

pervasive pro-accuser bias among academic officials; secret training of adjudicators to believe accusers even in the face of discrediting evidence; bans on meaningful cross-examination; concealment of exculpatory evidence; designation of a single bureaucrat as investigator, prosecutor, judge, and jury; and numerous other due-process outrages. 

Johnson and Taylor contacted Republican members of the  Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee to gauge their views. Lamar Alexander and Bill Cassidy  favor DeVos's proposed changes. None of the other committee members responded to Johnson and Taylor's inquiry.  The Republican senators on the committee who did not respond are as follows:

Michael B. Enzi

Senator Richard Burr
Senator Johnny Isaakson

Senator Rand Paul

Senator Susan Collins

Senator Todd Young

Senator Orrin Hatch

Senator Paul Roberts

Senator Lisa Murkowski

Senator Tim Scott

It is unclear whether the failure of ten Republican senators to respond indicates opposition to the amendments, cowardice, or lack of time and resources.  

A House Republican who has supported the amendments is Virginia Foxx of North Carolina. In contrast, Thomas Kean Jr., a Republican in the New Jersey state senate, is proposing New Jersey regulations that will please left-wing extremists who oppose due process.  Kean aims to preempt federal due process requirements by substituting state-based rules. Republican Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire is also siding with the left.

Perhaps a broader survey of  elected Republicans' positions on education reform would be beneficial.  I have been wondering for many years as to why elected Republicans seem to behave in a self-defeating way.  They are unperturbed at universities' functioning ideologically; they have no qualms about funding ideologically imbued cultural studies, social science, and humanities courses that indoctrinate students to be anti-Republican Party activists; they are unconcerned about the failure of universities to validate the efficacy of funds spent with respect to both education and job placement.  

  

It appears that what is happening is that since left wingers dominate education lobbies and few Americans who are not part of the lobbies take an interest in education, Republicans respond primarily to left-wing demands.  

That is a self-defeating cynicism because the higher education institutions banish Republican professors and teach students to hate Republicans. It reminds me of the faux quotation from Lenin: The last Republican will be he who votes the dollar to the educationist who teaches the student who buys the rope that hangs him.

What may be needed is a focused lobbying organization that counteracts educationist lobbies that take $200 billion a year in public money out of the economy, much of it amounting to dead weight social loss.  They have overseen a 50-year stagnation in the real hourly wage, questionable job outcomes for the bottom half of the college population, education programs that indoctrinate rather than educate, and administrative bloat. 

My Interview on Raquel Okyay's Podcast March 30

Raquel Okyay had me on her podcast, Rocky and the Gonz, on March 30  . I enter about one-half hour in. It was fun. 

Peter Wood's New Campus Anti-Americanism

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, has a great piece in Minding the Campus on the decline and fall of higher education, which he attributes to the "new camps anti-Americanism." Wood notes that a Pew poll "showed 58 percent of Republicans saying that they now view American higher education as having negative effects on the country." (The other 42 percent are uninformed.) He adds, "Then a Gallup poll in August offered the even more troubling picture that 67 percent of Republicans and Republican “leaders” had only some or very little “confidence on colleges and universities.” The figure for 'all adults' regardless of political affiliation was 56 percent." Wood says that administrators have been complacent, and their anti-Americanism will result in further declining public support for higher education. Wood is optimistic that the public will insist on reform.

I'm not so sure. The Republicans need to wake up to the partisanship of elite academia. The left ideology prevalent on campus is a market signal, i.e., a selection device that provides a screen, for Democratic Party affiliation. I know that sounds strange, but which party funds universities? May we not expect the party that funds universities to expect the institutions that they fund to support them? Which party are leftists most likely to support?

This claim is supported by the following: There is a strong tendency for academics to be left wing in ideology, but there is an even stronger tendency for academics to be Democratic in party affiliation. In many elite colleges the proportion of Republicans is not significantly different from zero. In contrast, Pew finds that about 38% of the highly educated are now Republican--and that number is endogenous because it follows a generation of campus indoctrination of the highly educated.

Since the New Deal, the Democrats have relied on universities to propagandize on behalf of their programs. The Republicans have been slow to recognize that universities have been playing a partisan role, and if the faculty is predominantly left and entirely Democratic while elite young are turned into US-hating, Gramscian transgender activists, how nice for the Democratic Party.  The Democrats have funded the universities; the Democrats will benefit from a youth indoctrinated into left ideology at those universities.

The solution is ending government subsidization and cartelization of higher education.

That can be done by ending tax exemptions for the social sciences and humanities and using the tax revenues to provide tax credits to students who pursue STEM-related subjects either in universities or in proprietary colleges. As well, business and professional education should be treated as proprietary and put on an even playing field with proprietary training.

Libertarian Professors Walk a Fine Line

The concept of a libertarian professor is oxymoronic. Higher education would not exist without state support, for it isn't value producing. It is, moreover, a special interest whose justification is inherently ideological and statist. Hence, to be a libertarian academic the professor needs to protest the statist system from which he benefits.

If a professor overtly favors the state-provided benefits he receives, then he is like any other industrialist who claims to favor free enterprise while lobbying for tariffs or bailouts. Such hypocrisy is damaging to professors, part of whose job is to exemplify integrity. Libertarian academics who lobby for public support and curry to their statist colleagues are hypocrites.

Can College Students Learn to Disagree?

My op-ed “Can College Students Learn to Disagree? The Importance of Contrasting Ideology with Prudence” just came out in Frontpagemag.  It contrasts  recent experiences with my speaker program at Brooklyn College and the Mill Series at Lafayette College with the recent riots at Berkeley and elsewhere.

My friend and coauthor Dan Klein just emailed and mentioned that I mix up Karl Polanyi with Michael Polanyi.  The republic of science concept was in Michael Polanyi's article.  

  

Dan suggests that Russell Kirk's objection to ideology is misguided. Dan suggests using "fanaticism," "dogma," or "foolishness" in place of "ideology." Dan points out that we libertarians are as ideological as leftists.

I agree with Dan in terms of political tactics, although I don't think that colleges should play an ideological role.  There should be some effort to reflect the spectrum of views in American society.  The claim that "science is settled" is most often code for insistence on left ideological positions that are not only not settled but nonsensically tendentious.  

Universities' substitution of ideology for prudential debate will end in their diminished role, especially if the Republican approach proves to become more economically successful than the Democratic. 

With respect to politics, the ideological approach is more tactically effective than the conservative approach, which is why after many decades of both conservatism and leftism, the nation has changed just as the leftists have hoped: in  the direction of socialism. The conservatives have lost every step of the way.  Part of the reason is their rejection of libertarianism, without which they lack the numbers to win elections.  The Trump administration may overturn some of the Obama administration's gaffes, but he is unlikely to leave a legacy of an opposing ideology. In that he is like the Tafts, Goldwater, and Reagan.

The error of conservatism is that compromise inevitably leads to the end toward which an opposing party with a consistent, unitary aim favors.  Conservatism only works if there is a level playing field with diverse interests that counterbalance each other. Instead, America has a soft socialist progressivism that aims in one direction, with every other interest counterbalancing each other and compromising with each other. 

The result is that the one interest with a consistent, unitary aim wins over time, and the party or parties that are conservative and believe in compromise and gradualism lose  over time.  The approach of National Review and other conservatives to vote for the lesser evil in time leads to the greater evil anyway.  At some point socialism needs to be overturned with radical, ideologically motivated steps. 

The Liberal Arts Can't Fix Higher Education

My essay "The Liberal Arts Can't Fix Higher Education" appeared at Minding the Campus on December 28, 2015. What can fix higher education? Better attention to basic skills, including memorization of the multiplication tables, reading-and-writing practice, writing correction, math correction, and grammatical skills are a start.  These need to occur at the K-12 level, but they also need to occur at the college level when they are needed. Liberal arts is problematic because it's not done well.  The liberal arts tradition was rooted in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but today's college students often cannot write English.

Indeed, the claim of today's colleges that they encourage diversity is belied by many students' (also here) getting no exposure to a language.  Indeed, I very much doubt that most faculties can teach from diverse perspectives because they are trained in narrow specialties and mostly do not have broad education. As well, few are interested in improving the skills needed to study liberal arts, including writing.

Ivy League Schools and Progressivism

William Deresiewicz critiques the performance of Ivy League colleges in The New Republic.   Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl, and Walter Lippmann founded The New Republic as a cornerstone of the early twentieth century's Progressive movement, and it has long advocated policies that impose hierarchy, expand government, and gut the economy on behalf of economic elites. The policies include the higher education system. Unsurprisingly, Deresiewicz's critique of the higher education system retains Progressive assumptions and ultimately serves to reinforce them.

Progressive policies have included the monopolization of credit by large, money center banks through their banking cartel, the Federal Reserve Bank; the income tax, which inhibits saving that facilitates capital formation among blue collar and lower-income workers; the inheritance tax, which by depriving later generations of capital forces them to seek corporate jobs that depend on the banking cartel; and a wide range of economic regulations that deter entrepreneurship and self-actualization.  Regulation disadvantages entrepreneurial, smaller firms by raising costs per unit and increasing economies of scale.

In the controlled, hierarchical, high-income inequality, militaristic, and centralized American economy that Progressivism has created, higher education plays an important part.  Deresiewicz makes valid criticisms.  At the same time, his criticisms are couched in his assumption that higher education is an independent variable, capable of manipulation, and that the forces that deter broad education are merely limited to universities.

Deresiewicz, who was on the admissions board at Yale and is a leading academic, notes that Ivy League schools manufacture students who have little intellectual curiosity, lack passion about ideas, avoid risk, and have not been taught to think.  Such students are conformist and concerned with fitting into the highest rungs of American society.  The great advances in America's economy have never come from its elite, though. America's elite has always concentrated on banking, law, and power. The great American inventions such as the assembly line, scientific management,  and AC electricity had little do with such elites.

Colleges cannot teach one how to think. They can demand that one thinks; provide material about what to think; and offer models, heuristics, algorithms, and solutions that illustrate thinking processes.  Thinking, though, is a natural reflex that a person must cultivate on his own.  The best thinkers, such as Einstein, Tesla, and Gauss, and the best leaders, such as Jefferson and Lincoln, received minimal schooling, most of which was unrelated to their intellectual achievements.  Wikipedia quotes Des Cartes, who had attended a Jesuit school through his ninth grade:

I entirely abandoned the study of letters. Resolving to seek no knowledge other than that of which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth traveling, visiting courts and armies, mixing with people of diverse temperaments and ranks, gathering various experiences, testing myself in the situations which fortune offered me, and at all times reflecting upon whatever came my way so as to derive some profit from it. 

Deresiewicz is surrounded by the hierachical, suppressive cult of Ivy League universities, and his solution to the poor quality of education is to attend universities lower in the cult's assigned hierarchical ranking. It doesn't occur to him that the lower-ranked schools and professors are also cult members.

The solution is not to partake of lower-ranked participants in the same failed cult but to reinvent it.  There is no need for undergraduates to attend research universities, and there is no reason for science, the main achievement of the Progressive university, to be done in undergraduate institutions. It can be better done in research institutes that serve graduate but not undergraduate students, a claim that Robert Maynard Hutchins cogently made 70 years ago.  Too many students attend college, employers place too much emphasis on college attendance, and Americans take college degrees too seriously.   Americans did not make the latter mistake before The New Republic was founded.

As well,  American society can be transformed so that widespread wealth can be accumulated and so that independent thinkers don't need to depend on the corporate hierarchy for which places like Yale and Princeton as well as Minnesota and LA City College,  prepare their students.

No One Wants to Teach Writing

My piece "No One Wants to Teach Writing" appears in the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy website commentaries section. 

The Wizard of Oz and the Business School

Much has been made about fraud in industry, but there is as much fraud in education.  An example is the enrollment of unqualified students who are told that they will find jobs appropriate to college graduates but never will because they lack the writing skills.  Often, colleges will tell applicants  that if they matriculate, they will get high-paying jobs. The students do the necessary work, and of course make the necessary payments, but in the end they do not get a job equal to the one promised.  This is especially true of business schools, which use statistical manipulation of data on graduates' salaries to trick students into attending.

The film The Wizard of Oz adumbrates the academic scam.  The Wizard tells the Scarecrow that he doesn't need a brain--all he needs is a diploma.  As William Leach points out in his Land of Desire, which is about consumerism, The Wizard of Oz is about consumerism, for its author, Frank L. Baum, was one of the first modern advertising men. He created the window displays at Wanamaker's.  The Wizard, the man behind the curtain, is the same old snake oil salesman whom Dorothy knew in Kansas, but he uses new imagery:  the medal for the Cowardly Lion, the testimonial for the Tin Man, and the diploma for the Scarecrow.  Coinciding with the development of commercialism and marketing is the development of the university degree, a replacement for intellect and education.  This point is captured by Robert M. Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago in the 1940s, who decries the advent of the anti-intellectual university in his Higher Learning in America.  

But the illiteracy-producing university?  This is a topic that deserves more scrutiny. How many of America's college grads cannot write and are literally illiterate?
 
I moved to Manhattan after a small college on Long Island canned me. One of the doormen in the building had attended the same college. The college produced doormen.  Like Dante's admonition to abandon all hope,  they should have said as much above the doorway to the administration building, perhaps employing one of their own alums to open and close the door for prospective students. 

What is the role of standards-setting bodies in limiting the modern university's fraudulent production of illiteracy?  From what I can tell, the current standards-setting bodies in American universities are indifferent to whether college graduates can read, write, or do basic arithmetic.  Admittedly, I have not studied the question, but recently I heard a former chair of the board of trustees of a public university state that his students were at the national norm. But I know first-hand that a large share of his students are illiterate.  This suggests that the problem is pandemic.

Is the production of illiterate college grads a form of fraud?  If the college admits openly that it is graduating illiterate students, and it tells the students that if they cannot write, then they cannot find jobs, then it is not committing fraud.  The board of trustees chair did no such thing.  He insisted that his illiterate students are literate.  The students pay for an education, so if they are paying thinking that they are being educated, and they are not, then the university is committing fraud.  Fraud is lying for money.  Colleges like to claim that their graduates will all get great jobs.  I suspect that a large share of colleges, including top business schools, routinely commit fraud.  Many, but of course not all, higher education institutions have ethical characteristics much like Enron's.

The Higher Education Bubble

A colleague from a public, western university told me that for an economics final exam he asked an exam question that required basic arithmetic. Unable to do the arithmetic, a student wrote in the allotted answer space: "Millennials don't do math."  Another colleague from an East Coast community college wrote this in a recent email:

Unfortunately, the whole enterprise has become a mockery. At my community college this semester, over 85% of our entering freshmen need math remediation -- that's 85 percent! Many do not know the multiuplication tables!

I recently met a philanthropist who told me that she thinks it's a waste of money for students who are unable to do college level work  to attend college. Even the mouthpiece of Progressivism, The New York Times, admits that the majority of high school seniors are not college ready:


In New York City, 21 percent of the students who started high school in 2006 graduated last year with high enough scores on state math and English tests to be deemed ready for higher education or well-paying careers. In Rochester, it was 6 percent; in Yonkers, 14.5 percent.

The new calculations, part of a statewide push to realign standards with college readiness, also underscored a racial achievement gap: 13 percent of black students and 15 percent of Hispanic students statewide were deemed college-ready after four years of high school, compared with 51 percent of white graduates and 56 percent of Asian-Americans.

The situtation is just as bleak with respect to performance in college.  According to The Chicago Tribune:

Arum, of New York University, and Roksa, of the University of Virginia, startled the academic world with their finding that 36 percent of students made no significant learning gains in critical thinking and communication skills from their freshman to senior years.

That tends to confirm what reader Jerre Levy, a retired University of Chicago professor of psychology, wrote: 'I wish with all my heart that a college degree implied that the person holding that degree was capable of critical thinking. However, this is, sadly, not true.'


According to Sandra Stosky and Ze'ev Wurman in Minding the Campus:

Estimates of those needing remedial classes before taking credit courses range from 30% of entering students to 40% of traditional undergraduates. According to a 2008 report by the CUNY Council of Math Chairs, 90% of 200 City University of New York students tested couldn't solve a simple algebra problem in their first class at a four-year college.

Except for the top 10 percent of students, college spending misallocates wealth.  There is no evidence that increased college attendance makes economies more productive.  America was a more innovative country when less than five percent of its population attended college.  For instance, Thomas Edison had three months of schooling. In 2012 66.2 percent of high school seniors enrolled in college.

Despite the absence of gains in academic achievement since 1970, K-12 education has, since 1970, tripled in inflation-adjusted cost.  I copied the following chart from Intellectual Takeout.org, which got it from the Cato Institute:

There also has been a higher education cost increase.  According to the American Enterprise Institute's Douglas N. Harris:

 Since the early 1990s, real expenditures on higher education have grown by more than 25 percent, now amounting to 2.9 percent of US gross domestic product (GDP)—greater than the percentage of GDP spent on higher education in almost any of the other developed countries.  But while the proportion of high-school graduates going on to college has risen dramatically, the percentage of entering college students finishing a bachelor’s degree has at best increased only slightly or, at worst, has declined.

I disagree with Harris that the flunkout rate indicates a productivity gap.  Colleges that make their courses easier graduate more students, but the result is not higher productivity.  Rather, attendance of students who cannot graduate at the current watered down level diverts resources from more productive uses.

There is no evidence that college increases the ability to think coherently, to come up with creative solutions to human needs, to become a better citizen, or to become more productive economically.

On the other hand, there is evidence that colleges are politically biased and that they serve to indoctrinate students in left-wing, Progressive,  and big-government ideology.  Although college degrees in fields like engineering, business, and health raise salaries, there is no evidence that a more targeted or online education cannot equally prepare students for careers in those fields.  A large share of the Forbes 400, for instance, does not have a college degree, and that is especially true of the self-made portion that has engaged in areas other than finance.

Research that shows that college education contributes to human capital is tautological and does not control for alternative explanations.  It observes increases in pay from college, then it concludes that the pay is a return to human capital.  One alternative explanation is signaling: The college degree signals personal and intellectual abilities, but its content may be irrelevant to the job.  In that case an IQ test combined with four years in the military or the Peace Corps could be used in its place--and those might more accurate measures. Another explanation is that firms find college to be an easy way to screen job applicants: It is cheap to employers because the job applicants pay; parents are eager to see their children have prestigious or professional careers, and they are willing to foot the bill. 

On their part colleges and their faculties function as special interest groups, pushing for ever greater subsidies, expansion of programs, and licensure requirements in fields like medicine and law. Licensure requirements force the public to subsidize higher education.   Moreover, colleges have succeeded in gaining tax exempt status despite their routine violation of the Section 501 (c) (3) requirement that tax exempt organizations not engage in political indoctrination.  Universities, especially in the social sciences, humanities, and bogus sciences like environmental studies, routinely engage in political propagandizing, and they do so unabashedly.

There is an additional explanation for the higher education bubble:  Federal Reserve Bank counterfeit money that has been allocated to student loans. Without student loans the growth in the number of students attending college, hence wasting public resources and being indoctrinated in Progressive ideology, would be much smaller.  Conversely, firms would not be able to require irrelevant college degrees in fields like retail.  College can be viewed as a Fed-generated economic bubble, much like the tech bubble, the Internet bubble, and the sub-prime housing bubble.

WHAT's IN A NAME?

Howard S. Katz wrote this blog here.
8-18-08

In commenting upon the recent (July-August) decline in commodity prices, Bloomberg news service recently reported:

"Commodities, measured by the CRB, are down 20 percent….”

Bloomberg, 8-15-08

This would seem to be an unobjectionable statement, mathematical in its precision. There is, alas, one problem. What is the CRB?

The Commodity Research Bureau was an organization founded in the 1930s by a group of economic types to study the commodity markets. In the mid-1950s, they started to compile an index of the most prominent commodities to do for commodity traders what the Dow Jones Index had done for stock traders. This index was called the Commodity Research Bureau (CRB) Index, and for half a century it served its function well. It told commodity traders what commodities as a whole were doing.

But in 2004, with the founding generation gone, the CRB, now a successful and established organization, had passed into the hands of a new generation. A generation educated in the new way of gathering knowledge. The new generation sought knowledge by hiring a group of authority figures with long and impressive titles to rework the CRB.

I will save you a lot of complicated mathematics and say that the new index they came up with was half crude oil. Each commodity was given a special weighting, and when all the calculations were in, crude oil and its associated commodities (heating oil, unleaded gasoline and natural gas) had a weighting of close to 50%. Since there was a high probability that the other commodities in the index would cancel each other out, the new index pretty much moved up and down with crude oil. The authority figures with their impressive titles had taken away the CRB index and in its place put in its place one commodity. It would have been like taking away the Dow Jones Index and substituting a new index based on GM. GM may be an important stock, but it isn’t a proxy for the market.

Fortunately, the new Commodity Research Bureau knew that they could not just throw out the old CRB Index. That would risk another group picking it up and taking their business away from them. So they kept the CRB Index and changed its name to the Continuous Commodity Index. The new index they called the Reuters/Jeffries CRB Index (hoping that it would be abbreviated to CRB Index and thus confused with the old index).

Of course, if one wants an objective record of what commodities have been doing for the past half century, then one needs to track the same index over that period. It would not be valid to track the DJI from 1956 to 2004 and then switch to GM all the while calling the whole thing the DJI.

In short, the new Reuters/Jeffries CRB is a worthless piece of garbage, and any commodities trader with half a brain will give it no further thought. It was to head off this kind of thinking that the modern CRB gave the new index the name of the old one and changed the old one’s name.

Now perhaps you might say, “Well, these people originated the index. They named it in the first place. They have the right to change the name to anything they want.” The problem, however, is that a name stands for an object. If a young couple has a child, they have the right to call him “Bill.” But if they have a second child 20 years later, they do not have the right to call this second child Bill and rename the first. The character of the first child has become associated with the name “Bill.” People who know him will become confused, and his reputation may (undeservedly) suffer. This is the kind of confusion inherent in the idea that definitions are arbitrary.

Let me take another example. Ever since there has been a science of economics, economists have known what money is. Money was the economic good with which you could buy things. For example, if you want to buy a car and go to the dealer, the dealer will only accept one thing in exchange. If you bring a famous painting to exchange for the car, you will be refused. They will tell you, “Sell the painting for money, and come back and give us money for the car.”

But in the 1980s, Milton Friedman announced a new “money” (which he called M-2), which included short term loans (bank certificates of deposit). This has the same problem as the painting above. It cannot be used to buy things. If you take a bank CD to the car dealer, he will tell you politely to turn it in for money and come back. Soon M-2 had spawned a dozen brothers, up to M-13.

To come up with something like this takes a Nobel Prize winner. Oh, excuse me. I forgot that there is no such thing as the Nobel Prize in economics. It was not one of the 6 prizes described in Alfred Nobel’s will. Indeed, it came along more than 70 years later. Somebody just announced that they were giving a prize in honor of Alfred Nobel. By calling their prize by this name, they were trying to give it the distinction and honor which the prize had acquired over the years. The world press fell for it hook, line and sinker.

The creation of M-2 is a serious problem because in trying to predict a rise in prices, one must take account of any rise in the money supply. If two people cannot agree on what money is, then they cannot predict when prices will rise. Prices only rise as a result of an increase in the economic good which is used to buy things.

Another of my favorite examples is the concept of capitalism. This concept was first used by Karl Marx, and he never defined what capitalism was. For the next century, Marx’s followers would call anything they did not like “capitalism.” For example, Hitler called himself a socialist (as in National Socialist – NAZI), but his leftist enemies called him a capitalist. Adam Smith never used the word. Neither did the classical economists (including Herbert Spencer). I have learned from bitter experience that whenever I hear the word, I am sure to be served up a pastry of confused gobbledegook.

The advantage of simply making up one’s own definition is that you can prove pretty much anything you want. But this is a big disadvantage in the honest search for truth. If you want your ideas to correspond to reality, then you must have accurate definitions of the concepts you use. And since any society has intuitive definitions for all its concepts, intuitive definitions which capture our minds and in terms of which we think, your explicit definitions have to correspond to these intuitive definitions. Otherwise you will confuse the two. Pretty soon you have won the argument and lost the search for truth. (The intellectual world is full of people who “cleverly” start out with formal definitions they know will lead to the conclusion they wish to reach. But these definitions do not correspond to the concept. For example, some sound money types, with whom I am in basic sympathy, defined inflation as an increase in the money supply. They did this so that they could “prove” that inflation is caused by an increase in the money supply. They have been hammering away at this point for over half a century and have still not convinced any of their opponents. If they define inflation as a general rise in prices, they will have a bit more success.)

For example, I define a witch as a woman who has magical powers used for evil. I don’t believe that witches exist. But when I define the concept, I have to put into words the (intuitive) idea of the people in my culture even if they do believe in witches. If I don’t do that much, then I will never be able to convince them that witches don’t exist.

The problem is that modern intellectuals support the arbitrary nature of definitions. It creeps into our culture, and it makes (most) people stupid. For example, do you remember being told early in the year 2000 that the DJI was going to 35,000? It was in all the papers. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal cooperated in shoving that idea down our throat. Did you buy stocks just before the horrific bear market of 2000-2002? Well, you are allowed a few mistakes, but you are expected to learn from them.

When I first took philosophy courses at Harvard, I was told that all they could teach me was that they didn’t know anything. Hey, wait a minute. The reason I went there in the first place was that they told me they knew more than anyone else. If they couldn’t teach me anything, then what was I paying them money for? How about a class action suit to get my tuition money back?

One of the things I learned about Harvard was that of all the things I learned there, nothing worked. I couldn’t do anything with my “knowledge.” Fortunately, I studied on my own before going to college, and this gave me some ability to question my professors. After college, I continued to study on my own, and now I realize that they are nothing but a collection of frauds.

Unfortunately, this collection of frauds continues to corrupt our youth and dominate our society. They make everybody dumb. We are so dumb that we even buy Books for Dummies. In a previous generation, any book reader would have been offended by such a title, and a book with such a title would not have sold. Today’s book buyer meekly accepts it because he feels himself to be a dummy.

Unlike my college professors, readers of this blog are expected to admit and learn from their mistakes. If it doesn’t work, then it isn’t true.

If you do nothing more than read The Federalist Papers or some of the other works of the Founding Fathers, you realize that the intellectual level has collapsed over the past 2 centuries. We are now seeing the cultural and economic collapses which are the result of this. And if nothing is done to stop it, we will eventually follow the path of ancient Rome.

# # #

Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

In Spring, A Student's Thoughts Turn to GETTING OUT OF THE EXAM

When I was a student I viewed an exam as a competition at which I would try to excel. For the first time in my 16-year teaching career students in several classes have been trying to get me to delay or cancel my exam. My practice is to wait until very late in the semester to give an exam, and I warn the students from the first day of class that the exam will be competitive. There is only one week left to the semester. I received the following seven e-mails today all from different senders in three different classes. Are our educational system and culture on the right track?

I. Saturday, May 03, 2008 3:16 PM

Hello Professor Langbert,

The reading for the exam has been little much for me, because I'm taking 6 classes this semester and I'm also interning for 20 hours a week. I feel like I need more time and I want to ask if there is any chance you would consider moving the exam date later in May? We can present our papers this Sunday instead of having the exam now. I hope you understand, but if not, I certainly do understand.

Thank you professor,

II. Saturday, May 03, 2008 7:25 PM

Good morning professor Langbert,

How are you? I was wondering if you might be kind enough give the class an extention on the exam? I have 4 other classes and the materials are a lot to cover.

Thank you!

III. Saturday, May 03, 2008 8:57 PM

is there any way of postponing our exam tomorrow ???
wouldnt your rather see 80s and 90s than have to curve the exam ??

please advs
Saturday, May 03, 2008 11:11 AM


IV. Hi Prof. Langbert, this is...and I wanted to know if I can please have an extension on my paper and the exam on May 4. I wanted an extension because i have not finish all my reading.

Saturday, May 03, 2008 12:43 AM

V. Professor,

How are you doing sir?
I got email from the classmates and I found out that some of us are having a hard time preparing for the exam.
I would greatly appreciate if you could post-pone the exam for us.
Thank you very much for your understanding.


Best regards,

VI. I received an email from ... indicating that you may post pone the exam tomorrow. Since I did not see an announcement on blackboard, I was just wanted to confirm that the exam is tomorrow May 4th.

Thank you,

VII. Prof. Langbert -

A few of us were wondering if you would consider postponing the exam.

My response:

The exam is tomorrow at the stated time and place, and it is going to be hard.

Ratio of Democrat to Republican Donors at Brooklyn College

Huffington Post lists political donors by employer. The information is publicly available on the World Wide Web. I am not breaching confidentiality by copying the data.

The folks at the American Association of University Professors keep claiming that there is no imbalance between Democrats and Republicans in universities. They claim that the professoriate represents a balanced range of views. That is of course absurd.

The top of the Huffington Brooklyn College list states:

$16,093 was given by people who identified their employer as "Brooklyn College".
$0 to Republicans
$16,093 from 25 people to Democrats

The summary states that it all went to Democrats. However, that is inaccurate, as there is one Republican donor on the list. Me. If you look down the list you will see that I gave $540 to John McCain. I am the only Republican donor on the list. With 25 on the list, the politically interested faculty appears to be 4% Republican and 96% Democratic.

Moreover, the amounts contributed to the Democratic Party are surprisingly large. For example, Professor Leo Zanderer donated $4,600 to Christopher Dodd. Professor Madelon Rand donated $1,950 to Hillary Clinton in the first quarter of 2008. Librarian Howard Spivak donated $1,000 to Hillary Clinton. Professor Barbara Winsolow gave $2,000 to Howard Dean.

My question, friends, is: why does the heading of the list say that there are no Republican donors at Brooklyn when it lists me as having given $540 to John McCain?

Brooklyn College Political Donations

Leo Zanderer Professor Brooklyn College Christopher Dodd $4,600
Madelon Rand English Instructor Brooklyn College Hillary Clinton $1,950
Howard Spivak Director, Academic Information,Brooklyn College Hillary Clinton $1,000
Gail Gurland Professor Brooklyn College Hillary Clinton $600
Mitchell Langbert ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR BROOKLYN COLLEGE John McCain $540
Philip Thibodeau Professor Brooklyn College Barack Obama $465
Ellen Wayne Professor Brooklyn College John Edwards $450
Renison Gonsalves Updated Q1/2008 Hillary Clinton $420
John Van Sickle Professor Q1/2008 Barack Obama $400
Donald M Levine Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2008 Barack Obama $391
Lindley Hanlon Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2008 Barack Obama $308
Michael Hipscher Teacher Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2008 John Edwards $300
Matthew Moore Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2008 Barack Obama $300
Mac Wellman writer/professor Dennis Kucinich $300
Andrew Meyer Professor Brooklyn College Q1/2008 Barack Obama $272
Sonia Murrow College Professor Brooklyn College Q1/2008 Barack Obama $250
Barbara Winslow University professor Brooklyn College Howard Dean $2,000
Charlene Forest Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 DNC $500
Joe Fodor writer Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 DNC $500
Ellen Wayne College Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 DNC $450
Clement Mbom Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 DNC $408
John Van Sickle Professor Brooklyn College Q1/2004 John Kerry $375
Kathleen Axen Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 DNC $300
Matthew Moore Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 DNC $300
Peter Wayne College Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 John Kerry $250
Len Fox college professor Brooklyn College Q1/2004 DNC $250
Todd Holden Professor of Physics Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 DNC $250
David Bloomfield Educator Brooklyn College Q1/2004 John Kerry $250
Roni Natov English Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 DNC $250
Daniel Mufson Assistant Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 Howard Dean $250
Steven Jervis Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 John Kerry $200
Corey Robin professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 Howard Dean $200
Charles Ayes Architect Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 John Kerry $200
Len Fox College Professor Brooklyn College Q1/2004 John Kerry $200
Frederick Gardiner Professor Brooklyn College Q1/2004 John Kerry $200
Mac Wellman Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 Dennis Kucinich $200
Gary Giardina Physician Assistant Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 DNC $150
Daniel Mufson Assistant Professor Brooklyn College Updated Howard Dean $150
John Van Sickle Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 Howard Dean $100
Allison Dean Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 Howard Dean $60

Karkhanis Blasts Professional Staff Congress

Sharad Karkhanis, who has been attacked in a Professional Staff Congress (PSC)-related law suit, has just released his latest newsletter, Patriot Returns. Karkhanis offers brilliant coverage of David Seidemann's case, about which Candace de Russy and I have blogged. The Chronicle of Higher Education has also covered the case. Karkhanis notes:

"Convinced that the PSC had treated agency-fee payers unfairly, David Seidemann, a Yale educated full professor of Geology at Brooklyn College, has been patient and tenacious in seeking justice. Since 2002, he's amassed voluminous documentation, collected and examined all relevant information and legal precedents, and pursued the PSC with the tenacity and conviction of an irate faculty member. Seidemann sensed that there was some hanky panky going on with his and your hard-earned dollars. The 1% of our gross salary that goes to union dues or agency fees should be spent for our benefit rather than being diverted to further the New Caucasians' political agenda."

Karkhanis asks:

"Our question is, although permissible in the eyes of the law for the union to spend monies to march, parade and shout out loud to bring pressure on the management on behalf of the dues paying members, how germane is it for the PSC to spend dues money on excessive participation in such activities?"

See the entire blog here. The PSC leadership has spent its time on anti-Iraqi War crusades while neglecting its function of representing faculty. Barbara Bowen and her colleagues have failed CUNY's faculty.

Chronicle of Higher Ed on Seidemann Case

I sent out a small press release concerning David Seidemann's victory in district court against the leadership of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC). Reporter David Glenn of the Chronicle of Higher Education called to thank me for the information and the story ran today (paid access). The article is accurate and even handed. David Glenn's reporting is excellent.

In addition to sending out the press release I had invited Barbara Bowen, Nancy Romer, Steve London, Stanley Aronowitz and several other members of PSC's administration office to comment on my last blog on the recent ruling, but none has responded.

The article points out that Dorothee Benz, a union employee, claims that

"the 'vast majority' of the disputed spending has been allocated to lobbying campaigns to encourage state and local governments to provide financial support to the university, not on political causes that have nothing to do with professors' wages or benefits."

However, this is misleading for two reasons. First, there have been considerable "soft money" activities by the union leadership involving Iraqi War protests, demonstrations and conferences. The leadership is paid salaries to participate in these activities. To be fair, agency dues payments should be reduced by the proportion that salaries for the union leadership's time spent on such political activites bears to the union's total budget. Second, lobbying typically involves political as well as wage and benefit concerns, as Professor Seidemann points out in the article.

An additional concern is that the union has used CUNY facilities to send e-mails and used CUNY facilities to conduct meetings of a political nature. Since CUNY is a section 501(c)(3) organization, the repeated use of CUNY facilities to further the Professional Staff Congress's political goals is inappropriate and likely a breach of the tax code's requirements for charitable and educational institutions (that is, that they not be used for political purposes).

The article quotes Christopher M. Callagy, a union attorney, as saying that the union's chief political efforts are in Albany. This is a lie. The union leadership has repeatedly notified faculty of Iraqi War protests, and used their time and union resources for such protests.

Moreover, the article points out that even Albany lobbying is not considered a collective bargaining expense:

"Mr. Seidemann pointed out in an interview on Wednesday. 'Lobbying for an increased budget for education—that is a political act,' Mr. Seidemann said. ['']There may be people who think education should be supported by property taxes or should be supported totally by tuition.' Mr. Seidemann said that...he distrusts the union's management and wants to give it as little financial support as possible. "

The article adds that Professor Seidemann is continuing with a further complaint. He is asking the judge to require that the union file its financial data online on a specific date. No more Enron-style financials for the Professional Staff Congress.

Professor Seidemann has performed an important social service, and he deserves an award. However, I would argue that his case does not go far enough. The case of Lehnert v. Ferris Faculty Association on which Judge Lois Bloom relies in the Seidemann case assumes that agency payers may be free riders because they receive union benefits but do not contribute to the costs of negotiation. But the PSC has won no benefits for its membership. Rather, because of the PSC's incompetent negotiation stance, silly demonstrations, and adverserial approach, the union has managed to diminish faculty wages and benefits. An equitable rendering of the Lehnert decision ought to be that where unions reduce wages, agency payers should be reimbursed for their losses because of the union's incompetence. Perhaps the next step ought to be to try this case under equity principles.

Progressivism Contradicts progressivism

Progressivism was the ideology of early twentieth century American government. Its argument was based on the idea that big business had developed to a point where it was too powerful not to be regulated and that in order to counteract big business's power the limited federal government of the 19th century needed to be expanded. Progressivism was mainly concerned with how to best manage big business in the public interest. The Progressives were pro-large business. They did not think, as many business executives did not think, that private ownership of monopolies was necessarily appropriate. In many respects Progressivism was similar to Marxism in that it argued that big business was a natural historical development and that an increase in state power was necessary to manage the big business. The Progressives wanted to make certain that the efficiency potential of big business would be actualized and that efficiencies from big business would be managed in ways that weer conducive to the public interest.

The pro-big business attitude of the Progressives changed during the New Deal. Part of the reason was that the New Deal did not focus on the efficiency goal. This was viewed as having been achieved. As well, the New Deal emphasized the importance of finance as opposed to manufacturng, and its policies primarily reflected the interest of large financial firms. In order to accomplish this, the New Deal had to cloak its positive supports for finance with imagery related to social democracy. The New Deal is thus associated in the minds of historians and the public with Social Security, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the National Labor Relations Act, the Securities and Exchange Act and unemployment insurance. However, the chief and most far reaching reform of the New Deal was the abolition of the gold standard and the granting to the financial community the power to create fiat currency in its own interest unimpeded by the gold standard.

In order to justify this profoundly redistributive policy that served the interests of large corporations, real estate holders and stockholders as well as the commercial banks and Wall Street the New Deal needed to seem anti-business. This was accomplished by insisting on unionization of large manufacturing, which created short term political resistance from Alfred Sloan and other business leaders but in the long run (seven decades) provided little or no benefit to the working class. At first, the division between manufacturers and the Roosevelt administration made Roosevelt seem a traitor to his class. However, this is not the case. The financial arrangements Roosevelt created resulted in the largest gains and the longest gains that have accrued to capitalists in the history of the world. There is no other time in recorded history when the asset markets have risen so consistently and to the degree that they have since the New Deal, and there is no other time in American history when real wages have progressed so little.

The progressives lack the perspective of the Progressives because Progressivism held that economic growth depended on a set of social relations, to include big business, stabilized markets and efficiently run companies, and that social justice would flow if big business was managed appropriately. It recognized that efficiency and productivity necessarily preceded social justice. In contrast, the New Deal did not focus on efficiency and concerns. It saw its goals as primarily redistributive. In rhetoric, business executives were reactionaries who fought its redistributional goals and big business was therefore its enemy. The New Deal assumed that the problem of production had been solved. Its followers were not able to grasp the profoundly redistributive policy that the New Deal established of redistributing from the poor to the rich because they naively assumed that the regulatory sops that were thrown to the poor constituted a major redistributional program. But the New Deal gave $100 to the rich for every $1 it gave to the poor, and in public image broadcast the $1 while cloaking the $100 in arcane Keynesian lingo that served as a cloak to 19th century Populist ideas, namely Greenbackism and free silver.

Academics were only too happy to lend credence to Keynesian rhetoric and to serve the rich. Marxism and Keynesian were two ideologies which ultimately serve to cloak the interests of the financial community and alternatively serve to so cloak the academic community's true intersest in providing succor to the wealthy.

Second, progressive rhetoric depicted big business as the enemy rather than a necessary development. Without claiming to foster business progress, progressivism becomes a form of attack on the nation's source of wealth. Small p progressives do not articulate a theory of economic growth and advocate ideas, to include protectionism, income taxation, regulation and expansion of the state that can easily be shown to harm innovation and economic development. The progressives are not troubled by their assault on progress because of their quaint insistence that the problem of production despite the development of innovative production concepts in Japan that American firms have been unable to replicate and have been protected from replicated by the progressives' inflationist and government support policies for big business.

In fact, the progressives reserve their worst venom for the few innovative businesses, such as Wal-Mart, which have contributed to economic growth. Those that have not, from Wall Street to Detroit, are viewed with favor by the progressive movement.

Brooklyn College Has a New Provost

Brooklyn College President Christoph Kimmich's internal release concerning Brooklyn College's new provost follows.

28 January 2008

To: The Brooklyn College Community
From: President Christoph M. Kimmich

I am pleased to inform you that I have invited Dr. William W. Tramontano to serve as Brooklyn College’s next Provost, and that he has accepted. The appointment will be effective 1 July 2008, subject to the formal approval of the University’s Board of Trustees. This concludes the search we inaugurated in fall 2006.

Dr. Tramontano comes to us from Lehman College, where he is Dean of Natural and Social Sciences and where, in 2006-2007, he served as Acting Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs. For many years he was chair of the Department of Biology at Manhattan College, where he also headed important governance committees.

Dr. Tramontano comes with a wealth of administrative experience, in public as well as private institutions, and he has a good working knowledge both of Brooklyn College and of The City University. He has a commitment to the mission of a public liberal arts college and to the faculty as the principal custodians of that mission. He is a strong advocate of teaching and research, of students and student learning, consonant with our values and goals. At Lehman (and earlier at Manhattan College) he worked productively with faculty to plan and develop new academic programs, to strengthen research, and to increase both research and institutional grants. At Lehman, he was deeply involved in the college’s strategic planning process and the Middle States Self Study Committee, and he played a major role in the planning and design of a new science building (also one of our priorities). As Acting Provost, he chaired the tenure-and-promotion and the Distinguished Professor committees, and he served on various subcommittees of the CUNY Taskforce on Restructuring Doctoral Education in the Sciences.

Dr. Tramontano has degrees in biology from Manhattan College and New York University, with a special interest in cell biology. He is well published in the field and the recipient of major research and institutional grants. He has taught biology and physiology, and in fact continues to teach even as dean.

I believe Dr. Tramontano will serve the College well as chief academic officer, embracing change but mindful of tradition, and will help advance our goals and objectives. Please join me in welcoming him to Brooklyn College.

Sharad Karkhanis--Man of The Year

I just put up Phil Orenstein's press release concerning the Queens Village Republicans' award to Sharad Karkhanis as "Educator of the Year". I have decided that Sharad should also be awarded "Man of the Year". I am hereby designating him the first official recipient of Mitchell Langbert's blog's Man of the Year award. Who needs Time?

Opiate of the Masses

Merv of PrairiePundit posts Mark Steyn's article about capitalism and change (thanks to Larwyn). He notes that whereas the presidential candidates say that they favor change:

"it's capitalism that's the real "agent of change. Politicians, on the whole, prefer stasis, at least on everything for which they already have responsibility. ts."

But the change thatReInflateoCrat politicians advocate is not make believe. Politicians do create change. Progressive-liberal or political change is reactionary and exploitative. The name "progressive-liberal" refers not to progress or liberalization for the public, rather progress and liberalization for its privileged beneficiaries: lawyers, big business, academics and hedge fund managers.

In aiming to "deconstruct" American values, progressive-liberals aim to supplant them with values that serve their ends. Progressive liberals aim not only to staunch general progress and technological advance, which threatens established economic interests, but to intensify income inequality; shore up inept businesses; protect inefficient health care; make the poor poorer; and make the rich richer. All of this is done in the name of making the economy more efficient; reducing income inequality; providing general health care; and helping the poor. Progressive-liberalism is a vicious philosophy.

Universities have played a critical role in reinforcing exploitative political change . In the 1970s Milovan Djilas argued that communism and left wing ideology served the interests of a new class of journalists and intellectuals.

In America, political use of intellectuals to advocate and support economic exploitation of the poor takes on a specific pattern. American academics argue for cultural change that reinforces their power. They attack religious institutions and traditional values, and argue for a pattern based on groupthink, the "liberal Borg", whereby the New York Times sets an agenda which progressive-liberal cult members mindlessly follow. The progressive-liberal groupthink mentality is a social control process that serves specific economic interests. The new class, academics and journalists, is paid for this pattern with academic jobs, funding and the like.

The effect of the academics' purposed cultural domination and hegemony is to distract the public from state violence and exploitation. The public is made poorer by inflationary policies of the Federal Reserve Bank, while the media advises them that inflation is low. The dollar is artificially propped up and some jobs leave the country, and the media tells the public that free trade is to blame. There is massive waste in government, and the public is told that taxes are too low.

All the while, academia distracts from its exploitative purposes by raising crank political issues: terrorism is justice; defending America is imperialism; crime is justice; taxation creates wealth; free trade makes us poorer, and so on.

The Republicans have been too often part of this process. Republicans, such as Theodore Roosevelt, supported progressive-liberalism. This element never left the Republican Party. In those days, the Democrats were free traders and the Republicans supported exploitative tariffs. Support for hard money was a minority voice in both parties. It was not until 1896 that the Republicans became the hard money party.

It is primarily because of capture of academia that the progressive-liberals have been triumphant in the last century. Now that their ideas have been discredited, it is even more crucial to them to retain control of academia. Without the reinforcement of academic propaganda, it will be difficult for the progressive-liberals to appear to be anything other than what they are: the ideologists of corruption, narrow special interest and economic decline.

Conservatives need to state their case. The Republican Party is not necessarily a conservative or moderate conservative party. It has been a corrupt or progressive-liberal party for much of its history. Conservatives must ponder the way forward.