Learning By The Numbers

It has become a graduation ritual at Kennesaw State University.  Soon after the graduates are assembled in the convocation hall, our president asks them a series of questions.  They are then instructed to stand if these apply to them.  The purpose is to acquaint those present with just how much KSU students have on their plates.

One of the first questions is: Have you held a job while attending KSU?  At this, more than three quarters of the students rise.  The next question is: Have you held two or more jobs?  At this, about one third rise.

Students are likewise asked if they are married or have children.  Once more large numbers stand.  By the end of the exercise, it is obvious to everyone that our students have many responsibilities beyond those incurred as students.

Kennesaw State began as a commuter school, but now has thousands of undergraduates living on campus.  Even so, most are not the traditional college students who went directly from high school to a small rural academy where all that was expected of them was to study and/or party.

It should, therefore, not come as a surprise that most of our students take longer than the traditional four years to earn their degrees.  After all, there are only so many hours in the day and if many of these must be devoted to family and work, how many are left over for study?

But now the powers that be behind Complete Georgia have decided that a fifteen hour, per term class load should be the minimum.  That translates into five three credit courses for each an every semester.  In terms of time, this requires three in-class hours per week and an additional three hours of study per credit per week.

So where is the time to come from?  The politicians promoting “15 to finish” appear not to care.  Their sole concern seems to be that students take less time to graduate.  This way they get to boast that the graduation rate has risen, with this feat promoted as somehow improving educational achievement.

But does it?  Consider what will happen.  Students forced to take classes for which they do not have the time to study, will naturally study less.  They will skip reading assignments and hand in term papers either cribbed from the Internet or dashed off with scarcely a moment of thought.

And how will their professors respond?  They will certainly be aware that the quality of student work has declined.  But because this decline will be general, they will be reluctant to grade students down, rightly concluding that if they do, their own performances will be negatively evaluated.

The result?  Fewer books will be assigned, course papers will be narrower in scope, and test scores will curved upward.  In the end—on paper—it will look as if students are learning as much as they ever have.  This will not be true, but the politicians will be able to manipulate the statistics to make it appear as if it were.

Once more, higher education will be dumbed down to serve other than educational purposes.  We will thus be in the same boat as when high school teachers were forced to graduate students who could not even read their diplomas.  Back then, social promotions inflated graduation rates and made it look like leaning occurred when it hadn’t.

So who benefits?  If this policy saves money, it is surely a fool’s gain.  But how ironic is it that the fewer funds the state funnels into higher education, the more strings it attaches.  This is said to be for the good of the students and the community, yet it is not.  It is all about talking points—not education!

On top of this, the politicians want more students to go to college so that they too can earn phony degrees.  Yet who is this fooling?  Producing more half-educated citizens is a sham that sooner or later will be found out.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University

Liberals Are Anti-Democratic

Every now and then I read a book that alters my perspective.  Fred Siegel’s The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Undermined the Middle Class is such a work.  It makes it clear that liberals have always been vociferously hostile to democracy.

While I have long realized that the “Democratic” party is misnamed, how far its roots lie from the egalitarian traditions of the United States came into much sharper focus.  Liberalism is—and was—a program designed by elitists for elitists.  It never was for, or appreciative of, the little guy.

Although I have a fairly large vocabulary, Siegel uses a word with which I was not familiar.  It is “clerisy.”  According to the dictionary, this is a synonym for the literati.  This is also the clique that Siegel identifies as having launched and kept liberalism afloat.

From its beginnings a century ago, modern American liberalism has been dedicated to promoting literary causes.  Its chief proponents were self-styled intellectuals who deemed themselves superior to the common ruck.  Convinced they were smarter, kinder, and more sophisticated than ordinary persons, they could afford to look down on them.

But more than this, they had to persuade themselves that they were not really snobs.  As a result, they styled themselves as knights errant on the mission to save humanity from its own defects.  They, albeit highbrows, would lead the lowbrows into a brave new world of gentility and equality.

Of course, they did not really mean this.  Utterly convinced of their own superiority, they were certain ordinary people could not govern themselves.  These boobs could not tell the difference between a Kandinsky and a toad and therefore they could not be trusted to make important decisions.

No, the clerisy would have to make the decisions—even for the personal lives of those they were destined to govern.  Persons of lesser ability would have to defer to their betters so that they could be saved from themselves.  Indeed, if these fools had to be manipulated into complying, it was for their own good.

Isn’t this what Barack Obama and his merry band of pseudo-democrats are attempting to do?  Don’t they habitually assure us that ObamaCare will rescue us from the mean-spirited insurance companies?  Aren’t they confident our nation’s hegemonic ambitions must be thwarted lest we corrupt the rest of the world?

And if we are not in favor of these things, they must persuade us to go along.  Should this require lies, lies will be told.  Should it entail misdirection, red herrings will be trotted out.  Should the truth lead people to come to the wrong conclusions, it will be withheld from them.

Why not?  Ordinary Americans are regarded as so dim that these forms of manipulation will slide by them.  Obviously, young women can be persuaded that conservatives hate them by repetitively making unsubstantiated charges of a “war against women.”  Clearly, the poor can be rallied to legislation that will make them poorer if offered a few small bribes.

Hence we witness the New York Times, the bastion of elite Liberalism, a newspaper that prides itself on providing “all the news that’s fit to print,” deciding not to cover the IRS scandal.  Ordinary people surely cannot be trusted with knowledge of how Lois Lerner plotted to deny tax relief to conservative organizations; ergo memos that reveal this are omitted.

Then there is Harry Reid who tells the masses that accusations ObamaCare is hurting people are all lies.  Or Nancy Pelosi who opined that if we were to find out what ObamaCare contained, congress would first have to pass it—naturally assuming that average Americans would never read the bill.

As for the president himself, he believes that his rhetoric can always get him out of a bad scrape.  Given the right honeyed words, and the appropriate cadences, voters can even be persuaded that ObamaCare is working.  Failing that, he can divert attention with lurid tales about why the climate-change sky is falling.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University

Deep Denial II

Since this past autumn, my colleague Ken White and I have been doing a pod-cast called “Honestly Speaking: Red Meets Blue.”  At roughly two weeks intervals, we choose a topic and debate it.  About a month ago, the subject was global warming.

As you might expect, Ken, representing the liberal position, championed “climate change,” whereas, I, the conservative, was skeptical of the thesis that this was “man-made.”  Time and again, Ken trotted out the argument that because “97 percent” of climatologists subscribe to global warming, the case is closed.

More recently, when I wrote a column about liberal denial for the MDJ, I cited the president’s insistence that the climate case was indeed closed as an instance of denial.  Not surprisingly, several readers chided me for not understanding that Obama was correct; that a scientific consensus confirms his assertions.

Among other things, I was told that I should be ashamed for not understanding how science works.  Thus, I was informed that because scientific papers are peer reviewed, we can depend on their accuracy. 

Now, as someone who has been published in peer-reviewed journals, but, more importantly, who is the editor of a peer-reviewed journal (The Journal of Public and Professional Sociology) I am not unfamiliar with the concept of peer review.  Nonetheless, I also know its limitations.

Indeed, how vulnerable scientific journals are to manipulation was recently reveled by a fraud of epic proportions.  Amazingly, over one hundred and twenty hard science and mathematics papers were exposed as having been generated by computer programs.   Produced by randomly, albeit grammatically, putting jargon together, they were complete nonsense.

In science, a consensus proves nothing.  In the end, it is always evidence that is telling.  Facts matter, and if these go against a thesis, the number of persons who support it is irrelevant.  The earth does go around the sun.  Einstein’s equations do explain more than Newton’s.  It doesn’t matter that huge majorities once thought otherwise.

Furthermore, scientific hypotheses must be open to disconfirmation.  If they aren’t, they are not science, but faith.  With respect to global warming, the true-believers allow for no disconfirmation.  Whatever the facts, they always prove them right.

Those who seek to win this case by accusing folks like me of being “flat-earthers” point to computer simulations as corroborating their thesis.  But computer simulations are hypotheses.  They are not facts and therefore cannot validate themselves.

Besides, the overwhelming number of climate simulations generated faulty predictions.  In other words, they have been disconfirmed.

Let me explain what denial is.  People who are in denial refuse to see facts.  They close their eyes and ears to reality and instead subscribe to rationalizations and fantasies.  Moreover, because they are in denial, they do not realize they are in denial.  To the contrary, they are convinced that those who disagree with them are.

So I repeat myself: Liberals are in deep denial.  The political facts are going against them; hence they become ever more desperate in their refusal to acknowledge reality.  Emotionally committed to the proposition that they are correct, nothing can budge them off center.

This intransigence not only applies to global warming, but to a host of contentious issues.  Most notable among these is ObamaCare.  The true-believers still insist the program is working.

Harry Reid (but not just Harry Reid) told us that every Obamacare horror story is a lie.  Not one single person has been injured by losing his doctor or health plan.  Those who claim otherwise are hoaxers.

So why did the president have to apologize for saying no one would lose a plan or doctor?  And were there really no glitches in the website rollout?  People in denial argue for the strangest things—but Reid went the extra mile.  The nation should be laughing at his blatant attempt at deception, yet I doubt many liberals are.

Denial is a wonderful thing.  It can cover a multitude of sins.  For Liberals, it is doing just that.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University

Slaying the Bureaucratic Dragon

Somewhat over a hundred years ago, W.E.B. Dubois predicted that the “color line” would be the chief concern of the twentieth century.  He was prophetic.  More recently, Barack Obama informed us that eliminating inequality would be the chief concern of the twenty-first century.  He was not.

The primary business of our times—and it may remain so for a century—is slaying the bureaucratic dragon.  If our prosperity has stalled and social justice is in jeopardy, this is largely because imperialistic, yet sclerotic, bureaucracies have over-reached themselves.

Bureaucracies have a tendency to both grow and become choked in impenetrable underbrush.  Time and again, they spread out to control whatever they can; yet they do so by proliferating as many pointless jobs and stultifying rules as possible.  At the close of the day, they develop into endpoints unto themselves—quite oblivious of their original purpose.

The only way to cut back this malignancy is to be ruthless.  We, as a society, must unsheathe our vorpal blades.  They must go snicker-snack, so that we can go galumphing back to reclaim our independence.  Only when the dragon has been brought to ground can we safely resume life as usual.

Our weapons must cut deep because bureaucratic tyrants multiply more quickly than rabbits and regulatory brambles propagate more lushly than kudzu.  In the name of providing essential services, they rob us of our freedom and set us to completing useless tasks designed only to keep us in bondage.

Actually, I don’t mean that we must slay the dragon; rather we must tame it.  Bureaucracies perform vital functions.  They allow us to coordinate extremely complex activities that can be managed in no other way.  Modern industries, governments, and universities could not exist without them.

But to use another analogy, they often mutate into unkempt lawns.  Unless the vegetation they generate is regularly mowed, it soon grows so high, and becomes so weed infested, as to destroy the curb-appeal of the most handsome McMansion.

So what to do?  As I say, we must be ruthless.  First off, overgrown bureaucracies, such as the federal government, must be frozen in place.  They must be denied additional sustenance so that they cannot increase their legions of superfluous administrators.

Next, unnecessary positions must be excised.  Organizational slots need to be terminated and their incumbents dismissed, transferred, or allowed to retire.  This is painful, but no less than we would do for a metastasized cancer.

Lastly, we must combine titles.  Instead of two vice-presidents, we can have one with an expanded portfolio.  This will not only reduce the number of redundant managers, but eliminate unnecessary duties.

What, you say, there will not be enough people to handle the work that needs doing.  In a sense, this is true.  But remember Parkinson told us that work expands to fill the space allotted for it.  Thus, when you shrink the space, you discover that it does not take as many hands to accomplish what is required.

In a civilized society, we need rules.  We also need enforcement agents.  But we do not need so many rules that we cannot keep track of them and so many administrators that they have to invent reasons to intrude into our lives.

Hence a university that boasts more vice-presidents than if has full professors is well on its way to no longer being a university.  When more people keep tabs on those who do the teaching than there are persons teaching—surprise, surprise, there is less education.

Likewise, when there are more government administrators making sure that small businesses do not engage in abuses than there are small businesses, the free market and the bounties it has provided are on the way to extinction.

Politicians tell us that they are merely protecting us from exploitation, but they are actually ensuring that we are neither free nor prosperous.  Theirs is the justice, and equality, of what Max Weber called the Iron Cage.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University