Reason Magazine - Topics > Academia

Donna Shalala's Wet Nightmare

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:23:00 EDT

Researching tomorrow's column, I came across a MADD quote from former Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, now president of the University of Miami, condemning the college presidents who want "an informed and dispassionate public debate" about the drinking age:

As a three-time university president, I can tell you that losing a student to an alcohol-related tragedy is one of the hardest and most heart-rending experiences imaginable. Signing this initiative does serious harm to the education and enforcement efforts on our campuses and ultimately endangers young lives even more. I ask every higher education leader who has signed to reconsider. I am old enough to remember life on our campuses before the 21 year drinking rule. It was horrible.

I'm also old enough to remember life on our campuses before the 21-year drinking rule, which did not apply to students at my college until halfway through my sophomore year. I don't recall it as horrible, or notably worse than it was after most students were officially forbidden to drink. To the contrary, the new restriction was a pain in the ass that made it harder to drink beer with friends at bars near the campus and encouraged us to drink liquor in private instead.

Of course, I am a generation younger than Shalala. Maybe her "horrible" experience occurred when she attended Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, in the early 1960s. It does not sound like a wild place, but who knows? Or maybe the alcohol-soaked hell was Hunter College, where Shalala was president from 1980 to 1987. Possibly she is overgeneralizing. Possibly I am. Does anyone else recall that life on campus was substantially more horrible when 18-to-20-year-olds drank legally than it was when they started drinking illegally?

College Presidents: "How many times must we relearn the lessons of prohibition?"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:27:00 EDT

College presidents from Duke, Dartmouth, Ohio State, and dozens of other schools are exhausted. They've tried pretty much everything they can think of to keep 18 to 20-year-olds from having a beer (or 10). It's not working, it's never going to work, and they're petitioning for a change.

The Amethyst Initiative (so called because the Greeks believed the stones could ward off drunkenness) is a pretty cool idea. Here are a bunch of sober (figuratively), unimpeachably serious people who have issued an interesting and well-thought-out declaration about how screwed up their campuses are, in part thanks to a foolishly high drinking age:

A culture of dangerous, clandestine “binge-drinking”—often conducted off-campus—has developed.

Alcohol education that mandates abstinence as the only legal option has not resulted in significant constructive behavioral change among our students.

Adults under 21 are deemed capable of voting, signing contracts, serving on juries and enlisting in the military, but are told they are not mature enough to have a beer.

By choosing to use fake IDs, students make ethical compromises that erode respect for the law.

They also make an explicit reference to the days of Dry Law, asking: "How many times must we relearn the lessons of prohibition?"

I'm especially keen on this point about eroding respect for the law. One of the first things that many teenagers do to prepare for college is get a fake ID. Congrats highway fund "incentive," you've turned us all into scofflaws before we even get started on adulthood.

Don't Trust Citations

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:08:00 EDT

Andy Guess of Inside Higher Ed writes up a recent study that seeks to quantify errors in citations in scholarly papers. The results are more than a bit disturbing:

As it turns out, scholars have already done some work quantifying problem citations, divided into two categories, "incorrect references" and "quotation errors." The authors of the paper, J. Scott Armstrong of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and Malcolm Wright of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia, Adelaide, write of the former type, "This problem has been extensively studied in the health literature ... 31 percent of the references in public health journals contained errors, and three percent of these were so severe that the referenced material could not be located."
More serious than such botched references are articles that incorrectly quote a cited paper or, as the authors put it, "misreport findings." For example, in the same study of health literature³, they write, "authors' descriptions of previous studies in public health journals differed from the original copy in 30 percent of references; half of these descriptions were unrelated to the quoting authors' contentions."

Whole story here.

Tennessee Takes the Fun Out of Toga Parties

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:38:00 EDT

Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen signed a measure last week requiring state-funded colleges and universities to notify parents any time their kid violates a school's alcohol or drug policy.

It seems that Bredesen and crew are banking on changes made in federal rules after the Virginia Tech shootings. The Department of Education modified the language in an effort to balance "safety, privacy, and treatment."

In other words, under the guise of keeping students safe, Tennessee lawmakers are forcing state schools to send home behavioral report cards for any kid under the age of 21, whether parents want to know or not.

Bredesen—who either believes (despite available evidence to the contrary) that a freshman or sophomore getting caught with pot or doing upside-down margarita shots constitutes an emergency; or is pretending to believe such a thing in order to force parents into doling out the kind of discipline that deans cannot—has likely gone too far with the new disclosure law.

Students who decide to challenge the law in future, perhaps after mom or dad cuts them off for smoking weed out of an apple, would probably win the court battle.

That is, if their parents don't ground them for getting caught doing a 20-second keg stand while wearing an adult diaper.

Ed Carson for reason on college drinking here.

Flunk This Movie!

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

“This is not a religious argument,” Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman asserts in the new anti-evolution propaganda movie, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Yet the film is free of scientific content: It gives no scientific evidence against biological evolution and none for “intelligent design.” Instead, host Ben Stein spends most of the movie asking various proponents of evolutionary theory for their religious views.

The film begins with moody shots of Stein backstage before he addresses an unidentified audience on the alleged suppression of scientific research in the name of Darwinian orthodoxy. Stein stalks onstage and suggests that we are losing our scientific freedom.

As evidence, Stein trots out a small parade of martyrs. In 2004, Richard Sternberg, then editor of Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, published an article by Stephen Meyer arguing that the “Cambrian explosion” 570 to 530 million years ago in which most of the body types of animals developed was evidence for intelligent design.

Many of Sternberg’s colleagues reacted with dismay, and the journal retracted the article. In the film, Sternberg says he lost his office at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, was pressured to resign, and had his religious and political beliefs questioned. Yet he still has office space in the museum and has been reappointed for three more years. True, some of his colleagues might not want to hang out with him anymore. But that is a far cry from the grim black-and-white shots of Soviet armies and concentration camps featured in the film.

In 2005, George Mason University did not renew a teaching contract with Caroline Crocker, an adjunct biology lecturer who believes in intelligent design. She tells Stein that she only wanted to teach students to question scientific orthodoxies: “I was only trying to teach what the university stands for—academic freedom.” Since George Mason let her go, she says, she can no longer find work.

Interestingly, Crocker delivered the same offending lecture at a local community college later. It didn’t turn out to be a “balanced” presentation of evidence for and against biological evolution. Why not? “There really is not a lot of evidence for evolution,” she says.

An assistant professor of astronomy, Guillermo Gonzalez, was denied tenure at Iowa State University in 2007. In 2004 Gonzalez co-wrote The Privileged Planet, which argues the Earth was precisely positioned to enable researchers like him to make scientific measurements. An Iowa State colleague, Hector Avalos, neatly skewers this conceit: “This rationale is analogous to a plumber arguing that if our planet had not been positioned precisely where it is, then he might not be able to do his work as a plumber. Lead pipes might melt if the Sun were much closer. And, if our planet were any farther from the Sun, it might be so frozen that plumbers might not exist at all. Therefore, plumbing must have been the reason that our planet was located where it is.”

Did Gonzalez fail to get tenure because of his views? The university denies it, but my guess is he did. On the evidence of The Privileged Planet, Guillermo’s colleagues could reasonably worry that his views weren’t likely to lead to fruitful research results.

The most egregious part of the movie is the attempt to link evolution with Communism and Nazism. The claim that Communism was motivated by Darwin is just silly. Official Soviet biological doctrine was Lysenkoism, and Russian Darwinists were denounced as “Trotskyite agents of international fascism” and thrown into the Gulag for their scientific sins.

And Nazism? In the film, the mathematician David Berlinski says, “Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like Nazism, but I think it was a necessary one.” Berlinski is suggesting that scientific materialism undermines the notion that human beings occupy a special place in the universe. If humans aren’t special, goes this line of thinking, then morals don’t apply.

But people through the millennia have found all sorts of justifications for murdering each other, including plunder, nationalism, and, yes, religion. Meanwhile, insights from evolutionary psychology are helping us understand how our in-group/out-group dynamics contribute to our disturbing capacity for racism, xenophobia, genocide, and warfare. The field also offers new ideas about how human morality developed, including our capacities for cooperation, love, and tolerance.

At one point in the film, the science studies gadfly Steve Fuller archly poses the question: Which comes first, worldview or evidence? Fuller aims his question at the proponents of evolutionary biology. As this dreary film itself makes it painfully clear, the question is far more relevant to the supporters of intelligent design.

Ronald Bailey is reason’s science correspondent.

Finally, a Good Reason to Declaim Wikipedia

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:30:00 EDT

Mark Bauerlein, occasional reason contributor and author of the provocative and exhaustingly subtitled book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30), has come up with a legitimately interesting critique of my favorite online resource:

The site is criticized for its superficiality, erroneousness, and amateurism, but, in fact, Wikipedia provides ready access to a fact, definition, or overview. No, the real problem with Wikipedia is a stylistic one. Read a dozen entries on the similar topics and they all sound the same. The outline is formulaic, the prose numbingly bland. Sentences unfold in tinny sequence. Perspectives arise in overcareful interplay. If a metaphor pops up, it’s a dead one. Consider the entry on Moby-Dick:
Ahab seeks one specific whale, Moby-Dick, a great white whale of tremendous size and ferocity. Comparatively few whaling ships know of Moby-Dick, and fewer yet have knowingly encountered the whale. In a previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab’s boat and bit off Ahab’s leg. Ahab intends to exact revenge on the whale.
Compare that to a sentence from Collier’s Encyclopedia, first published in 1950: “As he makes very clear to Starbuck, his first mate, Captain Ahab envisions in Moby-Dick the visible form of a malicious Fate which governs man thoughtlessly...” Or the description of Ahab in the 1953 Encyclopedia Americana: “a crazed captain whose one thought is the capture of a ferocious monster that had maimed him...” Or even this in CliffsNotes from 1966: “Ahab’s monomania is seen then in his determination to view the White Whale as the symbol of all the evil of the universe.”

Wikipedia, concludes Bauerlein, an English prof at Emory, is "a useful repository of information, but as a model of discourse, it’s a killjoy."

Whole thing here.

reason on Wikipedia creator and libertarian visionary Jimmy Wales.

Prof. Tattletale

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:11:00 EDT

Part two in the grown-ups who should know better whining about bullying series:

A professor is suing because her students were sort of mean to her when she offered them the golden gift of "problematizing" technology and life sciences with, for example, "ecofeminist" critiques.

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will “name names.”...
Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. “My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful,” she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review.

And the best quote from her:

“They’d argue with your ideas.” This caused “subversiveness."

Via Julian Sanchez, who is at least marginally more receptive to French narrative theory

Now Playing at Reason.tv: The Age of American Unreason; Q&A with Susan Jacoby

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:35:00 EDT

...

Steal a Little and They Call You a Thief; Steal a Lot and They Call You King; and Then There's Jim Twitchell

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:48:00 EDT

University of Florida professor of English and advertising Jim Twitchell—an occasional reason contributor over the years—has been unmasked as a serial plagiarist by The Gainesville, Florida Sun:

James Twitchell, a widely published UF professor who writes about consumerism and pop culture, has lifted words verbatim from multiple authors in at least three books published between 2002 and 2007, a Sun investigation found.
Twitchell initially denied a pattern of plagiarism, but the 64-year-old professor was contrite and ashamed when recently confronted with a larger body of evidence.
"It's my responsibility to make sure that the words and ideas are my own and, if not, that they are properly credited. In many cases, I have not done this," Twitchell wrote in an e-mail Wednesday. "I have used the words of others and not properly attributed them. I am always in a hurry to get past descriptions to make my points, a hurry that has now rightly resulted in much shame and embarrassment. I have cheated by using pieces of descriptions written by others."

More here.

From a reason perspective, what's particularly disappointing is that Twitchell, who contributed four memorable pieces that together made a fun and erudite case for consumer capitalism, ripped off at least two other reason figures: former Editor Virginia Postrel and anthropologist Grant McCracken.

Here's Postrel's reaction:

I was surprised at the extent of Twitchell's word-for-word copying, but I don't consider that his most egregious breach of ethics. Giving your readers inaccurate information because you've changed store names--to hide the source? to make a better story? just for fun?--is worse.

And here's McCracken:

This was witting behavior. Twitchell sent Postrel the manuscript of Living It Up to ask for a blurp. She noticed Twitchell's use of the Diderot Effect and asked him to acknowledge me. Twitchell did not. According to Stripling, Twitchell claims that Diderot Effect "has become such common parlance in his area of study that he wasn't even sure who coined it." Really? But his use of my exact words tells us he was acquainted with its origin.

We've done a quick scan of Twitchell's work for reason and have no obvious cases of rip-offery and plagiarism from other sources. If we dig that up, we'll make corrections. Twitchell's behavior is not simply indefensible but really fucking stupid: We live in an age where it's tough not to get caught for plagiarizing. And where there's no cost to acknowledging sources—if anything, it's a sign of erudition and plugs an author into a broader network of thinkers.

John Yoo's Right to Give Bad Advice

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:41:00 EDT

At a Manhattan Institute website devoted to higher education, civil libertarian (and reason contributor) Harvey Silverglate takes a skeptical look at calls to discipline, disbar, fire, or prosecute former Justice Department attorney John Yoo, now a Berkeley law professor, for his advice regarding the president's authority to torture prisoners and otherwise flout the will of Congress and/or the Constitution. Although severely critical of Yoo's views on executive power, some of which he calls "laughable" and "ludicrous," Silverglate approaches the issue as "both a criminal defense lawyer, with a vested interest in ensuring that a fellow member of the bar is dealt with fairly, and as a frequent critic of higher education's often evident contempt for academic freedom." He argues that proving Yoo gave his legal advice in bad faith, as required for prosecution and probably for disbarment as well, would be very difficult. Silverglate also warns that an investigation by his employer could have a chilling effect on academic freedom and set a bad precedent for partisan attacks disguised as ethical policing. Such inquiries would in any case be fundamentally misguided, I think, given the impressive ability that human beings have to convince themselves that what's convenient for them (or their bosses) is also what's right.

John Yoo's vision of presidential power scares me, but so do partisan attacks on freedom of speech.

Flunk This Movie!

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

"This is not a religious argument," asserts Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman in conservative Hollywood gadfly Ben Stein's new anti-science propaganda film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie opens this Friday in 1,100 theaters, the largest theatrical release ever for a documentary, according to Expelled's producers.

The movie's basic point? To quote a transcript from a Rush Limbaugh show posted to the movie's offical website: "Darwinism has taken root, taken hold at every major intellectual institution around the world in Western Society, from Great Britain to the United States, you name it. Darwinism, of course, does not permit for the existence of a supreme being, a higher power, or a God."

Yet despite its topic, the film is entirely free of scientific content—no scientific evidence against biological evolution and none for "intelligent design" (ID) theory is given. Which makes sense because biological evolution is amply supported by evidence from the fossil record, molecular biology, and morphology. For example, the younger the rocks in which fossils are found, the more closely they resemble species alive today, and the older the rocks, the less resemblance there is. In addition, molecular biology confirms that the more distantly related the fossil record suggests species lineages are, the more their genes differ.

Instead of evaluating this evidence, Stein spends most of the movie asking various proponents of evolutionary theory, including Richard Dawkins, P.Z. Myers, Michael Ruse, and Daniel Dennett, for their religious views. Neither the producers nor Stein understand that offering critiques of a theory with which they disagree is not the same as proving their own theory.

Stein and the film's producers maintain that belief in evolutionary biology makes societies more likely to succumb to totalitarianism. The flick is replete with grim black-and-white shots of Soviet armies, Nazi thugs, Stalin, Hitler, and concentration camps. The filmmakers portray opposition to teaching ID in universities and public schools as a threat to freedom on a par with Communist and Nazi repression. But ID proponents in the academy are not being dragged off to concentration camps by goose-stepping Darwinist thugs—the worst thing they suffer is the loss of their jobs. That's not fun, but it's not the gas chamber either.

This silly, duplicitous film features one associate after another of the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based "think tank" that has been at the forefront of campaign to smuggle intelligent design into science classrooms and public discourse. This campaign was outlined in the Discovery Institute's infamous "Wedge Strategy" document in 1998. That document begins with the sentence, "The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built." The Wedge document goes on to complain: "Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science."

The Wedge document makes it crystal clear what comes first for intelligent designers, and it isn't evidence. Under activities to popularize intelligent design, the Wedge document mentions "documentaries and other media productions." Expelled is just part of that propaganda strategy.

The film is being bankrolled by Walt Ruloff, a Christian evangelical software millionaire. A resident of Vancouver, British Columbia, Ruloff hooked up with another Expelled producer, Logan Craft, when Craft was studying with evangelical theologian J.I. Packer at Regent College in Vancouver. Ruloff claims that he was shocked when one of the leading genomic researchers in the U.S. told him that as much 30 percent of research in his field is never published because it points toward intelligent design theory. Just how this much research is hidden from view goes unexplained.

The film begins with moody shots of Ben Stein backstage before he addresses an unidentified audience on the alleged suppression of scientific research in the name of Darwinian orthodoxy. Stein stalks onstage and declares that freedom is the essence of America. So far, so good. Then he muses, What if our freedom was taken away? In fact, Stein asserts that this is already happening. We are losing our freedom in one of the most important sectors of our society—science.

As evidence of this loss of freedom, Stein trots out a small parade of intelligent design martyrs. Let's look at a few cases. In 2004, Richard Sternberg, who was editor of the scientific journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, published an article by Stephen Meyer arguing that the "Cambrian explosion" 570 to 530 million years ago in which most of the body types of animals developed was evidence for intelligent design. Meyer was then a professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University where all "trustees, officers, members of the faculty or of the staff, must believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments; that man was directly created by God."

Sternberg was serving on the editorial board of the Baraminology Study Group, a group of young-earth creationists. Baraminology is the study of biblical animal "kinds." Sternberg argued that he was a friendly outsider advising them against their young-earth views. Meyer is now the head of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture and Sternberg is a signatory of the Discovery Institute's A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.

Many of Sternberg's colleagues reacted with dismay and the journal retracted Meyer's article. In the film, Sternberg says he lost his office at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History, was pressured to resign, and had his religious and political beliefs questioned. Yet, he still has office space in the Museum and has been reappointed for three more years. To be sure, probably some of his colleagues are unhappy with him and don't want to hang out with him anymore. This is far cry from the concentration camps, or what Stalin did to proponents of evolutionary biology in the name of Lysenkoism.

In another case of alleged persecution, George Mason University (GMU) did not renew a teaching contract with Caroline Crocker, an adjunct biology lecturer who believes in ID. She says that she only wanted to teach students to question scientific orthodoxies. "I was only trying to teach what the university stands for—academic freedom," she says in the Stein's film. Since GMU let her go, she says that she can no longer find work. In the film, Crocker insists, "I did not teach creationism." Interestingly, Crocker apparently delivered the same offending lecture at a local community college later. It didn't turn out to be a "balanced" presentation of evidence for and against biological evolution. Why not? "There really is not a lot of evidence for evolution," Crocker said.

Assistant professor of astronomy and ID proponent Guillermo Gonzalez was denied tenure at Iowa State University in 2007. In 2004, Gonzalez was coauthor, with theologian and Discovery Institute fellow Jay Richards, of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery. The publisher's press release claims that the authors "demonstrate that our planet is exquisitely fit not only to support life, but also gives us the best view of the universe, as if Earth—and the universe itself—were designed both for life and for scientific discovery." Gonzalez is arguing that the Earth is precisely positioned to enable researchers like him to make scientific measurements. But is this so? An Iowa State colleague, associate professor of religious studies Hector Avalos, disagrees and neatly skewers this conceit. To wit:

This rationale is analogous to a plumber arguing that if our planet had not been positioned precisely where it is, then he might not be able to do his work as a plumber. Lead pipes might melt if the Sun were much closer. And, if our planet were any farther from the Sun, it might be so frozen that plumbers might not exist at all. Therefore, plumbing must have been the reason that our planet was located where it is.

Did Gonzalez fail to get tenure because of his ID views? Although the university denies it, my guess is probably yes. Why? On the evidence of The Privileged Planet, Guillermo's colleagues could reasonably worry that his ID views weren't likely to lead to fruitful research results. Gonzalez was not thrown into a concentration camp for his views. He just didn't get tenure.

The most egregious part of the film is the attempt to link evolutionary biology with Communism and Nazism. The claim that Communism was motivated by Darwin is just plain silly. Official Soviet biological doctrine was Lysenkoism, which was opposed to the findings of the modern synthesis of genetics and evolutionary biology. In fact, evolutionary biologists and geneticists were denounced as "Trotskyite agents of international fascism" and actually thrown into the Gulag for their scientific sins.

As for Nazism, the film interviews mathematician and Discovery Institute fellow David Berlinski who says, "Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like Nazism, but I think it was a necessary one." To visually illustrate the alleged totalitarian temptations of evolutionary biology, Stein wanders through the Nazi death camp at Dachau. Berlinski and other Discovery Institute denizens are basically claiming that scientific materialism undermines the notion that human beings occupy a special place in the universe. If humans aren't special, goes this line of thinking, then morals don't apply. This is a variation of the adage, "If god is dead, then everything is permitted."

Of course, this overlooks the fact that people down through the millennia have found all sorts of justifications for why they are permitted to murder each other, including plunder, tribal competition, and, yes, religion. Meanwhile, insights from evolutionary psychology are helping us to better understand how our in-group/out-group dynamics contribute to our disturbing capacity for racism, xenophobia, genocide, and warfare. Evolutionary psychology is also offering new ideas about how human morality developed, including our capacities for cooperation, love, and tolerance.

Near the end of the film, Stein asks Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and arguably the best-known living evolutionary biologist on the planet, if he could think of any circumstances under which intelligent design might have occurred. Incautiously, Dawkins brings up the idea that aliens might have seeded life on earth; so-called directed panspermia. This idea was suggested by biologists Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel back in the 1970s. In the film, Stein acts like this a great "gotcha" and is the silliest thing he's ever heard. Of course, the irony is that this is precisely what proponents of intelligent design are claiming—that a higher intelligence created life on earth. Only, they don't want that higher intelligence to be a race of purple space squids. (By the way, Dawkins says that he is not a proponent of directed panspermia.)

The film's close returns to Stein's speech in which he declares, "There are people out there who want to keep science in a little box where it can't possibly touch a higher power." Earlier in the film, Warwick University "science studies" sociologist Steve Fuller archly poses the question: Which comes first, worldview or evidence? Fuller aims his question at the proponents of evolutionary biology. However, as this dreary film itself makes it painfully clear, the question is far more relevant to the supporters of intelligent design theory.

If ID is all worldview and no evidence, here's something else to ponder. At an April 15 press conference for bloggers held at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., the movie's producers said that they plan to use the movie as part of a campaign to roll out legislation in states—so-called "freedom bills"—that would forbid anyone from "punishing" teachers and professors who question "Darwinism." Walt Ruloff noted that the science standards of about 26 states are currently in play and that Florida was likely to pass such a "freedom bill."

Asked if the movie's makers expected any friendly interest from scientific journals, Ruloff noted that Scientific American had savaged Expelled, adding, "I would expect that any other 'science rag' would do exactly the same thing."

"What's happening here is politics," lamented the film's star, Ben Stein, at Heritage. "Politics in the halls of science and that needs to be stopped."

I couldn't agree more.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Marxist Profs or Sensitive Students?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:16:00 EDT

Over at the LA Times' Dust Up, reason.tv interview subject and chief skeptic at The Skeptic Michael Shermer and The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's Greg Lukianoff are discussing academic freedom, student indoctrination, and the like. Two snippets:

Shermer: "...Unless they are openly teaching a course entitled, in effect, 'Why Liberals Should Rule the World,' professors have no business introducing their political bias to students. Their job is to teach the curriculum of their subject, not churn out a bunch of Marx-worshiping, Bush-hating, Che Guevara-loving, pinko graduates who will go out into the world woefully ignorant that most Americans think entirely differently from the way they do...."
Lukianoff: "...Is having an opinionated professor really the same as indoctrination? I have seen claims—often from conservative students—that students have a right not to be "harassed" by the left-leaning opinions of their professors. This drives me nuts because if there is one thing conservatives should not be doing, it is legitimizing the idea that merely being exposed to different points of view is the same thing as harassment. Harassment rationales are used to shut down people with dissenting opinions (often the socially conservative, the un-PC, or the merely unlucky) far too often...."

More here. They'll be kicking each other around each week.

reason on campus bias and more here.

Mother Superior State College Jumped the Gun Images*

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 10:11:00 EDT

Over at Inside Higher Ed, a publication that covers post-K-12 education issues with vim, vigor, and verve, Andy Guess reports on the case of Robert Crandall, a tenured prof at Lake Superior State College who has gotten in trouble for posting offensive content to his office door. LSSC's case, according to a lawyer representing the school, is that the prof has "acted in an unprofessional and insubordinate manner [and] his actions cannot be considered protected speech."

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), co-founded by reason contributors Harvey Silverglate and Alan Charles Kors, is publicizing the case. Writes Guess:

The first complaints date back to 2005, and the professor, Richard Crandall, was ordered to remove the materials from his door in 2007 (he eventually complied). Items included a photo of Ronald Reagan, pictures mocking Hillary Clinton, a sign posting a "Notice of the Weekly Meeting of the White, Male, Heterosexual Faculty and Staff Association (WMHFSA)," and various cartoons about abortion, Islamic terrorism and other topics. One depicts two hooded women looking over a photo album. One says, "And that's my youngest son, Hakim. He'll be martyring in the fall." The other replies, "They blow up so fast."
The university argues that the postings contribute to a hostile environment and therefore do not fall under First Amendment protections, although such arguments have not fared well historically in the courts. No lawsuit has been filed, but in the past some professors whose cases have been publicized by FIRE have pursued legal action. The university did not respond to requests for comment.
FIRE and Crandall, who could not be reached for comment, point out that other professors at the university are able to post politically charged pictures and phrases on their doors without consequence, presumably because their perspective is liberal or leftist rather than conservative or right-wing.

More here.

Take a look at the images and I think there's a strong implicit case that Crandall is a tool. Some are funny (IMO), some are not, but if I were an undergrad, they'd definitely kind of freak my shit—as did any number of door and office postings by lefty profs back in the day. But general freakage of shit does not seem not to be the issue here, as it really does appear to be the specific content—right-wing, and heavy on the pro-gun, anti-abortion themes—that is cause for complaint.

FIRE has always made a consistent argument (and has defended scholars and the right and the left) that public universities, precisely because they are government-sponsored, are totally bound by the First Amendment in ways that private universities are not necessarily (yeah, yeah, I understand that the line between public and private is totally nebulous given various funding issues ranging from federal research grants to Pell grants, etc).

I agree with that argument, and think that Crandall and all profs should be allowed to put whatever they want on their doors. Indeed, the whole point of going to college may be to expose kids to hostile environments—or, rather, intellectual environments in which they are exposed to all sorts of perspectives and taught to think critically about every aspect of their lives.

And yet, given the quality of political discourse (right, left, center) on most campuses, I think I may also want to live in a world where students and professors only meet in open areas devoid of any individualized signage, sort of like where prisoners and visitors meet. Plexiglass dividing walls optional.

[*]: I apologize in advance for this title, which is every bit as tortured as the inmates of Abu Ghraib.

Think Tanks Tanking

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 16:20:00 EDT

The 25 most media-prominent think tanks were cited 17 percent less in 2007 than they were the year before, FAIR’s annual survey of think tank citations found. The decline was felt across the board among centrist, conservative and progressive think tanks.

Researchers were somewhat baffled by this finding, but I can speak for my small part in the phenomenon: The difficulty of trying to find just the right quickie descriptor (right-of-center? progressive? wingnut? moonbat?) combined with the fact that many think tankers also have a university affiliation makes it desirable to just drop any mention of the tank tank altogether wherever possible.

Academics like Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo have used media citations of think tanks to take a stab at quantifying media bias. Their study makes me (and likely other journalists as well) much more aware of when and how to cite think tanks, and more likely to use a workaround where possible. It's worth noting though, that I'm a backstabber--I still find sources through think tanks, I just don't cite them as such if I can help it. Lack of citations may not indicate the the influence of think tanks is actually, well, tanking.

Via Jacob Grier

Oprah, Marilyn, Break Through Public-School Industrial Complex

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:09:00 EDT

This escaped my attention at the time, but through the L.A. Times' Tim Cavanaugh-tastic Opinion L.A. blog I see that USA Today recently asked high schoolers across these 50 United States to name the "most famous" non-president Americans since the time of the original illegal immigrant, and here's what they came up with:

1. Martin Luther King
2. Rosa Parks
3. Harriet Tubman
4. Susan B. Anthony
5. Benjamin Franklin
6. Amelia Earhardt
7. Oprah Winfrey
8. Marilyn Monroe
9. Thomas Edison
10. Albert Einstein

Sounds like the exact list I would have made in 5th grade, if you subbed out Parks/Oprah/Marilyn with maybe Pete Rose, Farrah Fawcett and Peter Frampton. Harriet Tubman in particular was someone I idolized at age 9 (due to Runaway Slave being both required reading and totally awesome ... what 9-year-old wouldn't dig an Underground Railroad?), and then never heard about again in the three decades since. Ditto for Susan B. Anthony, minus actually knowing anything about her in the first place.

Though the list probably says far more about the public school system than anything else, it was largely spun as what survey-leader Sam Wineburg of Stanford called "a revolution in the people who we come to think about to represent the American story." My favorite part of the USA Today explainer:

"There's a kind of shift going on, from the narrative of the founders, which is the national mythic narrative, to the narrative of expanding rights," he says.
Yes, but how does he explain No. 7: Oprah Winfrey?
She has "a kind of symbolic status similar to Benjamin Franklin," Wineburg says.

Who would you have included at 17?

Put Down the Book and Step Away From Your Co-Workers

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:39:00 EST

At Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis (IUPUI), the image to the right is considered Not Safe for Work. Can you guess why? Hint: It's not because the statue of the Virgin Mary atop Notre Dame University's dome is considered risqué. It's because—well, I'll let IUPUI Affirmative Action Officer Lillian Charleston explain (italics added):

The Affirmative Action Office has completed its investigation of [redacted]'s allegation that you racially harassed her by repeatedly reading the book, Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan by Todd Tucker in the presence of Black employees...
We conclude that your conduct constitutes racial harassment in that you demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your co-workers who repeatedly requested that you refrain from reading the book which has such an inflammatory and offensive topic in their presence. You contend that you weren't aware of the offensive nature of the topic and were reading the book about the KKK to better understand discrimination. However you used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your Black co-workers. Furthermore, employing the legal "reasonable person standard," a majority of adults are aware of and understand how repugnant the KKK is to African Americans, their reactions to the Klan, and the reasonableness of the request that you not read the book in their presence.
During your meeting with Marguerite Watkins, Assistant Affirmative Action Officer, you were instructed to stop reading the book in the immediate presence of your co-workers and when reading the book to sit apart from the immediate proximity of these co-workers. Please be advised, any future substantiated conduct of a similar nature could result in serious disciplinary action.
Racial harassment is very serious and can result in serious consequences for all involved. Please be advised that racial harassment and retaliation against any individual for having participated in the investigation of a complaint of this nature is a violation of University policy and will not be tolerated.

That's from a letter (PDF) that Charleston sent on November 25 to Keith Sampson, a middle-aged member of IUPUI's janitorial staff who is working toward a communications degree and likes to read scholarly books like Tucker's (about a 1924 brawl between Notre Dame students and Klansmen) on his breaks. He didn't realize that sort of provocative behavior could "result in serious disciplinary action."

After thinking about it for a couple of months, Charleston evidently decided her threat was unwarranted. In a February 7 letter (PDF) to Sampson, she said she wanted to "clarify that my prior letter was not meant to imply that it is impermissible for you or to limit your ability to read scholarly books or other such literature during break times." Charleston, of course, never implied that; she stated it explicitly. But now she wanted Sampson to know it was never the book that was the problem; "it was the perception of your co-workers that you were engaging in conduct [i.e., reading the book] for the purpose of creating a hostile environment of antagonism." She contrasted that perception with "your perception," which was that "you were reading a scholarly work during break time, and you should be permitted to do so whether or not the subject matter is of concern to your coworkers." Faced with the clash between these two equally reasonable perceptions, Charleston threw up her hands, saying, "I am unable to draw any final conclusion concerning what was intended by the conduct."

To clarify, then, Sampson was not in trouble because of the book he chose to read. He was in trouble because of what he might have been thinking while reading the book.

Still confused? You can reach Lillian Charleston at lcharles@iupui.edu or 317-274-2306 and ask for further clarification. If you have any suggestions for books that Sampson should add to his reading list, please offer them in the comments.

David Hoppe covered Sampson's run-in with IUPUI's thought police in Nuvo, a local alternative weekly.

Addendum: I've fixed the email address and Amazon link.

[Thanks to Nicolas Martin for the tip.]

Shouting "Screw You" At Prozac

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:35:00 EST

Found via Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly, an interesting new metastudy written up in the UK Guardian that casts doubt on the effectiveness of such SSRIs and SSNIs commonly prescribed for depression as Prozac and Effexor.

An excerpt from the Guardian account:

The study examined all available data on the drugs, including results from clinical trials that the manufacturers chose not to publish at the time. The trials compared the effect on patients taking the drugs with those given a placebo or sugar pill.
When all the data was pulled together, it appeared that patients had improved - but those on placebo improved just as much as those on the drugs.
The only exception is in the most severely depressed patients, according to the authors - Prof Irving Kirsch from the department of psychology at Hull University and colleagues in the US and Canada. But that is probably because the placebo stopped working so well, they say, rather than the drugs having worked better.
"Given these results, there seems little reason to prescribe antidepressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients, unless alternative treatments have failed," says Kirsch.
The paper, published today in the journal PLoS (Public Library of Science) Medicine, is likely to have a significant impact on the prescribing of the drugs.
.........
The pattern they saw from the trial results of fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Seroxat), venlafaxine (Effexor) and nefazodone (Serzone) was consistent. "Using complete data sets (including unpublished data) and a substantially larger data set of this type than has been previously reported, we find the overall effect of new-generation antidepressant medication is below recommended criteria for clinical significance," they write.

From my own perspective on the rolling juggernaut of psychatric medicine, I somehow doubt the optimistic "likely to have a significant impact" bit. Especially given Kevin Drum's observation on how little play this has gotten in American media, which still seems to be the case.

Drum's comment thread is very interesting and worth at least skimming for those who care about this topic. Lots of people jousting with the results, some of them of the level of intellectual sophistication of those who note that, damn, that horoscope that day really described exactly what I was going through; others raise the notion that the study might be misleading for either conflating some drugs that work with others and dragging down the working drugs average, or for mixing subjects who really are depressed with a bevy of people to whom the drugs were misprescribed and thus don't work.

The full study, from the open-access Public Library of Science.

Ronald Bailey wrote back in July 2007 for reason on the fascinating world of public access open source scientific journals such as Public Library of Science.

This July 2007 reason feature by me touches on some of the things that psychiatric medical science can't quite tell us.

And see this July 2000 reason interview with psychiatric critic Thomas Szasz, conducted by Jacob Sullum.

Nothing Left

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

When Hezbollah official Imad Mughniyeh was assassinated earlier this month in Damascus, the collateral damage was felt in academic departments, newsrooms, think tanks, and cafes far and wide. That's because it quickly became apparent how wrong many of the alleged "experts" writing about the militant Shiite organization had been.

At Mughniyeh's funeral, Hezbollah leaders placed him in a trinity of party heroes "martyred" at Israeli hands. The secretary general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, vowed "open war" against Israel in retaliation. Tens of thousands of people attended the ceremony, and for days Hezbollah received condolences. Iranian officials stepped over each other to condemn the assassination, many of them affirming that Israel's demise was inevitable. In the midst of all this one thing was plain: Mughniyeh was a highly significant figure in Hezbollah, and the party didn't hide it.

And yet over the years, an embarrassing number of writers and academics with some access to Hezbollah dutifully relayed what party cadres had told them about Mughniyeh: He was unimportant and may even have been a figment of our imagination. It was understandable that Hezbollah would blur the trail of so vital an official, but how could those writing about the party swallow this line without pursuing the numerous sources that could confirm details of Mughniyeh's past? Their fault was laziness, and at times tendentiousness.

Hezbollah is adept at turning contacts with the party into valuable favors. Writers and scholars, particularly Westerners, who lay claim to Hezbollah sources, are regarded as special for penetrating so closed a society. That's why their writing is often edited with minimal rigor. Hezbollah always denied everything that was said about Mughniyeh, and few authors (or editors) showed the curiosity to push further than that. The mere fact of getting such a denial was considered an achievement in itself, a sign of rare access, and no one was about to jeopardize that access by calling Hezbollah liars.

But there was more here than just manipulation. The Mughniyeh affair highlights a deeper problem long obvious to those who follow Hezbollah: The party, though it is religious, autocratic, and armed to the teeth, often elicits approval from secular, liberal Westerners who otherwise share nothing of its values. This reaction, in its more extreme forms, is reflected in the way many on the far left have embraced Hezbollah's militancy, but also that of other Islamist groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad—thoroughly undermining their ideological principles in the process.

The primary emotion driving together the far-left and militant Islamists, but also frequently prompting secular liberals to applaud armed Islamic groups as well, is hostility toward the United States, toward Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians, and, more broadly, toward what is seen as Western-dominated, capitalist-driven globalization.

Fred Halliday, himself a man of the left, wrote scathingly of the dangers in the accommodation between Islamists and the left based on a perception of shared anti-imperialism: "All of this is—at least to those with historical awareness, skeptical political intelligence, or merely a long memory—disturbing. This is because its effect is to reinforce one of the most pernicious and inaccurate of all political claims, and one made not by the left but by the imperialist right. It is also one that underlies the U.S.-declared ‘war on terror' and the policies that have resulted from 9/11: namely, that Islamism is a movement aimed against 'the west.'"

A bizarre offshoot of this trend has been the left's elevation of Islamist "resistance" to the level of a fetish. You know something has gone horribly wrong when the writer and academic Norman Finkelstein volunteers to interpret Hezbollah for you, before prefacing his comments with: "I don't care about Hezbollah as a political organization. I don't know much about their politics, and anyhow, it's irrelevant. I don't live in Lebanon."

In a recent interview on Lebanese television, Finkelstein made it a point of expressing his "solidarity" with Hezbollah, on the grounds that "there is a fundamental principle. People have the right to defend their country from foreign occupiers, and people have the right to defend their country from invaders who are destroying their country. That to me is a very basic, elementary and uncomplicated question."

It is indeed uncomplicated if you remain mulishly unwilling to move beyond the narrow parameters you've set for discussion. But the reality is that Hezbollah is an immensely complicated question in Lebanon, where a majority of people are at a loss about what to do with a heavily armed organization that has no patience for state authority, that refuses to hand its weapons over to the national army, that is advancing an Iranian and Syrian agenda against the legal Lebanese government, and that functions as a secretive Shiite paramilitary militia in a country where sectarian religious assertiveness often leads to conflict. That many Lebanese should have seen Finkelstein praise what they feel is Hezbollah's most dangerous attributes was surpassed in its capacity to irritate only by the fact that he lectured them on how armed resistance was the sole option against Israel, regardless of the anticipated destruction, "unless you choose to be [Israeli] slaves—and many people here have chosen that."

But Finkelstein is no worse than Noam Chomsky, or that clutter of "progressive" academics and intellectuals who, at the height of the carnage during the 2006 Lebanon war, signed on to a petition declaring their "conscious support for the Lebanese national resistance," described resistance as "an intellectual act par excellence" and condemned the Lebanese government for having distanced itself from Hezbollah, even though the party had unnecessarily provoked a devastating Israeli military onslaught that led to the death of over 1,200 people.

This behavior comes full circle especially for the revolutionary fringe on the left, which seems invariably to find its way back to violence. In the same way that Finkelstein can compare Hezbollah admiringly to the Soviet Red Army and the communist resistance during World War II ("it was brutal, it was ruthless"), he sees in resistance a quasi-religious act that brooks no challenge, even from its likely victims. What is so odd in Finkelstein and those like him is that the universalism and humanism at the heart of the left's view of itself has evaporated, to be replaced by categorical imperatives usually associated with the extreme right: blood; honor; solidarity; and the defense of near-hallowed land.

Blind faith in the service of total principle is what makes those like Finkelstein and Chomsky so vile. But their posturing is made possible because of the less ardent secular liberal publicists out there who surrender to the narratives that Islamists such as Hezbollah, Hamas, or others peddle to them—lending them legitimacy. That's because modern scholarship, like liberalism itself, refuses to impose Western cultural standards on non-Westerners. Fine. But as the Mughniyeh case shows, when Islamists dominate the debate affecting them, there are plenty of fools out there dying to be tossed a bone.

reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

...When You Pry My Sondheim Libretto From My Cold, Dead Hands...

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 08:51:00 EST

Insider Higher Ed has a sad-sack story about censorious college administrators shutting down a musical production:

A student production of Assassins, the award-winning musical, was to have premiered Thursday night at Arkansas Tech University, but the administration banned it - and permitted a final dress rehearsal Wednesday night (so the cast could experience the play on which students have worked long hours) only on the condition that wooden stage guns were cut in half prior to the event and not used. Assassins is a musical in which the characters are the historic figures who have tried to kill a U.S. president.

More here.

The winner here? Honestly, the potential audience for the play, which was godawful in its original conception and execution back in 1990 (and naturally, retardedly well-received in its 2004 Broadway revival). Assassins features ditties about various successful and unsuccessful attempts to kill various successful and unsuccessful American presidents. It's just one man's opinion, of course, but I dare anyone to listen to, say, the Leon Czolgosz number without wanting to put a bullet in his own head and then exhume the corpse of the Michigan-born killer and re-electrify it. Assassins is SCTV-style deep parody at its best and actual musical theater at just about its worst.

The loser here? Freedom of expression on college campuses, which has been taking it on the chin like Gerry Cooney in the first round.

Another sad tale of repression on the campus here.

reason on campus speech here.

Legacies of Injustice

info@reason.com (Shikha Dalmia) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

College-bound high school students do not always lose their chastity before graduation, but they certainly lose their innocence. Nearly every senior who has gone through the admissions mill can recount stories of peers with outstanding academic records—class valedictorians with stellar SATs and perfect GPAs—who were passed over by top colleges while others with far more modest credentials got the nod. The New York Times reports that Harvard turned down 1,100 applicants with perfect 800s on the math SAT this year. Yale rejected several with perfect 2400s on the three-part SAT exam. Princeton said no to thousands with 4.0 GPAs.

To many frustrated parents, one word de-scribes the admissions process at America’s elite universities: arbitrary. But that’s not the word admissions officials use, as I discovered two summers ago when I toured a dozen or so East Coast campuses with my son, a high school junior at the time. Asked what kind of grades and scores made kids competitive for their schools, officials in university after university insisted, as if reading off the same memo, that the review process was “holistic,” “comprehensive,” or “individualized.” Grades, we were repeatedly told, “are only one among many factors we consider.”

Another such factor is race. Nearly every selective college, public and private, gives a sizable edge to underrepresented minorities. Before the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the University of Michigan’s undergraduate admissions criteria in Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), the school relied on a complicated rating system that awarded points for several personal and academic factors, including skin color. Black and Hispanic candidates automatically got 20 points. A great essay counted for only one point; a perfect SAT score, a mere 12.

But as Justice Clarence Thomas observed in his dissent in a companion case, race is not the only factor that distorts college admission decisions. “The entire [college admission] process is poisoned by numerous exceptions to ‘merit,’ ” he noted.

The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Golden exposes those other exceptions in his 2006 book The Price of Admission. Golden shows that elite schools routinely hand preferences to athletes; to the children of faculty, celebrities, and politicians; to “development cases” whose fabulously wealthy parents offer hefty donations up front; and, above all, to the offspring of alumni. Universities expect the parents of these “legacy” candidates to contribute to their coffers after their children are admitted.

Robert Birgeneau, chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, told Golden that at one Ivy League school only 40 percent of the seats are open to candidates competing on pure educational merit. According to a 2005 study by the Princeton sociologists Tom Espenshade and Chang Y. Chung, in 1997 nearly two-thirds of all these non-race-based preferences at elite universities benefited whites, even though whites comprised less than half of all applicants that year.

We have a vigorous national movement to eradicate racial or minority preferences, at least in public universities. In 2006 Michigan became the third state in the country after California and Washington to approve a ballot measure imposing a constitutional ban on the use of race in admissions at state-run schools and in government hiring decisions. And this year the author of all those bans—Ward Connerly, a black California businessman—is stepping up his crusade. He has launched petition drives in Oklahoma, Missouri, Colorado, Nebraska, and Arizona to put similar measures before voters in November.

But there’s no comparable effort to get rid of legacy preferences. Even more troubling, many prominent opponents of racial preferences greet suggestions to get rid of legacies, the mother of all preferences, with a perfunctory nod—or a gaping yawn.

It shouldn’t be that way. Legacy preferences are the original sin of admissions, the policy that fundamentally compromises fair, merit-based standards. Universities can’t in good conscience tip the admission scales for the more privileged and then ask the less privileged to compete solely on merit. What’s more, eliminating race while keeping legacies will make the admissions process less fair, not more fair, because it will open up minority slots to competition by whites but not vice versa.

Legacy preferences are an especially terrible idea for tax-supported public universities, since they make it possible for rich, white, and less qualified kids to take seats that are at least in part supported by the tax dollars of poor, minority families. Private schools, of course, should be free to admit whomever they want, and it is therefore tempting to ignore their use of legacies. But there are few genuinely private schools in America anymore, thanks to the enormous amount of federal funding they accept. And setting public policy aside: Just as a matter of propriety, should there be room for legacies at institutions that market themselves as bastions of meritocracy? The use of legacies by the Harvards, Yales, and Princetons of the world dilutes the standards of excellence they pretend not merely to uphold, but to embody.

Who Cares About Legacies?
With only a few exceptions, both the right and the left have ignored legacy preferences. Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) has promised to do everything in his power to end legacy admissions if he becomes president. But for the most part liberals have picked up the anti-legacy mantle only in retaliation against efforts to eliminate racial preferences. Local activists forced Texas A&M and the University of Georgia to abandon legacy preferences, for example, after these universities stopped using race in admissions. Otherwise, liberals seem quite willing to tolerate legacies, presumably because they make it easier to advocate countervailing preferences for their favored groups.

Given that dynamic, you might expect the opponents of racial preferences to go on the offensive against legacy preferences. But if liberals have been opportunistic about legacies, conservatives have been paralyzed.

In part, that’s because they’re genuinely divided on the issue. Ward Connerly, like Justice Thomas, regards legacies as a fundamental violation of a fair, merit-based standard. He prodded the University of California, where he is a regent, to abandon them in 2000, four years after California voters banned racial preferences. But Terry Pell, who heads the Center for Individual Rights (CIR), the outfit that engineered the lawsuit against the University of Michigan’s race-based admissions, has never fought against legacies. Neither has Stephan Thernstrom, who has co-authored several books attacking racial preferences. “Legacy is a far more complicated issue than race,” insists Thernstrom, who once served on Harvard’s admissions committee.

Conservatives in Pell and Thernstrom’s camp argue that racial discrimination is in a class apart, given this country’s history of slavery and segregation. What’s more, they say, legacy preferences are just not as big a problem as racial preferences, quantitatively speaking. Further, they produce huge benefits for universities that racial preferences don’t. Above all, to the extent that legacies are practiced by private rather than public universities, there are no easy or desirable legal cures that aren’t worse than the disease.

The last argument is their most powerful one, but it is hardly grounds for ignoring the issue. There are ways to address the issue of private universities’ legacy preferences—and racial preferences—that don’t involve lawsuits or government action. But the other arguments for why legacies aren’t a public policy problem are simply disingenuous and suffer from the same ideological blind spots that afflict defenders of racial preferences.

A Small Problem?
Legacy preferences, like racial preferences, are repugnant because they reward not individual virtue or accomplishment, but an accident of birth that has no relevance for a college education. Moreover, just because they aren’t linked with an egregious history of racial abuse does not justify turning a blind eye to them. India has a far uglier record of discrimination by caste than race. Yet no one would argue that it ought therefore to concentrate only on eradicating caste discrimination and treat race as a non-issue.

It is true that the use of legacies is mainly limited to undergraduate programs in the more selective public and private schools. Racial preferences, on the other hand, pervade every aspect of every school—from undergraduate and graduate admissions to faculty hiring and promotion. Moreover, according to a 2007 paper by Princeton’s Douglas S. Massey and Margarita Mooney of data from 28 elite universities, while 77 percent of minorities had standardized test scores below the institutional average, about 48 percent of legacies did. In rare exceptions, such as Middlebury College, legacies actually scored higher than the institutional average.

How far below average do those legacies and minorities score? It’s impossible to get up-to-date, nationwide data on the subject, given the universities’ secrecy, but the late psychologist Richard Herrnstein and the social scientist Charles Murray reported one telling piece of information in their 1994 book The Bell Curve. In 1990, the average student admitted to Harvard scored 697 on the verbal SAT and 718 on the math section. By comparison, legacies scored 674 on verbal and 695 on math—a 47 point difference. Combined minority scores hover at about 100 to 150 points below the institutional average.

What’s more, even when universities lower admission standards for legacies, they don’t lower them as much as they do for minorities. As mentioned before, the Michigan point system used to award 20 bonus points to under-represented minorities—the equivalent of boosting a 3.0 GPA to a 4.0. By contrast, it handed only four points to children of alumni.

But such statistics don’t tell the full story. Given how intense the competition is for the nation’s most selective schools, even seemingly small differences in scores translate into significantly higher rates of acceptance for legacies over “unhooked” candidates—admissions lingo for those who don’t qualify for any preferences.

According to the October 1996 Brown Alumni Magazine, 40 percent of legacy applicants were accepted to Brown University, as opposed to 19 percent of the total applicants. The Office of Civil Rights similarly found in 1990 that children of alumni were twice as likely to be accepted at Harvard over more qualified students who did not get legacy or athletic or any other preferences. And a study by the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Virginia-based think tank, found that at the University of Virginia, after controlling for test scores, grades, and other academic credentials, a legacy candidate had 4.3 times higher odds of admission than non-legacy applicants in 1999.

Universities claim that legacy status is never a major or decisive factor in their admission decisions. It’s only used, they say, as a tie-breaker among otherwise comparable candidates. That’s what they claimed about racial preferences too, and that turned out to be false. Indeed, it is hard to really know how much weight universities award to legacies given their stubborn refusal to reveal their admissions data or even talk about their admission policies. (University of Michigan officials, for instance, declined repeated requests to discuss this issue.) But why do legacies deserve any edge, big or small?

Racial preferences, at least originally, were meant to remedy discrimination—both historic and current—against blacks. What is the justification for favoring the offspring of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton alumni? Unlike many inner-city kids, they grow up in families with a strong pro-education ethos. They have access to the finest public or private high schools in the country. Their parents can spring for tutors, standardized test preparation courses, and even consultants to help them write essays and complete their college applications. “These are kids who grow up with every privilege,” notes Connerly. “They don’t deserve any additional advantage.”

Moreover, though the policy of using legacy as a “tie-breaker” among equivalent candidates sounds innocuous, it has perverse consequences for one group in particular: Asian Americans. Asians don’t benefit from racial preferences because they are not considered underrepresented minorities. And they don’t benefit from legacy preferences because they tend to be the children of first-generation immigrants. Espenshade, the Princeton researcher, found that while legacy and athletic preferences offset the effects of racial preferences on whites, they compound them for Asian Americans.

According to Espenshade’s regression analysis of data from a dozen selective colleges, on a 1600-point SAT scale, being black and Hispanic adds up to an advantage of 230 and 185 extra SAT points respectively. The preference for legacies translates into an edge of 160 points. By contrast, being Asian American represents a 50 SAT-point disadvantage.

The CIR’s Pell, however, argues that the legacy problem is “self-correcting.” Racial preferences have become so ideologically embedded that universities will never abandon them unless forced to by courts or voters, Pell maintains. But as the ethnic mix of the broader population changes so does the composition of the student body. A generation later, then, so will the composition of the beneficiaries of legacy preferences.

But the problem with legacies is not that they never adjust to shifting demographics. It is that they slow the process of adjustment. Legacy policies protect groups that are already in, at the expense of those that are trying to break in.

Practical Benefits?
Conservatives pride themselves on being sensible realists, not starry-eyed utopians eager to stamp out every form of social injustice regardless of consequences. This tendency partially explains their squishiness on the legacy issue. On the one hand, they don’t dispute that legacy admissions border on institutionalized nepotism—rewarding children for the accomplishments of their parents and relatives. On the other hand, enforcing a strict merit-based standard seems a tad fanatical given all the practical benefits of legacy policies for universities.

One purported benefit is that legacies are an important source of funding for universities. Not only do more legacies donate to universities, they donate in greater amounts. For instance, according to the Cavalier Daily, the University of Virginia’s student newspaper, 65 percent of legacy parents contributed to the university’s 2006 capital campaign, compared with 41 percent of non-legacy parents. Moreover, legacy parents on average coughed up $34,759 each whereas non-legacy parents gave only $4,070.

All in all, legacies alone account for over 30 percent of the private donations to most elite colleges. “If mild preferences to legacy students allow universities to maximize their income, is that so objectionable?” asks Thernstrom.

Without such donations, universities claim, they could not invest in high-quality faculty and facilities and remain competitive. Even more important from the standpoint of social justice, universities say they couldn’t maintain need-blind admission policies. These policies allow colleges to admit students purely on academic grounds—and then offer financial aid to anyone unable to afford the roughly $50,000 per year it costs in tuition and living expenses to attend a top-notch university these days. Without legacy contributions, such aid would supposedly become more difficult, and elite campuses would truly become playgrounds of the rich.

But Thernstrom and Pell don’t buy arguments from social utility when it comes to racial preferences. Like other conservatives, they insist that universities that want to help inner-city minorities need to find race-neutral ways that don’t selectively dilute academic standards for some groups. Nor do they believe that the educational benefits of a diverse student body are real or big enough to justify giving minorities a leg up.

Yet they uncritically accept the business and social case for legacy preferences. And it is far from clear that universities lack “legacy-neutral” tools to—as Thernstrom puts it—“maximize their profits.” They could conceivably rake in more money by auctioning off a certain number of freshmen seats every year to the highest bidders. But elite universities would never entertain a scheme like that, because it could cost them their “elite” reputations. It would expose precisely how much they are diluting their admission standards for how many and for how much. This kind of information would erode their aura of selectivity—the very thing that makes them attractive to legacies and everyone else.

Connerly, after spending years on the University of California board, is not convinced that alumni will stop contributing to their alma maters if their kids don’t get preferential treatment. Indeed, as Golden noted in The Price of Admission, Caltech is able to tap alumni money without offering any edge to their children. For instance, Caltech in 2001 obtained a $600 million pledge—the largest gift in the history of higher education at the time—from Gordon Moore, cofounder of Intel, neither of whose two sons attends the university. Caltech’s commitment to high standards and excellence is a core part of its sales pitch to raise money from alumni and non-alumni alike.

Golden offers other examples, albeit isolated ones, of schools that have built sizable endowments through business strategies that don’t rely on legacy preferences. Cooper Union, a highly prestigious and selective art school in New York that offers a free education to everyone admitted, for decades lived off income generated through its investments in real estate. Berea College, a small college in Kentucky exclusively targeted toward low-income kids, has accumulated a startlingly large endowment by making its progressive credentials a selling point to potential donors: It is the South’s first inter-racial, co-educational college and was founded by an abolitionist minister. Its mission is to educate and uplift impoverished Appalachian families.

Legacy money doesn’t seem to boost the presence of low-income kids on elite campuses by subsidizing their educations, either. The schools that get the most legacy money—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—are among the worst when it comes to the economic diversity of their students. In his 2005 book The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel reported that among the top 40 schools, Princeton and Harvard are ranked at 38th and 39th, respectively, when it comes to such diversity, and Yale 25th.

For a contrast, look at Caltech. It is the nation’s most meritocratic private university that eschews all preferences, and it is among the 10 most economically diverse schools. Nor is it hard to understand why. Admissions are a zero-sum game with many candidates vying for a finite number of seats. The crucial determinant of economic diversity on campus therefore becomes not how much largesse legacies expend on poor kids but how many seats they take away from them.

If elite colleges were serious about offering equitable access to genuinely talented students, they could find business models that don’t involve legacy preferences. If they have not done so, it is because the government won’t—and market forces can’t—hold them accountable.

Is There Any Rationale for Legacies at Public Schools?
The core mission of taxpayer-funded public universities is not to conduct research, promote economic growth, or correct broader social problems. It is to expand higher education opportunities. That, at any rate, is what the general public believes: Respondents in a 2003 survey conducted by The Chronicle of Higher Education overwhelmingly picked “offering a general education to undergraduates” as the top priority among 21 different roles that public universities could play.

Taxpayers perceive different public universities as fulfilling this educational mission in different ways. They regard land-grant universities as catering to rural kids, urban universities to commuters who can’t live on campus, community colleges to students not served by traditional four-year colleges.

There is something problematic, even oxymoronic, about the very idea of “elite” public universities whose doors are by definition shut to the vast majority of taxpayers who fund them. If they must exist, they should exist to serve academically gifted kids. Thus the only defensible admission policy for these universities is one that allows all gifted kids an equal shot at admission.

This is precisely what legacy and other preferences don’t allow. They reduce the fate of applicants to the discretion of admissions bureaucrats, eliminating clear-cut standards applied equally to all. Preferences replace the rule of law with the rule of men.

There are no good legal tools to mount court challenges against legacies in either public or private universities. The Constitution requires public entities to award everyone “equal protection under the law.” But when a student tried to use this guarantee to mount a legal challenge against legacy preferences, she failed: In Rosenstock v. Governors of University of North Carolina (1976), an out-of-state applicant who was denied admission to the University of North Carolina argued that preferential treatment for in-state residents and children of alumni violated her right to equal protection. The court ruled that the state had no compelling interest in barring discrimination on the basis of alumni status, even at a public university.

But if the courts can’t or won’t ban legacy preferences, state voters certainly can. The simplest way to do so would be to append them to Connerly’s ballot initiatives banning “race, gender, color, ethnicity, and national origin” preferences. Even the CIR’s Pell acknowledges that it would be entirely appropriate for state voters to ban legacy preferences at public universities.

Connerly considered doing just that when drafting Proposition 2, the ballot amendment that banned racial preferences in Michigan in 2006. But he ultimately dropped the idea, he says, because constitutional amendments ought to be reserved for things that are “sacred for now and forever.” He wasn’t sure that alumni preferences were in that category.

But a further reason, some people close to Connerly admit, was that including legacies risked alienating whites in addition to blacks, making it harder to pass the initiatives. Strategically, it made more sense to deal with the two issues separately, reserving the ballot amendment process for race while looking for other ways to address legacies. Yet beyond Connerly’s own personal crusade against what he calls “fat cat preferences” at the University of California, there has been almost no action on a national level against legacies.

If voter bans against legacies won’t work, another way to force public universities to adhere to a stricter version of merit might be by requiring them to post—and adhere to—straightforward admission criteria like universities elsewhere in the world do.

For instance, Oxford, one of Britain’s most prestigious universities, states unambiguously on its website precisely what scores and grades applicants need in order to gain admission. U.S. kids, it notes, need a combined SAT score of 2100 or a composite ACT score of 32 to 36—comparable to what kids from England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland need. In order to remain true to its mission of creating an intellectually rigorous academic environment, Oxford, at least on paper, maintains the same admission standards for British students as for applicants from elsewhere. By contrast, it is accepted practice for elite American public universities to lower the bar for in-state students. To the extent that the tax contributions of the parents of these students fund the universities, they certainly deserve a break over out-of-state students. But that break ought to only involve lower tuition fees, not lower standards.

Openly publishing admissions criteria ensures transparency in the admissions process and serves as a sort of guarantee to prospective students that those who score below these minimum requirements won’t be admitted ahead of those who do.

Connerly could use the contacts and machinery he has built in various states in the course of pursuing his anti–racial preferences amendments to push admission reform laws requiring public universities to set open and objective admissions standards. Universities will no doubt wail about the loss of academic freedom. But the rule of settled and transparent laws is no loss to freedom. It would only hem in the discretionary power of bureaucrats who wield it in an arbitrary way to offer access for their own self-serving purposes.

What About Market Forces?
There is a strong civil libertarian argument against applying such laws to private universities. Such schools ought to be allowed to admit whomever they want for whatever reason they want, as part of their right of voluntary association. Some schools might exercise this right for pernicious ends. But just as tolerating odious speech is essential for the sake of protecting broader freedoms, so, arguably, is tolerating odious forms of voluntary association.

This thinking has restrained conservatives from challenging racial preferences at private schools, even though they have powerful legal tools to do so. For instance, Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act bars racial discrimination by any school that receives federal funds—a category that includes practically every private university given the ubiquity of federal research grants, scholarship aid, student loan guarantees, and countless other forms of direct and indirect financial assistance. Yet Michael Greve, former executive director of CIR, told the ABA Journal some years ago that his organization had no plans to go after private universities for racial preferences—a policy that his successor, Terry Pell, also adheres to. If Harvard, Stanford, and Yale want to discriminate for any reason, Greve said, that’s their business.

It is conceivable that laws requiring public universities to set open and objective admission standards might help trigger industry-wide change, including at private schools. But why hasn’t the higher education industry reformed its own admission practices? The market appeal of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton rests on the impression that getting through their door puts you in a league of intellectual superstars. If these schools dilute their standards—if they turn away incandescent intellects in favor of the merely bright with good family connections—how are they still able to maintain their luster? In a functioning marketplace, you would expect more Caltechs to emerge: Elite schools that market their uncompromising adherence to standards of excellence to snag students interested in being part of a true meritocracy. In the process, they would force Harvard and others to either reform their admission practices or relinquish their niche.

So far, instead of elite schools losing their niche, smart kids are losing their shot at an elite education. “Higher education is the only industry that is rewarded for turning away customers,” observes Richard Vedder, an economist at Ohio University.

There are both demand and supply reasons for this peculiar state of affairs. The demand for colleges with established reputations is artificially inflated, notes Vedder, because of the absence of any meaningful metrics of educational quality, leaving students with nothing but the prestige factor to go by. Meanwhile, instead of accommodating this demand by expanding their supply, colleges have every incentive to ignore it: Their ranking in the annual U.S. News and World Report college ratings depends in large part on their “selectivity”—on what percentage of applicants they reject.

U.S. News’ near-exclusive focus on inputs rather than outcomes when ranking universities perverts the admissions process in an even more direct way. One of the factors in its ranking is the extent of alumni giving, which is supposed to indicate alumni satisfaction with the education they received. Though this sounds reasonable, in practice it hands universities one more incentive to dole out more legacy preferences to shake down its alumni—and avoid a search for less compromising fundraising alternatives.

If market forces seem unable to hold elite universities accountable, it is because prospective students don’t have good information about their educational outcomes to truly gauge whether these colleges are worth six figures. “Competition succeeds only to the extent that customers…can define success in some legitimate way in order to establish a standard and reward those who best achieve it,” Derek Bok, Harvard’s president from 1971 to 1991, has noted. “In education, at least at the university level, this ability is lacking.”

So what did Bok—whose wife, the philosopher Sissela Bok, has written an entire book decrying institutional secrecy—do to make more information available to “customers” as Harvard president? Nothing. In fact, he tenaciously resisted repeated calls to reveal Harvard’s admissions and other data.

Bok’s reaction is typical. In 2003, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) tried to pass a mandate requiring both public and private universities to reveal their admissions data and show how many legacies they were admitting. Political pressure from universities killed the plan. Earlier this year, they opposed the recommendations of a commission convened by Education Secretary Margaret Spelling. The commission wanted all universities to report, among other things, their graduation and retention data.

Vedder, an ardent free-market advocate who served on that commission, is sympathetic to concerns about extending the government’s reach into private universities. But he also argues that these universities are only nominally private, given the enormous amount of federal research subsidies and student aid they receive. “If we are going to drop planeloads of money to these universities,” he asks, “why is it unreasonable to require them to report some basic information?”

Can Meritocracy Prevail?
Universities resist not just outside efforts to force more transparency, but also efforts from within the industry itself. Over the last decade, two serious efforts have emerged in the higher education marketplace to measure “outcomes”—the quality of education that colleges provide. In 2000, the Pew Charitable Trust and Indiana University launched the annual National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), which polls students about their college experience and, based on this feedback, ranks each college against its peers. Meanwhile, the Council for Aid to Education has developed the Collegiate Learning Assessment survey (CAL). While the NSSE measures only subjective student opinions about their college experience, the CAL actually offers extensive exit exams to students to measure what they have actually learned.

Making information about student satisfaction and learning available to consumers might revolutionize the way they make decisions about colleges. But elite colleges, having little incentive to have their reputation questioned by actual data, have refused to participate in either survey.

America’s fundamental promise is that individuals ought to control their destiny through hard work and talent, not arbitrary accidents of birth. Legacy preferences are no less damaging to this promise than racial preferences. Those who oppose race as a factor in admissions but ignore legacies open themselves to accusations of inconsistency and hypocrisy. But, worse, to the extent that they succeed in dismantling race while leaving legacies intact, they risk putting in place a less—not more—fair admissions system.

As their battle against racial preferences heats up this year, they need to open another front against legacy preferences. The U.S. Constitution and courts do not offer ready weapons for the new battle. But that hardly justifies laying down arms without a fight.

There are plenty of ways at the state level to stop the use of legacies at public universities, from constitutional bans to state mandates requiring more transparent admission policies. Government can’t ban private universities from using preferences, legacy or racial or any other, without running afoul of the Constitution. But that doesn’t mean that moral suasion can’t be used to prod them toward fairer admissions policies. Public outrage recently forced Harvard to give up its early decision program. The program, which overwhelmingly benefited the rich and connected, effectively lowered the bar for students who applied early and promised to accept its admission offer.

Most of all, we need policies to strengthen market accountability. We need to end the cartel-like character of the higher education industry, where private universities can keep consumers in the dark about their admission practices and educational product and still charge exorbitant prices without worrying that a competitor will emerge to challenge their market dominance with a cheaper and better product. An honest and straightforward recognition of the dangers of legacy preferences will go a long way toward bringing about such reforms.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at the Reason Foundation.