I think it would be more ethical for schools to point these out to students and to do so well in advance of financial aid forms and the like.
My law school has two orientations. One was for everyone and then there was a separate one earlier in the summer that was for kids (usually first in their family to graduate from college types) to give them a little extra boost. It also came with fairly regular meetings during 1L year. The proactive response seems to have largely worked. Everyone or almost everyone I knew in that program graduated on-time and did not flunk out after 1L year.
I grew up in a town where there was the opposite issue, we did not have a vocational track. The Home Ec classrooms were turned into science labs during my senior year (1997-1998) because no one signed up to take Home Ec for years. There were some traditional tech/car shop classes but only a small number of students took those.
How about people who just need advocates to help them navigate the system?
My hunch is that for the woman in the article, the one who dropped out of Emory is that it was not her intellect that held her back but that the system was alien to her and her family. I think she would have done fine if she had an advocate on her behalf. Someone who could review financial aid forms and the like and then check up and argue if Emory fucked up.
Is this patnernalism? Perhaps but plenty of middle-class and above kids have parents who advocate on their behalf to university administrators, why not find a system that provides similar support to the poor.
Excellent post. I have a hard time with this issue because I grew up in a suburb where most of the parents had college or advanced degrees and as far as I can tell most of my classmates have done the same. We were the top 1 or 10 percent in this regard. My college GPA was all over the map but I graduated in four years and then was able to do a Masters and Law Degree in the requisite amount of time as well.
"They are rudderless. Many seem to have no idea why they are in college. I often ask this of students at the beginning of the semester. They really seem to have no clue. It’s not that they are there for the goal of a liberal arts education in itself and are not yet career-focused. That is a perfectly legitimate goal. They literally have no fishing clue why they are there"
This is true and again hard for me to relate to. I feel like many classmates from high school knew why we were there and what was expected of us. This includes those who wanted a serious education and those who knew from day one that they were heading to law, med, or business school. What's the solution though? How do we give young kids aim? I'm not a fan of the right-wing blowhards who just want to send everyone to the Marines and this will teach them a sense of purpose. It might work for some but the leftie in me suspects that many will just become infantry-runts and finish their service with no real skills learned. I am skeptical of the Be all You can be campaign.
This is sad to me as someone who does believe in a liberals art education but it is untenable to have 18 year olds and their family study Dante, The Tale of Genji, and Plato just to get an accounting degree. Or worse to drop out with a lot of debt and no degree at all like the women in the article.
I think this is another Sailing Away to Irrelevance moment for the GOP and would love to see Tod take on the NRA as part of the boondoogle.
Salon.com noted that Rush Limbaugh called Wayne LaPierre, the "adult" in the room on gun control.
Though I disagree with one of your assertions but it could reflect my Pauline Kael problem. I do not think his arguments will be popular among non-gun owners. All of my friends are talking about how absurd and brutal and horrible the statements are. Why do you think non-gun owners will love them?
Most Americans support stronger gun regulations. However, there are very few pro-gun control people for whom it is a single issue. However, there are a lot of anti-gun control people for whom it is a single issue when coming to vote for a candidate or not.
I will vote for a candidate who is less strict on guns than I want if I think he or she is good on other issues that are important to me. Many gun rights people would not do otherwise. They won't vote for the pro-gun control candidate even if they agree with the candidate on everything else.
I think there is a decent amount of evidence in evolutionary psychology to show that people are hierachical by nature. It is not an accident that we form some kind of hierarchy in our cultures and societies but by design.
I hope the answer is that for many people the answer is no. When I went to Mexico City in 2008, I noted that many of the shops had heavily armed-security guards in front of things like department stores. This is a sign of an unsafe society.
I don't think he hates Republicans but it is not usually the reason people join political parties. As I said above, Tod's goals are nobles but probably Sissyphean and I really wonder "why bother?"
I have no knowledge of Tod's family background in politics. Perhaps he comes from a long line of moderate Republicans and is truly upset by the crazyification of the GOP.
There is the part of me that wants a viable opposition for reasons you wrote about several months ago. One-party systems tend towards corruption and complacency. I do not want the Democratic Party to become corrupt or complacent. However, I am not going to join the GOP to try and reform them from within. I don't want to be associated with that crowd.
I agree. In a multi-party system (say four parties or so), there would be a far-right populist party that constantly gathered 15-20 percent of the vote but this would not result in many elected seats. The power would be largely split between a true center-right part and a true center-left party.
This seems to be what happens in Europe most of the time and it nullifies the crazy vote.
This seems to be the driving ID of many on the Right for such a while and it really perplexes me.
I see it most in the Palinista set. There whole reason for existence seems to be "annoy a liberal". There seems to be a whole cottage industry devoted to making t-shirts and bumper stickers with slogans that are just designed to rib on liberals and often in very junior high school ways.
I am amazed and perplexed at how the populist-Right wing has managed to create a whole strawmen out of liberals and that somehow things like health insurance and welfare are really designed to make people unhappy. This is borderlander identity gone wild.
I grew up in bluest of the blue New York. My hometown congressional district is part suburban Long Island (but generally Jewish and Asian) and part-Queens. Republicans were in the minority. I come from a long-line of Democratic voters, no one in my family has been Republican ever.
However, if you are young and grew up in a heavily Republican area and in a heavily Republican family, you are probably going to come out as a Republican.
The GOP is a bit too gerrymandered to be sailing away to irrelevance.
There are probably dozens of heavily gerrymandered Congressional seats in the GOP's favor. These are districts where Congresscritters can only be defeated by a challenge from the right, not the left. Hence, the election of ultra-right congresscritters who say absurd things on TV. These things are not absurd in their very-safe districts.
Plus they do control more governorships than the Democratic Party as Aaron David pointed out.
There could be a chance that they are becoming irrelevant for people our age and younger (anyone born after 1975 or so) but I think there are plenty of late-Gen Xers and Millenialls who are Republican and just as conservative in the Fox News kind of way. Only time will tell.
The saddest part of this treaty debacle is that the UN was basically approving of US law. The treaty is a copy of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
I think Posner was opposed for more than the views outlied here. He was also opposed for his views against the Civil Rights Act and how he thought that racism was bad but there still needs to be a right to discriminate. He did not seem to think that the rights of minorities to fully participate in economic and civic life probably should trump the rights of bigots both legally and morally.
Bork's confirmation was not so much Fort Sumter but Shiloh, the first battle when we realized things we going to be ugly and ugly for a long time. The modern culture already started in the 1960s-70s with the rise of the hippies and the silent/moral majority. The Supreme Court had already filed decisions in Miller v. California, Roe v. Wade, Falwell v. Hustler by the time Bork was nominated. Rehinquist (who was just as noxious as Bork) survived two Senate confirmation hearings. Scalia survived his.
"There is a very large sub-culture of Americans concerned about civil unrest in the context of a natural disaster or a failure of the government. I think the latter is unlikely in our lifetimes but the former is very real."
I have noticed that many concealed carry types do seem to have a Mad Max mentality. In which, they think we are one step away from Science Fiction Warlord Universe or already living in it.
Bullshit. The United States is not Somalia or Afghanistan. We have a very active and effective government and civilian society. There have also been a lot of very serious natural disasters in which society did not collapse. Hurricane Sandy comes to mind from this year alone.
If people think like you described above, they are selling their fellow country people short.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “What I Wish My Students Knew”
I think it would be more ethical for schools to point these out to students and to do so well in advance of financial aid forms and the like.
My law school has two orientations. One was for everyone and then there was a separate one earlier in the summer that was for kids (usually first in their family to graduate from college types) to give them a little extra boost. It also came with fairly regular meetings during 1L year. The proactive response seems to have largely worked. Everyone or almost everyone I knew in that program graduated on-time and did not flunk out after 1L year.
"
Did your kids go to the same high school as you?
I grew up in a town where there was the opposite issue, we did not have a vocational track. The Home Ec classrooms were turned into science labs during my senior year (1997-1998) because no one signed up to take Home Ec for years. There were some traditional tech/car shop classes but only a small number of students took those.
"
How about people who just need advocates to help them navigate the system?
My hunch is that for the woman in the article, the one who dropped out of Emory is that it was not her intellect that held her back but that the system was alien to her and her family. I think she would have done fine if she had an advocate on her behalf. Someone who could review financial aid forms and the like and then check up and argue if Emory fucked up.
Is this patnernalism? Perhaps but plenty of middle-class and above kids have parents who advocate on their behalf to university administrators, why not find a system that provides similar support to the poor.
"
Excellent post. I have a hard time with this issue because I grew up in a suburb where most of the parents had college or advanced degrees and as far as I can tell most of my classmates have done the same. We were the top 1 or 10 percent in this regard. My college GPA was all over the map but I graduated in four years and then was able to do a Masters and Law Degree in the requisite amount of time as well.
"They are rudderless. Many seem to have no idea why they are in college. I often ask this of students at the beginning of the semester. They really seem to have no clue. It’s not that they are there for the goal of a liberal arts education in itself and are not yet career-focused. That is a perfectly legitimate goal. They literally have no fishing clue why they are there"
This is true and again hard for me to relate to. I feel like many classmates from high school knew why we were there and what was expected of us. This includes those who wanted a serious education and those who knew from day one that they were heading to law, med, or business school. What's the solution though? How do we give young kids aim? I'm not a fan of the right-wing blowhards who just want to send everyone to the Marines and this will teach them a sense of purpose. It might work for some but the leftie in me suspects that many will just become infantry-runts and finish their service with no real skills learned. I am skeptical of the Be all You can be campaign.
This is sad to me as someone who does believe in a liberals art education but it is untenable to have 18 year olds and their family study Dante, The Tale of Genji, and Plato just to get an accounting degree. Or worse to drop out with a lot of debt and no degree at all like the women in the article.
On “Today”
I admire people who can listen to Rush when they don't agree with him. It always makes me feel hypertension.
"
I think this is another Sailing Away to Irrelevance moment for the GOP and would love to see Tod take on the NRA as part of the boondoogle.
Salon.com noted that Rush Limbaugh called Wayne LaPierre, the "adult" in the room on gun control.
Though I disagree with one of your assertions but it could reflect my Pauline Kael problem. I do not think his arguments will be popular among non-gun owners. All of my friends are talking about how absurd and brutal and horrible the statements are. Why do you think non-gun owners will love them?
"
Most Americans support stronger gun regulations. However, there are very few pro-gun control people for whom it is a single issue. However, there are a lot of anti-gun control people for whom it is a single issue when coming to vote for a candidate or not.
I will vote for a candidate who is less strict on guns than I want if I think he or she is good on other issues that are important to me. Many gun rights people would not do otherwise. They won't vote for the pro-gun control candidate even if they agree with the candidate on everything else.
On “January 3rd”
A Constitutional Crisis seems to be the nation's anniversary gift to you.
On “Arkansas Town Declares Quasi-Martial Law to Fight Property Crime”
I think there is a decent amount of evidence in evolutionary psychology to show that people are hierachical by nature. It is not an accident that we form some kind of hierarchy in our cultures and societies but by design.
"
I don't disagree with you either. I almost commented on TNC's blog that a lot of people do seem to want it.
"
I really liked TNC's take of the whole issue.
Do we really want to live a world of maximum guns? Do we really want to live in a society where everyone is packing heat and is quasi-militarized?
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/a-world-of-maximum-guns/266320/
I hope the answer is that for many people the answer is no. When I went to Mexico City in 2008, I noted that many of the shops had heavily armed-security guards in front of things like department stores. This is a sign of an unsafe society.
On “Sailing Away to Irrelevance, Epilogue: In Which the GOP is Finally and Inevitably Made Irrelevant”
I don't think he hates Republicans but it is not usually the reason people join political parties. As I said above, Tod's goals are nobles but probably Sissyphean and I really wonder "why bother?"
I have no knowledge of Tod's family background in politics. Perhaps he comes from a long line of moderate Republicans and is truly upset by the crazyification of the GOP.
There is the part of me that wants a viable opposition for reasons you wrote about several months ago. One-party systems tend towards corruption and complacency. I do not want the Democratic Party to become corrupt or complacent. However, I am not going to join the GOP to try and reform them from within. I don't want to be associated with that crowd.
"
I agree. In a multi-party system (say four parties or so), there would be a far-right populist party that constantly gathered 15-20 percent of the vote but this would not result in many elected seats. The power would be largely split between a true center-right part and a true center-left party.
This seems to be what happens in Europe most of the time and it nullifies the crazy vote.
On “The First Contemporary Culture Warrior”
This seems to be the driving ID of many on the Right for such a while and it really perplexes me.
I see it most in the Palinista set. There whole reason for existence seems to be "annoy a liberal". There seems to be a whole cottage industry devoted to making t-shirts and bumper stickers with slogans that are just designed to rib on liberals and often in very junior high school ways.
I am amazed and perplexed at how the populist-Right wing has managed to create a whole strawmen out of liberals and that somehow things like health insurance and welfare are really designed to make people unhappy. This is borderlander identity gone wild.
On “Sailing Away to Irrelevance, Epilogue: In Which the GOP is Finally and Inevitably Made Irrelevant”
This is a task that is noble but possibly Sissyphean
"
I concur. It seems to me that Tod's joining the GOP is an attempt to revive the old moderate block.
"
Right. I am not surprised.
I grew up in bluest of the blue New York. My hometown congressional district is part suburban Long Island (but generally Jewish and Asian) and part-Queens. Republicans were in the minority. I come from a long-line of Democratic voters, no one in my family has been Republican ever.
However, if you are young and grew up in a heavily Republican area and in a heavily Republican family, you are probably going to come out as a Republican.
"
The GOP is a bit too gerrymandered to be sailing away to irrelevance.
There are probably dozens of heavily gerrymandered Congressional seats in the GOP's favor. These are districts where Congresscritters can only be defeated by a challenge from the right, not the left. Hence, the election of ultra-right congresscritters who say absurd things on TV. These things are not absurd in their very-safe districts.
Plus they do control more governorships than the Democratic Party as Aaron David pointed out.
There could be a chance that they are becoming irrelevant for people our age and younger (anyone born after 1975 or so) but I think there are plenty of late-Gen Xers and Millenialls who are Republican and just as conservative in the Fox News kind of way. Only time will tell.
The saddest part of this treaty debacle is that the UN was basically approving of US law. The treaty is a copy of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
On “The First Contemporary Culture Warrior”
One obituary rued that the Saturday Night Massacre was largely absent from mentions of his biography.
I was alive during his confirmation process but not during Watergate. Not that Borking was one of my memories from being alive back then.
"
On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me,
A copy editor in a pear tree
"
I am not so sure about your last sentence but otherwise spot-on.
"
Interesting essay.
I think Posner was opposed for more than the views outlied here. He was also opposed for his views against the Civil Rights Act and how he thought that racism was bad but there still needs to be a right to discriminate. He did not seem to think that the rights of minorities to fully participate in economic and civic life probably should trump the rights of bigots both legally and morally.
Bork's confirmation was not so much Fort Sumter but Shiloh, the first battle when we realized things we going to be ugly and ugly for a long time. The modern culture already started in the 1960s-70s with the rise of the hippies and the silent/moral majority. The Supreme Court had already filed decisions in Miller v. California, Roe v. Wade, Falwell v. Hustler by the time Bork was nominated. Rehinquist (who was just as noxious as Bork) survived two Senate confirmation hearings. Scalia survived his.
On “Today”
I still don't understand the whole Kim dynamic in this community.
"
Here are some issues or questions that I have:
1. Do you think that urban/suburban residents have different needs when it comes to gun policy than rural or exurban residents?
2. If yes, what are the differences and is there an equitable way to create a policy that meets the needs and desires of both groups?
3. Are you personally concerned or freaked out by any of the attitudes of the gun lobby? If yes, what are they?
On “Where Do We Go From Here?”
Mike,
"There is a very large sub-culture of Americans concerned about civil unrest in the context of a natural disaster or a failure of the government. I think the latter is unlikely in our lifetimes but the former is very real."
I have noticed that many concealed carry types do seem to have a Mad Max mentality. In which, they think we are one step away from Science Fiction Warlord Universe or already living in it.
Bullshit. The United States is not Somalia or Afghanistan. We have a very active and effective government and civilian society. There have also been a lot of very serious natural disasters in which society did not collapse. Hurricane Sandy comes to mind from this year alone.
If people think like you described above, they are selling their fellow country people short.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.