Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
The new Jesus and Mo strip, called “tragic,” came with the caption, “It’s okay, they had muesli for breakfast.”
I’m not sure about this one, save that the boys leave their McDonald’s cups and french-fry package on the bench after they leave. Is that the licensed immoral behavior?
Perhaps readers can explain. . .
Two readers sent me this 44-minute video posted by Tom Gross, showing Emily Hand, a 9-year-old girl kidnapped by Hamas, comforting her father Thomas, an Irishman, as he’s interviewed by Piers Morgan. (Hand’s wife died of cancer, and Thoma’s ex-wife, who served as Emily’s stepmother, was killed by Hamas.) It’s ineffably moving to see young Emily stroke her father’s face, wiping the tears from his eyes as he recounts the family’s ordeal.
You may remember Thomas Hand saying, when he thought his daughter was dead in Gaza, that her death was probably for the best, for her fate would have been worse had she been taken alive: he imagined what Hamas would do to Emily.(A clip from that interview is at 11:42.) I’m sure he feels differently now! But he did have to explain to Emily, after she returned, that her stepmother was dead.
My friend said this:
You have to watch this—it’s insanely powerful. I’m crying. He just lays it all out. Makes me want to move to Israel and help. . .
Towards the end, Thomas Hand gets very angry and calls Western university students “idiots”. . . and he mentions Harvard.
Here are Tom Gross’s notes:
Thomas Hand, the Irish-born father of Emily Hand who was released after 50 days in Hamas hell, gave an in-depth interview yesterday evening to Piers Morgan on Britain’s TalkTV. Emily was 8 when she was kidnapped and turned 9 in captivity.
One viewer said: “How she wiped her father’s tears, caressed and cared for him when he started to cry in the interview. Melted my heart.”
Also of note is when Thomas Hand says ignorant critics of Israel in the West “don’t know a thing” and have “no idea what they are talking about”.
Hand is no conservative: he brought up Emily on a kibbutz because he liked its socialist atmosphere. As for Emily’s kidnapping during a sleepover and the attack on the kibbutz, you’ll have to listen to the interview.
Three bits are worth noting: about 30 minutes in, Thomas explains how he told Emily that her stepmother/caretaker was dead. (See especially from 31:15 on.)
At 32:25, the discussion turns to politics, Israel’s response, and how the West has reacted. Thomas gets quite exercised, especially when he gets to the accusation that Israel is an “apartheid state.”
At 43:00, Piers asks Thomas to ask Emily (in Hebrew) how she felt when she saw her father again after her release.
A final word from me: of the roughly 200 people taken hostage by Hamas, from several countries, about 136 remain in Gaza. That there is no world outcry about this; that the UN hasn’t condemned Hamas for this; and that the Court of Justice in the Hague is not putting Hamas on trial for real genocide, including taking civilian hostages, firing rockets into Israel, swearing to keep attacking Israel until all the Jews are dead (as specified in its charter) and many other terroristic war crimes—all of this should bring deep shame to the West
As with many YouTube videos, this one is periodically interrupted with annoying advertisements. Nothing is immune from being monetized these days.
Today we have photos by Friend of the Site Greg Mayer, who sent these in when the photo well was about to run dry. Greg’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. This is part 1 of 2.
Southern trees: what’s on them?
One of the things you notice in heading south are the changes in the plants and animals you see. One of the most striking things you notice is the abundance of epiphytes– plants growing on plants– which are much commoner in the southern US than in the north. Epiphytes of all sorts, and often large ones– bromeliads, vines, strangler figs, etc.– are a typical characteristic of tropical forests, but there are a fair number in subtropical Florida. The following pictures are from Jacksonville, in northern Florida.
Among the first “southern” things you notice, even while driving, is Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides, in the bromeliad family) dripping off of trees; while driving south I first noticed it in southern Georgia. Unfortunately, there were none where I walked around to take these photos! But there were other air plants– which is what Spanish moss is. Here’s one, another species of Tillandsia, in a lime tree (Citrus sp.).
Air plants have no roots, consisting instead of twisted leaves clinging to other plants and surfaces; they get water and nutrients from the air and the rain. They are not parasitical in the usual sense– they don’t “feed” upon their host– but they are what are known as “support parasites”: their host holds them up, and gets them exposed to sunlight. Some support parasites can be inimical to the host, weighing it down and intercepting sunlight and rain; a friend here in Florida told me that a lot of Spanish moss will kill a tree.
Though the lime tree had no Spanish moss, it was not doing well, and epiphytes (mostly lichens) were abundant on the moribund parts of the tree; compare the left side, with leaves, vs. the nearly barren right side.
A live oak (Quercus sp., I think) with lots of epiphytes was also not doing well. Notice the few bunches of live leaves higher in the tree; the ground below it was covered with broken-off, epiphyte-encrusted, branches. [Edit by GCM: The clumps of live leaves in the tree below are probably mistletoe, an epiphytic parasite, not leaves of the oak. Also the oak is probably not a live oak. See the comments for further details. My thanks to readers Dennis Howard Schneider, j a higginbotham, bruce morgan, and debi!]
The most common epiphytes here are lichens. I won’t even venture an opinion on what species occur here, but there were differences in growth form indicating to me that several species were present. Here’s a wispy kind I found on branches.
Nearby on the same branches could be found a lichen with a more “structured” form, with “chimneys”.
Lichens also grew on trunks; this is the same live oak as shown above.
A common sight in Florida is a palm whose trunk is covered with ferns. The ferns on this one are modestly dense– I’ve seen much denser. I think the tree is one of the twelve native palms of Florida– perhaps cabbage palm. (IDs from readers on this or other plants would be appreciated!)
On this palm, moss is growing on the trunk, and we can see some epiphytic vines dangling.
Finally, neither trees nor epiphytes, and, in fact, not even plants, a couple of fungi on the lawn.
Welcome to a Hump Day (“Ngày bướu” in Vietnamese): Wednesday, January 17, 2024. This will be a curtailed post, as PCC(E) is travelling.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the January 17 Wikipedia page.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is a wise cat:
In Polish:
Hili: Mam wrażenie, że świat zwariował.
Ja: Z twojego miejsca też to widać?
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From Stacy:
Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, January 16, 2024, and by the time you read this I’ll be heading to California for eight days or so. Foodwise, it’s National Hot and Spicy Food Day, giving me a hankering for Szechuan cuisine. Here’s my favorite: mapo dofu:
It’s also National Good Teen Day (?), Rid the World of Fad Diets and Gimmicks Day, Book Publishers Day, Prohibition Remembrance Day (the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified on this day in 1919, going into effect a year later), National Fig Newton Day, and National Religious Freedom Day,
Here’s a video showing how they make fig cookies, but these are called “Fig Newmans”:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the January 16 Wikipedia page.
There will almost certainly be no more posts today, as I’m flying (assuming that the plane will take off in this cold), and posting will be light for a few days. Bear with me; I do my best!
Da Nooz:
*Tuesday update: As expected, Trump won a big victory in Iowa yesterday Get used to it; the GOP loves the maniac. But what wasn’t expected is that Ron DeSantis finished second and Nikki Haley third, although the polls showed her leading DeSantis.
The race for the Republican presidential nomination has come into sharper focus the morning after former President Donald J. Trump’s decisive victory in the Iowa caucuses. Mr. Trump presented himself as the party’s inevitable nominee. Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, relieved by a second-place finish, declared his campaign resuscitated.
And Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, who came in third, linked Mr. Trump and President Biden as the aging symbols of an older generation whose time had passed.
The new contours of this once-muddled contest emerged as the campaign moved from Iowa to New Hampshire. Wasting no time, Mr. Trump, Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley all have high-profile events planned in New Hampshire Tuesday night, kicking off what promises to be a brisk, one-week campaign leading to the first-in-the-nation primary next Tuesday.
Mr. Trump flew out with a burst of momentum as he moved into a state that is potentially more competitive for him than Iowa. And he escaped Iowa without a clear challenger for his opponents to rally around.
. . .Iowa quickly claimed one candidate: Vivek Ramaswamy, a wealthy entrepreneur, suspended his campaign for president and endorsed Mr. Trump after his weak showing on Tuesday night.
From Batya Ungar-Sargon at The Free Press:
According to MSNBC’s early entrance polls, Trump won voters without a college degree by 65 percent, to Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s 17 percent and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley’s scant 8 percent. Trump won college grads, too, but by a much slimmer margin—just 35 percent caucused for Trump. Haley, meanwhile, got nearly as many—33 percent, with DeSantis trailing at 23 percent. The AP had a similar breakdown.
It’s going to be a long year. Ceiling Cat bless America!
*Donald Trump is subject to yet another trial brought by E. Jean Carroll, a woman he sexually abused in 1995 or 1996. Trump had already been found liable in a civil suit last May, with a total of $5 million awarded to Carroll for both the assault and punitive damages for defamatory remarks Trump made in 2022. Now he’s being sued a second time for remarks he made in 2019:
A Manhattan jury will be asked a narrow question this week: How much money must former President Donald J. Trump pay the writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her after she accused him of raping her?
Ms. Carroll’s chance encounter decades ago at the Bergdorf Goodman department store, in which she said Mr. Trump shoved her against a dressing room wall, pulled down her tights and forced himself on her, was already the focus of a trial last year. A jury in May awarded Ms. Carroll just over $2 million for the assault and nearly $3 million for defamation over Mr. Trump’s remark in October 2022 calling her claim “a complete con job.”
The trial starting Tuesday focuses on separate statements by Mr. Trump in June 2019, directly after Ms. Carroll disclosed her allegation in New York magazine. At the time, Mr. Trump called her claim “totally false,” saying that he had never met Ms. Carroll, a former Elle magazine advice columnist, and that she invented a story to sell a book.
Now, Mr. Trump says he wants to attend and testify at Ms. Carroll’s trial, something he didn’t do in the earlier case. That’s sparked a bitter dispute between lawyers for Ms. Carroll, 80, and Mr. Trump, 77, over what the former president could say if he took the stand, and whether he would stray beyond strict boundaries the judge has set.
The judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, has ruled that given the jury’s findings in the first trial, Mr. Trump cannot now contest Ms. Carroll’s version of events — as he frequently does in public statements.
What, then, can he say, other than deny he made defamatory remarks? In fact, given that he still contests Carroll’s statement in public, I don’t think he’s even capable of shutting up about it in court, and then he’ll be in big trouble. The AP reports that the lawyer who won the $5 million in the first case “urged a judge Friday to take strong measures to ensure the former president doesn’t ‘sow chaos’ when a new jury considers next week if he owes even more in damages.” But sowing chaos is exactly what Trump’s good at!
*A former Israeli hostage who was held by Hamas for two months before release has spoken out about the physical and mental abuse she endured, abuse that surely still holds for the many women still in captivity.
“They took me, what remained of my family and it felt like, ‘That’s it, now we are living in Gaza,’” she told The Washington Post. “And that’s why it felt like it would be forever.”
Agam said she was forbidden from crying. She was not to mourn her father and older sister, 20-year-old Yam, shot dead by militants in their family home. Sometimes the captors shouted at her, she remembered, other times they tried to win her sympathy with looted creams and perfumes.
With guns cocked, Agam said they warned her family — especially her 9- and 11-year-old brothers — against making noise. If Israel found out where they were hiding, she remembers the kidnappers saying, the military would kill them all.
It was one of countless lies they told to assert “absolute control,” Agam realized after she was freed in late November — during a temporary humanitarian pause that involved the release of more than 100 hostages from Hamas captivity.
In her first interview with international media, Agam described the terror and confusion she endured over nearly two months as a hostage inside Gaza, held with her mother, Chen, and two brothers, Tal and Gal. Speaking from Shfayim, a kibbutz in central Israel that has transformed into a way station for hundreds of her displaced neighbors, she recounted the extreme exhaustion, the oppressive stench of the tunnels, the relentless psychological torture.
She turned the conversation again and again to the 136 hostages still believed to be held captive in Gaza. The Red Cross has not been allowed to visit them. The youngest, Kfir Bibas, turns 1 this week.
The Post could not independently confirm Agam’s account, but it is consistent with those of other former hostages. There are details she still can’t share, Agam said, to protect those left behind. She thinks of them constantly. She is trying to be their voice: “There’s nothing else I can do.”
. . .Agam did not say whether she was sexually abused. She was released on Nov. 26. “They suddenly charged in and told us to be ready at 9 a.m.,” she recalled. “And they told the other girls, who weren’t going home, maybe tomorrow — inshallah — God willing, tomorrow, tomorrow.”
It was another lie. They are among 19 women still held in Gaza.
There’s more, and it’s as bad as you expect. One issue that Israel is preparing for is what to do if any hostages released in the future were impregnated by terrorists. Israel does have a very liberal abortion policy, allowing the procedure right up to the moment of birth.
Here’s a new video by Bari Weiss on the issue (and others, such as pig noises). I’ve lost a lot of respect for Briahna Joy Gray (see 20:54):
*The Houthis are making good on their vow to reliate for U.S. strikes on their assets in Yemen, but their retaliation yesterday was pretty lame.
Fresh attacks targeted American ships in the Middle East, days after the U.S. led a round of strikes meant to blunt the capability of Houthi rebels to hit ships transiting the Red Sea.
A Houthi missile struck the Gibraltar Eagle, a U.S. bulk carrier, off the coast of Yemen without causing injury or significant damage on Monday, said the U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East.
The Houthis later claimed responsibility for the attack.
Eagle Bulk Shipping, the ship’s U.S. owner, didn’t respond to a request for comment. , the ship’s U.S. owner, didn’t respond to a request for comment.The Houthi actions, initially directed against Israeli-linked vessels, have rattled global markets, upended international shipping routes and become increasingly indiscriminate. The rebels have attacked everything from boxships to tankers moving sanctioned Russian oil as the global shipping nexus complicates their ability to identify specific targets.
They vowed again Monday to continue their campaign against U.S. and international targets in the region in response to Israel’s actions in Gaza. “Anyone attempting to hinder us from doing so will fail,” a Houthi official said Monday.
*The Iowa Caucus was yesterday, with voters in that “key” state set to choose a Republican nominee for President. The contest will probably be decided by the time you read this (and of course Trump will win), for I’m writing this on Monday evening, but the question remains: why does it matter? The AP discusses “what you need to know”:
Iowa appears to be a battle for second place given Trump’s dominance. The real question is whether either of the two Republicans who lead the pack of very distant also-rans can make it a two-person race in the long run.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis once talked of winning the state, but he’s lowered expectations to simply having a good showing. With his campaign apparatus in turmoil and funds drying up, he needs a strong finish in a state where its movement conservatives would normally be his natural audience.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s technocratic and consensus-building pitch doesn’t seem tailor-made for Iowa, but the caucuses come just as she gained increased attention and financial support. Her strongest state may be the next one up, New Hampshire, and a second-place finish in Iowa could put her in a strong position as attention shifts to New England.
Rarely has so much ridden on a second-place finish in the first nominating state.
. . .One of the more unexpected side plots in the 2024 Republican primary has been Vivek Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old pharmaceutical entrepreneur who wrote a book called “Woke, Inc.” and then decided to run for president. His aggressive, social media-driven approach initially attracted some curiosity from Republican voters but seemed to turn many off after he attacked rivals during the debates.
Ramaswamy’s hard-charging style may not exactly be “Iowa nice,” but neither is Trump’s and he’s far ahead. Ramaswamy has been all over Iowa, hitting the campaign milestone of visiting all 99 counties in the state not once, but twice.
It’s not clear what Ramaswamy is competing for — he goes out of his way not to criticize Trump, but flames all other candidates in a potential audition for the frontrunner’s administration. Iowa will help determine whether he has a reason to keep running his quixotic campaign.
I doubt that Trump will nominate the second-place finisher to be his Vice-President, as he doesn’t want anybody that popular to be his second in command. So what, really, is riding on this second-place finish. And “a potential audition for Trump’s administration?” I wouldn’t count on it.
*The lawsuit against the University of California’s DEI requirements has been dismissed, but only because of lack of standing.
A federal judge threw out a lawsuit that challenged the University of California system’s requirement that applicants for faculty positions must file diversity statements.
The court, which issued the ruling on Friday, did not rule on the merits, but said that the plaintiff lacked standing to sue because he never actually applied for the open faculty position that he singled out in his suit.
That would be John Haltigan, a psychology professor from Toronto who never even applied for the job, but constructed a faux diversity statement that he thought would sink his application. As I wrote earlier, he wasn’t hurt because he didn’t apply, so it’s no surprise that he didn’t have standing. More:
In his lawsuit, John Haltigan, who has a Ph.D. in developmental psychology, said he would have applied to a position at U.C. Santa Cruz, but that the D.E.I. statement made his application futile, since he is “committed to colorblindness and viewpoint diversity.” The lawsuit contended that the requirement acts as a “functional loyalty oath,” violating his rights under the First Amendment.
The Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian group that filed the lawsuit for Dr. Haltigan, did not make him available for an interview. But in a February post on Substack, he wrote that D.E.I. statements have become “a political litmus test” that has eroded diversity of thought in academia.
“Public trust in our universities has been severely diminished as a consequence,” he wrote in the post.
The rules need to be challenged by somebody with standing, that is, somebody who was actually damaged by the DEI policy. Haltigan couldn’t claim that because he wasn’t denied the job since he didn’t apply for it. The real test case has yet to be brought.
If you want to read from the judge’s decision, see this post at The Volokh Conspiracy.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s being the sartorial police!
Hili: Do you think that I don’t see anything?A: What’s the matter?Hili: You are putting on this torn jumper again.
Hili: Czy ty naprawdę sądzisz, że ja nic nie widzę?Ja: O co ci chodzi?Hili: Znowu wkładasz ten podarty sweter.
*******************
From the FB site I am Not a Grammar Cop, with the caption, “Hyphens save lives”:
From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:
From Mark; now THIS is a pizza!
Down in Florida, it was 57°F yesterday (positively Arctic there), and Jango, staffed by Divy and Ivan, was cold. After all, he is a Floridian cat.
From Masih: This woman and many others (watch the video) were blinded in one eye, thanks the the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Google Translation: I am happy since the day when I, as the first woman, put my photo on Instagram on my sports page and showed the dirty crime of Ja. The face was shot in the eyes. You can celebrate freedom with one eye.
خوشحالم از همون روزیکه به عنوان اولین زن عکسمو تو اینستاگرام تو پیج ورزشیم گذاشتم و جنایت کثیف ج.ا رو به کل دنیا نشون دادم و بعد بقیه بچه های آسیب دیده ی چشمی رو پیدا کردم و صدامون به کل دنیا رسید که ج.ا به صورت هدفمند به چشمها شلیک کرده.
با یک چشم هم میشود آزادی را جشن گرفت. pic.twitter.com/yShrSh83Xl— MersedeH_eye (@mersedeh_eye) January 13, 2024
From my own feed. These ducklings want to sleep with the kittens:
Mother Duck leads the ducklings to sleep with the kittens 🐥💛🐈 pic.twitter.com/ayRHazBezX
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) January 15, 2024
Greta may well want the end of Israel, for the sign on the left is ambiguous. At any rate, she should stick to climate change.
Climate strike week 282. #FridaysForFuture #ClimateStrike pic.twitter.com/KyGKLMTa3B
— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) January 12, 2024
From Malcolm; how to get people to take the stairs and get some cardio workout:
Would you take the stairs? 😊 pic.twitter.com/6S981SE75s
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) December 30, 2023
From Ros; a kitten trying to sleep on a barbell, for crying out loud!
strong but sleepy pic.twitter.com/cSeN9Ignns
— Why you should have a cat (@ShouldHaveCat) January 8, 2024
From my feed; THREE sugar gliders in one hand:
I can't stop watching this pic.twitter.com/3hw5ccMxPZ
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) January 15, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial. This Polish teacher, head shaved, lived about six weeks after arriving at Auschwitz.
15 January 1900 | A Polish woman, Helena Jackowska, was born in Przasnysz. A teacher.
In #Auschwitz from 7 October 1942.
No. 22173
She perished in the camp on 20 November 1942. pic.twitter.com/zYEICvQfpU— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) January 15, 2024
Two tweets from Doctor Cobb. Matthew put a frowny face 🙁 on the first one. Indeed! You can read more in the Jerusalem Post; the player was also kicked out of Turkey, which sides with Hamas. (h/t Jack)
Welcome to Turkey’s Midnight Express.
This is unbelievable.
An Israeli football player, Sagiv Yehezkel, scored a goal for Antalyaspor, a Turkish team.
He made a gesture “100” for the Israelis who have been held hostage by Hamas for the past 100 days.
All hell broke loose:… pic.twitter.com/Lv5wHJYTbQ
— Naftali Bennett נפתלי בנט (@naftalibennett) January 14, 2024
Matthew, who’s aging like all of us, posted this tweet with his comment:
Hooray for Mr Treanor! From @guardian 5 November 1969. That's the kind of news we need! pic.twitter.com/3KwDP3yJfM
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb) January 14, 2024
The Atlantic is actually becoming a reasonable venue instead of a woke one. Example in point: this article by podcaster and writer Josh Barro. We’ve probably encountered most of his indictments before, but he explains why the problems with American universities is making most Americans—Democrats, Republicans, and independents—lose respect for the institutions. Click to read, or, if the article is paywalled, you can find an archived version here.
First, the data that constitute the problem (Barro’s words are indented):
Over the past few years, conservatives have rapidly lost trust in higher education. From 2015 to 2023, Gallup found that the share of Republicans expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education fell by 37 points, from 56 to 19 percent. As conservatives have come to look negatively at these institutions, Republicans have engaged in political attacks on the sector, most recently in the fact-finding and pressure campaign that caused Claudine Gay to resign as president of Harvard.
This decline is something close to common knowledge. Less discussed is the fact that public confidence in colleges has fallen significantly across all ideological groups since 2015. Though Republicans’ confidence cratered the most, Gallup found that it fell by 16 points among independents (from 48 to 32 percent) and nine points among Democrats (from 68 to 59 percent, not far from where Republicans were nine years ago).
Below are some data I found from that Gallup poll (click to enlarge if you can’t see the figures).
First, the data for all Americans, showing a drop in just the last 8 years from 57% to 36% in those who have either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education:
And the data divided by demographics. Notice that confidence fell in other groups, too, especially those with no college degree, and also a greater decline among older than among younger people.
Why is this happening? According to Barro, and he seems on the mark to me, it’s largely because the institutions are perceived as dishonest and weaselly. I’ll summarize his reasons, giving Barro’s quotes as either indented prose or with added quotation marks.
a. Universities seem less interested in finding truth that in supporting an ideology, usually one aimed at social justice. (Thinks of all the “studies” courses that exist now but didn’t in the past. Even the University of Chicago now has a Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity.)
b. “Their public accountings of the reasons for their internal actions are often implausible. They deceive the public about the role that race plays in their admissions and hiring practices.” It’s clear that many universities now are trying to maintain race-based admissions though that’s been outlawed by the Supreme Court. And there doesn’t seem to be any push to expand ideological or political diversity.
This also goes for hiring practices as well as undergraduate admissions. A quote from Barro:
Because using racial quotas in hiring is illegal, universities can’t explicitly admit to setting positions aside for candidates from underrepresented minorities. Instead they use ideological screens and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statement reviews as a proxy for race. This approach has many drawbacks—in addition to involving a concealment of the university’s true objectives, it is of no use to Black and Hispanic candidates who are not interested in “ideologically supercharged” areas of study, and sometimes it leads to the hiring of white candidates anyway, if they know best how to include the magic trendy words in a DEI statement.
And a quote about Harvard’s litigation about race-based admissions policy, about which they simply dissimulated. This went all the way up to the Supreme Court, of course:
The dishonesty at elite universities extends beyond their research output to how they describe their admissions processes. Like many universities, Harvard has long used race as a factor in college admissions, producing a class that is less Asian and more Black and Hispanic than it would be if it did not consider race. Throughout the litigation over this practice, the university’s representatives didn’t just defend the appropriateness of race-conscious policies to promote diversity; they denied that they were discriminating at all. They played word games—similar to the “what even is plagiarism?” bit deployed by Gay’s defenders—arguing somehow that race could be used as a positive factor for admission without ever being a negative one, a mathematical impossibility when awarding a fixed number of admission slots.
c. The degrees that universities give “will not justify the time and money that students invest in them.” I’m sure this is one factor, as some schools give degrees with ridiculous names, or “studies” degrees that would make it hard to get a job. And, of course, schools are expensive, especially for “elite” colleges. This is what it’ll take you to send a student to Harvard next year. If you multiply that by four, you get nearly $320,000, not counting books and other supplies.
Even at the state school where I went, The College of William & Mary, tuition for an out-of-state student is $63,967, not that much less than Harvard’s, while in-state students pay amore reasonable amount: $39,595 When I went there it was $1200 per year, which works out, with inflation, to be the equivalent of $10,800 today—a bit more than just half in real money of the student tuition-only fee of $18,252. But the point is that except for state schools if you’re a resident, college costs more than many parents make.
Of course you shouldn’t look at college as a way to get a pecuniary return on your investment, but that’s the way things have become. It’s this “consumerist” mentality that is in fact ruining many colleges, leading to lame “pop culture” courses, grade inflation, the decline of the humanities, and the fear of professors that their students will beef because they’re not getting a monetary return. (When I taught evolution to students who were mostly pre-meds, I got complaints that evolution wouldn’t help students become better doctors. And they’re largely right, but that’s not the point of studying evolution.)
d. The “replication crisis” affecting the reliability of data has led people to think that many researchers are either sloppy or dishonest, so what you learn in college may not be trustworthy. This is Barro’s accusation, though I don’t see it as nearly as big a contributor to the problem as the first three issues above.
e. The waffling, euphemisms, and plagiarism evidenced in the Claudine Gray scandal. This doesn’t play into the Gallup data above, which were compiled before Gay resigned as President of Harvard, but it’s surely embedded in the minds of the public now. They also remember the waffling that she, Liz Magill, and Sally Kornbluth showed during the House hearing. Granted, they were being bullied, but none of them made a particularly good showing, and Magill has resigned as well. This, I think, did a great deal to debase higher education in the minds of Americans. I’m not even mentioning the use of euphemisms like “duplicative language” instead of “plagiarism,” which didn’t fool anyone but made Harvard look defensive and weaselly.
f. Even science has been tarred by misguided advice by experts, especially during the pandemic. Barro:
Yet another distortion of academic output is subject-matter specialists using the guise of expertise to impose their policy preferences on the public. This phenomenon exploded as a huge problem early in the coronavirus pandemic, and it wasn’t limited to universities—some of the public-health professionals who fought to turn transmission estimates into policies that closed schools, offices, and places of worship were on faculties, some were at hospitals, some worked for the government, and some just posted a lot on Twitter. But I’ll say that several years of hearing “science says” prior to claims that weren’t science as such but rather were applications of scientific claims through a specific value framework I didn’t share—part-communitarian, part-neurotic, part-left wing—made
I’m going to add two others, which are mine. Here they are. They’re coming now. First, the deplatforming of speakers. This mainly affects conservative speakers, like federal judge Kyle Duncan, who was shouted down at Stanford Law School, an incident for which the university had to apologize. This, of course, turns off more right-wing than left-wing Americans, but the problem is that all Americans are losing confidence in colleges, and many on the Left, like me, still favor free speech for everyone.
Second, the spread of identity politics and identity issues, which “intersects” with several of the issues above. These include “studies,” DEI, and the segregation of students by race, often in “affinity houses” or in race-specific graduations. This again is guaranteed to anger a lot of people, including members of minorities who don’t favor this kind of voluntary segregation.
Finally, I want to quote one bit from Barro’s piece that’s particularly invidious:
The commentator Matt Yglesias wrote a few weeks ago about a paper by Jenny Bulstrode, a historian of science at the University of London, who alleges that a moderately notable metallurgical technique patented in England in the late 1700s was in fact stolen from the Black Jamaican metallurgists who really developed it. The problem with Bulstrode’s paper is that it marshals no real evidence for its allegation—not only failing to show that the Englishman Henry Cort was aware of a Jamaican metallurgical technique similar to the one he patented but failing to show even that such a technique was ever used in Jamaica.
The paper, because it fit into the fashionable category of “historian finds yet another thing that is racist,” garnered credulous press coverage. And when people pointed out that the paper didn’t have the goods, the editors of the journal that published it came out with a “what is truth, anyway”–type word salad in defense of the article, including this:
We by no means hold that “fiction” is a meaningless category—dishonesty and fabrication in academic scholarship are ethically unacceptable. But we do believe that what counts as accountability to our historical subjects, our readers and our own communities is not singular or to be dictated prior to engaging in historical study. If we are to confront the anti-Blackness of EuroAmerican intellectual traditions, as those have been explicated over the last century by DuBois, Fanon, and scholars of the subsequent generations we must grasp that what is experienced by dominant actors in EuroAmerican cultures as ‘empiricism’ is deeply conditioned by the predicating logics of colonialism and racial capitalism. To do otherwise is to reinstate older forms of profoundly selective historicism that support white domination.
This ideology-first, activism-oriented, the-truth-depends-on-who’s-looking approach leads me to suspect that a lot of what’s happening at universities isn’t really research—it’s social activism dressed up as research, which need not be of good quality so long as it has the right ideological goals.
Look at that word salad in the penultimate paragraph! As best I can figure, it really says that a paper which is completely bogus is okay, so long as it adheres to the narrative of white oppression and cultural appropriation. For the kind of “selective historicism” that called out Bulstrode’s paper simply “supports white domination”—even if Bulstrode was dead wrong.
Is this loss of trust good? In two ways, yes; in another way, no. The good bits are that this lack of trust may force colleges to clean up their act. Further, people who really don’t want to go to college or need to go to college (John McWhorter says that college isn’t necessary for many people, and others may want to go to trade school), this could put them on a better career path.
But the worst part is that for those who really want a good university education, the structure has to be in place to offer one. All of the problems above reduce the quality of education on tap, and, if you’re concerned about such things, will make America sink even lower in the worldwide competition for good colleges. Although I don’t care much whether, say, Britain offers a better college education than does the U.S. (I don’t know if this is the case), you simply want every school to be as good as it can, no matter where it is.
Barro has put his finger on a serious issue, and perhaps now that GayGate has occurred and the Supreme Court has begun dismantling DEI, the decline in respect for colleges may slow or even reverse.
h/t: Carl
Athayde Tonhasca Júnior is back, taking us on a trip to Madeira. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
Ilha da Madeira (Wood Island) sits some 900 km to the southwest of Portugal and 700 km west of Morocco. The island is the largest of the Madeira Archipelago, a Portuguese autonomous region. It has no beaches to speak of, but that doesn’t deter hordes of European tourists, mostly Continental Portuguese, Britons and Germans, who are lured by the island’s year-round mild climate and abundant sunshine. Inevitably, the horrors of mass-tourism are creeping in. But a judicious visitor that avoids the high season, festival days and resort hot spots near the capital Funchal, can have a memorable time – if in possession of strong legs and sturdy shoes.
Funchal is not at all a photogenic city, but it has several museums, gardens and monuments such as this homage to João Gonçalves Zarco (c. 1390-1471), winner of the Godzilla Prize for urban developer of the millennium. Prince Henrique the Navigator tasked Zarco with creating the right conditions for agriculture to encourage colonization in the hitherto uninhabited island. Zarco set to it, but faced a considerable obstacle hinted in the island’s name: a thick, luxurious forest blanketed it. But an easy solution was at hand – fire. Zarco set the island alight, and the inferno was reputed to have lasted seven years. The lowland native vegetation was wiped out, giving way to sugar cane © Vitor Oliveira, Wikimedia Commons:
A gondola lift from Funchal to the parish of Monte, a vertical climb of 560 m.:
In the 1850s, Monte residents were fed up with the long and boring slog to the city centre. So they came up with a speedier and more exciting alternative: to careen downhill in a carro de cesto (basket car), a wicker basket sledge mounted on wooden runners. Soon tourists wanted to hop on board, and today a carro de cesto journey is one of Madeira’s main attractions – Ernest Hemingway declared it to be one of the most exhilarating rides of his life. Gravity and greased runners propel the sledge forward at speeds nearing 30 km/h, while two sledge drivers negotiate crossings, moving cars, stray dogs, pedestrians and kerbs. Watch a safety-conscious Brit have a go at it:
Madeira is a piscivores’ paradise. Funchal’s fish market offers an enormous variety of seafood, some with odd shapes and appearances such as the peixe-espada preto, or black scabbardfish (Aphanopus carbo). Espada com banana is a local delicacy, but The World Health Organization recommends consuming the fish ‘in moderation’. Despite being an oceanic, deep-sea creature, the black scabbardfish is contaminated with cadmium, lead, mercury and other unsavoury ingredients. No corner of Earth is safe from human screw-ups:
While piscivores will be impressed in Madeira, frugivores will be dazzled. Thanks to the island’s generous climate and fertile volcanic soil, a range of aromatic, flavourful and exotic fruits are grown, such as guava, custard apple, pitanga, prickly pear, passion fruit, and physalis – without mentioning the run-of-the mill banana, papaya, mango, grape and avocado, among others:
Madeirans call their island the ‘floating garden of the Atlantic’. You can spend days hopping from one garden to another:
Cabo Girão: with a 580-m free fall, this the highest promontory in Europe (yes, Madeira is legally European, despite being much closer to Africa). The green carpet on the bottom is grapevines. A sphincter-tightening skywalk was installed at the edge of the chasm after this photo was taken. Madeira is small (57 x 22 km), but during most of its history of human occupation, the interior was uninhabited and uncultivated because of its unforgiving topography of mountainous gorges classed as Very Steep, Terrifying or Ohmygod. To this day, villages are confined to the few spots of gentler slopes:
You would expect cars, lorries, coaches and motorcycles to go slow in this Wile E. Coyote & Road Runner film set. You would be wrong:
Madeira has one the most impressive irrigation systems in the world. The island is intersected by some 200 levadas, which are channels cut into stone that carry water from altitudes of up to 1,800 m in the northern and central mountains to the dry, arable land in the south. The channels, 50-60 cm deep, cover more than 3,000 km, including 40 km of tunnels. Water from the levadas is strictly controlled, distributed to villages and farmers in rations that average 15 minutes every two weeks. Each of the channels’ exits has its levadeiro, a person in charge of monitoring and managing the operation. For tourists, the paths that run along the levadas are excellent avenues for exploration, and the only way to reach some parts of the island. Some levadas are easy going, others require hunchbacked trudges in dark tunnels or pacing narrow strips between the water channel and the void. Routes, maps and possible hazards can be consulted in a variety of levadas guidebooks © Jotbe1961, Wikimedia Commons:
Levadas were built mostly by hand: men often handled their picks and shovels from wicker baskets suspended from above or tied by ropes. Here a group of workers construct a levada sometime between 1947 and 1952 © Cultura Madeir:
Cultivated terraces (poios in the local dialect) seen from the Levada do Norte, which is 50-km long with 7 km of tunnels, bringing water from an altitude of 1,000 m through mountains and valleys. The Portuguese, like the Italians, are experts is putting any scrap of land into cultivation. These terraces are very good at controlling erosion; no tractors here, though:
Curral das Freiras seen from Eira do Serrado viewpoint (1,095 m). The village was originally called Curral (pen), but was changed to Curral das Freiras (nuns’ pen) – as one version of the story goes – in 1566, when Funchal was raided by French corsairs. The good sisters from a local convent suspected that a shared religion would not be sufficient to deflate the enthusiasm of French marauders in heightened stages of concupiscence, so they skedaddled to the mountains. The humble Brides of Christ knew a thing or two about the world:
The village of Casas Próximas (“nearby houses”), which are not that near – 600 m below:
Ecological field work in Madeira is not for the easily intimidated:
Back to Funchal, just in time for Carnaval. According to a native historian, the island’s festival of debauchery inspired the Brazilian version. If so, Brazilians adapted it by tackling the Madeiran revellers’ overdressing, which must be a health and safety hazard in tropical climates:
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