The War on Christmas: Is the truth of Christianity relevant to it?

Stephen Kershnar

Original Sin and the War on Christmas

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

December 10, 2018

            The war on Christmas is an attempt by the government and private companies to avoid mentioning Christmas or its religious content. Schools, stores, and advertisers are soldiers in the war. Partly in response to the war, some religious folk encourage people to keep Christmas focused on Christ. An interesting issue is whether the war is justified.

   

            Christianity has a number of problematic doctrines. Examples include atonement (Christ can be punished or, perhaps, pay for other people’s sins), transubstantiation (all of Jesus can be located in each of many different wafers), and the trinity (the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are distinct and yet only one person).  

            Perhaps the most bizarre religious doctrine, though, is the doctrine of original sin. The Catholic version (seen in Catechism of the Catholic Church and Catholic Encyclopedia and other places) holds that through his sin, Adam caused the human race to face not only bodily death, but to also have evil desires that produce a tendency to sin. Adam’s sin was so monstrous that not only did he lose holiness and justice, but he lost it for almost everyone else. This sin so stains humanity that infants have to be baptized to wash it out of them. The original sin that Adam brought about is not universal, though. The Virgin Mary was conceived without original sin.

Some Protestantism lines adopt a similar position. This was true of some of its leaders. Consider, for example, Martin Luther (1483-1546) and John Calvin (1509-1564). Nor was this position plucked out of thin air. It is a plausible interpretation of the Old Testament (see Psalms 51:5) and New Testament (see Romans 5:12-21 and Corinthians 15:21-22). Mormons and most Jews reject this doctrine, but have plenty of other problematic doctrines.  

            St. Augustine (354-430) believed that original sin was so serious that unbaptized infants who die early go to hell. However, the Catholic Church’s current position is that it does not know what happens to them. It instructs members that they can hope that such infants go to heaven rather than in Limbo or to hell. Still, a grieving parent can’t rule out that her miscarried or aborted fetus or tragically dead infant might be in Limbo or Hell, perhaps even permanently.

            The doctrine of original sin has problems. First, what did Adam do that was so bad that he stained not only himself, but also humanity? He (and, perhaps also, Eve) was disobedient to God and consumed forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It is hard to see why this is a sin given that he wasn’t blameworthy for doing it. He wasn’t blameworthy because he didn’t know disobedience is wrong. He didn’t know it was wrong because such knowledge requires his knowing good and evil (and this came about from eating the fruit).

            Second, even if it were sinful to eat the forbidden fruit, it is hard to see why this result in future people being in a fallen state when they didn’t perform the sin. In general, one person cannot be blamed for what another does unless both are part of a conspiracy. People today did not conspire with Adam. Even if a fallen state is not strictly speaking sin, it is unclear how Adam could have done something that resulted in people thousands of years later lacking holiness, justice, and (sanctifying) grace.

            Third, even if Adam did sin and a son can be blamed for his father’s sin, one wonders why God would not simply give people holiness, justice, and grace. That is, did God have a good reason to deny them these things? If he did have a good reason, then it is this reason, rather than Adam’s sin, that explains why they are in a fallen state. If God does not have a good reason, then he harms them or, at least, refuses to benefit them for no good reason. We expect more from him.    

            Fourth, science gives us no reason to think that there ever was a Garden of Eden, tree of knowledge of good and evil, or that early humans or apes were free of envious, lustful, and violent desires. Thus, the doctrine fits poorly with science.

            Should the problems with Christianity provide a justification for the war on Christmas? The motivation for the war in the context of government rests on concerns about the separation of church and state. In the private sector, its motivation is not causing unnecessary offense. It doesn’t rest on whether Christianity is plausible.

There is nothing wrong with government or businesses using their resources to make people happy even if it does so by catering to an implausible worldview. Still, if large number of people believed in the moral views of the Westboro Baptist Church or the metaphysical views of Mormonism or Scientology, it would seem that the destructive or false nature of such belief systems might be a good reason not to cater to them.

If this is correct, and I am not sure it is, then perhaps whether the government or businesses cater to Christianity should also be evaluated with regard to whether it is destructive or false. The doctrine of original sin suggests that some lines of Christianity would not fare well when evaluated for truth. It is less clear if Christianity is destructive. The religion’s costs and benefits are so complex and extensive that is nearly impossible to determine whether people would have been better off without it.  

Still, Christmas is a joyous and beautiful holiday. It would be a shame for businesses and other private groups to tamp it down merely to avoid offending hyper-sensitive babies. Perhaps a good rule might be that if promoting a holiday makes many people happy, then in the absence of a strong evidence of a comparable cost, it is fine to promote it.

SUNY Fredonia: Declining Student Enrollment and Quality

Stephen Kershnar

Fredonia Undergoes Surgery

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

November 16, 2018

            Fredonia State has decided to undergo life-saving surgery. Quoted in The Observer, President Horvath said the structural deficit for this academic year was projected to be $12 million. There is another massive structural deficit projected for next year.  

           

Facing these difficulties, the college tentatively plans to surgically cut out programs such as applied mathematics, art history, French, philosophy, and some fine arts programs (ceramics, film, and sculpture). It also tentatively plans to cut the English and biology departments’ graduate programs as well as graduate education programs in the education and math departments. Disclosure: I chair the philosophy department.

            The alleged emergency is caused by a sharp decline in the quantity and quality of students at Fredonia. Consider first quantity. The student body has fallen 20% in eight years from the enrollment high water mark to its current level (5,775 in 2009 to 4,631 in 2017). It now has, roughly 1,100 fewer students. Fewer students means less revenue. The structural deficit came about in part because each year between 2009 and 2015, the number of students decreased while spending increased.

            Consider, next, quality. The number of weak high school students (bottom half of their high school class) has increased by 65% in the last five years (15.8% to 26.1% of Fredonia’s incoming class). This underestimates the increase given that an incredible 29% don’t report their high school rank. Assuming that they have the same distribution of high school ranking as the rest of the incoming students, roughly a third of incoming Fredonia students were in the bottom half of their high school class. Over the same period, the acceptance rate has climbed upward (52% to 65%).

These things matter because student ability (measured by SAT score and class rank) predict a student’s likelihood of graduating from college and performance while there.

Along with this change in student ability, retention is a problem. Many of the students who transfer out of Fredonia go to community colleges, suggesting that some were not ready for the rigor of a four-year college or didn’t want to be too far away from home. It is unclear if retention explains why Fredonia has a lower graduation rate than a number of its competitors such as Brockport, Geneseo, New Paltz, Oneonta, and Oswego (U.S. Department of Education numbers).

            In comparative student ability, the college has held steady. Among comprehensive SUNY colleges, it is tied for having the sixth smartest students (out of the ten comprehensives that provide a SAT range). In order of student ability as measured by SATs, Fredonia ranks behind Geneseo, New Paltz, Oswego/Cortland, and Brockport. It is tied with Oneonta.

Fredonia is far behind the major university centers (in order of student ability) Binghamton, Stony Brook, Buffalo, and Albany. It’s worth noting that two of the four university centers have students who are, on average, noticeably better than Geneseo students. Buffalo and Geneseo students are on par.

            Fredonia State frantically pursues diversity. Here the college had less success. According to a recent study by the USC Race and Equity Center, Fredonia received an F in the diversity equity index. In fact, it received the lowest score of any SUNY college. For those of us who think diversity is unimportant, this is no big deal. If Fredonia State poured resources into pursuing it, though, this is a problem.

            There is good news on the campus as well. The college regularly has outstanding students (often in my classes). They end up doing very well in areas such as law and business and, also, in their family lives. The faculty is peppered with talented scholars and outstanding teachers.

            The college will have to choose what sort of institution it wants to be. First, it could move toward being an open-admissions-type institution, thereby aiming to serve disadvantaged and first generation college students. Consider, for example, Buffalo State or Old Westbury. Second, it could shrink the number of employees and students and aim to be a highly competitive liberal arts college similar to Geneseo. Third, it could more sharply focus on its signature arts programs by further transferring resources from business, humanities, and the sciences into the arts (music, studio arts, and theater). The arts programs (for example, music) are expensive per student and, as a result, investing in them has significant opportunity costs. Fourth, it could try to be an all-purpose college that pursues all of these goals and achieves them to varying degrees.

            The problem with the fourth model is that it risks Fredonia not having a brand name. This is a problem for marketing and recruitment. It also results in an unclear roadmap when the college is deciding how to tradeoff increasing the caliber of students against providing opportunity for the disadvantaged students, promoting diversity, and making sure there aren’t layoffs.  

            There is a moral case for the university continuing to allow the caliber of students to fall by focusing on the disadvantaged and diverse students. This might be accompanied surgically cutting out programs that add too little revenue to the university (see tentative plans above) or that are unlikely to serve disadvantaged and weaker students. The argument is that the most capable students are much more likely than other students to graduate, graduate on time, and major in fields that have a good return on investment. If so, these students have the least need for educational subsidies. They can go to better private colleges or, within SUNY, university centers or elite comprehensive colleges. The students who are less likely to graduate, graduate on time, or who tend toward weaker majors (in terms of return on investment or worth of subject matter) are the ones most in need of education-welfare.

One might think that investment in education like any other investment should be private as a way to ensure efficient decisions and that taxpayers don’t get soaked. However, given that this is not going to happen, one can see why a university might want to pursue social-justice-related goals.

Immigration: The U.S. ceases to be constituted by a people or committed to a particular idea

Stephen Kershnar

Immigration and Who We Are

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

November 13, 2018

            Migrants from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador have formed a caravan to come into the U.S. Their number, perhaps less than ten thousand, is a drop in the bucket given the number of people in the U.S., but it highlights how the U.S. is changing.   

            In 2017 according to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), immigrants (legal and illegal) are nearly one out of seven (14%) U.S. residents. This is the highest percentage since 1910. CIS reports that the number of immigrants is now a record 45 million.

These figures underestimate the impact of immigration. Current immigrants have had 17 million U.S. children (2017 figure). This means that roughly one out of five U.S. residents are now immigrants or their children (62 million out of 326 million). Also, roughly one out of five babies in the U.S. are now born to immigrants, whether legal or illegal.

According to a recent study by Yale and MIT professors, there are now 22 million illegal aliens in the country. Again, this number underestimates their impact. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that, roughly, 5 million children have been born to illegal aliens and received birthright citizenship.

Consider what a country is. A country is a collection of people connected through certain legal relations. What makes a government morally legitimate is that the people that constitute it consented to it. It is analogous to a country club in that voluntary membership creates the club, distributes its privileges and duties, and controls the use of its property. Without such consent, members would have neither a duty to pay for the club nor would they have to subject themselves to the club’s rules. The content of such consent is set out by the contract that members agreed to when they formed or joined the club.

            The problem is that the U.S. citizens have not authorized this flood of immigrants into their club. First, they did not authorize the sea of illegal aliens. Second, many of the immigrants became naturalized through birthright citizenship that the Constitution does not permit. The Claremont Institute’s Edward Erler convincingly argues that birthright citizenship involves a deliberate misreading of the Constitution. Third, even if the citizens did authorize the past flood of immigrants, and they didn’t, by electing Donald Trump they sent a clear message that they want the flooding to stop. By analogy, if citizens were to elect a President and Congress on the basis of their explicit promise not to send the country to war and then they promptly do so, the people’s will would have been thwarted.  

            Importing so many people with different histories, values, and cultures will significantly change the country. Imagine how members of a rich-and-educated WASP country club in Westchester County, New York would be shocked at what happened to their club if suddenly one out of five of its members were a poor-and-uneducated Central or South American. They might not be able to reverse the change if it were done by a do-gooder executive board who didn’t tell them what it planned to do. Because a club is composed of its members, it would even go out of existence in a metaphysical sense, if not a legal one, were its membership to change fast enough.

            Just as the country club members are within their rights not to want their club drastically changed, Americans are within their rights not to want their country drastically changed. This is true regardless of whether the proposed changes would make the country worse.  

It is worth noting that the way in which the elites want to change this country will make it worse. It is a fact, no matter how impolite, that today’s immigrants are less educated, intelligent, and skilled than the native population. They vote for higher taxes, more government spending and regulation, more affirmative action, and so on.    

To see some of these differences, consider that 27% of working-age immigrants are high school dropouts versus 7% of working-age Americans (2015 CIS number). CIS also reports that more than half of households headed by an immigrant (legal or illegal) used at least one welfare program (Medicaid, cash, food, or housing assistance) versus 30% of native households. National Review’s Jason Richwine argues that the average IQ of immigrants is lower than that of native American whites and that this difference is likely to persist over several generations.

Even if none of this were true, a people have the right to prevent their country from drastic change. A country has a culture to the extent that its people share a history, identity, and set of values. Intuitively, it is morally permissible for Israelis, Japanese, and Norwegians to ensure that their country stays focused on their interests rather than others’ interests. One way that they might do this is by making sure their countries are mostly composed of their peoples. This will ensure that their culture, government, and surroundings remain Jewish, Japanese, or Norwegian. Americans should be able to do the same.

The purpose of the United States is increasingly unclear. If it continues to be flooded by immigrants who differ greatly from native Americans, it will cease to constituted by a specific people. It already wasn’t constituted by a people in the way that Israel, Japan, and Norway are. Every year it is less committed to an idea or coherent set of them. The country’s commitment to freedom or the Constitution is waning with increasing government power. This can be seen whether we look at ever increasing taxes, encroachment on traditional American rights (for example, free speech, gun ownership, and rights against search and seizure), or the number of people under the control of the criminal justice system.

Perhaps the U.S. doesn’t need to be constituted by a particular people or committed to a particular idea or a coherent set of them. Still, it would have been nice if the citizens had been asked.

The Left Pursues Its Goals By Any Means Necessary

Stephen Kershnar

By Any Means Necessary

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

October 29, 2018

The American left have clear goals. However, their unprincipled pursuit of them is a troubling indication of what can be expected of them when they next regain power.  

            Democrats have three central goals. First, they want to socialize as much of the economy as they can. In particular, many of their leaders want to socialize medicine (Medicare for all), education (make college free), and elections (publicly finance elections). Other sectors, such as manufacturing and high tech, they wish to regulate as much as possible in pursuit of their views on discrimination, diversity, the environment, healthcare, privacy, retirement, safety, unions, etc. Sometimes this is to be done via regulation, other times via government contracts, subsidies, and tax breaks.    

            Second, they want an interventionist foreign policy. Obama’s war on Libya, meddling in Syria, continuing Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and frequent use of drone killings was unsurprising. Earlier, Bill Clinton involved us in wars in Serbia and Somalia. Historically, Democratic presidents oversaw the two world wars as well as the Korean and Vietnam wars. This tendency to get the U.S. mired in wars, some of which were not in the U.S.’s interest, is different from some Republicans, although not left-leaning ones such as the Bush dynasty and John McCain.   

            Third, Democrats reject the Constitution as envisioned by the country’s founding fathers. They reject the notion that the federal government has few and enumerated powers. Instead, they view the Commerce Clause as permitting Washington’s vast centralized control. They also reject the founders’ vision of limits on the police’s power to search (Fourth Amendment), individual gun rights (Second Amendment), and restricted eminent domain and regulatory powers (Fifth Amendment). Consider, for example, how Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer would have ruled on most of these issues. The founding fathers would have thought that the Constitution disallows Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and the current smorgasbord of welfare programs. These programs result in the federal government taking and spending more than one in five of the dollars Americans earn.  

            These goals reflect a coherent, albeit mistaken, vision of centralized-and-powerful government as necessary to correct and, in some cases, replace the free market. The left views the Constitution as open-ended and thus allowing for reinterpretation, if not rewriting. On this vision, the hands of white men dead centuries ago should not reach out and control our destiny.

  

            What is disturbing is the any-means-necessary way that the left pursues these goals. One area in which this occurs is in their attempts to rein in speech. The American left simply does not believe in free speech like it used to. Facebook, Google, and Twitter all censor political speech. While this is legal because they are private companies, one would expect the American left to join the right in denouncing such censorship. Instead, crickets.

In academia, campus administrators try to censor, regulate, and chill speech as much robust discussion of race, gender, sex, etc. as they can get away with (see, for example, Michigan, Stanford, and Wisconsin). The courts have had to repeatedly slap them down.

The courts have had to protect religious speech on gay marriage (see Masterpiece Cakeshop) and spending on political speech (see Citizens United) as leftist state officials tried to clamp down on it. Elsewhere, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, campus protesters, and political mobs intimidate, and sometimes smash, those with whom they disagree. Consider, for example, the violence in Berkeley, Charlottesville, Portland, and Washington D.C.  

            A second area in which the any-means-necessary stance can be seen is in the tolerance of criminality in politics. Contra to the left’s stance, it is clearly unlawful for tens of millions of illegal aliens to work, live, and use fraudulent documents in the U.S. Similarly unlawful is their ignoring hearings regarding their often spurious claims for asylum.

            Sanctuary cities involve state and local authorities refusing to participate and, in some cases, preventing the federal government from finding and returning illegal aliens. This refusal to participate in the federal government’s efforts might be legal, depending on the degree to which they refrain from helping the federal government rather than blocking it. Still, if Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi decided to be sanctuary states with regard to the environmental regulation, gay marriage, or transgender bathroom use, the left would need fainting couches.  

            Everyone who closely followed the FBI and Department of Justice’s Russia investigation knows that leading officials were neck deep in criminality and corruption. Consider, for example, those who misled the FISA court, leaked information to the press, put a spy into the Trump campaign, lied to Congress, hid and slow-walked documents to keep them from Congress, or tanked an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s crimes. For example, no adult thinker believes that Clinton’s minions were permitted destroy evidence under subpoena. The list of leading FBI and DOJ officials who have been fired or demoted because of misconduct is impressive. Here are just a few: James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Bruce Ohr, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok. Other officials are so conflicted that in a sane world they would never be permitted to oversee the investigation (see, for example, Rob Rosenstein and Robert Mueller) and would be forever banned from government.

            A third area of the any-means-necessary approach has to do with the double-standards that infect the left. Claiming that merit matters and then flagrantly discriminating against Asians students is one example (see, for example, Harvard). Another is the different attitudes toward sexual-harassment allegations the left has with regard to Brett Kavanaugh when it still celebrates Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy and shields Keith Ellison. A third instance is the deafening silence when the Obama administration ran up the debt to the point that it is larger than the economy. Now that Obama is out of power, the left now worries about fiscal responsibility. 

   

            One can understand why Democrats and the left want to pursue socialism, interventionism, and rewrite of the Constitution. The any-means-necessary pursuit of it, though, is disturbing.

Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Day of Absence, and Other Out-of-Control Protests

Stephen Kershnar

Arrest Violent and Destructive Campus Protesters

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

October 15, 2018

            In recent years, out-of-control protests have rocked college campuses.

            At the University of California at Berkeley in 2017, masked and black-clad Antifa and other black bloc members protested a planned speech by libertarian Milo Yiannopoulos. They set fires, destroyed property, violent assaulted and pepper sprayed people, and threw rocks at the police. This intimidated Berkeley authorities into canceling not only Yiannopoulous’s talk, but also a later talk by conservative intellectual Ann Coulter.

At Claremont McKenna College in 2017, Black Lives Matter protesters prevented audience members from entering a building where conservative intellectual Heather Mac Donald was to speak. Out of fear for her and others’ safety, the college moved her to secure location where she had to speak over the web. The protesters were mad at Mac Donald because, in her book The War on Cops (2016), she argued that no one is more committed to protecting black lives than data-driven and accountable police departments.   

At Middlebury College in 2017, protesters caused the college to cancel a talk by political scientist Charles Murray. With police escort, Murray had to flee the campus. Protesters assaulted the female professor who invited him. Murray along with Harvard University’s Richard Herrnstein wrote the ground-breaking book: The Bell Curve (1994). This book argued that general intelligence is in part inherited, affects how well people’s lives go, and should affect public policy.

At Evergreen State College in 2017, campus protestors disrupted the campus after a biology professor, Brett Weinstein, refused to stay off campus during the Day of Absence. This is a protest day in which, following the election of Donald Trump, campus activists demanded that white people stay off campus. Campus police told the professor that it could not protect him and recommended he stay off campus. Weinstein and his wife (also a professor there) left Evergreen. Evergreen later paid them half a million dollars for failing to properly protect them.  

Despite these protests, there are only a few areas of unprotected speech in the Constitution and they are irrelevant to the above political speech. The Constitution does not protect fighting words, incitement of imminent violence or destruction, defamation, obscenity, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Campus political speech does not fit into these categories.

In the context of fighting words, governments may ban words that are directed at an individual and that that tend to provoke an immediate violent fight. They may not punish, ban, regulate, or financially burden speech merely because it might offend a hostile mob. In the context of imminent law lawless action, the state may ban speech that is intended to bring about imminent lawless action and likely to do so. In the context of defamation, a victim may recover for defamation only if the speaker carelessly made a false statement directed at an individual and it causes unjust damage to the target’s reputation or livelihood. None of this has to do with careful arguments on immigration, intelligence, policing, and political correctness.  

In contrast to the political speeches, the protesters committed crimes such as assault (including battery and threats), disorderly conduct (including disturbing the peace), trespass, and rioting. Thus, protesters who were violent and destroyed property should have been arrested.

            There are also good moral reasons to allow such speech. One reason to protect free speech, even when offensive, is that on the whole it contributes to the marketplace of ideas. Just as the marketplace of goods usually results in the spread of goods that are better or cheaper than competitor goods, the marketplace of ideas usually results in the spread of ideas that are true or better justified than competitor ideas.

A second reason is that people should be able to shape their own lives. They can do so only if they can consider the full range of ideas and decide for themselves what to believe and how to live. This is hard to do when campus censors and leftist thugs shut down access to some ideas.

            A third reason is that campus history at universities such as Michigan and Wisconsin shows that when campuses try to ban some types of speech (usually hate speech), this is invariably done via rules that are vague, too broad in that they cover protected speech, and lead to overreach. For example, such rules generated complaints when students expressed ideas in class such as homosexuality is a disease, minorities have difficulty in certain courses, and Jews use the Holocaust to justify mistreating Palestinians. These topics are worth discussing even if one disagrees with them.

            There are further good reasons not to ban speech that is merely offensive (again, consider bans on hate speech). First, as philosopher J. Angelo Corlett argues, there is no principled ground by which to decide which speech is truly offensive and which is not. For example, it is unclear whether the claim that the Christian God condemns gay people to hell is offensive or merely reports what the Old Testament says.

What is offensive can’t be merely what offends someone because this applies to almost every controversial statement worth listening to. Even if there were a principled criterion for what is offensive, there is no principled measure of when something is offensive enough that it should be banned.      

            Worse, a ban on ban offensive speech would likely be applied inconsistently and without regard to context. Corlett notes that the same people who want to ban racist words (chink, kike, nigger, and spic) because they offend people are often oblivious to the offense caused when the American flag is burned or confederate monuments smashed. Those who want to mechanically prohibit words usually fail to take context into account. A black chemistry student saying to a fellow black student, “Nigga, you da shit!” is not expressing hate or causing offense. Note the n-word here is being mentioned not used.

            Conservative intellectuals’ speech on campus is legally protected and morally deserves to be protected. In contrast, protesters’ violence, property destruction, and suppression of speech should lead to arrests.

Weak Majors and College as an Investment

Stephen Kershnar

Subsidizing and Encouraging Weaker Majors

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

October 1, 2018

            There is an interesting issue as to whether it is wise to heavily subsidize weaker college majors.  

            College is a risky investment. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, roughly 59% of students who enrolled in colleges (and universities) in 2009 graduated in six years. Only about 40% graduated in four years. Jaison Abel and Richard Dietz of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found in that in 2010, 62% of college graduates had a job that required a college degree. As a result, more than half of those who enter college don’t get a job that requires a college degree.

            College is expensive for students and, often, parents. According to Project on Student Debt, in 2015, 68% of college graduates had student loan debt. According to the Federal Reserve, the average debt in 2017 for student who had taken out loans was $39,000. The amount of these loans can also be seen in that Americans owe more in student-loan debt ($1.5 trillion) than credit-card debt ($0.9 trillion). Students frequently default on these loans. More than one in nine people with student loans default. A college student also loses years of income and on-the-job training.  

            Taxpayers and others also pay for college. Writing in The Atlantic, University of Colorado Law Professor Paul Campos reports that in 2014 federal and state taxpayers paid roughly $160 billion ($7,900 per college student) to colleges. Many pay for the student-loan defaults.  

            In The Case Against Education (2018), George Mason economist Bryan Caplan concludes that the return on investment for return for fair and poor students is often small (1-2%) and, in some cases, negative. On his account, a fair student is in the 41% of cognitive ability and the poor student in the 24%. Caplan also found that the social return on investment (return taxpayers get for investing in a college education) for college is poor and, sometimes, negative in part because the college student gets most of the return on the investment. Again, the return is noticeably worse for fair and weak students. This will become an issue at SUNY-Fredonia because more than a quarter of recently admitted students graduated in the bottom half of their high school class.

            The problem is exacerbated with weaker majors. Weaker majors have some of these features: higher unemployment, lower salaries, weaker students, and a less important subject matter. They include art (drama, music, studio, and visual arts), communication, education, ethnic and gender studies, and recreation (parks, recreation, and leisure and, also, physical fitness). Stronger majors include accounting, computer science, economics, engineering, mathematics, and physics. Some majors are harder to categorize. Consider English and psychology.  

            Subsidies for weaker majors should be reduced. Lessening subsidies to these majors might be done by offering them at fewer or no state colleges or by using merit-based subsidies as a way of discouraging less capable students from studying them. Private universities would likely still offer these majors and taxpayers generously subsidize these universities through below-market loans, grants to students, grants to universities, and tax breaks.  

            Here is the argument. First, if, on average, one college major has a lower return on investment for students and taxpayers than a second, then it should receive less of a subsidy. Second, on average, weaker majors have a lower return on investment for students and taxpayers than stronger ones. Hence, weaker major should receive less of a subsidy. A similar argument suggests that students should be encouraged to choose stronger majors. This is especially true for fair and poor students.

            It is arguably callous, if not cruel, to subsidize and encourage fair and poor students to have weaker majors when they are less likely to graduate, less likely to do well in the major, and, if they graduate, less likely to get a job that requires a college degree and pays well. This is similar to how it was arguably callous, if not cruel, in the years leading up to the 2007-2008 subprime mortgage crisis, to subsidize and encourage poor people to take risky loans for houses they couldn’t afford.

            One objection is that weaker majors do not give students a worse return on investment. However, writing in Forbes, Niall McCarthy found that in 2017, the majors with the lowest median salaries included exercise science, education, music, and psychology. According to a 2015 study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, the majors with the lowest median earnings include counseling psychology, early childhood education, drama and theater arts, studio arts, and visual and performing arts. It also found that the majors with the highest part-time employment include visual and performing arts, studio arts, and music.

            A second objection is that even if weaker majors give students a worse return on investment, they do not give taxpayers a worse return on investment. I can’t find evidence for this claim. Perhaps I am missing it. Even if there were such evidence, there is little reason to believe that the greater return to people other than the student would outweigh the lesser return to the student.

            A third objection is that even if weaker majors give students and taxpayers a worse return on investment, neither taxpayers nor students should care about a major’s return on investment. This might be because money is not a good measure of what these majors provide. Instead, the value might be the students’ love of the major or the benefits it provides to the rest of us that markets don’t value.

Consider the arts. Even if students are willing to face lower salaries and worse employment to pursue what they love, the rest of us shouldn’t have to pay for it. Taxpayers can probably get much of the benefits through top-ranked programs in these fields. For example, in music consider Julliard, Curtis, and Eastman and in film consider USC, NYU, and UCLA.

It is unwise to subsidize and encourage weaker majors, especially for less able students.

Diversity is Our Strength: Rubbish

Stephen Kershnar

Diversity is Our Strength

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

September 17, 2018

The U.S. cultural elite constantly repeats the mantra: diversity is our strength. This idea supports affirmative action, a sizable diversity industry, and immigration policies (for example, the diversity lottery). Academia, businesses, and the military enthusiastically promote diversity. Recently, FOX talk show host Tucker Carlson questioned the mantra is true and in so doing caused public outrage.   

The mantra that diversity is our strength expresses the notion that countries, communities, schools, and teams are better if they have people from different racial, ethnic, and religious groups as well as the two, or perhaps more, genders. The mantra does not support diversity of ideas in that the elites pushing diversity do not seek to increase the number of Christians, free market theorists, pro-gun types, etc. On the whole, the evidence does not support the mantra.  

First, consider nations. Columnist Pat Buchanan points out that the Soviet Union split into 15 nations largely on ethnic grounds. He notes that three of those new nations (Moldova, Ukraine, and Georgia) further split along ethnic lines. Racial and ethnic identities also split the British Empire, Czechoslovakia, Sudan, and Yugoslavia. Other countries have so far avoided an ethnic divide only through the use of coercion or violence. Consider, for example, China, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Tribal violence and separatist movements can be found throughout the world, even in old world countries such as Spain.

In contrast, largely homogenous countries such as Israel (outside of the occupied territories), Japan, and South Korea flourish despite a lack of diversity. The same is true for Nordic countries that have a history, at least until recently, of small homogenous populations.

Second, consider the free market’s view of diversity. The economic free market is the most reliable test we have of the relative costs and benefits of an idea or program. The market does not value diversity much. Consider competitive fields in which contribution is measurable, such as Hollywood, National Basketball Association, and the National Football League. They are notorious for their lack of diversity.  

Third, consider the social free market. This market also doesn’t value diversity much. Writing in The Huffington Post, Emily Swanson notes that 75% of whites only have white friends and only 8.4% of marriages are interracial. Economist Roland Fryer points out that only 0.4% of whites have a black spouse. This pattern is rational. The National Marriage Project’s David Poponue observes that marriages are more likely to succeed if the couple is similar in backgrounds, life goals, social networks, and values. Similarly, Cornell University sociologist Karl Pillemer finds that, “The research findings are quite clear: marriages that are homogamous in terms of economic background, religion and closeness in age are the most stable and tend to be happier.” It is plausible that racial, ethnic, and religious similarity tends to correlate with these other similarities.

The social free market has a similar take when it comes to communities. Harvard political science professor Robert Putnam argues that people in diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, distrust their neighbors, withdraw from even close friends, expect the worst from their community and its leaders, volunteer less, give less to charity, and work on community projects less often. He summarizes his findings as showing that diverse communities lead people to “huddle unhappily in front of the television.”

We find the same pattern in children. Duke University’s James Moody found that the more diverse the school, the more students self-segregate by race within the school and the fewer interracial friends they have.

Fourth, consider education. UCLA law professor Richard Sanders and Stuart Taylor Jr. argue that the pursuit of diversity mismatches black and Hispanic students to their schools and that doing so often harms them. Their idea is that a black student who would do well at Cal State Fresno might do poorly at Berkeley because he is mismatched against his peers. This is analogous to how a wrestler who does well at a small Division III college might do poorly at a top flight Division I program.

I should note that there is some evidence that diversity improves group decision-making and business profitability. Research by Carnegie Mellon University professor Anita Woolley and others found that in laboratories, diversity improves team-based decision-making. Research by Vivian Hunt and others of McKinsey & Company found that gender and ethnic diversity increases firms’ profitability.

Even so, it is unlikely that the diversity in the business world involves people with strikingly different abilities, education levels, and values. In addition, it is not clear how these purported benefits in diverse executive boards compare to the cost of moving away from merit-based hiring and promotion. It is odd that diversity at the executive level would benefit businesses, while it appears to harm performance elsewhere. Also, well-known MIT management professor Thomas Kochan has challenged the notion that the studies on the whole provide a business justification for diversity.  

Even if there were evidence that diversity is worth pursuing, the American people do not want it. Americans in effect show their preference against it in their churches, friendships, housing, and marriages. Their vote for Donald Trump against the elite’s hysterical opposition was a clear statement that the American people do not want their country flooded by immigrants, especially those who are very different from them. Seven states have banned affirmative action at public universities (Arizona, California, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Washington) and more would do so were other states to have referenda on it. The majority of voters in those states did so despite a shrill defense of it by the cultural elites (specifically, the leaders of academia, business, entertainment, military, and politics). Americans just do not want merit being sacrificed to diversity.

In summary, diversity is not our strength. It has harmful effects in communities, education, nations, relationships, and at least some economic areas. Similar to other outdated mantras (“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”), it’s time to drop it.   

What the Sexual Abuse Scandal Tells Us About Catholicism

Stephen Kershnar

Lessons from the Catholic Sexual Abuse Scandal

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

September 3, 2018

            Like Lucy, the Catholic Church has some ‘splainin to do.

            This year, a Pennsylvania grand jury released a report that found that in six of the eight Roman Catholic dioceses there were over 1,000 identifiable child victims of sexual abuse. It guessed that there were thousands more. It found that over 300 priests abused the children. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer’s David Gambacorta, this included a ring of priests who raped children, shared intelligence on potential victims, and made child pornography on church property.  

            The John Jay Report found that in the U.S. from 1950-2002, there were over 11,000 allegations made against 4,392 priests. This was roughly 4% of the priests who served during this time. The Huffington Post’s Eoin Blackwell and the BBC report that in Australia from 1950 to 2010, 7% of all priests were alleged to have engaged in child sexual abuse and that the average victim was pre-teen.

This report found the abuse was largely male on male with roughly 4 out of 5 victims being boys. Also, much of the sex involved teenage boys, many not so young. The report found that 27% were 15-17 when first abused. 51% of the victims were 11-14 and 22% were 10 or younger. Thus, much of the sex likely involved ephebophilia (sexual interest in mid- to late-adolescents, generally ages 15-19) and hebephilia (sexual interest in early adolescents) and not pedophilia (sexual interest in a pre-pubescent child).

In many cases, the words “abuse” and “children” are highly misleading in that, as a moral matter, a priest who has sex with a willing 17 year-old male does not commit rape and his act is far less wrong, if it is wrong at all, than that done by a priest who forces himself on an unwilling 10-year-old boy. The same is true, for example, when an archbishop “molested” seminarians. It would helpful here to have an account of how the data on sex with mid- and late-adolescents relates to the general pattern of sex in the gay male community.

The grand jury found a common pattern in how the dioceses handled these matters. There overall finding was that the church focused on avoiding scandal, not protecting its members. The dioceses used misleading language (never say “rape”), didn’t conduct genuine investigations with properly trained personnel, sent priests to get church-run (and likely half-assed) diagnoses, removed problematic priests without explaining why, transferred problematic priests to new locations, and didn’t tell the police.

The Pope, archbishops, bishops, and priests from around the world have been accused of committing or covering up sexual abuse. According to BishopAccountability.org the church has paid out more than $3 billion in settlements. This includes Boston ($85 million), Los Angeles ($660 million), Portland ($75 million), and San Diego ($198 million). From 2004-2011, settlements bankrupted eight Catholic dioceses.

A couple of lessons that can be drawn from this. First, the pattern is evidence that Catholicism is deeply flawed. Consider if a diet organization found that 4% to 7% of its full-time dietary experts became morbidly obese after they started working for the organization. The organization would conclude that its dieting method or way of selecting experts is defective.

Here we have 4 to 7% of priests engaged in sexual abuse and arch-bishops, bishops, and other priests sweeping it under the rug. Unlike overeating, sexual abuse of unwilling children (again, not sex with willing mid- to late-teens) is a serious moral wrong and harshly punished by the criminal law. When this vast moral failing is added to the logically incoherent doctrines (consider, for example, Atonement, original sin, trinity, and transubstantiation) and empirically impossible ones (consider, for example, virgin birth and multiplying bread and fish), the likelihood of Catholicism being true becomes infinitesimally small.

Second, the scandal makes the moral lessons of the Church become ever more dependent on arguments that are independent of its religious premises. A church whose most committed practitioners are too often sexual predators has no business lecturing people on abortion, capitalism, divorce, gay marriage, and immigration, except to the extent that it has good arguments that are independent of its religious and moral doctrines. Lessons based on papal infallibility and sacred tradition are less convincing to the extent we discover that the people putting forth these doctrines are not particularly reliable.

For example, the Catholic Church teaches that abortion, desecrating the Eucharist, and renouncing one’s faith are mortal sins that result in the sinner going straight to hell. Here I am assuming that the person who does these things is sane, has sufficient knowledge of what he was doing and the consequences of doing so, acted voluntarily, and so on. It is less clear whether other acts (divorce, masturbation, and premarital sex) are mortal or venial (forgivable) sins. It is hard to see why someone would accept these claims unless they viewed the church as a moral authority.

The specific stories tell us that some of the priests warrant our sympathy rather than hatred. One priest from Scranton alleged raped a girl and then helped arrange for her to have an abortion. Another forced a boy to perform fellatio on him and then tried to purify the boy’s mouth with holy water. A ring of priests marked their favorite boys with telltale gold cross necklaces. If the priests really believed Catholic doctrine and yet performed these acts, they are so deeply troubled as to merit our pity rather than blame.

  

 A defender of Catholicism might argue that all groups have members who bad, ignorant, or weak and it is unfair to criticize the church for the general failings of humanity, specifically, the failings of adult men with their intense sexual desires. Still, the church puts forth its bishops, pope, and priests as being experts on God and morality and, in some cases, as having special access to what God believes people ought to do. Under these conditions, one would expect that its vanguard would perform better.