Barack Obama referred to Bill Ayres, his Chicago buddy and former Weather Underground domestic terrorist, as an "English teacher." Would that it were so! A better phrase would be a "Terror teacher." From Sol Stern in City Journal:
As I have shown elsewhere in City Journal, Ayers’s politics have hardly changed since his Weatherman days. He still boasts about working full-time to bring down American capitalism and imperialism. This time, however, he does it from his tenured perch as Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to indoctrinate America’s future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students.
Indeed, the education department at the University of Illinois is a hotbed for the radical education professoriate. As Ayers puts it in one of his course descriptions, prospective K–12 teachers need to “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.” Ayers’s texts on the imperative of social-justice teaching are among the most popular works in the syllabi of the nation’s ed schools and teacher-training institutes.
One of Ayers’s major themes is that the American public school system is nothing but a reflection of capitalist hegemony. Thus, the mission of all progressive teachers is to take back the classrooms and turn them into laboratories of revolutionary change.
And therefore, the mission of teachers is not to teach children real skills they need in the real world, like math, English and science, which after all are also nothing more than reflections of capitalist hegemony. Ayres is not even bright enough to figure out why capitalism has become the global economic hegemon (because it has proven itself better and more progressive than any other system), yet he is entrusted to teach the teachers of our children.
Does Obama know this? Possibly not, or he wouldn't have referred to Ayers as an English prof in the debate. I'm much more upset about what Bill Ayres says about the state of education in America than I am about what he says about Obama.
Public pressure and a deceitful resume brought down Ward Churchill, who was much less dangerous than Ayres because he didn't teach teachers. Let's take a lesson from Ayres' own playbook and show some struggle, outrage and action to get this #$%@! out of the classroom and banned from influencing future generations.
Fighting anthropologists ... the idea seems laughable, but there are indeed anthropologists in Iraq, helping protect our troops. And that ticks of the left.
As the leftist news compiler AlterNet explains it, their work sounds like a good thing:
The Human Terrain Systems (HTS) program, in operation for several years, was significantly expanded by the United States military last September. It has recruited anthropologists to be embedded with U.S. troops at brigade and division level in Iraq and Afghanistan. ... [T]he program takes anthropologists, some of whom are not experts in the relevant cultures, and charges them with advising commanders to prevent them from misreading local actions and -- potentially violent -- situations. The idea is to reduce casualties.
The New York Times reported on 5 October 2007 on an anthropologists' contingent involved in a major operation meant to reduce attacks against U.S. and Afghan troops. The anthropologists identified many widows in the target area and surmised that their young male relatives would be under pressure to support them and would be likely to join the attackers out of economic necessity. A job-training program for the widows led to a reduction in attacks.
Sounds pretty good, doesn't it; an elegant approach to diminishing the violence against not just our troops but also the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan. Certainly one would think that understanding the enemy is better than just killing them. But the left doesn't share the view.
First, there's the technical issue:
The anthropological profession has a code of ethics which, like the Hippocratic oath, mandates no harm to people who are studied, and requires their informed consent in participation in research. This is impossible under combat conditions, where there is no opportunity for embedded anthropologists to identify themselves with ordinary people.
So the left apparently would be happier if the military just shot up the young sons of the widows rather than breaking the obligation to inform subjects of "research." The word is in quotes because by no stretch of the imagination can this work be defined as research; its intent is not to crunch data and publish papers, but to make quick decisions to help save lives.
Then there's the whole leftist aversion to spying:
And the work looks enough like intelligence work to cause people to view anthropologists as spies (even under ordinary conditions), inhibiting their scientific mission.
First of all, their mission isn't scientific here; it's humanitarian and military, but really, looks enough like spying? Spying doesn't look like something; it is something; it has a definition, and this program isn't it. "Observing" is different from snooping, eavesdropping or taking on assumed identities in order to get information.
So guess what the anti-war anthropologists named their new little group? The Network of Concerned Anthropologists. How creative of them to use "network" instead of "union." Their pledge: Not to participate in counter-insurgency.
Isn't that pretty much the same thing as supporting insurgency? What makes insurgency acceptable and counter-insurgency not?
Now the peaceniks do have a good idea:
She advocated the establishment of a large research program leading to a socio-cultural knowledge database, recruitment of young cultural analysts into government service and establishment of a clearing house for cultural knowledge. None of these would be a problem.
They wouldn't for me either -- in fact, I wish we had done this before Iraq so we would have understood this whole tribal dynamic a bit more.
The problem, though, is that Saddam would have killed them all before they finished their research, which kind of makes it a better idea to team up the anthropologists with the soldiers, where they can actually do good and save lives.
Unfortunately, "saving lives" apparently also means "helping the US," so the ivory tower dwellers in our formerly great bastions of higher education must take up arms ... pens ... against the few, the sensible, the good members of their profession.
I asked Incredible Daughter #1 if she was experiencing a lot of Leftist indoctrination at Chapman U., and she affirmed it's there in some classes:
From what I've seen, there is a liberal slant, but the students aren't afraid to call BS on stuff that is way out there.
I'm proud to say that she's one of those unafraid students:
We had some guest speaker in that human diversity's class, and the class would push them very hard afterwards based on what they said. You may go cross eyed over what one of them said.
She said that it is DISCRIMINATION to assume that someone is heterosexual and that it is OFFENSIVE AND NOT POLITICALLY CORRECT to ask a guy if he has a girlfriend because he might be gay. I told her that if you assume he is gay and he's straight, you might get your butt kicked, so sorry, I'll err on the side of political incorrectness.
She was a little shocked at my response.
Interestingly, in our work I'm becoming concerned about writing about real estate developments as "homes for families," and a cringe a bit each time I see "mom" or "dad" in copy, especially if it's copy that's directed to children.
I'm dreading the day gay activists get on us for assuming that houses will be filled with families, not gay couples, or that schools will tell us they're not interested in materials that assume children have moms and dads, rather than dads and dads, moms and moms, dads and ponies or whatever.
I'm sticking with the good ol' fashioned copy for now, but feel the ice getting thinner at all times.
It's from the site Minding The Campus, and presents an interview of a UC San Diego student who has just finished a three-quarter, 16-unit required series of classes called "Dimensions of Culture."
The entire interview is an outrage and a damning indictment of the depths of foolish hypocrisy and idiotic teachings that have overcome and threaten to destroy our universities. Here's one excerpt. The student has just explained the module on diversity and goes on to talk about the justice module:
A. I liked that quarter best because all it was about were Supreme Court cases like affirmative action and Brown v. Board... My teaching assistant, who you have in discussions twice a week, was crazy. I remember one day she was talking about how there should be affirmative action in terms of who becomes a Fortune 500 CEO and that they should require that a certain percent of all CEOs in Fortune 500 companies be women.
I said I disagree, "Who's to say that a woman is going to be a better CEO than a man? Let's be honest, you know, a lot of women don't become CEOs because most women choose to not work as much 'cause you have no life if you're a CEO to raise a family or anything." But she said, "How can you be a woman and think that? That's totally wrong. That's what's wrong with women in our society because we need affirmative action to get ahead." She was unbelievable.
When we talked about investment bankers and people who worked in finance... she said, "Well, I hate investment bankers anyway, I hate them, I hate their whole attitude." And she went on and on how they're terrible people...
Apparently the Teaching Assistant missed out on the diversity module. How could she hate investment bankers if she's supposed to be tolerant? Oh wait ... "investment banker" translates as "white male." No tolerance required.
And how can you embrace diversity without embracing that women can have different views about women? Is only one point of view allowed? Yes, indeed. One viewpoint is the new diversity.
I particularly liked this passage:
A. I guess what annoyed me most about this class is that they said that it was, you know, everyone can have their opinion, you're really entrusted in like learning, but if you said anything against what they thought, they were mean. And I remember on my paper I wrote about the Supreme Court case that dealt with Seattle [racial quotas] in which I said that it's unconstitutional, which is what the Supreme Court decided, I literally spent an hour arguing with my TA before I turned it in because she said, "I think you're wrong."
Q. And you wrote that it was unconstitutional to do what?
A. The Seattle case was about having quotas for different races going to high school. They presented it as only white people were upset about it and never talked about how minorities were just as upset ... but so yeah, I spent an hour, and she finally was like, "Okay, we'll agree to disagree. I don't agree with what you're saying, I think it is constitutional." So I turned in the paper, I get an A, and she writes on my paper, "Just so you know, I still think you're wrong."
It was supposed to be a persuasive essay or argumentative, and I wanted to say, "Aren't you supposed to be grading on how I'm arguing, not on my opinions?" It was ridiculous. I didn't learn to write at all in that class. You had to write pretty much what they wanted, or you had to go and fight for an hour. And I'm sure she just knew that she couldn't give me a B-, or else I'd have gone and complained. So I was just disgusted by it and that she was just so rude.
Remember: The student being interviewed was on the same side of the Supreme Court of the United States, but that didn't matter to the TA -- the student was wrong. All that mattered to the TA is that her view of the world be held by all.
For this, you get to pay $8,062 a year as a resident (plus books and everything else) or $20,021 as a non-resident. You'd think you could destroy a young mind for much less ....
In her recent excellent post, Rape, Bookworm gives us this quote from a Harvard female student who told this story of being raped -- or at least "raped" in today's warped sense of the word:
What can I tell you about being raped? Very little. I remember drinking with some girlfriends and then heading to a party in the house that some seniors were throwing. I’m told that I walked in and within 5 minutes was making out with one of the guys who lived there, who I’d talked to some in the dining hall but never really hung out with. I may have initiated it. I don’t remember arriving at the party; I dimly remember waking up at some point in the early morning in this guy’s room. I remember him walking me back to my room. I couldn’t have made it alone; I still had too much alcohol in my system to even stand up straight. I made myself vulnerable and even now it’s hard to think that someone here who I have talked and laughed with could be cold-hearted enough to take advantage of that vulnerability. I’d rather, sometimes, take half the blame than believe that a profound evil can exist in mankind. But it’s easy for me to say, that, of the two of us, I’m the only one who still has nightmares, found myself panicking and detaching during sex for many months afterwards, and spent more time looking into the abyss than any one person should.
The inequalities of the consequences of the night, the actions taken unintentionally or not, have changed the course of only one of our lives, irrevocably and profoundly.
She didn't even remember the party. She was making out with a guy she hardly knew. They slept together. Is it rape? Or as I said in my post on the same topic, The Rape of Rape on America's Campuses, was the guy guilty of no more than saying "OK" to her "Lesh do it?"
Before you answer, consider this email I got from a friend regarding the post:
Your past few blogs have been really excellent! I’ve OFTEN fumed about the feminist agenda when it comes to rape statistics. While at UCSB, the TAKE BACK THE NIGHT parade always had me miffed. They always quoted the 25% number. As the only “sober sister” at my sorority, I witnessed first hand the drinking, promiscuity and tears that followed over and over and over again.
When I asked why the girls would get so hammered knowing that they would probably make a choices that night that they would later regret, they all, without fail, said that they were “in college and just wanted to have fun without stressing about it.” Sleazy, cheap, drunken sex never sounded that great to me. It also doesn’t sound like RAPE. If the boys are just as drunk as the girls, how are they expected to be more accountable?
They shouldn't be. When a woman opens herself to a man and encourages him, the resulting act can be many things, but it can't be rape. But apparently some prosecutors don't get the difference. With a hat-tip to Bookworm, here's a case from England, told by The Daily Mail:
The sex trial nightmare of a Cambridge graduate ended yesterday leaving a huge question mark over the decision to charge him.
Jack Gillett was accused of assault by a fellow student after a drunken night of passion. He has spent nine months under a cloud of suspicion and facing the threat of up to ten years in jail.
But after a three-day trial this week, a jury took just two and a half hours to throw out the £50,000 case. Afterwards, Judge Gareth Hawkesworth questioned why it had ever been brought by the Crown Prosecution Service.
"It is a very sad thing that a case like this should come before the court involving two young people struggling to come to terms with the complexities of life and about to start on their careers," he said.
Indeed it is sad. Gillet, 23, was accused by a 22-year-old, whose charges included that she had begged Gillet many times to stop. Her anonymity is protected by the law despite the fact that the jury discounted her tale, and despite the fact that Gillet is anything but anonymous.
The girl's charges appear to be not unlike her Harvard sister's:
The jury had heard that Mr Gillett's accuser, the daughter of a well-known personality, had twice left the room on the night of the incident, but returned.
That effectively neuters her claim that she told him to stop early on, but he kept going. He counter-claims that he did stop, but she came back for more -- twice, apparently.
As for her cries for help:
Two students in a nearby room testified that they had not heard her calling for help, even though their door and Mr Gillett's were left ajar throughout the alleged ordeal.
This case has a fair amount of "she said/he said," but the circumstances obviously weighed in Gillett's favor -- especially testimony of one of the "victim's" friends:
A friend of the accuser said last night that she had not wanted Mr Gillett convicted, but just wanted to "give him a scare so he wouldn't do it again".
This is the even more unseemly flip side of the promiscuousness that permeates our society. It's all about morals: There's really not much difference between a girl having no compunction about going to a man's room and having sex with the door open, and a girl not being able to think proportionately about any other of her actions. Subjecting a person to a lengthy, public court process to "give him a scare?"
"My son's reputation has suffered, while she remains anonymous," [Gillett's mother] said. "If she could have been named maybe she would have held back."
Maybe if she had been taught logic, civics and morality, she would have held back as well.
Listen to this very short clip and be prepared to be attacked in a whole new way for your conservative beliefs:
And you probably weren't even aware that as a conservative, you were promoting the gray rape myth! I certainly wasn't. In fact, because of my Incredible Wife's Voice of the Victims work, I'm very concerned about the very real problem of drug-induced rape -- although I admit that "gray rape" is a phrase I would have defined incorrectly, if asked.
Heather Mac Donald, whose LA Times piece so triggered Tracy Clark-Flory's clip above, defines gray rape thusly:
In all these drunken couplings, there may be some deplorable instances of forced and truly non-consensual sex. But most campus "rape" cases exist in the gray area of seeming cooperation and tacit consent, which is why they are almost never prosecuted criminally.
Mac Donald's piece starts with a simple enough premise: The reported number of campus rapes is so high as to raise legitimate questions regarding the source and quality of the data:
It is a central claim of these [campus sexual assault] organizations that between a fifth and a quarter of all college women will be raped or will be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years. Harvard's Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response uses the 20% to 25% statistic. Websites at New York University, Syracuse University, Penn State and the University of Virginia, among many other places, use the figures as well. ...
If the one-in-four statistic is correct, campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. No felony, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20% or 25%, even over many years. The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most violent cities in the U.S., was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants -- a rate of 2.4%.
Such a crime wave -- in which millions of young women would graduate having suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience -- would require nothing less than a state of emergency. Admissions policies, which if the numbers are true are allowing in tens of thousands of vicious criminals, would require a complete revision, perhaps banning male students entirely. The nation's nearly 10 million female undergraduates would need to take the most stringent safety precautions.
It is a healthy reaction in a Free Press society to question statistics that seem unreasonable, so Mac Donald is absolutely legitimate in posing here question -- especially given that NationMaster tells us the rape rate per capita in the US is 0.3 incidents per thousand population. Even so, that Mac Donald even raised the question set Ms. Hyphenated off:
There is the stereotype of the feminist blogger foaming at the mouth while banging on a keyboard covered in spittle. Let me tell you, though, writing week after week about feminist issues inevitably causes you to become a bit jaded; things that once would have sent the spittle flying only inspire a curl of the lip, a roll of the eyes. But today, thanks to an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times about "the rape hype" on college campuses, my blood is boiling and I am fully embodying that stereotype.
Having vented, Clark-Flory does actually rebut Mac Donald, but she does it by quoting another study instead of addressing the perceptive demographic challenge raised by Mac Donald.
Let's dispense with the "science" behind this argument first. It all goes back to a 1980's study commissioned by Ms Magazine (red flags, anyone?), in which the author, Mary Koss, didn't use the word "rape" in her survey designed to identify the rate of rapes on campus.
That may seem odd, but she had her reasons. Her question didn't use "rape" because she thought sensitive females would not answer such a direct question honestly. Instead, she asked,
"Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?"
Not surprisingly, she got HUGE results -- the same 20 to 25 percent figure the colleges want us to believe. Mac Donald says, and I believe, that many women who answered "yes" simply had on "beer goggles" at a bar and put out, then regretted it. As Mac Donald put it:
College women -- as well as men -- reportedly drink heavily before and during parties. For the women, that drinking is often goal-oriented, suggests Karin Agness, a recent University of Virginia graduate and founder of NeW, a club for conservative university women: It frees the drinker from responsibility and "provides an excuse for engaging in behavior that she ordinarily wouldn't." Nights can include a meaningless sexual encounter with a guy whom the girl may not even know.
These women are not the victims of rape, even though they would answer "yes" to the survey question. Rape is a violent, ugly crime, not a Saturday night moment of ill-advised (or even self-directed) promiscuity.
The study with which Clark-Flory fights back attempted to fix this problem, not by asking about rape straight-up, but by rephrasing the question,
Have you engaged in sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to but were so intoxicated under the influence of alcohol or drugs that you could not stop it or object?
The results were identical to Koss', thereby "proving" a phenomenal amount of drug or alcohol-facilitated rapes on campus.
But here's the problem: Neither question addressed the man's intent, the woman's actions against the man, or any of the circumstances of the act. Rape is -- or has been up until now -- described legally by a particular set of circumstances that feminists are now trying to redefine. Just as anti-war factions are trying to redefine "torture" in order to create a cause where where wasn't one before, the feminists want to broaden the meaning of rape so more women become victims, thus increasing the relevance of their cause.
In one sense I agree with them: More attention has to be given to women who are victimized by drug-assisted rape, when a man slips GHB or a roofie slipped into their drink so they become immobilized, then hustles them out of the bar and carries out upon them an act that is, indeed, rape.
Drug-facilitated rape is very real crime that should not be minimized. Incredible Wife posted on her blog the story of Annette, the drug-facilitated rape victim you see here, that illustrates that the crime is, indeed, rape, with long-term damage that can be even worse that when the rape victim is sober.
Victims like Annette have trouble convincing police and prosecutors they've been raped. They have no memory of what happened and there's frequently no physical evidence because memories of what happened to them start to become real well after the crime. And, most damaging to the victims, law enforcement officials too readily dismiss these victims as bar sluts, not rape victims. That's particularly damaging to them because they were drugged, and were not drunk and promiscuous prior to being drugged.
To the extent that creating a false crisis out of campus and bar rapes will help the thousands of Annettes who are struggling to be heard, and who are psychologically damaged because society is calling them bar sluts instead of rape victims, more power to the false statistics.
But the studies cited by Clark-Flory do just the opposite. They group true date-rape victims with the girls who just got drunk and got laid. That minimizes the crime, and worse, it minimizes the perpetrator. One perp is a premeditating criminal who uses dangerous drugs just as effectively as other rapists use weapons and threats of violence; the other is some guy who just happened to be at a bar when a drunk girl said, "Lesh do it."
The other danger of the Clark-Flory approach is that it places justice in the hands of collegiate bureaucrats. As you can imagine, the colleges have set up protocols for dealing with the crisis created by foolishly broadening the definition of rape. Girls can ask committees of muddle-headed academics to rule on the fate of boys whose crime may have been no more than to say "Sure" to the girl's "Lesh do it."
Muddle-headed? You bet. This is from Mac Donald's piece:
"If one partner puts a condom on the other, does that signify that they are consenting to intercourse?" asks Alan D. Berkowitz, a campus rape consultant. Short of guiding the thus-sheathed instrumentality to port, it's hard to imagine a clearer signal of consent, although Berkowitz apparently finds it "inherently ambiguous."
Woe be to the American university.
Boiled down to its core, Clark-Flory puts her faith in academic research and Mac Donald puts hers in human intelligence and reason -- all of which makes Mac Donald a quaint anachronism in a world that is set at full speed towards confusion and victimization.
She is demonized because she has the gall to suggest that dressing with your boobs and butt-cheeks hanging out, dancing the bump and grind with whatever male approaches you while swilling booze straight from the bottle may have consequences.
No matter if she's fighting against the minimization of rape -- a position feminists should laud -- she has argued against freedom without consequences and victimization without a crime.
Lost in all this is education, which once was the reason for going to college. That we are even having this debate is evidence that another institution that was foundational to the creation of America's greatness is slipping into mediocrity.
Who hasn't heard the hapless answer of Miss South Carolina, Caitlin Upton, to the question, How can it be that a survey found that 25 percent of Americans can't find the U.S. on a map? [See comments for a more accurate rendering of the question.] If you haven't, you can watch it here, or read it here:
I personally believe the U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some, uh ...; people out there in our nation don't have maps, and, uh, I believe that our education like such as South Africa and, uh, the Iraq everywhere like, such as and ...; I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., err, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future ... for us.
Three thoughts:
First, pity on the poor girl. She is no doubt at least somewhat brighter than her answer would have you believe. She just choked ... big time ... nationally. For the rest of her life, she'll hear, "Are you the Caitlin Upton, the 'South Africa and, uh, the Iraq' Caitlin Upton?" She'll just have to overcome it, and overcoming it will make her a stronger, smarter person.
Second, I don't know what survey it was that found that 25 percent of us can't find the U.S. on a map, but I can tell you what the right answer to the question is, the answer Caitlin should have come up with:
I personally believe that the only way a survey could report such a finding is that it was a biased, left-leaning tool, not a truly scientific survey. I would be willing to bet my crown, which I sure hope you will place on my pretty blond head soon, that the survey was doctored by a National Education Association in order to dupe Congressmen and Congresswomen into sinking even more money into the bottomless pit of our failing public education system. Americans are smarter than that, but the NEA apparently knows members of Congress aren't.
But I wasn't on the spot like Caitlin was, so who can fault her?
And third, if you haven't ever had a "Caitlin Upton moment," it's probably because you've never had the courage to step out in front of a crowd of people and accept a spotlight.
My Caitlin moment came when I was emceeing an annual awards ceremony for our professional association -- a big deal, hundreds in attendance. The night had progressed well, and it was time for the big award.
What I meant to say was, "This is it ... hold your breath ... the winner is..."
What I said was, "This is it ... hold your breasts ...."
There was no point in even trying to get to "the winner is," because the laughter was so loud and I was so mortified. Fortunately, I don't remember then next few seconds, I just have vague sense that somehow the award was announced and a recipient -- who no doubt holds a grudge against me to this day for spoiling his or her big moment -- came up and accepted the reward.
Paying To Value The Differences In American Society
There's a Steiner cartoon in last week's Weekly Standard that I can't find on-line. It shows a professorial sort talking to a mom, dad and incoming college student. The professor's dialog balloon:
At Yale we regard the dormitory experience as essential. It teaches students how to get along in an amoral and dissolute society.
The reality of this hit home today when I was looking at Incredible Daughter #1's fall schedule for her Junior year at Chapman University, a great school right here in the heart of conservative OC, and there it was:
HMDV-300-01 (00274) Valuing Differences in Am Soc
Here's the email chain that followed. First, me to ID #1:
Looks good – but I really can’t believe we have to pay for you to take a course called “valuing differences in American society.” It sounds like multi-culti brainwashing; I value assimilation into the American culture more than continuing divisive differences. Put on your native clothing once a year and dance your native dances, then go back to baseball, apple pie and the red, white and blue.
She to me:
It fulfills some intercommunication pre req or something. I don’t remember right now what my other choices were, but this one had the best time, and still had seats available. ... Some of the classes I was trying to get had only 2 or 3 seats left. Beggars can’t be choosers. Besides, I have a degree in Environmental Science, you really think a multi-cultural class is going to brainwash me? I have 4 years of multi-cultural education under my belt as well.
Me to she:
“Beggers can’t be choosers.” I think you do need some multi-culti brainwashing after all. Beggars are people too, and they certainly can be choosers, just like all of us.
I've learned to wait and see; sometimes things aren't as bad as you think they'll be. Perhaps a part of this course will be careful analysis of the benefits of fitting in vs. the liabilities of refusing to do so. But I expect I'll be disappointed on that count.
The debate over immigration focuses primarily on the unskilled dregs Mexico foists on us so that country's leaders don't have to face up to the fact that they have utterly failed at the relatively simple task of making a hard-working, democratic country successful.
It's a good focus. A study released in February by the Public Policy Institute of California lets us know that fully 30% of the workers in California who have no high school diploma are immigrants. (They're 18% of the US workforce.)
Clearly, the low jobs on the totem pole are going away from Gringos big-time.
But the PPIC report has a stat at the other end of the education scale that's a real eye-opener: 43% of those holding doctorate degrees in the California workforce are immigrants. (They're 28% of the national workforce.)
Look at that again: Nearly half of the PhDs, MDs and other doctorate-holders in the nation's most populous state came here from another country. Presumably, there are not as many illegals in this bunch (the PPIC report doesn't differentiate between legal and illegal immigrants.)
I get flummoxed by stats like this.
On the one hand I worry about the caliber of U.S. kids and U.S. education. Are we incapable of turning out enough engineers, physicists, researchers and mathematicians to take care of ourselves? Are our kids too busy with YouTube and XBox and Ecstasy to amount to much?
On the other hand, I'm thrilled that the brightest people on the planet still see America as the place to be. You can bet your Phi Beta Kappa pin that 28% of China's doctorate degree holders aren't foreign-born, nor are India's, nor, probably, are France's.
While many of those YouTube, XBox, Ecstasy offspring feel closer to Cindy Sheehan than Condi Rice, bright people from Buenos Aires to Bombay see that there's really just one country on the planet that stands out as the best place on earth, and it's us.
For them, our immigration policy must always look like a welcome mat. We can't let liberal kumbayah politics try to equate these people with the dirt-poor, poorly educated people who come up from Guadalajara to mow our lawns.
If America is going to stay competitive in a global economy, and if, in fact, we're not turning out enough scientists and thinkers, then let the brain drain continue to run in our direction. Every PhD we recruit from some other country makes us more competitive on the global stage and them less competitive.
Caveat: High grey-matter individuals from China, Iran and other enemies of the state are obviously very different from most PhD immigrants. With them tight controls over whether they can come here, what they do when they're here and how long they stay are absolutely essential.
"Thank you for the "Voice of the Victims films. The students really liked them, and it means so much to them to hear real stories and not watch a cheesy drama like so many other videos."
— High school teacher.
