Month: August 2013

by Tracy R. Walsh

Yesterday, President Obama delivered the first of three speeches setting out his vision for higher education: an ambitious if not-entirely coherent list that includes new federal college rankings, outcomes-based funding, more MOOCs, and universal income-based student loan repayment. Jon Chait zooms out:

The most controversial element of Obama’s proposal is to create a metric measuring which colleges provide the best value. This has been a longtime goal of higher education reformers – the Washington Monthly, for instance, has published its own college rankings. Under Obama’s proposal, the U.S. Department of Education would craft such a measure by 2014 and then, after trying it out to ensure it works well enough, begin using it to prorate federal tuition subsidies by 2018. That is, students could get more generous loans for the most effective schools, and less-generous loans for the least effective. 2018 is far enough in the future that it might as well be “eventually,” but it matters in the sense that Obama is laying down a marker that a successor president can choose to hit if the first stage goes off as planned.

Kevin Drum adds, “The basic idea here is that endlessly increasing the amount of federal student aid just isn’t working anymore”:

At this point, all it does is encourage universities to raise their prices, which means that students are no better off than they were before. In fact, maybe worse, since they end up graduating with ever more gargantuan loans to pay off. Instead we need to reward universities that actually provide a good bang for the buck: a solid education and high graduation rates at a reasonable cost.

Scott Jaschik notes that the plan has “common elements” with the administration’s proposed regulations for for-profit schools:

An underlying goal both of those regulations and this plan is an attempt to judge colleges based on the “value” they provide to students and taxpayers, based on a mix of student outcomes. Gainful employment, aimed at vocational programs, focused exclusively on employment outcomes and debt; the president’s plan for colleges generally would look at a broader mix of institutional and student outcomes, including access and affordability as well as employment outcomes.

For his part, Josh Barro is enthusiastic:

We’ll need to see how the rating systems work when the Department of Education releases them next year. But this is the right direction to be moving in. As with health care, third-party payment causes the education sector to focus too little on cost, and the government needs to make sure that tax dollars are spent efficiently. If we want to make college affordable, the government needs to bend the cost curve, not just write bigger checks.

Daniel Luzer is cautiously optimistic, but notes that “there are a lot of ways for this to go wrong”:

Colleges are likely to lobby pretty seriously against more oversight. Republicans might oppose it just because it’s an Obama policy, and because it introduces more regulations to a system many argue is already over regulated. The real outcome will look a lot different from what Obama proposes and it’s possible some compromises will result in very different outcomes from those intended. Rewarding colleges for higher graduation rates but not also rewarding them for enrolling more Pell students would likely cause colleges just to enroll fewer poor students, who have more trouble getting through college. Enrolling all students in “pay as you earn” programs but not providing schools with more money through Pell grants could result in massive funding shortages, for instance. But there’s a lot to work with here, and the ideas are impressive.

Tyler Cowen is more skeptical:

So far, I don’t get it. There seems to be plenty of information about colleges, and I doubt if a federal rating system would improve on those ratings already privately available. To the extent that federal system became focal, the incentives to game and scheme it would become massive, and how or whether to punish the gamers, if and when they are caught, would be a political decision. I don’t see that as healthy. … Should we be giving colleges an incentive to identify and deny admission to potential lower earners? Do we really want the federal government helping to crush humanities majors? And I don’t see that the kind of rating system under discussion here is measuring actual value added.

Meanwhile, Diane Ravitch slams the plan as “No Child Left Behind for higher education,” and Walter Hickey is outright cynical:

In the pursuit of fundamental change, President Obama will in all likelihood create just a new way for college to juke the stats. He shouldn’t be surprised. Colleges “adjusting” the stats in order to achieve a higher rating is a longstanding tradition in academia. In order to rank highly on the U.S. News and World Report college ranking — by and large the most trusted resource for high school seniors attempting to ascertain an arbitrary and decontextualized numerical value of a college — universities will do anything necessary to move the needle. … George Washington university lied about their freshmen class rankings, worth 6 percent of the score. Baylor paid their freshman to retake the SAT, worth 7.5 percent. The U.S. Naval Academy allegedly inflated their admissions numbers, worth 1.5 percent. Allegedly, the Ivy League often has discrepancies between the numbers they report to U.S. News and the number they report to the Federal Government. Clemson University was alleged to have manipulated a realm of stats in order to climb from 38th place to 22nd place in the ranking.

Borrowers in the class of 2013 started their post-collegiate lives $35,200 in debt and entered a job market where even biology and chemistry majors struggle to find work. In that context, Obama’s speech is welcome: After all, the first step is solving a problem is admitting you have one. But ranking systems and accountability-based funding have backfired at the K-12 level, and Obama’s plan does little to address two major problems: declining state aid to universities, and student-loan bankruptcy laws that encourage banks to lend students enormous amounts of money regardless of their ability to repay (and encourage schools to raise tuition accordingly). Given those realities, it’s not clear students have much to celebrate.

by Matt Sitman

Recently Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, offered these thoughts on how conservative Christians should respond to the “transgender question”:

As conservative Christians, we do not see transgendered persons as “freaks” to be despised or ridiculed. We acknowledge that there are some persons who feel alienated from their identities as men or as women. Of course that would be the case in a fallen universe in which all of us are alienated, in some way, from how God created us to be.

But we don’t believe this alienation can be solved by pretending as though we have Pharaoh-like dominion over our maleness or femaleness. These categories we believe (along with every civilization before us) are about more than just self-construction, and they can’t be eradicated by a change of clothes or chemical tinkering or a surgeon’s knife, much less by an arbitrary announcement in the high school gym.

The transgender question means that conservative Christian congregations such as mine must teach what’s been handed down to us, that our maleness and femaleness points us to an even deeper reality, to the unity and complementarity of Christ and the church. A rejection of the goodness of those creational realities then is a revolt against God’s lordship, and against the picture of the gospel that God had embedded in the creation.

I suppose the caveat Moore includes about transgender people not being freaks is welcome, but what he gives with one hand he immediately takes away with the other, rigidly adhering to the binary categories he supposedly finds in “creation.” So, transgender people aren’t “freaks,” just particularly stubborn examples of the sinfulness of this fallen world. Its truly bizarre to characterize the struggles and, often, suffering of the transgendered as a “revolt” against God, as if their experiences merely were a form of arrogant defiance, something chosen and pursued out of a prideful rejection of God’s plan. Even more importantly, its far from clear to me that “creation” is so simple. Jonathan Merritt, responding to Moore, points out the complexity of the matter:

According to research conducted by Anne Fausto-Sterling of Brown University, one in 100 children are born with “bodies that differ from standard male or female” biology. This includes those children born with both a penis and a vagina, as well as those with vaginal agenesis, ovatestes, or genetic disorders such as Klinefelter syndrome. Apparently, God sometimes creates humans both male and female or neither fully male nor fully female.

Intersex persons offer a critique of those who believe that gender is a static binary assigned from birth and divinely ordained. For example, what about a person who is a sexually “mosaic,” which means they have mixed gonadal dysgenesis such as the development of both ovaries and testes? It’s hard to say because Christian commentators almost never acknowledge the existence of these individuals…

[T]he situation seems to grow even more complex when one considers the internal workings of transgender people. According to research conducted by the National University of Distance Education in Madrid, Spain, transgendered people show significant differences in brain patterns. MRI scans of female-to-male transgender people, for example, resembled male brain function even though they were born biologically female.

Christians believe that God not only creates our bodies, but also our minds. Are one’s external created realities more revealing about God’s intentions than one’s internal created realities?

Merritt asked Moore about these matters, which he waved away by replying that these facts are “a question of epistemology, not of ontology,” meaning they merely obscure what sex a person “really” is. Which is another way of saying: everyone is either male or female, they just don’t know it yet. Sound familiar? Its similar to many right-wing Christians’ rhetoric about homosexuality – everyone really is straight, they just haven’t realized it, or refuse to act in accordance with that “deeper” reality.

What I find so disturbing about Moore’s approach is both its evasion of the actual, documented facts noted above and its a priori imposition of easy answers, gleaned from one rather narrow reading of Scripture, on this sensitive question. I haven’t considered all the theological implications of transgender people – its an issue, I suspect, many Christians haven’t fully considered – but I do know thinking through the question should begin with profound empathy, and a willingness not to presume to have the “right” answer from the start. Moore’s position bothers me, then, not just because of its substance, but because of the posture it exemplifies: there’s not a trace of doubt in his essay about the righteousness of his own approach. Sharon Groves wrote a follow-up article that captures this almost perfectly. She argues that Moore’s handling of the matter “is dangerous because it discourages a curiosity about the actual lived experiences of trans people” and that he’s “shutting down any deeper conversation and, in the process, dampening our understanding of how the spark of the divine exists in all of us.” She continues:

The core teachings of Christianity are to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. We cannot love God fully if we don’t do the work of trying to understand who God is for each of us. When we look at the most moving and transformative religious writing – from Augustine to Thomas Merton – there is a sense of openness and curiosity to the experience of God.  We can’t love God if we don’t try to glean how God works in our lives.

Similarly, we can’t really love our neighbors if we cast off all curiosity about who they are and their experience of life in the world. And finally, if we remain uninterested in ourselves – about how we come to know our gender–then we can’t really love the difference that shows up in our neighbors.

The heart of Christianity is grace, or God’s one-way love for each of us, wherever we are in our lives. Its a message of radical acceptance and affirmation, without conditions. It does not depend on our having figured everything out, or having gotten our lives together, or having settled questions about our gender or sexuality. Similarly to the way the Bible does not address the matter of homosexuality as we have come to understand it, there is no “biblical” position on the issue of transgender people – except to love them exactly as they are.   Transgender people need to be shown this love, not have their own experiences dismissed as a form of alienation from God’s intentions for them. Showing them this love, if it is real and not a mere pose, necessarily includes walking along side them on their journey, not pointing them to a one-size-fits-all destination. A love that seeks to change or cure is not love at all, but only a more subtle form of power and control, the very means of relating to others Jesus consistently rejected. Like all of us, transgender people need mercy, not easy answers. Like all of us, they need to experience the church as a welcoming refuge – a place of genuine affirmation. Like all of us, they need to be reminded, not of those verses Moore rips from the book of Genesis, but of St Paul’s words from his letter to the Galatians that, in the Kingdom of God,

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

(Photo: Five-year-old Tyler, known until last fall as Kathryn, gets a haircut from his dad Stephen at their suburban Washington, D.C., home, on Monday, March 12, 2012.  Tyler’s insistence on being a boy started at the early age of 2. By Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

by Matt Sitman

Librarian Judith Finnamore of London’s Westminster Archive Centre has been cooking her way through The Unknown Ladies Cookbook, “a 300-year-old British compendium of family recipes” she rediscovered. You can follow her culinary exploits via her blog, which offers detailed recipes and historical snippets from the manuscript. Handwritten by several different women between 1690 and 1830, the recipes show just how much the way we prepare our food has changed. In a profile of Finnamore’s work, Amy Guttman highlights a few of these shifts. One of them? Brits used to use a lot of eggs:

Some recipes call for as many as 30 eggs to bake a cake; others suggest whisking for an hour. But if you were to try out these recipes today, you’d need to use just two-thirds or even one-half of the eggs indicated, Gray says, because eggs have grown larger over the last century. As eggs began to be classed by quality and weight, farmers culled smaller chickens in favor of larger ones that produced bigger eggs.

Even in 1940, Gray says, egg cups were much smaller than they are today, indicating a gradual change. While whisking for an hour sounds like a workout, with servants to do the actual work, the women running a household wouldn’t have minded. Gray says she has actually whisked eggs for a full hour, and it does make a difference in texture. So if you have servants to do it, why not?

Samuel Muston notices some of the more interesting recipes Finnamore uncovered:

“Some of the recipes are ‘challenging’ for our palates – I mean the sheep’s head dish won’t be for everyone.” Other surprises include “mince pies” with calves tongue in them. There is also a vast 3lb cake, whose inclusion is puzzling given Finnamore doesn’t think this was used by a cook at some great country pile, but rather that it came from a “place like the Bennett house in Pride and Prejudice”.