Author: Andrew Sullivan

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

Regarding the reader who referred to science and engineering, such researchers sometimes do take risks with regard to the subject matter of their research – by exploring what are (initially thought to be) wacky ideas or adopting ideas from distant disciplines.  Computer scientists, for example, have been stealing concepts and ideas from biology and ecology the over last decade or so, with very fruitful results. (Such borrowings were initially frowned-upon by others in computer science, but no more.)

However, the main benefit of tenure in science and engineering is not that it encourages risk, but that it encourages long-term research efforts.  There are many powerful ideas which have only borne fruit after many years or decades of lonely, intense exploration by a single researcher or by a single team.  Think of Princeton mathematician Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, which occupied Wiles for nearly two decades, during which he published hardly anything.  In a university environment where, as in business,  “What did you for me recently?” is the prevailing tone from administrators, tenure provides the necessary cover for long-term research work.  Indeed, tenure may perhaps be the best way for society to ensure such long-term research takes place.  

Another writes:

As a researcher in the natural sciences, I have always understood that tenure is about the big studies, the long-term work – not the short period of time required to constantly prove yourself to the institution.  For example, check out a recent NYT article on arthritis in wolves. Essentially the biggest risk factor for a moose developing arthritis in old age is its nutrition at an early age.  Moose live for more than 20 years, and it's thanks to the tenure process that 50-year long studies can track these patterns.  Whether it's the Grants on Galapagos, studies of the effects of climate change, or the big changes to Yellowstone ecology caused by the reintroduction of wolves, these stories can't be told without the time to devote to a single topic that tenure allows.

by Chris Bodenner

Palin embraces the knife metaphor.

Today on the Dish, we asked how hallowed the ground around 9/11 really is. A reader questioned the automatic power given to 9/11 families, we assessed Imam Rauf and Mitt Romney; and Bernstein and Klein agreed the entire controversy doesn't matter. 

We looked deeper into the middle class milieu, argued about affirmative action, and the race debate kept reeling. Conor responded to Thomas Sowell on Obama overstepping his bounds by pointing out it has everything to do with war and nothing to do with illegal immigrants, and Eliot Abrams got the Atlantic pile-on for his comments on bombing Iran.

Conor appealed to Republican voters for substance instead of culture wars, Patrick asked who we trust, and Chris railed against CNN for giving airtime to Bryan "Ban All Mosques" Fischer. Kiera Butler responded to Dish readers about emails polluting the earth, hard times were harder for those susceptible to suicide, and convicts could walk the streets like Canadians, according to Graeme Wood. Palin's custody clause may be par for the course, circumcisions in the U.S. were on the decline, Matt Stopera compiled Maggie Gallagher's dumbest quotes, and the Great Zucchini was the subject of today's entry into the long form journalism Hall of Fame.

Ray Bradbury had enough of the Internets, there was more blowback on tenure from Beam, and the government gained license to steal. We collected the pot or profits debate, and this reader boiled 44 months of heavy use down to a likely cause: college. We marveled at the Depression in color, and awed at stories of your first kisses here and here. Cool ad watch here, FOTD here, VFYW here, MHB here, app of the day here, and the sailor who nailed the VFYW contest #11 here. 

Ta-Nehisi went to the woods, dogs made us better workers, and one reader informed us that TED can't be Harvard until it can get too drunk to undress itself.

— Z.P.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Graeme Wood's piece on replacing jails with electronic monitoring of convicts is well worth a read. He tested out a tracking anklet himself:

Devices such as the one I wore on my leg already allow tens of thousands of convicts to walk the streets relatively freely, impeded only by the knowledge that if they loiter by a schoolyard, say, or near the house of the ex-girlfriend they threatened, or on a street corner known for its crack trade, the law will come to find them. Compared with incarceration, the cost of such surveillance is minuscule—mere dollars per day—and monitoring has few of the hardening effects of time behind bars. Nor do all the innovations being developed depend on technology. Similar efforts to control criminals in the wild are under way in pilot programs that demand adherence to onerous parole guidelines, such as frequent, random drug testing, and that provide for immediate punishment if the parolees fail. The result is the same: convicts who might once have been in prison now walk among us unrecognized—like pod people, or Canadians.

There are, of course, many thousands of dangerous felons who can’t be trusted on the loose. But if we extended this form of enhanced, supervised release even to just the nonviolent offenders currently behind bars, we would empty half our prison beds in one swoop. Inevitably, some of those released would take the pruning-shears route. And some would offend again. But then, so too do those convicts released at the end of their brutal, hardening sentences under our current system. And even accepting a certain failure rate, by nearly any measure such “prisons without bars” would represent a giant step forward for justice, criminal rehabilitation, and society.

Read the rest here.

by Patrick Appel

Ta-Nehisi is out in the woods working on a writing project:

There's a great jazz pianist up here with whom I have shared meals and talked often. The first day we met he informed me that the essence of our work was learning to get out of our own fucking way. I am learning that out here–how to get out of my own fucking way–and really listen to what I care about, what I truly ache to say. I do not ache to edit, in real-time, the collected speeches of Barack Obama.

Part one here.

by Chris Bodenner

"It's an atrocity that they would take a young man with honorable intentions who served his country and lie about how he died to promote a war, to use him as a propaganda tool. … He was a human being. By putting this kind of saintly quality to him, you're taking away the struggle of being a human being," – Mary Tillman, speaking about her son in the upcoming documentary.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Rob Long is an enormously entertaining writer whose provocations I've enjoyed a lot lately. I've got to disagree, however, with this post, titled "All You Need to Read Is…"

The payoff: "Instapundit, pretty much." I say that as a longtime Instapundit reader. "Glenn Reynolds is a terrific writer: eloquent, witty, pared down to the word," says Rob Long, and I agree. In the past, I've interviewed him, recommended his book, An Army of Davids, and enjoyed numerous of his articles. The problem is Rob's next statement: "If you get all of your news from his site, trust me: you're getting all the news."

In a way, this is a quibble. Mr. Long is being hyperbolic. He doesn't actually rely on Instapundit for all his news, he's just remarking on the impressive breadth of subjects that blog covers. Still, it's worth pointing out that the coverage is filtered through the worldview of Glenn Reynolds, and that as a result certain narratives are unlikely to be upset. It would be reasonably easy for a person to read Instapundit, click through to several links each day, and never have their "conservo-libertarian except for foreign policy" worldview challenged. Especially since there are more partisan zingers and one-liners aimed at rhetorical point-scoring than there used to be. Unless I am mistaken, it is not a blog that aspires to be a fair and balanced look at the world.

It is nevertheless a perfectly defensible enterprise, and one I continue to find worth scrolling through a couple times a week, despite what I regard as its shortcomings.  But it isn't a substitute for wide reading anymore than any other one man blog.

Conceding my bias on this matter, I think The Daily Dish does a much better job (than Instapundit and most every other blog) at prominently highlighting dissents, and I'd certainly never recommend that anyone get their news exclusively from this site. (For one thing, Instapundit has us beat on the actually very important disaster preparedness beat, among others.) A strength of the blogosphere is that readers can engage news and commentary through the lens of a personality they trust. Inescapably, you're also subject to the blind spots of your favorite bloggers.

Don't rely on any of us too exclusively.

by Patrick Appel

Ambinder answers:

38 percent of Americans in 2006 said they would never vote for a Muslim for president, just about the number who said they would never vote for a gay person. In December of 2004, Cornell released a survey showing that half of Americans consciously told a pollster that they would favor a curtailment of civil rights for Muslims. About 40 percent of Republicans had explicitly anti-Muslim views in the survey.

What's fascinating — and disturbing — about prejudice against Muslims is that it is not driven by the same factors that have marginalized immigrants and minorities in the past. There are no economic incentives to push Muslims to the outside; there is an instinctive mistrust of Islam within evangelical Christianity and a very persistent post 9/11 ideological gulf between average and elite Americans. As of 2010, 43 percent of Americans admitted feeling bias against Muslims.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

One of the oddest things things about the tenure debate in America is that it completely ignores the clear comparison-condition: Britain. For a couple decades, Britain has not had tenure for most academics, who  are now on "permanent" contracts that can be terminated at department heads' discretion at any time. The result? Not an explosion of creativity.

I have had the opportunity of being faculty in both the USA and Britain, and the things I saw at a top university in England were chilling.

For example, one mid-career faculty member (Senior Lecturer) was given ultimatums that she had to change her research area to a more mainstream area or she would be fired (she did change); another was fired from his university for publishing too many books explaining science to the general public. Beam writes that American tenure disincentivizes junior researchers from do groundbreaking research, but why does giving academic freedom to *no one* improve incentives for anyone?

One lesser-known dimension of academic is participating in emerging research areas that most people have never heard of. This freedom is not as newsworthy as the freedom to say things that the powers that be don't want to hear, but it may be just as important for a country's long-term scientific health. Pick an arbitrary research area that has emerged in the last 5-10 years, and which is not known by the public. You'll find that the UK is almost invariably badly underrepresented, compared to smaller countries with true tenure (Canada and Spain, for example).

The reward of tenure is a major incentive for faculty. Top academics have a choice of what country they want to work in. I've gotten offers in Germany, Australia, and Ireland, for instance, and I'm still quite junior. Why would a top scientist choose a job without security when most countries maintain tenure? Getting rid of tenure will lose superstars and leadership in emerging areas. It's probably the most powerful step that America could take to make sure it loses its scientific leadership.

by Patrick Appel

Bernstein says the Park 51 controversy doesn't matter:

It's not going to affect elections, it's not substantively important, and to the extent it's symbolically important…well, let's just say it's not symbolically important as a stand-alone issue in any significant way (at best, it's what Kevin Drum says, one straw — so shouldn't we pay more attention to all that other straw?).  I'm sorry to be a stick in the mud about it, but it just isn't actually a big story no matter how much it gets hyped.  Okay?

Ezra Klein is on the same page. Andrew Sprung dissents:

I think the Republicans completely repudiating Bush's efforts to differentiate Islam from Islamism is significant. I think Palin's success in bringing another poisonous meme to the eruption point is significant. I think that waves of hysterical demagoguery that hit fever pitch are significant. And I think that, as with torture, when it comes to defense of civil liberties leaders have to be better than the rest of us, because majorities will sell those liberties without a twitch for a modicum of relief from rage or fear. When one of our two major parties goes all out demonizing an entire religion and works assiduously to interfere with a local government's approval of a religious institution to be built on private property, that's dangerous.

Bernstein responds:

I'm not saying that anti-Muslim bigotry isn't important; I absolutely think it is. I guess I don't see this particular kerfuffle as nearly as much of a turning point, or whatever, as some of you do. I don't know…Yes, George W. Bush said some good things about tolerance and all in 2001-2002, but I think that there was quite a bit of bigoted stuff coming from the usual suspects even back then, and certainly by mid-decade. IIRC, Muslims became a solid Dem voting block by 2006, maybe by 2004 (but not in 2000), in large part because one party (Bush notwithstanding) was far more likely to use conflate Islam and terrorism a whole lot more than the other was. Someone can check my memory on that, but at any rate, I just don't see this event as looming very large within the general story of civil rights and civil liberties. I mean, we've basically had conservatives saying for the last couple of years that all Muslims should be tortured and that American Muslims shouldn't have any Constitutional protections within the criminal justice system; is this really a significant step after that?