Political Targeting, Unconscionable Delays, Harassing Questions

Have you heard about the scandal in Washington? Turns out that people are being targeted for their political beliefs. People in positions of authority are abusing their power. For no good reason (other than political animus) the powerful are imposing unconscionable delays on simple requests. Applicants are being forced to answer an absurd number of questions by out-of-control, power-drunk people in government.

But I'm not talking about the IRS. I'm talking about Republican Senators.

Recently, the Senate finally confirmed the nominee to head the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

It took them 510 days to do it.

President Obama has nominated Gina McCarthy to head the EPA. According to a New York Times report, Republican Senators have submitted 1,100 questions for her to answer. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew received 395 questions from Republicans (compared to 49 questions from Democrats to George W. Bush's Treasury nominee).

The committee considering Ms. McCarthy's nomination has been unable to vote on it because no Republican member of the committee will show up for a meeting, denying it a quorum.

The IRS officials who used search terms to identify conservative organizations for extra scrutiny were obviously wrong to do so. But it is more than a little ironic to hear Republicans loudly denounce as a scandalous abuse of power harassment tactics that they regularly use to deny the president his nominees.

This is not "advise and consent" by any reasonable definition of that phrase. It is pure obstructionism.

Rand Paul's "Outreach"

Commenting on Rand Paul's address at Howard University, Andrew Sullivan wrote yesterday:

"I have to say the sheer lack of any grace among some liberal commenters on what was an obvious outreach to African-Americans depresses me." Sullivan thinks critics have been "too harsh" and that Paul deserves some credit for his criticism of the drug war.

Sorry, but the fact that Paul had one idea that might actually benefit some part of the black community does not mean he gets a pass on the rest of that address.

Like his father, Rand Paul often does get a pass because of the evident sincerity of his beliefs. Sincerity is certainly refreshing among politicians and to be lauded when it appears. But I find it hard to believe Paul was being sincere at Howard University.

I wrote nearly three years ago in the aftermath of his infamous interview with Rachel Maddow, "I believe Paul is sincere when he says he has no racial animus." I still believe that (that some people seem to think this in itself is notable and commendable is a sad commentary in and of itself).

But when confronted with that interview by a questioner at Howard, Paul disputed that he had ever "wavered in my support for civil rights or the Civil Rights Act." That is simply not true. He is on record opposing the part of the act that applies to privately owned businesses.

He believes that restaurant owners ought not to discriminate against black customers because it is bad business, but he does not believe government should make that illegal. He opposes that part of the Civil Rights Act (and a not insignificant part it is). But he did not have the integrity to say that at Howard. He lied instead.

Paul was also asked by a questioner: "Are we discussing the Republican Party of the 19th century or are we discussing the post-1968 Republican Party?" His response was either dishonest or stunningly ignorant: "The argument I'm trying to make is we haven't changed," he said.

Paul completely ignored the history of the "southern strategy," with which the questioner was clearly familiar. Even when asked about it, Paul simply denied it. Instead he said: "the Republican Party has always [emphasis added] been the party of civil rights and voting rights."

There can be no true Republican "outreach" or "re-branding" on civil rights unless the party ends its denial and confronts and forthrightly repudiates its history since the Civil Rights Act. The undeniable truth is that the GOP made a conscious, deliberate decision to exploit the white backlash against that law, and has been reaping political benefits among some white voters ever since.

Also on the topic of Republican re-branding, one aspect of Paul's address has gotten relatively little attention: the way he revealed that he basically shares Mitt Romney's 47% mindset and Paul Ryan's "makers and takers" rhetoric.

After extolling the largely positive civil rights record of the Republicans through the 1950s, Paul did attempt to explain why the GOP lost African-Americans. His explanation is the same as Romney's for why he lost the last election: the Democrats bought black votes:

"I think what happened during the Great Depression was that African Americans understood that Republicans championed citizenship and voting rights but they became impatient for economic emancipation.... The Democrats promised equalizing outcomes through unlimited federal assistance while Republicans offered something that seemed less tangible-the promise of equalizing opportunity through free markets."

"Equalizing outcomes through unlimited federal assistance." The Democrats bought your votes, he effectively said, by offering you free stuff. And, unfortunately, African-Americans somehow have failed to see the "less tangible" benefits of Republican policies. He seems blissfully unaware of how insulting that argument is.

He also plays a cynical game. He tries to turn his brand of libertarianism into the instrument of black liberation, by equating his aversion to federal power in general with the African-American opposition to the abuse of power by the states of the Jim Crow South.

"The history of African-American repression in this country rose from government-sanctioned racism." That much is true.

"Jim Crow laws were a product of bigoted state and local governments." Also true.

"Big and oppressive government has long been the enemy of freedom, something black Americans know all too well."

Not true.

It was not "big" government that brought about Jim Crow. It was oppressive small governments. It was an empowered, big, federal government that proved to be the only institution in America able to end Jim Crow. African Americans know that, even if Rand Paul pretends to be naively unaware of it. His blinkered view of freedom is one that, had it ruled the day in 1964, would have left intact the daily insults to the dignity of every African American, as long as the perpetrators were private individuals and businesses. The audience at Howard knew that too.

Paul also showed an appalling ignorance of the Constitution: "The bill of rights and the civil war amendments," he said, "protect us against the possibility of an oppressive federal or state government." It makes no sense to conflate the Bill of Rights and the Reconstruction Amendments. The first ten amendments all limit the federal government, but the 13th, 14th, and 15th all empower the federal government. And it was that empowerment that made possible the final abolition of slavery, the temporary civil rights advances of the Reconstruction era, and eventually, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.

People who do not wear the kind of ideological blinders permanently attached to Paul know that federal power is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. It depends on circumstances, on how it is employed. But that seems too confusing for the simplistic libertarian mind to wrap itself around. It is so much easier to just flatly deny any historical reality that contradicts your infallible ideology. And then condescendingly tell other people, who know all too well that historical reality, that they have simply failed to appreciate your truth because your ideas "seemed less tangible."

Rand Paul had barely begun his speech when he effectively congratulated himself for giving it: "Some have said that I’m either brave or crazy to be here today." Andrew Sullivan may be more inclined to the former, but if Rand Paul honestly thinks the message he gave at Howard was true "outreach" that will win over many African American voters, I'm inclined toward the latter.

A Revolution in Parenting

Parents around the world had been buzzing for months about massive open online parenting, or MOOPs: Internet-based parenting programs designed to raise thousands of children simultaneously, in part using the tactics of social-networking websites. To supplement video parenting, much of the learning comes from online comments, questions, and discussions. Children even evaluate one another's behavior, relieving the online parent of the tedium of correcting them.

MOOPs exploded into parenting consciousness in summer 2012, when a free parenting platform offered by Cranford University in California attracted 160,000 children from around the world — 23,000 of whom finished it. Now, Parentsera in Valley View, California — one of the three researcher-led start-up companies actively developing MOOPs — is inviting star parents to submit parenting courses for broadcast on its software platform.

Self-esteem boosting, tender loving care, and homework help courses have been in the vanguard of the movement, but offerings in bedtime reading, discipline, and moral guidance are growing in popularity. “In 25 years of observing parenting, I've never seen anything move this fast,” says Dr. Benjamin Mock, a parentologist and leading MOOP entrepreneur at Cranford.

The ferment is attributable in part to MOOPs hitting at exactly the right time. Our increasingly competitive and flat world cannot take the risk of allowing individualized parenting, which is often done by people with less than spectacular parenting skills. Traditional parenting is simply too inefficient and not cost effective. Bricks-and-mortar homes are unlikely to keep up with the demand for advanced parenting. In-home parents are also under tremendous financial pressure, especially in the United States, and unable to provide the kind of hands-on parenting of previous generations. With MOOPs, however, the cream of the parenting crop — parents who otherwise might have only raised three or four (at most maybe eight or nine) children — can reach thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of children.

Dr. Mock got involved in because he wanted to bring quality parenting to “the people who otherwise would never be able to get good parenting,” he says. Following a path blazed by the open-source software movement, he started a project to post online free parenting videos and handouts. His approach was fairly crude, he admits: just record the parental lectures, put them online and hope for the best. But to his astonishment, strangers started coming up to him and saying, “Are you Professor Mock? I've been taking ‘Do Your Homework’ with you!” He began to grasp how far online parenting could reach, and started working on a scaled-up version of his system. “When one parent can raise 50,000 children,” he says, “it alters the economics of parenting.”

Since even the best parents don't have a clue about how to exploit the online medium, companies develop their courses in-house, working with parenting experts to make the child-rearing as effective as possible.

MOOPs address the problem of a lack of the individual attention normally associated with traditional parenting with support discussion forums, video feeds and other basic online services, so that an instructor parent only has to provide the content.

Online discussion forums are a good way to bring communities of children together — for 100 or so users. “With 100,000 children it gets more complicated,” he says. Hundreds or even thousands of children might end up asking the same question. So the developers implemented a real-time search algorithm that would display related questions and potential answers before a child could finish asking.

Mock also let children vote items up or down, much like on the link-sharing website Reddit, so that the most insightful questions would rise to the top rather than being lost in the chatter. “No more ‘Why is the sky blue, Daddy?’ in these discussions!” Mock exclaims.

Virtually everyone participating in this upheaval agrees on one thing. In-person parenting will change — perhaps dramatically — but it will not entirely disappear. “No one says that all parenting has to be online,” says Mock. “Sometimes — though admittedly rarely — a home is better. But a home really isn’t at all profitable, is it?”

Irish Pride

In case it isn't obvious from the name, I'm Irish, mostly: three-quarters Irish, one-quarter German. At the risk of perpetuating stereotypes, I like to joke that I get my love of reason and ordered thinking from the German side and my sense of humor and love of arguing from the Irish side.

I grew up hearing Irish music in the house (Clancy Brothers, Irish Rovers), and not just on St. Patrick's Day. I've always been conscious of being Irish and have drawn a sense of pride from it. Ethnic identity can be a powerful good, but it can also be ugly. Keeping the former without the latter can be tricky.

When I teach the subject of nationalism in Western Civ, I have the students read a piece from 1789 by Richard Price. As an Enlightenment thinker, Price warns that love of country "which is our duty, does not imply any conviction of the superior value of it to other countries." Every celebration of one's nationality or heritage threatens to bleed over into "love of domination; a desire of conquest, and a thirst for grandeur and glory."

So how do we keep ethnic pride from becoming something ugly? Guisseppe Mazzini, the 19th century Italian nationalist, said we do it by always remembering that in "labouring for our own country on the right principle, we labour for Humanity." Have pride in your own, but always remember that you and your people are part of all Humanity, no better, no worse.

Looking back, I can now realize when I was taught that lesson. I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, when the civil rights revolution was taking place. I was a child and had a limited sense of the events going on around me, but at some point something must have registered with me. I don't remember exactly when, but I must have asked my Dad about it. His exact words are lost, but the sentiment stuck with me.

He reminded me that we were Irish, and that when the Irish first came to the United States, they sometimes suffered discrimination. (Family legend has it that the name was originally "O'Byrne" and the "O" was dropped and the "S" added to make it sound less Irish.) If it was wrong to do that to them then, he told me, it was wrong to do it to black Americans now too.

As I learned more about the history, I realized that the two situations were not exactly comparable, but the simple lesson held true: if it is wrong when it is done to one of your own, it is wrong when it is done to anyone. Simple enough for a child to understand, easily forgotten by too many adults.

This is the right way to use ethnic pride--not to exalt some over others, but to reinforce our common humanity; to unite, not divide; to foster empathy, not hatred.

So St. Patrick's Day is not a day for me to lord my Irish heritage over all of you unfortunate enough to not share it (as tempting as that is), but to celebrate the Irish in everyone. 

Sláinte!

MOOCs and Books, Ctd.

Thomas Friedman continued his love affair with MOOCs this week. Some of us "may think this MOOCs revolution is hyped," he wrote. But we're wrong, because one Harvard professor who is about to teach the first Humanities MOOC on edX was asked to throw out the first pitch at a baseball game in South Korea. No, I'm not making that up.

Friedman is confusing celebrity and fame with being an effective teacher. Since this professor's lectures have been seen on TV and online, he is now famous in places like South Korea and China. I am all for this--I'd love a world in which professors who lecture on justice are routinely as popular as "Hollywood movie stars and N.B.A. players."

My question for Friedman would be this: did Carl Sagan revolutionize teaching? He was a learned scholar, and his "Cosmos" programs were seen probably by millions (maybe even "billions and billions"?), and he achieved celebrity and pop culture fame. But his success at popularizing science did not change the way we learn.

Moreover, Friedman really does not seem to understand the difference between MOOCs and online education (or using online resources in traditional classes). The key word in the acronym is "massive." These courses purport to be able to do for tens (even hundreds) of thousands of students what college and university classes do for dozens or at most hundreds now.

But he blithely slides into a discussion of the "blended model" in which online lectures are "combined with teacher-led classroom experience." There is simply no way this can be done in a MOOC. There can be no meaningful "teacher-led classroom experience" that is also "massive."

Friedman actually says "we have to get beyond the current system of information and delivery--the professorial 'sage on a stage.'" I had to read that twice to be sure he really said that--MOOCs are the ultimate "sage on a stage" experience. Those 20 million Chinese views he earlier extolled were pure "sage on a stage." The MOOC is almost exclusively a means of information delivery. Yet Friedman seems utterly unaware of the contradiction.

What MOOCs promise (at least as represented in Friedman's fevered prose) is ultimately impossible. Their massive nature precludes it. He says, for example, that all that matters now is that you "can prove you mastered the competency." How does a MOOC do this? If the competency is critical thinking, no professor, even with assistants, can judge that in a MOOC. So what are MOOCs moving toward? Peer grading. So the people who decide whether you have "mastered the competency" are also people who are in the process of mastering the competency themselves. In what other area would anyone accept such a proposition?

Peer evaluation can be a good teaching tool. In our Historiography and Research Methods course here at Wofford, we do a peer evaluation exercise. But the actual grade is not assigned by another student. The professor grades both the essay under peer review and the review itself. Having done this many times, I can assure you that students cannot competently grade each other--certainly not without oversight. Many times a student will "correct" something that is not wrong or offer terrible advice that would make the essay worse rather than better. Only someone who has mastered the competency already is in a position to judge those things.

Friedman makes an obligatory nod to the "huge value in the residential college experience and the teacher-student and student-student interactions it facilitates." But, he continues, they cannot survive without "blending in technology." That just shows how little Friedman understands current realities. That's being done all the time--but NOT in MOOC style. (A tool like Moodle, e.g., allows for posting PDFs and videos to an online syllabus, as well as online discussion, and is used widely at Wofford College right now).

The real problem is what Friedman thinks technology can do. Technology, he says, can "improve education outcomes in measurable ways at lower costs."

That's the fantasy at the heart of MOOC mania. The very things that create that "huge value" are not "measurable," and cannot come at "lower costs." As I wrote in my previous MOOC post, the mirage is the same old one: a quick, cheap technological fix.

Friedman says "We still need more research on what works." While more research and more data is always good, I disagree. We know what works: dedicated teachers, low student-faculty ratios, experts who give concrete individual feedback on student work. We know these things work. They just don't come cheap.

If American society were determined to provide better educational opportunities to more people, it could do so without a single MOOC. There are thousands upon thousands of unemployed or underemployed PhDs out there, ready, willing, and able to give students the individual attention they need to thrive. But that does not come at "lower costs."  It is time to face the fact that in American higher education, we want the quick pay-off and we want it cheaply. This is the short-term corporate mindset come to education. We could simply make a choice to invest in more colleges, to increase the government funding given to state universities. Instead, as a nation, we have been disinvesting in higher education. We lack the will to put the money into it. MOOCs foster the illusion that we can have our cake and eat it too.

One footnote on the benefits of the old ways of doing things: I read Friedman's column the old-fashioned way. In print. Right along side it on the page was another op-ed by David Toscana entitled "The Country That Stopped Reading," about the education system in Mexico. One sentence struck me: "In our schools, children are being taught what is easy to teach rather than what they need to learn." That is the danger of MOOCs--that we will let the technology drive what we teach. As Toscana says, "it’s not about pedagogical theories and new techniques that look for shortcuts. The educational machine does not need fine-tuning; it needs a complete change of direction. It needs to make students read, read and read."

Does anyone think MOOCs will do that?

The Perverse, Anti-democratic Logic of Antonin Scalia

This past week, the Supreme Court heard arguments on the Voting Rights Act. The nearly 50 year old landmark legislation is under challenge by those who claim that its work is effectively done. The challengers argue there is no need for states (and other areas) with a history of discriminatory tactics to be under any special burden to show that proposed changes in voting practices will not be discriminatory.

Some of the "questions" from Justices John Roberts and Antonin Scalia have received a lot of attention: Roberts for falsely claiming that Massachusetts had the worst record of racial disparity in voter registration, and Scalia for despicably calling the continuation of the current provisions of the Voting Rights Act the "perpetuation of a racial entitlement."

Scalai made another less obviously loathesome, but just as disturbing, statement. With stunning arrogance, he claimed that the unanimous vote in the Senate in 2006 to reauthorize the act is precisely why it needs to be ruled unconstutional. Pointing to the widespread support for the law, he said: "Now, I don’t think that’s attributable to the fact that it is so much clearer now that we need this." (It never seems to occur to him that we might have a political consensus that we need it.)

Scalia evidently not only believes that he has the ability to read the minds of the Framers of the Constitution, but also believes he can read the minds of today's legislators. Those 98 senators (and by extension the 390 members of the House) who voted for it did so not out of conviction, but because there was no benefit in voting against it: "I don’t think there is anything to be gained by any Senator to vote against continuation of this act."

What a bizarre argument: the Court must step in and rule the law unconstitutional because Congress won't vote against it. The law, it seems, is too popular, and that's why it needs to go.

As I've written before, Scalia does not make a constitutional argument: he decides on a politically preferable outcome and figures out how to achieve that result, with no concern for consistency or principle.

What is particularly sickening about Scalia's approach to this question is that, on a superficial level, it echoes the arguments for Court decisions in civil rights cases like Brown v. Board of Education. Because local and state governments had systematically disenfranchised black voters, the political process in those places had in fact become a "racial entitlement"--for whites. That made it impossible for the political system to produce a just and constitutional outcome because that local political consensus (among whites) effectively prohibited political participation by black members of the community. As long as that was true, there was no "benefit" to legislators to vote to end Jim Crow. It was thus necessary for the Court to step in and rectify that situation by ruling against segregation.

Scalia, in what strikes me as a disgustingly cynical inversion, now argues that our current mechanism for insuring the right to vote is a similar flaw in our system: it creates, Lord help us, a situation in which elected representatives see no advantage in opposing the means of insuring the right to vote. 

That is exactly what it was meant to do. A well-functioning democracy requires that its citizens have equal access to the ballot box. When all members of society have that access, they can protect their own rights through the democratic process. That was the purpose of the Voting Rights Act--and that result is what Scalia finds objectionable.

Yes, Justice Scalia, no senator sees benefit in voting against legislation that protects the most basic right of a citizen in a democracy. But no, it is not a problem. It is a solution.

That Scalia equates the evidence of the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act with the evidence of the effectiveness of Jim Crow tells us all we need to know about his approach to this question. That a member of the Court today could espouse such views is evidence of how far we still have to go to achieve the "color-blind" society Scalia would like to pretend we've already achieved.

Presidents and Precedents

Today is the federal holiday for Washington's Birthday, which we now refer to generically as Presidents' Day. There are many reasons to honor the first president, if only because of the many positive precedents he set--eschewing any form of address that smacked of royalty, e.g., or not running for a third term. The latter is particularly important, because had he done so and won (which he likely would have), he would have died in office in 1799, meaning that the new United States would have had the example of a president holding onto the office until death, instead of voluntarily stepping aside.

In that same light, there was another precedent set by his less-revered successor, that perhaps deserves our notice on Presidents' Day. Few historians would place John Adams up there with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Franklin Roosevelt in the pantheon. But he did at least one thing that should not go unremarked: he gave up power, not because he wanted to, but because the voters wanted him to.

Adams ran for re-election in 1800 and lost the hotly contested campaign to his vice-president, Thomas Jefferson. Throughout the contest, the two sides had predicted calamity if the other prevailed. Abigail Adams believed that "the peace, safety, and security" of the nation depended on her husband's re-election. If he were not returned to office, she wrote, "I am mortally certain we shall never have another" election.

Yet, when the votes went against Adams, he accepted the verdict. Perhaps the near-simultaneous death of his son Charles helped put his electoral defeat into perspective. Rather than plotting how he might remain in office, or how he might later re-gain power, Adams moved on: "The only question remaining with me is what shall I do with myself?" No unquenchable thirst for power consumed him: "I must go out on a morning and evening and fodder my cattle, I believe, and take a walk every afternoon to Penn's Hill--pother in my garden among the fruit trees and cucumbers and plant a potato yard with my own hand."

This precedent is among the most under-appreciated in our history. Yes, Washington chose not to run a third time and gave up power. But Adams had tried to remain in power. He hoped that the garden he would be tending the next four years was the United States. It was not his will to return to Massachusetts in March 1801. He believed in all sincerity that the voters were wrong. But when the vote went against him, he accepted it and went home.

This unquestioning respect for process should have our admiration and emulation. In an age in which far too many people believe that the definition of a "bad process" is one that produces a result they do not like, Adams shows us that respect for process transcends our personal desires, beliefs, and ambitions.

As Pope Benedict showed last week, sometimes the best example to set is not grasping for power, or desperately clinging to it, but the graceful relinquishment of it.