Facts Against Rhetoric

Good being here.

No. I thought of it as enabling students to get an education despite being in college.

Because rhetoric and visions play such a large part in higher education. I saw a replay recently of AOC, the congresswoman from New York, and I was amazed that there seemed to be no factual issue as far as she's concerned. She just pronounces things to be so, and that's the end of it. Too many college students, and high school students, are introduced to a certain vision, for example, that the capitalists are exploiting the workers, and they memorize it and talk about it as if it's a known fact, and there's no developing in them the ability to look at two different views and figure out which is correct. Back when I taught a course with a lot of controversial material, I'd spend a great deal of time putting together a reading list, the strongest argument on one side, and the best example I could find of the opposing view, and when I tested them, I didn't test them on which side you believed, I tested them on whether they understood the arguments on both sides. That is rarely done today.

I don't think so. But if he was, the way to answer would be to put forth opposite evidence to what he's saying, and that's what doesn't happen. A lot of what is called education is really indoctrination. It's not a question of whether I happen to agree with Milton Friedman. It's a question of whether the people who disagree have any facts, any reasoning, any logic relevant to what he's saying. All too often, they don't.

Absolutely. Without that, civilization would not be possible. Every one of us is vulnerable. Take it from birth, we come into the world knowing nothing, we don't even know that we need food, much less how to get any. So you must have a structure out there. And even into adulthood and old age, there are times when other people are essential to our own wellbeing. I think of all this talk about equality. In one sense equality is enormously important, and in another sense enormously irrelevant. It's important that we have equality before the law, that we regard each other with a certain kind of equality. But to talk in terms of equality of capabilities is madness. If you're the world's leading authority on some particular subject, that doesn't mean you have even minimal competence in a hundred other things. One of the most dangerous things among intellectuals is they assume they know better than other people about all sorts of things, including things those people know from their own personal experience. That's what makes intellectuals so dangerous.

All groups have their own cultures, and within the same race there are internal differences in culture. One of the great handicaps the Black community has had historically is that during slavery Blacks were concentrated 90% or more in the South, and the South had its own culture, different from other parts of Britain the settlers came from. I've gone into this at length in Black Rednecks and White Liberals. The people who came from the South had this culture back in Britain, where they were called crackers and rednecks. Once transferred to the United States, that same culture was a huge handicap, and that's the culture Blacks grew up in. Over generations, Blacks, like the whites, began to put aside that culture to operate in more productive ways. But this counterproductive culture persists in many low-income ghettos, and there are intellectuals who celebrate it and try to keep it going, when in fact it's a great handicap.

Yes. This is part of a larger pattern in looking at statistics over time. Everything depends on the date you arbitrarily choose as the beginning. Many credit Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed, with making the country conscious of auto safety, and after the government agencies came in, the death rate in automobiles went down. But if you go back 30 years before Nader, automobile fatality rates were already going down, and at a far higher rate than after him. In the case of Blacks, I'd pick 1940 to 1960. In 1940, 82% of Black children were raised with two parents. After the '60s, that fell to 17%. You've destroyed one of the key institutions of any society, the family. Similarly with violence: the homicide rate among Black males fell 18% during the 1940s, and again by 22% in the '50s. In the 1960s, when all progress is assumed to have begun, the Supreme Court began creating new constitutional rights for criminals, and almost immediately the homicide rate doubled, after three consecutive decades of falling rates. Some things can be coincidences, but I don't think that qualifies.

They did harm, and across the society, not just among racial minorities. You have people who've had meaning taken out of their lives. Having a family to support, a child to raise, that puts meaning in people's lives. But when all of that is taken out by the government, and especially when the government pays people when there's no husband present and not if there is a husband present, you're subsidizing a social change that does far more harm than whatever incidental good you're doing by handing out money.

It suggests we ought to spend a lot more time comparing these cases where students are in comparable places, same building, same neighborhood, most from low-income families. And they didn't put the smarter kids in one system; charter schools admit deliberately by lottery, so they're taking whoever wins, not picking the smartest. The school you mentioned is one I went to as a teenager in junior high, on 129th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan. One of my great frustrations is that despite whatever praise the book got, it changed nothing. It should be a high priority to let low-income Black, Hispanic, and other families know what difference the charter schools can make. Not all are good, but ironically, even the disappointing charter schools almost invariably still do better than the traditional public school housed in the same building.

The unions collect billions of dollars in union dues, and they spend millions financing the campaigns of politicians who will do whatever the unions want. It's painful that even people who started out wanting to give parents a choice, when they learn the political realities, realize they won't get the teachers' union money if they don't try to stop the charter schools. And the things done to stop them, in various cities with population loss, there are plenty of vacant schoolhouses, and the educational establishment does everything it can to prevent charter schools from using them. In some places they've simply demolished schools vacant for years to make sure the charter schools can't use them, that's happened in Chicago and across the country.

Yes, but there's another side. The teachers' unions have put in all kinds of roadblocks. In California, the law says charter schools are not allowed to suspend or expel students who disrupt the schools. Can you imagine any educational benefit from that? One reason charter schools are good is that they insist on maintaining law and order. So when kids do all kinds of things, including beating up teachers, the kid doesn't get expelled. The charter schools were put in as an experiment, more freedom to try things, and if some worked, they could be transferred to the traditional public schools. What's actually happening is the reverse: you transfer the things that are failing in the public schools and force them on the charter schools. Instead of bringing the traditional schools up to the charter schools' level, politicians are bringing the charter schools down to the level of the traditional schools.

When I was in the Marine Corps I was trained as a photographer, and in the barracks, down South in the 1950s, I was the only Black photographer. When the white Marines from the South took a picture that went wrong, they'd come to me rather than to the white photographers. It baffled me for about 20 years. Then at UCLA, teaching a course, a young man came to me with the textbook, a passage he couldn't understand, and asked me to explain it. I did, and he said, "Are you sure?" I said, "Yes, I'm sure. I wrote the textbook." People use race as a way of getting at other things. Those white Marines had no way of knowing who knew more about photography, but they knew that if the Marine Corps had trained some Black man to be a photographer, he was probably pretty damn good. And conversely, after affirmative action, when I have far more experience, the students are questioning whether I know what I'm doing.

Yes, and not incidentally, to ensure the universities can continue to get hundreds of millions of dollars each, places like Columbia, which they couldn't get if they didn't have a certain percentage of minority students. If they don't have minority representation similar to the population, they can be accused of discrimination, and that can cost them money. So these Black students, put in institutions where they're likely to fail even though there are hundreds of other institutions where they'd have succeeded, are there more or less as human shields.

After Cornell started admitting Black students with qualifications not as high as the students already there, I discovered half the Black students were on academic probation. I looked up the test scores. The average Black student at Cornell scored at the 75th percentile on the SAT, they did better than three-quarters of the students who took that test. But at Cornell's liberal arts college, the average student was at the 99th percentile. The professors teach to the students they have, faster pace, fewer explanations. So someone perfectly capable of handling the work, if it were taught at a pace geared to the 75th percentile, cannot keep up. It was even more extreme at MIT, the average Black student in one study was at the 90th percentile in mathematics, top 10% nationally, but at MIT that put them in the bottom, because virtually everyone at MIT is in the top 1%.

Adjectives are not always the main thing. I'm ready to deal with the factual evidence, that minority students do better when they're put in institutions where the other students have qualifications similar to theirs. The University of California is a classic example. Great numbers of Black and Hispanic students were brought in and sent to Berkeley or UCLA, and they were doing very badly, as they admitted more, the number graduating declined absolutely. The voters voted to end affirmative action admissions. It was predicted there'd be no more Black students. It turns out over the next few years there were a thousand more Black students who graduated from that system, not sent to UCLA and Berkeley, but to campuses where the other students had qualifications similar to their own. And students put where it's a struggle just to keep from being flunked out switch from difficult subjects like math, science, and engineering into things like sociology and education. The point of going to college is not to be on campus, but to graduate so you can go out into the world and do something.

Unfortunately, that decision included something by the Chief Justice about how you could somehow read stuff that told you the student's race and consider that. The same game was played with the Bakke decision years ago, what it amounted to was that you can't have racial quotas if you call them quotas, but you can if you call them something else. I don't know how this latest caveat will work out in practice, but I found it very painful that a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court would suggest some way to evade the decision being made.

It's painful to see what a ruinous decision from back in the 1920s being repeated. Insofar as he's using these tariffs to get various strategic things settled, and he's satisfied with that, fine. But if you set off a worldwide trade war, that has a devastating history, everybody loses, because everybody follows suit, and you get a great reduction in international trade. It's disturbing in another sense. Franklin Roosevelt said you have to try things, and if they don't work, admit it, abandon it, and try something else. That's not a bad approach if you're operating within a known system of rules. But if you are the one making the rules, then all the other people have no idea what you're going to do next, and that is a formula for having people hang on to their money until they figure out what you're going to do. And when a lot of people hang on to their money, you get results such as the Great Depression. If this is just a set of short-run ploys for limited objectives, fine, maybe. But if this is going to be the policy for four long years, you'll try this, then that, then something else, a lot of people are going to wait.

Yes, and it's one of the most encouraging developments, one I was surprised to see finally come. One reason it's so hard to get a decent education for low-income Black kids is that the Black vote has gone automatically to the Democrats by huge margins for a very long time, and it's the Democrats who get the money from the teachers' union, for which they'll let the union do whatever it wants, regardless of whether that's bad news for the Black kids who can't get a decent education. However, Jason Riley writes for The Wall Street Journal, and low-income people are not likely to be reading it. The civil rights organizations have lined up with the teachers' union, and they're doing it for the same reason the politicians do, they get money from them. Decades ago a Black Democrat I knew said, "The NAACP has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the labor unions." He didn't say it publicly, but he said it to me privately. Years ago I did a book, Affirmative Action Around the World, Malaysia, Israel, England, and again and again I saw the same pattern: wonderful beliefs and an utter failure to look empirically at what happens when you put the programs into action.

First, they should understand something about the actual history of the United States instead of the propaganda, that's not likely to happen. This is a problem that extends beyond Blacks and other low-income minorities. This longer-than-a-year curse of anti-Semitism all over the country, not just in words but in violence, is going to be very tough to get rid of. But I think it can be, and taking away the money from Columbia is a perfect first step. Columbia's not the only one, they're the ones who got caught red-handed. We need to stop thinking about these institutions as places that are so wonderful and have great people. The latest issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education is expressing outrage that the government dares to expect these institutions to live up to the laws. It is long overdue for them to live up to the laws.

[reading Basic Economics] "However useful economics may be for understanding many issues, it is not as emotionally satisfying as more personal and melodramatic depictions of these issues, often found in the media and in politics. Dry, empirical questions are seldom as exciting as political causes or the ringing moral pronouncements. But empirical questions are questions that must be asked if we are truly interested in the well-being of others, rather than in excitement or a sense of moral superiority for ourselves. Perhaps the most important distinction is between what sounds good and what works."

Thank you.