RUTHFULLY YOURS

Science is a process for finding truth in our material world. The blossoming of science occurred in Medieval Europe and continued to flourish until the early part of the last century, almost exclusively in the Western world. This was not coincidental.

The combination of the ancient Greek desire for free inquiry combined with the Judeo-Christian belief in an orderly universe and, most vitally, the Judeo-Christian primary value of honesty created in poor, small Europe explosions in thought that the old, rich empires of the East could not achieve.

It is also not an accident that the overwhelming majority of early great scientists were either among a small pool of ancient Greeks – essentially Pythagoras, Archimedes, and Euclid – or among especially devout Medieval Christians – (Friar) Roger Bacon, (Bishop) Jean Buridan, (Bishop) Robert Grosseteste, (Father) Nicolai Copernicus, and (Canon) Galileo.

Because these profoundly devout Christians considered physics and mathematics simply another manifestation of a holy and ordered Creation, they never worshipped science. Lying was a sin, and lying about the nature of the world was a particularly serious sin, because it knowingly concealed the true nature of the world.

Within the Medieval university was that same sort of freedom and mutual respect that had never existed before except in the academy of Plato. As with the academy, the Medieval university had schools of thought and different interpretations of what phenomena meant. This was science.

Scientism, on the other hand, is a vile misology that arose at the end of the nineteenth century and has infected those processes intended to discover the truth about our world ever since. The most evil and dishonest regimes in modern history – Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Maoist China – were all utterly and passionately devoted to whatever pseudo-science was needed to support the party.

Often these regimes cranked out huge numbers of physicists, mathematicians, engineers, and related hard science disciplines, but it is not the quantity of trained scientists, but the quality of their environment that matters. We were afraid, at the beginning of the Cold War, that the hordes of physicists and engineers that the Soviet Union turned out would leave America behind. In fact, science did much better under the tsars than the Soviets.

Millions of Americans enrolled in for-profit colleges in recent years to learn a trade and find decent-paying work. A new study found devastating results for many of their careers.

The working paper, published this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research, tracks 1.4 million students who left a for-profit school from 2006 through 2008. Because students at these schools tend to be older than recent high-school graduates, they’ve spent time in the workforce. The researchers used Education Department and Internal Revenue Service data to track their earnings before and after they left school.

The result: Students on average were worse off after attending for-profit schools. Undergraduates were less likely to be employed, and earned smaller paychecks–about $600 to $700 per year less–after leaving school compared to their lives before. Those who enrolled in certificate programs made roughly $920 less per year in the six years after school compared to before they enrolled.

The key factor is that most of these students never earned a degree–they dropped out early. Excluding them, the minority of students who earned degrees saw an earnings bump after graduating.

“Certificate, associate’s, and bachelor’s degree students generally experience declines in earnings in the 5 to 6 years after attendance relative to their own earnings in the years before attendance,” write co-authors Stephanie Riegg Cellini of George Washington University and Nicholas Turner of the U.S. Treasury Department.

The picture is even worse when considering most students borrowed to attend the colleges. Nearly 9 out of 10 for-profit school students took on student debt; those in associate’s programs borrowed an average $8,000 and those in bachelor’s programs, $13,000. CONTINUE AT SITE

It is not every day that a panelist at a conference worries about getting killed later.
“You are going to get me killed…I have got my flight back home,” stated Pakistani religious freedom advocate Arafat Mazhar to an audience questioner at an April 20 Georgetown University conferencerecently made available online. His jarring response emphasized that the conference’s examination of Islamic blasphemy norms in Pakistan and the world beyond was no mere academic matter but involves global, often lethal, threats to freedom of speech and religion.

Mazhar’s statement occurred during the conference’s afternoon panel in an exchange with an audience member from Afghanistan studying in America. Mazhar emphasized that his organization Engage Pakistan currently only supports reforming the Islamic Republic of Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws with theological arguments such that these laws would not have a divine status. Any abolition of these laws, a proposition that has had deadly consequences for Pakistan’s Punjab provincial governor Salman Taseer and Federal Minister for Minority Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti, would be a much longer term goal.

Just as illuminating and disturbing was Mazhar’s Afghan interlocutor who cited a 2015 Afghan incident in which a mob brutally killed a woman accused of burning a Quran. “Had there been a good anti-blasphemy law” with codified standards, he suggested, “she would not have been killed that viciously.” On the basis of such conjectured more humane executions he accordingly asked, “Is it a good idea to get rid of the anti-blasphemy law or is it good to have a good law?”

Mazhar responded that empirical evidence contradicted such arguments previously made in favor of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. From Pakistan’s 1947 independence to the 1986 completion of these laws, Islamic blasphemy accusations caused only four extrajudicial killings, but after 1986 these killings increased by 2,500 percent. His fellow panelist, University of Notre Dame professor Daniel Philpott, noted that Pew studies had found that blasphemy laws had a perverse “pedagogical effect” in inciting hostility towards the protected faith’s opponents real or imagined.

Ambassador Alberto Fernandez, a retired American career diplomat, concurred on the panel that blasphemy laws are “like handing a loaded gun” to people. He cited a 2005 Sudan case where the government had dropped charges of insulting religion against a newspaper editor, but outraged mobs still demanded retribution. Months later his beheaded corpse turned up after a kidnapping.

Nicholas Christakis and his wife, Erika, came to Yale University in 2013 with high expectations. At Harvard, the couple had held prominent teaching and administrative roles. At Yale, Dr. Christakis, a sociologist and physician, received a laboratory directorship and four appointments; Ms. Christakis, an expert in early-childhood education, became a seminar instructor. Two years after their arrival at Yale, Dr. Christakis and Ms. Christakis were awarded positions as master and associate master of Silliman College, Yale’s largest residential college. (I attend the university and reside at Silliman).

Last week, the Christakises resigned those posts.

Their departure comes as no surprise. For seven months, the couple has been subject to bullying, harassment and intimidation. They inadvertently became a national media story last fall and catalyzed a month of campus protests, prompting Yale President Peter Salovey to tell minority students: “We failed you.”

The Christakises encountered a witch-hunt mentality on a contemporary college campus. It began fittingly on the day before Halloween, when Ms. Christakis questioned guidelines from Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee warning against “culturally unaware or insensitive” costumes. Ms. Christakis reasoned, in an email to Silliman residents, that students should decide for themselves how to dress for Halloween, without the administration’s involvement.

Student radicals of the 1960s might have recognized her note as a defense of free expression, but those days are long gone. Instead, Ms. Christakis was denounced as a proponent of cultural insensitivity. Irate students circulated petitions, wrote editorials and posted social-media tirades. They scribbled criticisms in chalk outside the Christakises’ home and posted degrading images of them online. Two student groups demanded their removal from Silliman. CONTINUE AT SITE