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By Gregory Taggart, February 11, 2011 9:44 pm

I showed this video on Quantitative Easing to my American Government students last night prior to our scheduled showing of the movie Absence of Malice. It’s a little over 7 minutes long. By minute 3 they were laughing out loud. It may be the first time they understood economics, something Amity Shlaes discusses in her Forbes piece, Economics by Cartoon.

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By Gregory Taggart, February 11, 2011 10:18 am

An interesting piece by Peter Wood in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the Academia v. Beck v. Piven controversy conversation. He writes,

This controversy might in principle have remained in the popular press, but it has in fact rather quickly become a topic of academic debate too. The Chronicle reported this week that Cary Nelson, president of the AAUP, issued a statement saying that Piven is the victim of “what nearly amounts to an American Fatwa,” from Beck’s “virulent attacks.” Nelson says, “Amid these relentless tirades, Professor Piven has herself begun to receive threats of violence.” And he concludes by calling for—what else?—civility: “We join others in strongly urging those who are critical of Professor Piven’s writings to advance their positions in ways that foster responsible criticism and debate.”

“Responsible criticism and debate.” These are the cynosures of academic discourse. Who would be opposed?

Actually, it would seem, quite a few, perhaps beginning with Cary Nelson himself, who, by invoking the idea of “an American Fatwa,” indulged in the kind of rhetoric that can hardly be called responsible or conducive to debate. If you imply that someone is seeking to kill his opponents, you have pretty much ruled out the grounds for a respectful airing of differences of opinion.

For the record, I have been unable to locate any instance in which Beck called for Piven’s death or incited violence against her. As many others have pointed out, however, Piven herself has long extolled the value of civil unrest up to and including riots, which would seem to put her own academic discourse in a place other than “responsible criticism and debate.”

Beck is no PhD, but he apparently has a DDS, and he has struck a nerve that has been exposed for a long time to anyone who has paid attention.

Hat Tip: Althouse

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By Gregory Taggart, February 9, 2011 2:55 pm

Veronique de Rugy, an economist at George Mason University, has a post at The Corner on bias an academia. This paragraph captures the essence:

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

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By Gregory Taggart, February 4, 2011 10:50 am

Among other things, Roger Rosenblatt teaches writing at Stony Brook University. He talks about teaching in a recent interview with The Christian Science Monitor.

Two key paragraphs hit home, the first, because it has already caused me to raise the bar for myself:

Who taught you to write?
I went to the the Friends Seminary in New York, which was a dreadful school largely, except for one fellow named Jon Beck Shank. He was a Mormon who had come out of the army, went to Yale, and was very interested in theater. He gave us Canada Mints to taste and said, “Taste this and write down what it tastes like,” so we would learn to write metaphor and simile. He had us read poetry, a great deal of poetry so as to appreciate original language. When we studied Shakespeare he had us build a model of the Globe Theater. He just did things that no other teacher would have thought of doing to get into our minds so that we would begin to understand that writing was something that was important to our lives. I was very very lucky to have had him. He meant the world to me.

The second, because it reminds me that I matter as a writing teacher:

What have your students taught you?
That they need me. They need me and my ilk. They need teachers who value them and their lives. Because writing is a validation of their lives and they know it. Whether they’re writing poetry, essays, or stories, it doesn’t matter. Every writing teacher gives the subliminal message, every time they teach: “Your life counts for something.” In no other subject that I know of is that message given.

I learned nothing new in either of these paragraphs, but I needed reminding.

By the way, I have never heard of Jon Beck Shank until today. A Mormon myself, I’m interested in knowing more.

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By Gregory Taggart, January 30, 2011 8:46 pm

I know the answer

The chicken came first:

Then the egg:

The secret’s out.

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By Gregory Taggart, January 25, 2011 11:01 pm

The Wall Street Journal thinks so.

Tomorrow is the big game. Go BYU.

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By Gregory Taggart, January 20, 2011 11:52 pm

Hadley Arkes spoke this evening in the Harold B. Lee Library Auditorium at Brigham Young University. Until I saw a poster on campus advertising his up-coming speech on Constitutionalism and Its Presupositions, I had never heard of him, even though he is apparently at the front in the battle to save traditional marriage and to abort abortion.

Afterwards, I did the obligatory Internet search on his name and also visited a new webzine he and others just launched. The Catholic Thing is now bookmarked on my computer.

His most recent contribution is titled Ave Maria University: A Challenge Among Friends, a piece in which he recounts a conversation he had recently with a friend, a Harvard grad, who now has two daughters at Ave Maria and promises never to send his children to Harvard because, according to Akres,

The new sexual ethic, whether on pornography, promiscuity, abortion, homoeroticism, is so pervasive, touching every aspect of life, that there is little room for those who will not pay homage to that reigning ethic.

I understand the man’s concern. I sent a daughter to Berkeley. However, I find myself more in agreement with Akres:

He may indeed be right. But I think of Fr. Benedict Ashley, a central figure in teaching on the theology of the body. Ben Ashley, in the 1930s at the University of Chicago, was a flaming atheist and perhaps a Communist – until he met Mortimer Adler, who confronted him with Aquinas and natural law, and flipped him. That flipping produced a writer who has educated several generations of Catholics.

Substitute Mormon for Catholic–or don’t–and I must thank the many intelligent and eloquent believers who labor in Babylon to shepherd God’s stray and sometimes confused lambs back into the fold, turning some of them into intelligent and eloquent defenders of the faith in the process.

By the way, as Adler did to Ben Ashley, Akres did to me. No, I’m still Mormon, but I am a Mormon who will be reading much more about natural law, beginning with Arkes’s book Natural Law & the Right to Choose.

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By Gregory Taggart, January 1, 2011 9:27 pm

My son gave me The 4-Hours Workweek to read, and it’s got me thinking. The take away so far is that we need to think outside the 9 – 5 box that employers put us in. The author, Tim Ferris, claims that by planning, implementing deadlines, and eliminating the unnecessary, you can cut your work week back to 4 hours.

Well, among other things, I teach writing. And I grade writing. Ferris’s book has me thinking about how I can serve my students, make my employer happy, and still cut back on the time I spend grading my students’ writing. A few ideas come to mind.

Since I’m an obsessive copy editor, my first order of business is to cut back on the amount of copy editing I do. I’ve tried this before by stopping after a page or two of pointing out comma errors and grammar problems and drawing two lines across the paper to indicate where I stopped. The idea is that since students can only work on so much, they should concentrate on the types of errors I’ve checked above the line. Once they’ve mastered those, the next time around the errors above the lines should be different.

Another idea is to give my students a list of say five or six problems that show up in most writing, and have them work only on them. That way, all I have to look for are those problems.

Finally, and probably the best idea of all, I need to stress peer review in class and out of class more. That way, the burden is on the student. Again, I could give them lists of five or six things to look for in the writing of others. Such repetitive learning should result in mastery of those five or six things.

Imagine how much better everybody’s writing would be if they simply eliminated the passive voice and mastered the comma. Add a more precise word choice and fewer words, and their writing should be singing in short order.

Is a 4-hour workweek in my future? Probably not, but I may be able to cut it to less than 40 hours.