We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Higher Ed is not one thing. It is many things from a nursing degree at a community college to a BA from a state college to a doctorate in Philosophy at an Ivy.
It is all pretty much as expensive as the market will bear because greed is in the nature of institutions. It's never enough.
What is the proper role of the federal government in higher ed? My problem with it, as you might suspect, is that government "help" always ends up with government control. That's how Leviathan rolls. The College Try
It is a complicated topic. Private schools can and should accept whoever the heck they want for whatever reasons they want. However relevant SAT scores and grades are, they are not the only things of interest to colleges and not the only measures of merit or of potential. If all a school cares about is IQ, then a combined SAT is an excellent proxy for that.
It has always seemed quite simple to me: Socialist schemes require governmental force while free markets permit people to do what people naturally do of their own accord- trade things they make, or trade their work, to get whatever they want. Freedom can not exist without property rights.
Of course, there are no truly free-market nations, so it is all relative.
For an excellent summary of the inspirations of the socialist, "idealistic," totalitarian-minded youth, The Leftist Intellectuals Hovering over the Campuses. Short version: They want my stuff, by force if necessary. Take my freedom, my autonomy, my stuff - and then what? Shoot me as a bourgeois, hang me as a kulak - and then what happens?
“Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem, are insufferable in their human contacts.” Before the Fall, Adam and Eve were sinless, cognitively innocent and morally innocent. But after the Fall, with moral innocence shattered, this other innocence turns into a mode of obtuseness. It is sin-blind and self-unaware. It will not and cannot see itself addressed when Jesus looks upon sinners and says with authority, “go and sin no more.”
Myron Magnet summarizes the history of the decay of the US Constitution. Even the founders thought that might be inevitable, given their wisdom about human nature, but they did their best to provide roadblocks. Securing the blessings of liberty (from government, of course) and securing defense from exterior powers...
There is always the excuse of a reason: Security, or To Do Good.
... we had better understand just what happened. There’s no single villain. As these books show, all branches of government conspired over more than a century to turn the Constitution that the Framers wrote in 1787, plus the Bill of Rights that James Madison shepherded through the first Congress in 1789 and the Fourteenth Amendment ratified in 1868, into something their authors would neither recognize nor endorse.
"No believer in force truly respects his fellow-men. He always slightly despises them, even while he serves them. They tend to become for him mere material for carrying out his views. His views may be honestly and sincerely held; they may be excellent in themselves; but when he uses force on their behalf he commits the capital mistake of exalting himself and his views into the first place, and of degrading his fellow-men, with an intelligence and conscience like and equal to his own, into the second place. Thus it comes about that the user of force loses all hold on moral principles; he becomes a law, and a very defective law, to himself; and thus it comes about also that politics – which are simply the method of force – are in every country not only the battlefield of opposed fighters, but the hotbed of intrigue and corruption."
Now 71, Scruton has been the bête noire of British left intellectuals for more than 30 years, and gives them another beastly mauling in his new book Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. It is a tour de force that, the introduction concedes, is ‘not a word-mincing book’, but rather ‘a provocation’. In just under 300 pages he Scruton-izes a collection of stars, past and present, of the radical Western intelligentsia – the likes of Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson in Britain, JK Galbraith and Ronald Dworkin in the US, Jurgen Habermas, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze in Europe. An expanded and updated version of his controversial Thinkers of the New Left (1985), the book ends with a new chapter entitled ‘The kraken wakes’ dealing with the ‘mad incantations’ of Alan Badiou and the left’s marginally newer academic celebrity, the Slovenian Zizek.
I support the idea of "holistic" college admissions. Not "holistic" as an excuse to admit unprepared students, but holistic in the sense of students with many different talents and areas of potential besides just their SAT scores. (I would use SAT for screening, though, as it is essentially an IQ test.)
I will want musicians, mathematicians, writers, actors, geniuses, etc. I would want people who comport themselves as ladies and gentlemen. I would not have athletic admissions though except as an extra extracurricular on an otherwise desirable resume.
Some admissions officer somewhere claimed that Stanford could fill its entering class with Asians with perfect SAT scores. Well, those kids are smart, and driven. Some are surely overachieving drudges but so are some non-Asians. Some claim that Asians are the new Jews, discriminated against because of their drive and academic success.
If I ran a college, I would ignore race and ethnicity entirely, and look for interesting people with depth, curiosity, academic and other talents, energy, and integrity.
A wonderful topic, often discussed: All Stories Are the Same - From Avatar to The Wizard of Oz, Aristotle to Shakespeare, there’s one clear form that dramatic storytelling has followed since its inception.
Dr. Lawrence M. Principe is Drew Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. Professor Principe earned a B.S. in Chemistry and a B.A. in Liberal Studies from the University of Delaware. He also holds two doctorates: a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from Indiana University, Bloomington, and a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Johns Hopkins University. In 1999, the Carnegie Foundation chose Professor Principe as the Maryland Professor of the Year, and in 1998 he received the Templeton Foundation's award for courses dealing with science and religion. Johns Hopkins has repeatedly recognized Professor Principe's teaching achievements. He has won its Distinguished Faculty Award, the Excellence in Teaching Award, and the George Owen Teaching Award. In 2004, Professor Principe was awarded the first Francis Bacon Prize by the California Institute of Technology, awarded to an outstanding scholar whose work has had substantial impact on the history of science, the history of technology, or historically-engaged philosophy of science. Professor Principe has published numerous papers and is the author or coauthor of three books, including The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest.
I'm impressed. He is a young fellow too. With 20+ more IQ points, I could have enjoyed his stellar career.
Most sermons I hear are pretty good. Some are more on the intellectual, apologist side; some more spirit-soaked and uplifting. All good, but all mainly addressed to the converted. (In my view, to become a capital-C Christian one must become a convert regardless of how raised. Some term it "re-born," which is an ok term.)
Jesus didn’t come because humans had somehow missed the point of moral teaching and needed to be set right on a few points and given some inspirational coaching. He didn’t come to do TED talks. He came, the gospel writers believed, because history revealed the failure of the ‘moral approach’ to the problem of evil, and God decided that something more and something different needed to be done.
I recommend it especially to non-Christians and to the Christ-curious, but it refreshed my mind in a good way too.
If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust and immoral.
But if I curtail or lose my freedom, in order to lessen the shame of such inequality, and do not thereby materially increase the individual liberty of others, an absolute loss of liberty occurs. This may be compensated for by a gain in justice or in happiness or peace, but the loss remains, and it is a confusion of values to say that although my ‘liberal’ individual freedom may go by the board, some other kind of freedom—social or economic—is increased.
Beware the intellectual who seeks power over our decisions and over the persuasion to which we can respond, especially when he seeks this power to prevent us from doing what he thinks we should not desire to do.
“Fuck social mobility… Fuck money. Fuck rising above your class… Fuck marriage, mortgage, monogamy, and every other small, ugly ambition.” These, she says, are things “we should have abandoned.”
It is always a fun topic. I view myself as middlebrow in taste and capacity for appreciation but with aspirations to fuller and deeper appreciation of the finer things.
There are 1000 things I'd rather do than to go to a NASCAR event. Call me a snob, but it is of no interest to me although I love to drive fast and have a string of tickets and an auto insurance bill to prove it. Bread and circuses for the people? Well, I want everybody to have whatever sort of fun they choose.
The death of High Culture has been announced forever, but I don't even know what it is. Is Picasso high culture? Is Puccini high culture? (Definitely not - too much fun). Is Bob Dylan lowbrow folk-rock? Is The Messiah pop schlock? (Many feel it is, but I love it). Joseph Epstein: Whatever Happened to High Culture? An inquest
In the end, I think that such distinctions are about how generally accessible creative endeavors are, and how much instruction and thought might be useful to engage with them. Reverence towards such things is silly though, I feel. The Mona Lisa? Give me a break but OK, he was an all-round genius and genius is rare and wonderful.
Refined tastes? I can get on board with that, to a degree. There are many things in mass culture and pop culture that offend my delicate sensibilities and which seem vulgar to me, but I let it go. To each, his own. Live and let live.
For my doctors, lawyers, colleagues, and other remote pals: Holiday Cheesecakes. Would send one to our Webmeister but do not have his new address. It's old-fashioned, but who does not love getting festive food treats in the mail?
For garbage guy, $50. For mailman, $50. Gotta thank those guys personally for their work. Sure, they get paid, but I mean personally.
Then comes my list of charities which I will not list other than a plug for Salvation Army. This year, I am giving to FIRE instead of to my schools. Much better educational use of my hard-earned dollars now and in the future. All of my alma maters have gone to the dark side, and they do not need my money anyway. They have billions in the bank.
Of course giving people money ends poverty, technically. (In the US, poverty stats ignore the value government benefits. Poverty stats also ignore those with voluntarily low reported incomes: clergy, grad students, hippies, criminals, the early-retired, budding entrepreneurs, aspiring actors, etc etc).
People ought to make life choices designed to meet their goals. To put it another way, in the absence of mental illness or mental incapacity, we should respectfully assume that adults' choices are guided by their goals. In America, part of poverty is electing not to do the things that prevent poverty. The best way not to be poor is to be married before having kids. Statistically, single motherhood is the best path to poverty and dysfunctionality.
Higher Ed is not one thing. It is many things from a nursing degree at a community college to a BA from a state college to a doctorate in Philosophy at an Ivy. 
Most sermons I hear are pretty good. Some are more on the intellectual, apologist side; some more spirit-soaked and uplifting. All good, but all mainly addressed to the converted. (In my view, to become a capital-C Christian one must become a convert regardless of how raised. Some term it "re-born," which is an ok term.)