Category Archives: education

Gross Incompetence?

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As if we didn’t need another reason to disband the Department of Education (see its Dear Colleague letter for an example of its gross dishonesty), here’s another, of utter failure to perform. DoE isn’t taking care of its digital data.

The Education Department doesn’t hold nuclear launch codes. But its vast data trove on student-loan borrowers and their parents—and the nearly $100 billion it disburses in new loans every year—are reason enough to want the bureaucrats to prevent digital intrusions. ….
The stakes go well beyond personal privacy. Federal student loans outstanding exceed $1 trillion, and Team Obama is trying to forgive those debts. It would add injury to injury if cyber-fraudsters were able to pile on for a taxpayer plundering.

It isn’t a matter of an isolated error, even a serious one, which can happen in any large enterprise, either.

Department of Education Inspector General Kathleen Tighe reported in November that her team has been “finding the same deficiencies over and over again” regarding information security. Since 2009 independent auditors “have found persistent IT control deficiencies in key financial systems,” she said.

For six years, auditors have found persistent DoE IT failure. This is not an inability to achieve perfection in personal digital data handling; this is a conscious and deliberate refusal to bother.

We don’t need a Federal government Department of this sort. Not at all.

For the Children

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Liberals love their programs “for the children;” albeit they’re carefully paid for with OPM. Take, for instance Michelle Obama’s school lunch program, which has become a Federal government mandate—carefully paid for by the States and the school districts. But never mind, it’s for the children.

Now we get this. A food service worker in the Irving Middle School in Pocatello, ID, gave a lunch to a 12-yr-old girl who had no money to pay for it. The lunch cost all of $1.70, and the food service worker offered to pay the bill for the child.

No dice, said District 25 Director of Human Resources, Susan Petit. You’re fired, she said in her letter telling the worker that she’d been fired.

It’s for the children.

Update: The Pocatello/Chubbuck School District No 25 has apparently released a statement (it’s not available on the District’s Web site as I write this) that offers the food service worker her job back.  Buried at the bottom of the 600+ word statement was this sentence:

The District has been in communication with Ms. Bowden extending an opportunity for her to return to employment with the District.

However, as of last night, the food service worker hadn’t actually heard anything from the District, much less anything about the details of this “opportunity.”

A University President’s Answer to Safe Spaces

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Oklahoma Wesleyan University President Everett Piper has a bad attitude toward “safe spaces.” He’s right. Here’s a note from Everett posted on OKWU’s Web site.

This is Not a Day Care. It’s a University!

Dr. Everett Piper, President

Oklahoma Wesleyan University

This past week, I actually had a student come forward after a university chapel service and complain because he felt “victimized” by a sermon on the topic of 1 Corinthians 13. It appears that this young scholar felt offended because a homily on love made him feel bad for not showing love! In his mind, the speaker was wrong for making him, and his peers, feel uncomfortable.

I’m not making this up. Our culture has actually taught our kids to be this self-absorbed and narcissistic! Any time their feelings are hurt, they are the victims! Anyone who dares challenge them and, thus, makes them “feel bad” about themselves, is a “hater,” a “bigot,” an “oppressor,” and a “victimizer.”

I have a message for this young man and all others who care to listen. That feeling of discomfort you have after listening to a sermon is called a conscience! An altar call is supposed to make you feel bad! It is supposed to make you feel guilty! The goal of many a good sermon is to get you to confess your sins—not coddle you in your selfishness. The primary objective of the Church and the Christian faith is your confession, not your self-actualization!

So here’s my advice:

If you want the chaplain to tell you you’re a victim rather than tell you that you need virtue, this may not be the university you’re looking for. If you want to complain about a sermon that makes you feel less than loving for not showing love, this might be the wrong place.

If you’re more interested in playing the “hater” card than you are in confessing your own hate; if you want to arrogantly lecture, rather than humbly learn; if you don’t want to feel guilt in your soul when you are guilty of sin; if you want to be enabled rather than confronted, there are many universities across the land (in Missouri and elsewhere) that will give you exactly what you want, but Oklahoma Wesleyan isn’t one of them.

At OKWU, we teach you to be selfless rather than self-centered. We are more interested in you practicing personal forgiveness than political revenge. We want you to model interpersonal reconciliation rather than foment personal conflict. We believe the content of your character is more important than the color of your skin. We don’t believe that you have been victimized every time you feel guilty and we don’t issue “trigger warnings” before altar calls.

Oklahoma Wesleyan is not a “safe place”, but rather, a place to learn: to learn that life isn’t about you, but about others; that the bad feeling you have while listening to a sermon is called guilt; that the way to address it is to repent of everything that’s wrong with you rather than blame others for everything that’s wrong with them. This is a place where you will quickly learn that you need to grow up!

This is not a day care. This is a university!

The only thing I’d add to this is my own disdain for precious snowflakes who want to blame others for causing the snowflakes’ own character shortcomings.

 

h/t PJMedia

Free Speech and AIs

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Toni Massaro, Regents’ Professor, Milton O. Riepe Chair in Constitutional Law, and Dean Emerita at the University of Arizona College of Law, and Helen Norton, Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School, discuss whether Artificial Intelligences might ever gain free speech rights. After all, as Citizens United affirmed, lots of non-human entities have at least some aspects of a right to free speech.

Indeed, it is a question that warrants consideration: do only humans have full free speech rights, or do AIs, also; do sentient beings of any stripe have full free speech rights; and if the answer to either of the latter two is “Yes,” then what’s the threshold of intelligence beyond which such rights must be acknowledged (or granted: is our endowment of inalienable rights imbued by God in humans only, or in other beings, too?), and how do we measure that threshold?

Massaro and Norton, in their paper Siri-ously? Free Speech Rights and Artificial Intelligence look into the question (absent any religious aspect) as it relates specifically to AIs. It’s a paper well worth the read, if only for the thought experiment aspect that is the authors’ purpose.

I’m interested in a particular part of their argument, though, as summarized by The Wall Street Journal Law Blog [emphasis in the original].

The idea becomes less preposterous, according to the scholars, when one focuses not on who or what is doing the speaking, but on who is doing the listening.

Such an approach, emphasizing “expression’s value to listeners” or the “listeners’ enlightenment,” yields “many similarities…between much computer speech and human speech that we already protect,” the professors say.

Listening is a hugely important aspect of our freedom of speech, no doubt. The right of the listener to choose for himself the speech to which he will listen or not listen—the right to assess for himself the value of the speech—is absolutely critical; without it there is no freedom of speech.

But.

The right to choose which speech to which to listen or not can only be derivative of the right to speak freely. After all, if the speech can be blocked in any way, or censored in any form, there can be nothing to which to listen, and so no choice of listening can exist. Within that, the value of the listened-to speech, and of the ignored speech, is in the mind of the speaker first and in the ear of the listener/ignorer second. There is no third. Government’s view, including court’s view, of that value never enters into it.

The authors dilute IMNSHO their argument to a large degree by basing a significant fraction of their argument on the value to a listener of that derivative aspect.

Free Speech

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Universities are struggling to balance the free exchange of ideas with students’ growing desire to be shielded from offensive views, a philosophical divide at the heart of recent protests that have roiled campuses around the country.

That’s the opening paragraph of Dan Frosch’s and Tamara Audi’s Friday piece in The Wall Street Journal. There’s no struggle here, though, except in the minds of school administrators and professors too timorous, too disrespectful of free speech to be fit to hold their positions.

While the tension between political correctness and open discourse has riven colleges for decades, a hunger strike and protests over racial incidents that forced out the University of Missouri’s president on Monday have supercharged the debate.

This is a coarse misunderstanding, and not only by Frosch and Audi, but by the precious little snowflakes at each of those universities and colleges. There is no such tension at all. What is politically incorrect is the attempt to control discourse in order to protect the self-proclaimed too-fragile from the vicissitudes of life.

Freedom of speech begins, of necessity, with protecting the most offensive, the most uncomfortable of speech. As soon as governments begin banning the most offensive or uncomfortable speech, the definition of “offensive” and of “uncomfortable” begins to be elevated. In very short order, indeed, today’s ordinary, inoffensive, comfortable (and comforting) speech becomes offensive and uncomfortable. Especially to the men in government who now are making the definitions.

Here’s an excerpt from a 6th Circuit en banc ruling on a free speech/free exercise case from Dearborn, MI [cites omitted]:

Diversity, in viewpoints and among cultures, is not always easy. An inability or a general unwillingness to understand new or differing points of view may breed fear, distrust, and even loathing. But it “is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.” Robust discourse, including the exchanging of ideas, may lead to a better understanding (or even an appreciation) of the people whose views we once feared simply because they appeared foreign to our own exposure. But even when communication fails to bridge the gap in understanding, or when understanding fails to heal the divide between us, the First Amendment demands that we tolerate the viewpoints of others with whom we may disagree. If the Constitution were to allow for the suppression of minority or disfavored views, the democratic process would become imperiled through the corrosion of our individual freedom. Because “[t]he right to speak freely and to promote diversity of ideas…is…one of the chief distinctions that sets us apart from totalitarian regimes,” dissent is an essential ingredient of our political process.
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The civil-rights era cases tell us that police cannot punish a peaceful speaker as an easy alternative to dealing with a lawless crowd that is offended by what the speaker has to say … The Supreme Court … has repeatedly affirmed the principle that “constitutional rights may not be denied simply because of hostility to their assertion or exercise.

It would do these children a great service to learn to read (a form of free speech…), and then to add this sort of thing to their literature lists. It would do the administrators and professors a great service to steel themselves to reading and understanding our Constitution. Their disdain for such responsibility is microaggression of monstrous proportion against these children.

To quote, sort of, another man, life is hard. It’s harder if you’re precious and fragile. Or if you’re in a position of responsibility that exceeds your courage.