It’s Not Up To Them

Posted on by
Reply

Or it shouldn’t be. Harvard may be moving to control grade inflation for its students—everyone gets an A—by capping the number of A’s a professor can hand out in his classes.

The whining and bellyaching from the students are loud and hysterical—”crude and absurd” they caterwaul. That shouldn’t matter to school management, though; the kiddies are there to learn in what should be a challenging environment, not to get stars on their calendars and Blue Ribbons for showing up.

A frenzied debate has gripped campus, with students protesting that the changes would increase stress, fuel competition, and discourage academic exploration.

Bunch of crybabies. Stress, as much as happiness and ease, are a part of life and is much more productive than celebrating unearned plaudits and partying. It’s cowardly of them to fear competition; aside from strengthening them for life in the world, competition is how progress is made—good ideas, mechanisms, techniques, et al., survive, even flourish, while bad ideas fall by the wayside. Without competition, the latter simply clutter to the point of pollution everything else. Finally, only the timid would be discouraged from exploration, and the stress and competition would only strengthen the timid, or move them out of the school altogether. Those pupils don’t belong in school, anyway; they’re only wasting their parents’ money and whatever school financial aid they’ve been getting.

“The fact that this policy even MIGHT go into effect with 94% student disapproval is absurd and goes to show how much this administration cares about us,” said one commenter on a Harvard discussion forum.

Crybabies, indeed. The school’s caring would be coming—if management has the backbone to proceed—in the form of badly needed tough love.

If the students put as much energy into their studies as they are in protesting having to work at those studies, they’d be doing better and be stronger graduates for that.

There’s another aspect to this, though:

Harvard’s faculty is set to vote next week on a proposal to cap the number of A’s per course, which now comprise more than half of undergraduate grades after years of inflation. The plan also suggests getting rid of GPA as an internal metric, instead using percentile rank to calculate honors like cum laude recognition.

It shouldn’t be up to the faculty, either. Their input would be useful on something like this, but they work, at least nominally, for the school management team, not the other way around, and this sort of thing more properly belongs as a management decision.

In the end, three things need to happen. The first is to implement the system without hesitation while recognizing, and acting on the recognition, that this is only a first step (capping A’s but not A-‘s is just silly). Second is to recognize that the decision is management’s not faculty’s and proceed with or without faculty “approval.” Third is handling the pupils and faculty members who can’t handle this academic culture change: expel the students who don’t adapt, and send the faculty members who don’t adapt (including by slow-walking implementation or finding ways to weasel-word around the change) on their way to another enterprise’s payroll.

Humanitarian, or…?

Posted on by
Reply

The Cuban government released 2,000 prisoners from its jails in conjunction with Easter celebrations (I’m writing this on Friday in anticipation of the government having followed through on its Friday plans).

Cuba’s Communist government said on Thursday that it would free 2,010 prisoners from its jails in a “humanitarian and sovereign gesture” as it carries out negotiations with the Trump administration.

The cynic in me has doubts regarding any humanitarian motive. I see two others. One is that this is just a PR move of no further import than virtue signaling and trying to curry favors, even though it might be good for those released.

“Might be” brings me to the second motive. The Cuban government can no longer support the prisoners it holds, even in the truly deplorable conditions extant in Cuban jails, so it’s dumping them out onto the street and into an economy that also cannot support them, much less support the not-jailed Cuban population.

Another Issue

Posted on by
Reply

Recall the theft of nearly 414,000 units of KitKat bars while enroute from Poland to Italy. Nestlé and other companies publicized and otherwise reacted to the theft with humor, turning the theft into a marketing success for those companies.

Nestlé, though, has not lost sight of the seriousness of the matter.

Nestlé said it had publicized the incident with humor to raise awareness around the more serious issue of thievery. In this case, it added, the risks are low since the theft won’t affect supply and the chocolate bars can be traced by unique product codes.
“Whilst we appreciate the criminals’ exceptional taste, the fact remains that cargo theft is an escalating issue for businesses of all sizes,” the company said.

My paranoid (or conspiracy theorist) mind has an additional concern, though. For all that the stolen bars can be traced by their product codes, those bars would make excellent devices with which to attack children by inserting nefarious items into the bars, items ranging from drugs to ground glass to metal shavings or staples. Keep in mind the dangers of Halloween candies. This could become an extension of that.

When is a Strategic Strength a Strategic Vulnerability?

Posted on by
Reply

The lede laid out the misconception:

The oil states of the Persian Gulf have made great strides to diversify their economies in recent years, but they have also created a new vulnerability: more strategic targets for Iran to hit.

More targets to hit? Sure. But attacking them dilutes and dissipates any ability to attack a choke point in any economy, to seriously degrade or to destroy a Critical Item in an economy. Indeed, by diversifying, an economy’s single or a couple of Critical Items are eliminated, and what replaces them are a larger number of Important Components to that economy.

But that number protects the economy as a whole, and so strengthens the targeted nation: it will suffer economic losses, but it has become much harder to shut down.

When is a strategic strength a strategic vulnerability? Not this time.

A False Perception

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been over this before, but it bears repeating in light of President Trump’s (R) and SecState Marco Rubio’s contemplating the US leaving NATO altogether. The misperception is this:

The alliance’s lifeblood is its deterrent credibility: the perception by potential adversaries that attacking a NATO member would likely trigger a war with the full alliance, including the US.

As the news writer noted a bit later in his paragraph, though, this is a chimera, one that I claim is dangerous by its existence.

The alliance’s political promise to defend its members goes beyond the flexible wording of its famous Article 5, which says that each country in NATO would help a member that is attacked by taking “such action as it deems necessary.”

The relevant part of Article V is this:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence…will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

“Such action” includes—but does not require—a military response.

Congress passed, in 2023 under the Biden administration, a law requiring a two-thirds vote of the Senate agreeing before the US could withdraw from NATO. The law has questionable constitutionality, interfering as it does with the President’s constitutional Article II role as our nation’s Chief Executive and our military’s Commander-in-Chief. This question is easily sidestepped, though, simply by adhering to the flexible wording of the NATO treaty’s Article V and declining to commit American military to a fight, confining our response, instead, to diplomatic words of demurral regarding an attack on other members.