Dhimmi Watch: Harvard Edition

Via Instapundit, this article about an effort to make Muslim Harvard students more "comfortable" in the gym. By instituting women-only gym hours. They're being instituted at the insistence of -- you guessed it -- the Harvard Islamic Society:

Harvard Islamic Society's Islamic Knowledge Committee officer Ola Aljawhary, a junior, said the women-only hours are being tested on a trial basis. The special gym hours will be analyzed over Spring Break to determine if they will continue, she said.

Aljawhary said that she does not believe that the women-only gym hours discriminate against men.

"These hours are necessary because there is a segment of the Harvard female population that is not found in gyms not because they don't want to work out, but because for them working out in a co-ed gym is uncomfortable, awkward or problematic in some way," she said.

Will we never stop giving in to Muslim demands? Gender integration in places like the gym is a part of Western Civilization's acceptence of gender equality. It's a good thing, damnit, something that makes us better than the Muslim world where they keep women wrapped up in "modest" attire, lest men be driven into a sexual frenzy at the sight of an exposed ankle. Our culture is better than theirs -- that's why we make the airplanes that they have to hijack. And it's worth fighting for, inch by inch if we must.

Maybe working out in a co-ed gym is "uncomfortable, awkward, or problematic" for some Harvard students. But that can be a useful part of getting an education, or adopting a new culture. If these women are so "modest" that they can't don a pair of sweatpants (no rules says that have to wear leotards) and work out, well maybe they ought to move to Saudi Arabia.

Where they will be more "comfortable."

Let the Koran Desecration Begin!

P.Z. Myers links to this story about a 23-year-old guy arrested on "hate-crime" charges for throwing a Quran (aka "Koran") down the toilet at Pace University. He's been charged with "criminal mischief" and "aggravated harassment," both of which (according to the article) count as hate crimes.

Of course, Muslim students are in a tizzy, and Pace has caved to them:

Muslim activists had called on Pace University to crack down on hate crimes after the incidents. As a result, the university said it would offer sensitivity training to its students.

The school was accused by Muslim students of not taking the incident seriously enough at first. Pace classified the first desecration of the holy book as an act of vandalism, but university officials later reversed themselves and referred the incident to the New York Police Department's hate crimes unit.

Pace got it right the first time: tossing a book in the toilet is simple vandalism, because it can clog the toilet and cause a flood. If nothing else, some poor janitor has to remove the book from the tiolet. Vandals don't think about the person who has to clean up after them, and so deserve our animus.

However, the nature of the book being tossed in the toilet is immaterial. So long as it is his copy of the Q'ran, and not, say, one he stole from the library, the owner has the right to wipe his ass with the pages and flush them down the toilet, if he so chooses. Charging somebody with a "hate crime" because he desecrated the Quran is an example of punishing him for evil thoughts, pure and simple. This is America: we're allowed to hate Islam, or Christianity, or Muslims or Christian people in general, and we are allowed to express that hatred.

Pace University missed out on a real "teachable moment" here. Oh, not the doofus who flushed the books down the toilet -- he is surely not worthy of our attention. No, Pace missed out on an opportunity to teach its Muslim students. Rather than force its students to undergo "sensitity training," where they will undoubtedly be exposed to all sorts of multiculturalist blather and lies about the benevolence of the Religion of Peace, Pace should have offered a course in "First Amendment Sensitivity Training" to its Muslim students.

Yes, Debate is Weird . . .

Steve Sailer highlights this documentary about high school debate. Many people assume that high school and college debate feature students dressed in suits speaking eloquently about the issues of the day. But, in fact, debate has become its own little insular world, where both the speaking style and type of argument are incomprehensible to the average person. For the uninitiated, what happened is that people started talking really fast and using debate-specific jargon while judges took detailed notes, called a "flow."

As Sailer somewhat tendentiously puts it:

When I was in high school debate in the early-mid 1970s, it was obvious that debate had gotten off track and needed a rules change. To make the competition more objective, younger judges had started flowcharting the entire debate in enormous detail on three foot wide drawing pads. Debaters responded by increasing the number of arguments they put forward by speaking faster. If they could spit out 32 arguments in 8 minutes, and their slower-speaking opponents could only refute 24, then there were 8 arguments that had gone unrefuted and therefore, logically, they must win!

It is not true that sheer numbers and fast-talking necessarily win. If a team makes 32 arguments, odds are that a bunch of them are really the same argument in different terms, and a skilled debater can group similar arguments. Sailer also ignores word economy -- responding in fewer words. (The Variety review indicates that the movie does a good job of explaining how the fast-talking style came to predominate.)

Sailer doesn't like this fast-talking jargon-filled style modern debate:

Obviously, this emphasis on speed isn't good training for much of anything in the real world, where trying to talk faster than the other guy is more likely to get you a punch on the nose than the acclaim of your fellow men. When FDR, for example, was in debate at Groton in the 1890s, they taught him to try to persuade his audience, not overwhelm them.

It's quite true that debate involves a style of public speaking that one will probably never use outside of the debate context. But of course that's true of most games and contests -- chess players are rarely attacked by people dressed as bishops coming at them diagonally. Is tennis realistic? Backgammon?

Sure, the speaking style is bizarre, even ridiculous, and the arguments are often absurd. Nobody actually thinks that a minor change in education policy will lead to nuclear war. But, just as tennis develops physical fitness and coordination, debate develops other skills. For example, most high school debaters know how to use a university research library better than your average graduate student. In debate, people have to organize and keep track of a huge amount of information -- certainly a useful skill. They learn to think on their feet, under conditions of pressure and stress. And, they learn a lot about the specific topic subject area -- whether it's education policy or space exploration, always a good thing.

So yeah, it's true -- debate can be an absurd stylized ritual. But, like chess or Scrabble, it builds other useful skills. And, given Steve's obsession with IQ, you would think that he would find it admirable that it puts such emphasis on sheer cognitive ability.

Libertarians Against Vouchers -- Accepting Members Now

Megan McArdle and Mathew Yglesias are having a back and forth over vouchers. Megan (I can call you Megan, can't I?) continues the debate in her latest thoughtful post. She seems to have gotten Yglesias to agree that vouchers would be a good idea in the abstract, but he worries about various political and institutional barriers. Megan quite reasonably points out that Mathew Yglesias and other like-minded folks are the political and institutional barriers. After conceding that "should not be used at Tom's House of Arithmetic and Billiards," Megan invites Mathew and his ilk to come forward with a proposal she could get behind:

Come over to our side, outline a voucher plan you'd accept, and as long as it doesn't include "all schools must employ union teachers under centrally negotiated contracts that protect seniority and outlandish grievance procedures", I'll sign on. Central testing? Fine. You want to make sure they serve organic seaweed salad in the lunchroom? If that's what it takes to get you and other liberals into the voucher camp, I'll agree to that too. Double spending per student, for all I care. Libertarians and conservatives are standing here with the door open, ready to negotiate, and so far, no one's even wandered by.

Pardon me, but I may be the only libertarian on the face of the Earth who isn't exactly wild about the whole voucher concept, even if the late Milton Friedman (whom I worship as a god) was, if not the originator of the idea, one of its main proponents.

Voucher proponents (and I was one for a long time) like to think that vouchers will make state-funded schools more like private sector schools. My fear is that it will end up corrupting the private sector schools and making them more like government schools. I fear creeping regulations that may start out as being common sense rules to prevent them from being used at "Tom's House of Arithmetic and Billiards," but which end up being "all schools must employ union teachers under centrally negotiated contracts that protect seniority and outlandish grievance procedures."

We're already off the rails already. Look at one of Yglesias's basic principles: "Public money without public accountability: Bad idea." No! NO! A thousand times, NO! The whole point of a voucher system is that it replaces a system of state-based bureaucratic accountability with a market-based system where the consumers -- i.e., parents and their kids -- get to decide what works and what doesn't work. Bad schools are supposed to close for the same reason that restaurants which serve vile-tasting food tend to close: because people won't buy their product.

If we get vouchers-plus-regulations, which Mathew kinda-sorta thinks is a good idea, then instead of working to please parents and children, school officials are going to be spending a lot of time generating reports, filling out forms, doing paperwork, and demonstrating compliance with the regulations. And even if the regulations start as the kind of light generally-reasonable regulations that Megan or I might devise, regulations are seldom repealed and are often augmented. Twenty years after a voucher system is put in place, I can see it being as heavily regulated and bureaucratic as our current system.

Matthew even starts with a poison pill. He says if he were doing a voucher system, "schools would need to do admissions by lottery." I'm sorry, but maybe some schools really will benefit from having selective admissions. I don't think that schools like the Illinois Math and Science Academy could exist if they had to let in just anybody. And we're not just talking about highly selective schools like that. One of the things about our current system that strikes me as regrettable is its one-size-fits-all mentality. I'm quite willing to believe that some kids might thrive under a hippie-dippie wander-around-and-do-what-you-want system, while others might respond better to rigid military-style discipline. Letting some schools select their students is surely part of a good overall system.

And even well-intentioned rules and regulations are likely to stifle innovation and experimentation. We're all worried about a storefront "school" that's a scam to get money from poor people, but how do you distinguish between a scam and a scrappy entrepreneurial little school with few resources but a willingness to really challenge kids? Maybe Tom's House of Arithmetic and Billiards actually will turn out kids who know a lot of math, in addition to being good pool players. Maybe a school-of-the-future might not actually have its own building with kids sitting in neat rows arranged in classes -- perhaps some sort of decentralized system that combines use of computer-based instruction with private tutoring will be optimal.

I don't know what the perfect system would look like, and I'm honestly not sure that I can come up with a set of regulations that distinguish between outright scams and worthwhile experiments. But I'm pretty sure moving to more government funding isn't a step in the right direction.

UPDATE: Micheal Stastny makes similar points about "public accountability" versus market forces.