Using the Burger King Mentality to Destroy a Four-Year Investment

Can you hear the tune playing? “Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce. Special orders don’t upset us. All we ask is that you let us serve it your way. … Have it your way at Burger King.”

It’s an enduring commercial with a memorable tune. Forty-three years since its release, people still recall the jingle as one of the most effective pieces of advertising ever made, driving home exactly what Burger King was selling — convenience, made-to-order fast food, delivered to you just the way you like it, no questions, no lip, no delay.

It’s the Burger King mentality, and it’s great for ordering a drive-thru dinner. But the sentiment has crept into a lot of college campuses lately, and unless you’re in the student union food court, the Burger King mentality has no place at these institutions of higher learning. In fact, it can do real damage to a four-year investment in a college education.

Sadly, however, that’s how many students think of this four-year investment in a college education. Take this example:

Back in my early days of college, I complained often and loudly about any professor who had the temerity to include attendance as part of the course grade. ‘Not only am I capable of making my own decisions about going to class,’ I’d explain haughtily, ‘my tuition and fees pay his salary, so I should really get to choose how I’m graded.’ I eventually learned the inherent flaws of this opinion – thanks in no small part to several well-meaning professors more than happy to use ample amounts of that mandatory class time disabusing me of this and myriad other asinine notions.

Unfortunately, my consumer-based justification for why I ‘deserved’ to be given a bespoke educational experience – I pay your salary – is quite common on college and university campuses. Rather than consider postsecondary education an undertaking of self-improvement or intellectual exploration, many students approach college as more akin to ordering off a fast-food menu: I already know what I want, and since I’m paying, I expect it served to me just as I asked, immediately.

This is how Grant Addison, an education policy studies research assistant barely out of college, described his thinking. His mind has changed since conducting the research showing the downside of such a haughty outlook.

Put generally, evidence suggests that today’s students graduate without sufficient intellectual humility. Intellectual humility governs how a person views (one’s) own mental capabilities: This involves things like one’s understanding of the limitations of their knowledge, receptivity to new ideas and evidence and ability to consider new or conflicting information fairly and dispassionately. Critical-thinking and argumentative-reasoning skills draw from this well, as do many emotional qualities related to positive social interaction. Therefore, along with increased educative abilities, the intellectually humble are also better able to engage in civil discourse and interact with opposing perspectives.

Unfortunately, intellectual humility has gone out the door as universities shift “toward a customer-service paradigm.” The commodifying of higher education — in which university administrators focus on the bottom line rather than on higher learning — has created other problems as well.

The first is that schools are intolerant of intellectual diversity, which means little room for dissent or creative energy. You can’t churn out uniform degrees if everyone has his or her own opinion. And this means a crackdown on the very purpose of university education — intellectual rigor and truth-seeking.

Perhaps nowhere has the abject failure of higher education to teach students to think critically or act maturely and civilly been on greater display than with the issue of free speech and expression. Examples of campus-speech controversies are numerous and varied, yet together they illustrate of a kind of intellectual protectionism that has consumed a significant portion of higher education. Feeling entitled as consumers, petulant students increasingly demand safety from and punishment of any views deemed ‘offensive’ or simply unwanted – justifying censorship with such intellectually bankrupt canards as ‘speech is violence,’ or even perpetrating actual violence. Fearing the ire of the campus mob – or worse, that prospective students might not view their school as ‘supportive’ – feckless administrators turn a blind eye to their institutional strictures and basic psychology to join this regressive call-and-response.

If that weren’t bad enough, then there’s this: Uniformity is taking its toll not only on the ability of students to think critically or to engage in intellectual disputes, but also it is damaging their ability to function in the workforce.

Just this week, The Wall Street Journal unearthed more data highlighting the failure of colleges and universities to improve students’ critical-thinking skills. This analysis builds on earlier work by Rich Arum and Josipa Roska concerning undergraduates’ abysmal results on the Collegiate Learning Assessment Plus, a little-known test that measures students’ critical-thinking, analytical-reasoning and problem-solving abilities. According to test results from dozens of public colleges and universities between 2013 and 2016, the Journal found, “At more than half of schools, at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table.” Even at some of the most prestigious flagship universities, “the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years.’

These findings come on the heels of last Friday’s lackluster May jobs report, which detailed a continued deceleration of the job-growth rate. Analysts believe this signals that businesses are struggling to find qualified candidates to hire – which is consistent with reams of survey data gathered from employers who lament that newly hired college graduates aren’t prepared for the workforce. When asked which traits are lacking, most employers cite either critical-reasoning skills or interpersonal or people skills as their primary complaints.

What can be done? Well, there’s always the money angle, and removing the wrinkle of unfettered tuition loans in the supply-demand formula. Then there’s the option to skip the universities and choose alternative educational methods to hone valuable skills for the workplace. Lastly, administrators could return to doing their jobs.

As social scientist Charles Murray points out after a recent protest-turned-assault at Middlebury College, the president of the school could have used her authority to hold the offending students accountable. She did not. It would have been a good place to start, yet inaction has become the all-too-common response of late.

Murray quotes social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s description of Aristotle’s concept of telos as an aspiration these administrators may want to revive. “A university must have one and only one highest and inviolable good,” in this case, truth.

Murray continues:

The competing agenda of social justice is incompatible with truth. In their personal lives, students, faculty, and administrators are free to pursue social justice as they define it. But the university cannot take sides. The end of the university, its very reason for being, is to enable the unending, incremental, and disputatious search for truth. A university must be a safe place for intellectual freedom, else it has failed in its purpose.”

To wit: if you use a Burger King mentality, don’t expect to get a prime rib-quality education.

Rebuilding America: An Investment in Social Capital

With the advent of modern transportation, community certainly extends beyond the boundaries of one’s home, so it shouldn’t be a great surprise that the percentage of adults who say they spend a social evening with a neighbor at least several times a week fell to 19 percent in 2016 from 30 percent in 1974.

No longer is this country based on loving they neighbor, but perhaps neighborliness is a lost art in need of a renaissance.

That’s the gist of a new report just released by the Joint Economic Committee on Capitol Hill. “What We Do Together: The State of Associational Life in America,” is part of the Social Capital Project, run by Sen. Mike Lee of Utah.

Its stated purpose?

The Social Capital Project is a multi-year research effort that will investigate the evolving nature, quality, and importance of our associational life. ‘Associational life’ is our shorthand for the web of social relationships through which we pursue joint endeavors—namely, our families, our communities, our workplaces, and our religious congregations. These institutions are critical to forming our character and capacities, providing us with meaning and purpose, and for addressing the many challenges we face.

The goal of the project is to better understand why the health of our associational life feels so compromised, what consequences have followed from changes in the middle social layers of our society, why some communities have more robust civil society than others, and what can be done — or can stop being done — to improve the health of our social capital. Through a series of reports and hearings, it will study the state of the relationships that weave together the social fabric enabling our country — our laws, our institutions, our markets, and our democracy — to function so well in the first place.

The first report from the project is a bit dispiriting. While Americans are much more materially better off, the social fabric is frayed, fractured, and seemingly coming apart. At risk is pretty much the social norms that allow a middle class and the sustainability of a “free, prosperous, democratic, and pluralistic country.”

Some of the findings in the report reveal that social capital is dropping because Americans are spending less time socializing with neighbors, declining to vote, and lacking in trust of fellow Americans (from 46 percent in 1972, the report to 31 percent in 2016, according to the General Social Survey).

Political columnist Ramesh Ponnuru points out some exceptions raised in the report.

Rates of volunteering have increased. Some kinds of political engagement have also risen: The percentage of the population that reports having tried to influence someone else’s vote has gone up over the last few decades. The overall story, though, is one of fewer and weaker interpersonal connections among Americans.

Social scientists Charles Murray, who testified to the Joint Economic Committee this week, described the impact of a decline in social capital: fewer people are getting married and fewer men are working. He said that the government can try to find policies to encourage behavioral changes, but the declines are symptoms of a larger, more visceral problem.

If I had to pick one theme … it is the many ways in which people (behave) impulsively — throwing away real opportunities — and unrealistically — possessing great ambitions but oblivious to the steps required to get from point A to point B to point C to point D in life.

In other words, the desire for instant gratification has its consequences. Another problem he cited is a general self-destruction created by the squandering of an ample number of opportunities to get ahead.

The solution?

It comes down to the age-old problem of getting people, especially young people, not to do things that are attractive in the short term but disastrous in the long term and, conversely, to do things that aren’t fun right now but that will open up rewards later in life. The problem is not confined to any socioeconomic class. The mental disorder known as adolescence afflicts rich and poor alike. And adolescence can extend a long time after people have left their teens. The most common way that the fortunate among us manage to get our priorities straight — or at least not irretrievably screw them up — is by being cocooned in the institutions that are the primary resources for generating social capital: a family consisting of married parents and active membership in a faith tradition.

I didn’t choose my phrasing lightly. I am not implying that single parents are incapable of filling this function — millions of them are striving heroically to do so — nor that children cannot grow up successfully if they don’t go to church. With regard to families, I am making an empirical statement: As a matter of statistical tendencies, biological children of married parents do much better on a wide variety of important life outcomes than children growing up in any other family structure, even after controlling for income, parental education, and ethnicity. With regard to religion, I am making an assertion about a resource that can lead people, adolescents and adults alike, to do the right thing even when the enticements to do the wrong thing are strong: a belief that God commands them to do the right thing. I am also invoking religion as a community of faith … For its active members, a church is far more than a place that they to worship once a week. It is a form of community that socializes the children growing up in it in all sorts of informal ways, just as a family socializes children.

Murray said his ideas are not meant to generate policy recommendations, but more a warning.

I would argue that it is not a matter of ideology but empiricism to conclude that unless the traditional family and traditional communities of faith make a comeback, the declines in social capital that are already causing so much deterioration in our civic culture will continue and the problems will worsen. The solutions are unlikely to be political but cultural. We need a cultural Great Awakening akin to past religious Great Awakenings.

Will the social capital project be able to trigger a “Great Awakening”? Perhaps not, but a disconnect in society will most certainly cause bigger problems that will ultimately cause a larger breakdown that will rely on homegrown gumption to fix.

As Ponnuru explains, a return to the aspirational nature of social capital may require a “rediscovery of Tocqueville.”

Sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another. … In order that men remain civilized or become so, the art of associating must be developed and perfected among them.”

‘By Any Means Necessary’ on an Upswing? How to Stop Campus Violence

A major uptick in violence on college campuses has been reported lately, concerning many over whether violence as a means of protest is now in vogue after a long dormant state. Is there a way to put an end to campus violence? Former Sen. Jim Talent has some ideas.

But first to recap a recent disturbing episode: You may have heard the story about Charles Murray, the famous social scientist who was invited to Middlebury College to speak and a mob broke out, threatening him and sending one of his hosts, Professor Allison Stanger, to the hospital.

Apparently, students at the liberal arts school were afraid of Murray’s words. He had written the book Coming Apart, The State of White America, 1960-2010, several years back, which premised that white America, like other racial and ethnic groups, is starkly divergent as a result of disparate wealth levels. The book description reads:

Drawing on five decades of statistics and research, Coming Apart demonstrates that a new upper class and a new lower class have diverged so far in core behaviors and values that they barely recognize their underlying American kinship—divergence that has nothing to do with income inequality and that has grown during good economic times and bad.

The top and bottom of white America increasingly live in different cultures, Murray argues, with the powerful upper class living in enclaves surrounded by their own kind, ignorant about life in mainstream America, and the lower class suffering from erosions of family and community life that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness. That divergence puts the success of the American project at risk.

Murray has been touring around the country discussing this book since its release. But college students at Middlebury decided that Murray needed to be shut down since he is so clearly (sarcasm) a “white supremacist.”

Murray says he was deeply shaken by the events that transpired, not because of the accusation, which he has confronted before, nor because of a protest of his speech, which is also not new to him. Murray said his fear stemmed from the animalistic behavior of the students.

Many looked like they had come straight out of casting for a film of brownshirt rallies. In some cases, I can only describe their eyes as crazed and their expressions as snarls. Melodramatic, I know. But that’s what they looked like.

Murray called for the university to inflict severe punishment on the students who behaved with such mob mentality, not because he was the subject of the attack, but because it is morally wrong and ultimately dangerous to normalize such behavior by letting it slide. Malcolm X popularized Jean-Paul Satre’s term “by any means necessary,” which predicated that violence is a fair tactic for protest. But even Malcolm X believed that violence is not necessary if the ends can be achieved through another method.

That’s where former Sen. Jim Talent comes in. Talent recently wrote that he thought America had already reached the point in which violence is never necessary as a means of political protest.

No one’s ideas should be shut out or shut down because of mob violence. Our people should not have to risk life and limb, or the destruction of property or property rights, because they want to speak or hear others speak.

But since it has evidently become popular again to use violence as protest (there seem to be plenty of examples of late), Talent says it’s time for government to get involved.

The government is not helpless to protect this right. Controlling the mob is something that governments have known how to do for millennia. In fact, if “controlling the mob” were a class in political science, it would be a survey course, part of “Government 101.”

And if local governments are unable or unwilling to protect the right to free speech on campus from the mob, state authorities should intervene and bring the full force of state law, and state resources, to bear.

In short, what is needed here is a classic exercise of the government’s police power, which belongs in the first instance to state government. So let’s not talk about the Justice Department intervening in this area. This is a job for the governments of the several states; in fact, it is an opportunity for the states to show that freedoms still matter, and that the law is still capable of defending them.

Talent offered a very legislative approach to coming up with rules about disorderly disruptions of speech on college campuses, including mandatory jail time for a first-time misdemeanor conviction, or a felony conviction for second offenses.

He also called for laws that require “automatic termination of any state employee, or expulsion of any student at a state university, convicted of violating the new statute, even if the conviction is a misdemeanor and regardless of whether the state employee has tenure or other civil-service protections.”

Talent also listed law enforcement training, special prosecutors, and other solutions in his piece.

Some of these solutions may seem severe, but Talent’s point, like Murray’s, is that failure to do anything is allowing the problem to grow.

Every time one of these episodes occurs, dozens of columns are written decrying them. That is good as far as it goes, but at a certain point it looks like hand wringing. The right response to speech is more speech, but the right response to violence against speech is not just verbal condemnation but strong laws, carefully written and stringently enforced.

We are not defenseless in the face of violence. This isn’t 1929, and America isn’t the Weimar Republic. Nor should our people have to rely on organizing their own self-defense. We don’t need anarchists and vigilantes fighting it out on the grounds of our universities. But that’s what we’re going to get, unless those who have the authority, and therefore the responsibility, take firm action to protect their people in the exercise of their rights.

Political speech is one thing, and shouldn’t be shut down, but violence is entirely another matter. Are new laws needed to curtail this particular type of violence?

Want to Work? Then Don’t Wait For Universal Basic Income

I recently read an interesting series of memos that propose three possible futures for the U.S. economy. This suite of essays, published by the Knight Foundation, merit a read if you’re interested in innovation and techno-futurism.

Their most optimistic scenario includes a version of a “universal basic income,” a popular policy idea among academics. The UBI would replace most complicated, conditional welfare programs with a straight-up minimum income guarantee that everyone receives from the government simply for being alive. (Nice work if you can get it!)

The UBI is the rare idea that garners support from both liberal and conservative intellectuals. Progressives like the idea of a generous and unconditional benefit for anyone who needs it; conservatives like the idea of replacing messy bureaucracies with a much clearer and more concise policy.

Unfortunately, on this front, I am the skunk at the garden party. As I wrote in a drive-by Medium response to the Knight memo, simply conceding a “post-work” future and paying everyone a salary to breathe is a poor substitute for the tougher job of actually getting people back to work. As the memo rightly notes, there are huge costs to simply cutting work out of people’s lives, even if you mitigate the financial aspect.

You can read the Medium post for my favorite research on this, but here’s one sample. Running my own statistical analysis on some survey data, I have found that Americans who have a job and feel successful at it are more than twice as likely to say they’re “very happy” than people who don’t meet those conditions. Importantly, this holds up when you control for income. Put simply, having a reason to set our alarm each morning gives us a psychic benefit that goes way beyond a paycheck.

What’s the better, more meaningful solution? How about we try a radical new agenda for forming human capital that empowers more Americans to stay engaged in the economy, rather than making it less painful for them to drop out?

Do You Know Anyone Who Drives A Pickup Truck and Other Offensive Questions

In the past days, Twitter has been on fire over a tweet by a Florida-based web developer and blogger who asked, “The top 3 best selling vehicles in America are pick-ups. Question to reporters: do you personally know someone that owns one?”

The inferno that erupted was notable for its defensiveness, particularly among New York and Washington-based media elites who tried to challenge the premise of the question without answering it.

The quarrelsome reaction, noted in conservative blogs and media outlets who kept the conversation alive a full two days after the question was asked — a rarity in the era of 24-minute news cycles, is a fulfillment of the cliché about “hitting a nerve.”

But blogger John Ekdahl’s bubble question, and the commentary that ensued, isn’t the first of its kind on the subject nor does it really get to the heart of the matter. That’s where social scientist Charles Murray comes in.

Murray has been probing the issue of American-made bubbles for decades, and has written several books about the sectionalism of American culture, most notably in his best-selling book, Coming Apart. In it, he offered a quiz in which people could test the thickness of the bubble in which they lived.

More than 140,000 people responded to the quiz, which was picked up and shared by PBS’s News Hour, and Murray has been sizing up the feedback for the past couple years.

Interestingly, the bubble that Murray investigates is the same one that Ekdahl triggered. And when the boys in the bubble started to react, the Twitter conversation, as usual, melted down and became less of a teachable moment and more of the same ol’ same ol’.

Murray, on the other hand, offers a meaningful and insightful discussion of not merely what the bubble is, but why the bubble matters. He explains his position in response to questions that he received on his own Twitter feed, where he often shares his analyses.

For instance:

“Why are large, diverse cities considered a ‘bubble’ but ethnically homogeneous small towns are not?”

Because it’s not just any old bubble that I’m interested in, but the bubble in which too many members of the new upper class live. The reason their bubble poses problems whereas the bubble in an ethnically homogeneous small town does not is an asymmetry of power. The people in ethnically homogeneous small towns don’t affect the lives of the new upper class. The new upper class pervasively affects the lives of all Americans everywhere, through their effects on the nation’s politics, economy, and culture. What we saw in the last presidential election was in part a result of the members of the new upper class being isolated in their bubbles. It would be good for the nation if they got out more.

So who is this new upper class? Murray describes them as fitting several criteria that put them into a very narrow and elite group of people. This is not based merely on zip code or socioeconomic status, but also on education and culture.

(U)rban-rural isn’t really the major source of the difference in bubble scores. Culture is, with mainstream American culture being conspicuously different from the culture of the new upper class. The decisive indicator of that culture is a zip code’s percentage of adults with college degrees. … (E)ducation continues to have the largest independent role even after putting measures of urbanization into the analysis. …

What does this tell you? Well, it’s not a critique of America’s educational system, and amusingly, the quiz turns pass/fail on its head so that the lower the mean score in a zip code, the bigger the bubble in which its residents reside.

After serious number-crunching, Murray finds that the biggest bubbles are no surprise, not merely because of their insularity, but because of their nearly homogeneous attitudes about everyone else.

The lowest means were found in New York City, San Francisco, Boston, and Los Angeles—the core cities for the regions that contained such a large proportion of the nation’s 100 bubbliest zip codes. Now look at the bottom of the list, where the mean bubble scores for the elite zip codes are closer to the national mean. These with means of 38 and higher are all well away from the Northeast or the Left Coast.

So while pickup trucks may be the biggest selling vehicles in the United States, these thick-bubbled cities are more likely to contain Amtrak’s Acela riders and SUV drivers, and they’re apparently none too happy for having that pointed out, especially since they discovered in the most recent presidential election that their influence didn’t have the seeming sway it usually does.

Take the bubble quiz.