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OPINION 6 March 2014 A4

33 E. College St. Hillsdale, MI 49242

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Enjoy the trainwreck The opinion of The Collegian editorial staff

Well, here it is. The week before Spring break. That light at the end of a dark, cold, and snowy tunnel grows ever closer. It will, we hope, bring respite from a semester of unceasing obligations. Yet between it and us, an onslaught of midterms, exams, homework assignments, and other academic obligations threatens ominously — unwelcome yet common attachments any pre-break week. Consequently, many students see this light not

Futile attempts at doing everything

Erin Mundahl Student Columnist I was rejected today. Or rather, my internship application was politely declined using the most cordial of blandly complimentary fluff. Neurological studies say that the brain processes rejection with the same regions it uses to handle physical pain. Which I guess means I feel a little like the letter punched me in the face. I look at the email with chagrin and think I should have gone somewhere else, maybe Harvard. I won’t claim that I could have been accepted at Harvard. What I do know is that, by choosing to come to Hillsdale rather than the University of Minnesota, my education benefited and my grades suffered. I doubt there are many students here who could speak differently.

Jonah Goldberg Syndicated Columnist President Obama announced last week a new race-based initiative, My Brother’s Keeper. According to the White House, the program will coordinate government agencies and private foundations to help young men and boys of color. “Of color” basically means blacks and Latinos. In fact, it’s pretty obvious the program is aimed at young black men. This fact has invited some conservative criticism. The Weekly Standard’s Terry Eastland notes that the program is

his family — take second place to his party duty. Even his sex life is synchronized with the obligations of the cause... Are Communists a menace to America? Yes, there IS a Communist menace in America... A Communist trick frequently echoed by some liberals is to insist that “Fascism is the real danger, not Communism.” That’s like saying that tuberculosis is no danger, because cancer is... April 15, 1947

pers. Impossible as it may seem, you will survive this relatively minor ordeal (unless you’re writing a thesis. If so, no guarantees, and you have our sympathy). And try to take from your survival as many lessons into the real world as you can. Because that’s when the challenges truly begin. Ask any second semester senior: panicking over five page essays wastes time you could spend with friends and professors you get to know for four short years.

Hillsdale provides a good eduAt the same time, Hillsdale cation, not a good GPA. By the does not aim to compete with retime we graduate, we can joke gional schools, but rather seeks to about Aristotle and roll our eyes meet the standards of top tier uniat nerdy Latin humor. Our profes- versities. Ironically, their average sors have demanded much from GPAs are much higher. Last Deus, and we strive and struggle to cember, the Harvard Crimson, its provide it. Virtue rejoices in the student newspaper, reported that, challenge. “the median grade Every ma- We can pretend that at Harvard Coljor has its horlege is an A-, and ror stories. My the scale can be shifted the most frequentfriends in Clasly awarded mark and that institutions sics speak of is an A.” The same fervid exam and employers will article also noted review, knowthat 62 percent of ing that if they recognize the value of grades at Yale fell did not do well a Hillsdale education, into the A- range. enough, they The university set would get their but many will only look a goal of limiting tests back with the number of stucompleted drop at the numbers. dents graduating cards stapled to with honors to 60 the front. I have percent. my own share of stories of the What this means is that Hill“Jackson C” and the “Somerville sdale grades more strictly than C,” both of which merely dem- top-tier Ivy League schools. Unonstrate that you produced good fortunately, we don’t have the college-level work. name recognition to go with it. Taken in isolation, this is a Somewhere around 260 students valid standard. But if Hillsdale have submitted applications to wishes to prepare students for graduate in May. Even if each graduate education, its grading and every one of them intended policies can never be taken in to go to graduate school, mediisolation. cal school or law school, they are Several years ago, the Col- too few to allow the college to legian published an article on become known for its academic Hillsdale’s grading policy. Cam- rigor. pus administration defended the Ironically this problem is only policy by comparing Hillsdale’s exacerbated by the sort of gradaverage GPA to those at other ing which drives intelligent stuMichigan colleges, including dents away from applying to top Grand Valley State University programs due to their GPAs. Hilland Hope College. The compari- sdale students are forced to aim son was intended to show that lower because they were held to Hillsdale’s grades were not a sta- a higher standard. tistical anomaly. Many professors try to help

students by explaining the college’s grading policy through letters of recommendation. Yet even with stellar test scores, many applications are rejected before such letters are even opened, automatically discarded because they did not meet the GPA threshold. As I speak to other seniors, I catch a refrain: “I know I can impress in an interview, but I don’t know if my grades are good enough to get one.” This is the trouble with the college’s current approach to grades. We can pretend that the scale can be shifted and that institutions and employers will recognize the value of a Hillsdale education, but many will only look at the numbers. In short, the trouble with the “Jackson C” is that once it goes onto my transcript, the only name on it is mine. I can’t claim to know the answer to this problem. If I were to discover that all of my professors this term gave me A’s solely because I wrote this column, I would be disappointed, because I would know that I hadn’t earned them. Still, the college should consider what its goals are. If it intends to help foster a renaissance of conservative thinking in higher education, it should not hamstring its students with an archaic grading policy that prevents them from exploring certain careers. The decision is not mine to make though. I’ll stick to sending out applications, while questing after unicorns and the elusive Jackson A. I’ll tell you which one I find first.

MY BROTHER’S KEEPER: RACE DOES, AND SHOULD, MATTER

From the Archives: How to recognize a Red Ted Grace, a[t] a recent chapel meeting, told us what Communism is; in this article we will tell you the dangers of Communism and how to recognize a Communist when you see one — and don’t think that you won’t see Communists in the small city of Hillsdale... Because the whole Communist apparatus is geared to secrecy, it is not always easy to determine just who is a Communist. The American Communist is not like other Americans; to the Communist everything — his country, his job,

probably procrastinated in prior weeks, forgetting that deadlines are always closer than they appear. Besides, if your most pressing concern is finishing your term paper before 4 p.m. on friday, you have a pretty good life. Most college students are in a similar position. Never before will we enjoy so many of the privileges of adulthood with so few of the responsibilities, nor will we ever again. So go finish your last few pa-

Hunting the unicorn, the 4.0, and other elusive prey

The editors welcome Letters to the Editor but reserve the right to edit submissions for clarity, length, and style. Letters should be 450 words or less and include your name and number. Send submissions to snelson1@hillsdale.edu before Sunday at 6 p.m.

My sophomore year woke me up. Oddly, it had none of the stigma associated with my riotous freshman year. By all appearances, I was thoroughly reformed. I had a second chance to succeed. This was balm to my recently disenchanted soul, primarily because, in performing badly my freshman year, I had failed to hold up a fairly substantial family legacy at Hillsdale College. My father and mother both attended this school. I don’t remember a time when Central Hall didn’t shimmer out at me on the letterhead of one of innumerable college Ian Andrews publications. It was an icon Student Columnist of higher education in my home, though my parents never expected me to trace their footsteps. My father was a true renaissance man, winning the concerto competition, founding Intervarsity Christian Fellowship on Hillsdale’s campus, double majoring in economics and Christian studies, and, most notably, graduating with a 4.0. He met my mother his freshman year. They began dating towards the end of their second semester, and married 3 days after graduation. Theirs was the perfect college experience, full of accomplishments and honors, in addition to legendary friendships and a beautiful love story. I left freshman year deeply confused by the drastic difference between my college experience and theirs, and entered sophomore year ready to pursue their college legacy as earnestly as I had renounced it the previous year. While during my freshman year the college held me to a higher standard than I could meet, sowing humility in my wild oats, it filled a different role my sophomore year. It offered me to myself by laying so wide a range of study at my feet that I was forced to choose what I truly wanted to learn. Unfortunately for me, this required that I know myself well enough to focus my efforts, which I certainly did not. And I was scared. What if I missed college just because I was a moron? How was I to know I was working hard enough, or involved in the right mixture of things to come away with a glowing experience to tell my own children about? It was arrogance that led me to assume I’d succeed on talent alone freshman year; it was fear that drove me to do literally everything my sophomore year. Success, after all, had been defined for me already. My impressive father had set the bar. And now that I had realized not only that I would have to work hard, but that I wanted the benefits that hard work could achieve, I retreated towards the nearest exterior standard of right accomplishment. If I did it all, just like my father had, there was no way I could miss out on his college experience. I decided promptly to become a double English and Music major with a Philosophy minor, to join a worship team affiliated with the Intervarsity ministry, and take all of the professors that my parents had talked about when I was young. I attacked the core classes in as short a time as I possibly could to make up for the previous year’s failures. None of these things contributed the sort of security I wanted. Instead, stressed out and stretched thin, I was unable to devote myself thoroughly to any of these many commitments. The pendulum had swung backwards, from negligence into over-commitment, and I was miserable. Enter phase two of my education. In the face of this overabundance of good things, I had to find out who I, not my father, was. I began to discover what I liked to do, where I wanted to spend my time, and what, precisely, Ian’s interests actually were. Though terrifying, developing my own vision for my personal growth also offered me an unfamiliar comfort in affirming my individual identity. I began to discover what my parents had before me. I realized that the breadth and depth of available knowledge effectively defined the parameters of my being by showing me its limits. To know oneself in such a fashion relieves the pressure to know everything. I left sophomore year content to offer myself to a few disciplines, rather than laboring futilely to possess them all.

as a relief but as an oncoming train. Complaints ring out on Facebook and campus over the unconquerable mountain of tasks to complete before break begins that prevents us from truly anticipating our rest. How can we, with so much left to do? But complaint without action accomplishes little. Much of our anguish is not purely a product of insidious collusions among professors to generate the most possible misery anyway. You

likely unconstitutional. Doling out benefits explicitly based on race is generally a no-no, according to the Supreme Court Even more frowned on: discrimination against women. The program will categorically exclude women and girls. In 1996, when the court (wrongly, in my opinion) ordered the historically single-sex Virginia Military Institute to admit women, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ruled that blanket sex-based discrimination requires an “exceedingly persuasive justification.” For me, My Brother’s Keeper meets that bar. The statistics are gloomy and familiar: 1 out of 15 black men is behind bars; 1 out of 3 can expect to be incarcerated at some point in his life. The simplistic talk about how this is all the result of white racism misses the scope and nature of the problem. The vast majority of interracial violent crime is black on white. But most violent crime is actually intra-racial (i.e., black on black or white on white). Still, blacks are far more likely to die from homicide; half of murder victims are black, which may partly explain why black men in prison have a higher life expectancy than black men out of prison. And this leaves out all of the challenges — educational, economic, etc. — facing black men that don’t show up in crime statistics.

The Uses of a Liberal Arts Education

by Forester McClatchtey

Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, also thinks the program is unconstitutional because there is no “compelling” government interest here: “It may be that a disproportionate number of blacks and Latinos are at-risk, but many are not, and many whites, Asians and others are. This is just another kind of ‘profiling.’” Yes and no. Obviously there are at-risk youth of all races, but the problems facing young black men are so disproportionate, the difference of degree becomes a difference in kind. Yet, I also think Clegg is obviously right that this is another kind of profiling. There’s an intriguing double standard that tangles up the right and the left. We’re told it is outrageous for government to assume that a young black male (in some contexts) is more likely to commit a crime; we’re also told that government should target young black men for help because they are more likely to commit crimes. Most liberals hate law enforcement profiling but support — for want of a better term — social justice profiling. For conservatives, it’s vice versa (though Clegg opposes both kinds of profiling, it’s worth noting). Yet the empirical arguments for positive and negative profiling are the same: The plight of young black men is different.

Clegg says that the initiative should be aimed at all at-risk males. Maybe that would be ideal -- on paper. The hitch is that a program that appeals to all young males may not be as effective as one that focuses on young blacks in particular. Relatively benign appeals to racial solidarity and pride by definition don’t work on groups of different races. The point is even more obvious when you consider sex differences. A strong male role model can tell boys to “act like a man” in ways women can’t. Sure, a woman can say the words, but she can’t be a man. For some boys, particularly ones without fathers at home (the majority of at-risk youths), that’s still a huge distinction. That’s why I agree with those liberals who think Obama should have done more sooner for young black men. It may be irrational in a legalistic sense, but in human terms it is utterly obvious that the first black president of the United States — raised by a single mother no less — might have special standing with at-risk black youth. Real life happens outside the neat boundaries of rigid legalisms. It also happens upstream of government. I’m very skeptical this program will do much to fix the deeper problems, but if it causes Obama to focus on them, it’s probably worth it.