As long-time (or casual) readers of SJ may already be aware, I’m not a big fan of feelings. It’s not that they don’t have their place, but they tend to be used inappropriately, as in lieu of thinking. History prof at UNC, Molly Worthen, sees the problem as well.

IN American politics, few forces are more powerful than a voter’s vague intuition. “I support Donald Trump because I feel like he is a doer,” a senior at the University of South Carolina told Cosmopolitan. “Personally, I feel like Bernie Sanders is too idealistic,” a Yale studentexplained to a reporter in Florida. At a Ted Cruz rally in Wisconsin in April, a Cruz fan declared, “I feel like I can trust that he will keep his promises.”

These people don’t think, believe or reckon. They “feel like.” Listen for this phrase and you’ll hear it everywhere, inside and outside politics. This reflex to hedge every statement as a feeling or a hunch is most common among millennials. But I hear it almost as often among Generation Xers and my own colleagues in academia. As in so many things, the young are early carriers of a broad cultural contagion.

A contagion, indeed, although it might have been worthwhile to leave “believe” out of the mix, since that’s the nature of religion. Priests believe.  Continue reading →

Whom are you going to believe?  Some fat, bald, funny looking lawyer or an award-winning investigative journalist? News anchor/managing editor @tjctv?  Steven I. Weiss, clearly.

There seems to be this idea that parody is protected in absolute and unlimited fashion by the First Amendment. This is not so.

— Steven I. Weiss (@steveniweiss) May 1, 2016

Continue reading →

Stanford University was under the gun.  Its alumni were outraged threatening to withhold donations. What could cause the graduates of an elite school on the wrong coast to feel such anger?  Results that didn’t confirm their bias.

Moreover, Stanford’s chosen methodology and presentation of data produces misleading results. For example, Stanford has made much of the finding that just 1.9% of its students experienced sexual assault, but the 1.9% figure averaged together the experiences of men, women, and gender-diverse students. Similarly, the 1.9% figure — as well as other statistics — is derived from a considerably narrower definition of sexual assault than the definition used by the AAU survey and most of our peer institutions. Under Stanford’s definition, some behavior that would constitute a felony would be classified as “sexual misconduct,” rather than as assault.

These and other problems seriously undermine the value of the survey in addressing sexual assault at Stanford.

Everyone knows there’s an epidemic of rape and sexual assault on campus,  Rape is more prevalent on campus than in prison. Everyone says so. Everyone. Except the damn empirical survey. This cannot stand, say the alums. There must be rape, so there can be rules and procedures to prevent rape. If there’s no rape, than whatever will they do?

It’s not that Stanford’s administration and faculty didn’t understand the problem, and the depth of feelings. And they did the best they could to calm things down. Continue reading →