THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

I write in response to the postings, here and here, on the life-damaging consequences of the cost of higher education and student loans.

Modern people generally, liberals, logical positivists, moral relativists, and the entire tribe of sociologists, vehemently deny that correlation is causation. Personally, correlations impress me – as do analogies, to which the same people listed above also deny significance.

When I began as a freshman at UCLA in the fall semester of 1972, the cost of a college-term was under one hundred dollars. My memory, which might be faulty even though it is quite good, is that the price (it was not called tuition, but a “registration fee”) of a ten-week quarter (three quarters in the academic year) was forty-eight dollars. Books were an extra cost. Life in the dorms or in an apartment near campus, was an additional cost. Commuting was an additional cost. But the cost was affordable. Of course, admission to the UC system was still more or less strictly by meritocratic measurement. Anyone in the top tenth percentile of his high-school graduating class was guaranteed admission to the University of California – as I recall, at the campus of his choice. Affirmative action existed in some primitive form, but it was not the totality of the game. Read More »

MANY excellent comments have been added to recent discussions. I hope you will go back and read the additions. Please see the entry on student debt, in which Proph from The Orthosphere responds to the story of a recent female graduate of a top university whose parents have advised her to default on her student loans. Proph is $60,000 in debt for his higher education, and makes occasional loans to his father. He writes:

I can certainly agree … with David’s indignation at the rank, monstrous irony with which a grown man would complain about the irresponsibility of young men, while himself selling his daughter into debt slavery so she could pay his Social Security bills. I’m 26 myself, $60,000 in debt, with a strict budget and a plan to get myself debt-free in six or seven years, and I’m still lending money to my father, who, with twice my income and half my debt, often finds himself surprised and bankrupted by modest, anticipated expenses. His is the “dumbest generation of narcissists in the history of the world” (to borrow a turn of phrase from The Last Psychiatrist), and they’ve made a mess of everything.

SOPHIA writes:

As a young woman with traditionalist values, I am finding things difficult. I am enrolled in college and find it more disagreeable and unfulfilling with each leftist professor and aimless course. I have found a select few schools that offer compelling curriculum, such as Thomas Moore College of Liberal Arts and St. John’s College, but their accumulative tuition and board costs surpass my available funds, and I am not willing to go into debt. Thus, I seem to be stuck getting this “education” and for what purpose I’m without a clue. I feel I am merely going with society’s flow and look to the future with vague, idealist dreams and simplistic trust in God. Read More »

INTERESTING comments have been added to the discussion about an Alaska woman who is too impoverished by student loans to join a cloistered convent. In that entry, David C. tells the story of a female friend who recently graduated from a top university with a degree in Latin American studies. Leaving aside the issue of what this degree has done to her intellectual development, David explains that she is already considering defaulting on her $75,000 in loans, with her parents’ approval.

David writes:

I’m 26 years old. My friend is a few years younger than me and graduated recently from a prestigious university with a degree in Latin American studies. Total cost: $75,000… almost totally financed by student loans, one of which has, I believe she’s told me, an 11 percent interest rate. She is currently unemployed and is certainly having difficulty finding work in her field. The most realistic opportunity she has found so far is work as an au pair for a family in Spain, which she may be able to do next year. Read More »

GENO AURIEMMA, the prominent women’s basketball coach at the University of Connecticut, has an idea for getting more people to watch the women’s games. He wants the standard height of the rim to be lowered about seven inches. That way the ball will get in the basket more often (or at least I think that’s how it works.)

According to CBS News, Auriemma said:

What makes fans not want to watch women’s basketball is that some of the players can’t shoot and they miss layups, and that forces the game to slow down.

This would be very, very funny if it weren’t for all the money and high-priced careers riding on women’s college basketball at a time when men’s college sports teams are curtailed to comply with Title IX, the coercive scheme for equality in sports.

Auriemma is actually hoping that women’s basketball will become as popular as women’s volleyball even though the aesthetics, so to speak, of the two sports are vastly different. Women basketball players are warriors in shorts. Women’s volleyball players are pert girls in underwear. One is machismo and the other soft porn.

I don't get it. Why don't people want to watch women's basketball?

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ONE WOULD think that women chief executives were flooding American corporations, judging from the constant press about the needs, desires, whims, career advice and amazing, totally breathtaking and awesome accomplishments of female CEO’s, such as the darling of the business world, Marissa Mayer, above, who recently returned to work as CEO of Yahoo just two weeks after giving birth to her first child at the age of 37. One would even think, given the press, that women make better top executives than men. A recent issue of Fortune magazine actually made this claim and it has been repeated elsewhere, most notably by EU bureaucrats who want to mandate that 40 percent of all directors of European corporate boards be women. There is a pervasive myth that female-headed companies are more stable and better-performing, a conclusion that not only flies in the face of the documented history of free enterprise but cannot possibly be proven given the low numbers of women at the top. For despite decades of celebration of women in business and decades of pressure to discriminate in favor of women, they still occupy less than four percent of CEO positions in Fortune 500 companies. This year, the total is 18 out of 500. According to the research firm Catalyst, women occupy about 14 percent of executive officer positions in all companies and the figures in general for women in corporate leadership have not risen in six years. Six years! Six years of glowing encomia to women executives.

The truth is, it is not possible to draw any conclusions about the comparative performance of women executives except the obvious one: There aren’t many women at the top. All the profiles of glamorous CEO’s such as Ginni Rometty, of IBM; all the breathless stories about whether Marissa should have left her son so soon and all the aggressive affirmative action in favor of women haven’t made that much difference. Women are still interesting novelties in the chief executive suite, and everyone wants to know how they do it because everyone knows, though no one will say it, that women will aways be anomalies at the top. Barring some dramatic and overwhelming revolution in human nature, women are not as competitive, or as comfortable in positions of authority, as men. They do not wish to make the grueling climb to the top. Everyone knows this, except, of course, feminists, who claim that women are still discriminated against or lack “sponsorship” or “on ramps and off ramps.” Many millions in consulting fees have gone into various forms of flexibility and “on ramps and off ramps” for women in business but these efforts have not changed much at the top. What they have done is keep the tantalizing dream alive that women can have everything. What they have done is create positive discrimination against men and a stifling fear of offending feminist groupthink. What they also have done is create a culture in which fewer and fewer women can find men to support them so that they can do what they want to do most.

By the way, in case you were wondering, Mayers has named her son, Macallister. She asked for suggestions for a name on social media after he was born. One wonders how Macallister will feel years from now when he digs into the archives and finds that his mother bragged that she would only be taking a week or so off from work after he was born and that the above cover photo appeared when she was nine months pregnant.

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This is a bed rug completed by Mary Foote (1752-1837), in Colchester, Connecticut in 1778. According to The Magazine Antiques, it was made in preparation for her wedding:

This is one of four spectacular bed rugs made to commemorate the weddings on November 5, 1778, of three siblings of the Foote and Otis families, prosperous farmers and landowners in the Connecticut River valley. The women likely spent the prior year spinning, dyeing, and sewing the rugs, all of which contain a center of stylized flowers enclosed within a reverse-curved border. The outlines are sewn with a running stitch and the designs are filled in with a darning stitch, requiring careful planning.

This beautiful rug is now in the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. Given that poor Mary was obviously very oppressed, I wonder why this rug conveys such a sense of happiness and delight in the floral world.

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DANIEL S. writes:

I was reading several essays by the late philosopher Josef Pieper (perhaps my favorite philosopher of the twentieth century) about art and music tonight, which can be found in his book Only the Lovers Sing: Art and Contemplation. His observations are ever timely, and I thought I would summarize a few of his ideas and observations that stood out to me. Read More »

IN A CULTURE where women are encouraged to take out massive debt for higher education, it is not only difficult to become a housewife, it’s hard to become a cloistered nun. Tara Clemens is trying to pay off more than $100,000 in loans she took out for law school so that she can enter a convent.

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AT HenryMakow.com, a Frenchman named Darcel vents about the aggression and self-centeredness of contemporary French women. The piece is short and roughly written (or translated), but he makes some good points. He writes:

French girls used to be famous for coquetterie,” a behavior that made them charming and above all lovable. Needless to say it’s not the case anymore. It’s seems that all the good old qualities that used to make a girl desirable as a mate as well as worthy of devotion and respect, have simply disappeared.

I believe that comes mainly from education or lack of it. As the matter of fact, most of the girls of my generation (born in the eighties) are the product of divorce. Between 40-50 per cent of French marriages end in divorce.

Simone de Beauvoir, the mother of French feminism and author of The Second Sex, said at one point:

“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.”

French women have followed in her footsteps. Even though they surpass women in earnings and accomplishments, men are the second sex in France now.

THIS SHORT video depicts Génération Identitaire’s non-violent occupation of a mosque in Poitiers, an historic act of protest against mass non-Western immigration and the growth of Islam in France. Read about it at Galliawatch.

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HERE’S another outstanding comment — a comment that’s too good to leave buried in a thread — about the Boy Scouts sexual abuse scandal. Texanne writes:

Our children are victimized every day by people who don’t touch them or even get near them, but who constantly bombard youngsters’ minds with sexual thoughts and images and generate anxiety about what kind of sex they might prefer or even what sex they might be. There are no secret files kept on these predators — they abuse openly and with public funds, with the endorsement of school authorities and even with parental approval. And yet, somehow, the protective glow of victimhood remains.

Perhaps the Boy Scout abuse story will help to dispel the victimhood myth.

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THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes in this entry:

I was never a Scout, but I hope that Scouting survives. What fascinates me is not so much the revelation about Scouting as the revelation about liberalism, which is willing to switch positions diametrically, systematically ignore evidence, and exploit whatever is of momentary advantage against the objects of its perpetual scorn and hatred.  For decades the Boy Scout organization made the point that permitting homosexuals to serve as group leaders would be to invite abuse.  The Scouts based their position on the well-grounded assumption that male homosexuality is essentially pedophiliac and that it would be crazy to put pedophiles in charge of boys and adolescents.  The American Left sustained a relentless culture-war against the Scouts that rested on categorizing that perfectly reasonable assumption and its argumentative consequence as a bigoted fantasy.   Read More »

A READER writes:

It’s over for the Boy Scouts. There’s going to be no balanced coverage of this old story. My view is that they could have done worse and they could have done better, but certainly it was the custom of the time not to talk about it, or report it, but just try to get rid of the problem.

The condemnation will be deadly. Read More »

AT The Orthosphere, Bonald wonders why Paul Ryan has not more emphatically rejected his previous enthusiasm for Ayn Rand:

[A]ren’t we entitled to a major speech in which he totally renounces her and all her works and all her empty promises?

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AT The Orthosphere, Proph argues that it is morally wrong for Catholics and any “men of good faith” to vote for either of the two major-party candidates for president. He writes:

Those who choose to exercise their right to vote should …. either vote for a morally commendable third party candidate (if one can be found), write-in such a candidate of their own choosing, or else spoil their ballots. The same principles apply in general to all candidates down-ticket, as well.

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