GIN AND TACOS

My current university has numerous top-tier graduate programs but is sometimes the butt of jokes about the quality of its undergraduates.
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The criticism is not entirely without merit, but broad generalizations about any university with 20,000 undergrads are inherently unfair. In reality, every school has some mixture of brilliant students, students who are just along for the ride, and students who absolutely do not belong in a college environment. The ratios may be different (Yale vs Community College) but all three types are present at every university. From the Ivy League to the local night school, there are a lot of people in the higher educational system who utterly lack the skills necessary to succeed and should not be there.

That's a harsh, elitist thing to say in America 2008, isn't it? Well, "Professor X" at the Atlantic Monthly lays out the argument quite nicely in "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower." This essay should be mandatory reading for everyone involved in the business of higher education. If you've ever taught courses beyond high school I think you'll identify with his committment to teaching and frustrating realization that he is dealing with students who are devoid of some very fundamental college-level skills.

I've had students who are more than intelligent enough to write their own ticket in life, students whose eagerness and ability to understand complex arguments exceed that of some of my colleagues. They're both smart and committed. And they're not terribly rare. At IU, I'd estimate that they are about 25% of the undergraduate population. The next 50% are the people who are just shuffling through. They are easy to deal with, because either they will do the work and pass (they're capable of doing what we ask – if they bother to do it) or they will do nothing and fail. They don't participate in class, know why they are here, or care; they're thrilled to slide by with a C-.

The remaining 25% are Professor X's students. I mean this with the utmost respect toward undergraduates and none of my characteristic condescending prickness: about 25% of the students I deal with are, in the words of Nigel in Spinal Tap, "not exactly university material." Like Prof. X, I am not talking about people with a few learning or academic problems. I'm talking about students who are utterly devoid of the basic math, writing, research, communication, and problem-solving skills required. They do not know how to write a basic research paper. They don't understand the difference between fact and opinion, sentence and fragment. They often lack basic computer skills. Frankly, they don't merely lack college-level skills; some do not even have high school-level skills.

Like Professor X, I can spot these students immediately. And no matter how many times I explain what a research paper is, I inevitably get a sprawling, poorly-researched, barely-in-English summary of their opinion. Of course I do not hate these students or think they are incapable of learning. In most instances they simply have not been taught these skills (or were taught poorly).
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It is beyond frustrating for me, because I cannot turn political science classes into High School English 101. I do not have the time (or the training/expertise) to teach them how to write.

Who is to blame? Well, I'm glad you fucking asked.

High schools and parents play a role. The former pass students who lack basic skills, often because the latter have taught those students to do shitty work and then complain/negotiate their way to a B. But a far larger burden rests with the colleges. We are culpable. The admissions criteria in most colleges these days (with elite exceptions, of course) revolve around the means to pay.
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If you (or Mom and Dad) can write out the tuition check and you meet some ridiculously low standard (21 on the ACT), you're in. The universities goddamn well know that a relevant portion of the students they accept – especially in borderline-fraudulent moneymaking scams like "distance learning" or "extension" programs – can't hack it. They aren't prepared. They will not succeed. And we take them anyway because they can write the checks.

This is a serious ethical dilemma for universities. The folks in the state capitol cut the budget and the schools respond by admitting lower and lower tiers of applicants to make up the revenue. Rather than honestly telling some applicants "I'm sorry, but you are not ready to succeed in this environment" we smile and take a few semesters of tuition from them before they fail out. We take students – usually white, upper- or middle-class kids who lack college skills but have well-off parents – to subsidize other students. And the people who teach have to deal with the fallout – the emotional pleas, the poor nights of sleep, and the profound sadness that accompany handing a D- to a student who tried but simply isn't able to produce at the required level. The $12,000 per year grad student on the bottom of the food chain is left to deliver the bad news. As the author says,

Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns. … (the students) are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college. I am the man who has to drop the hammer.

Bill Clinton and that dude from the West Wing like to say "Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything." Some vague, unspecific "education" for "everyone" is the key to solving our problems. In the reality-based community, postsecondary education simply isn't for everyone. But what is the alternative? As we've seen blue collar employment disappear or settle into the $10/hr-no-benefits trough, the futility of one commonly proposed "solution" – that we should expand vocational or technical education as a college alternative – becomes clear. Why sink money into training people for jobs that will be in Mexico or Indonesia when they graduate?

No, instead we have financially able families sending unprepared people to college in the desperate hope that doing so will turn Billy into a lawyer. As working class jobs disappear in droves, people panic and buy into the delusion that the world needs an infinite number of engineers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, and pharmacists. Even if that were true (hint: it isn't), the ability to pay for an expensive education isn't going to turn some of these students into white collar professionals any more than buying an expensive set of golf clubs will turn a talentless, uncoordinated person into Tiger Woods.

People often complain (justifiably) that Americans fail to remember the meaning of major holidays. We're too busy buying seasonally-themed candy, tacky decorations, and expensive gifts. I think also-ran, non-gifting holidays get it even worse. How much time do you spend on Labor Day thinking about the sacrifices people made to improve our working conditions? You don't. We don't. Likewise, Memorial Day is about camping and driving and cook-outs and the Indy 500.

I'd be surprised if half the country could even describe what this holiday is intended to mean.

At absolute random, I plucked one of the 4,080 (and counting) U.S. military deaths off of the official coalition casualty list. This is Jose Paniagua-Morales. He died on March 7, 2008 from blunt trauma and blood loss after his vehicle was attacked with a roadside bomb in Samarra, Iraq. He was a 22 year-old from Bell Gardens, California. He had been in Iraq less than a month.
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Jose and a lot of other human beings appear in our discussions about political issues as numbers or abstract ideas, in stories about "casualties" or "surges" or terrorism. Conceiving of reality as a sterile statistic is intended to make it easier on the suburban TV-watching public. "2 killed in roadside attack" goes down a lot more smoothly than reality, which boils down to this: Jose Paniagua-Morales was somebody's neighbor, somebody's friend, somebody's son, and a guy on the bus to the rest of us.

There's nothing unique about him. He was a person who did what he was asked to do and succumbed to the inherent dangers of the task. But he had a life and a story, like 4079 other Americans, 176 Brits, 33 Italians, 23 Poles, 18 Ukranians, approximately 40 people from other Coalition countries, and somewhere between 90,000 – 150,000 Iraqi civilians and combatants.

Today's a good day to remind ourselves that we're sitting in our comfortable homes talking in abstract terms about war while, a world away, lives are being lost or ruined on a daily basis. That those lives rarely have a face or name is an unfortunate manifestation of our society's inability to deal with guilt or accept responsibility for our decisions. We cope by overcompensating and making angels out of the dead. I don't think that "honors" anyone's memory.
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Jose might have been a great guy. He might have been a jerk. My guess would be that he is like all of us – a lot of people loved him and some people didn't like him much. That's life. What's important is that, regardless of what role he played in the lives of people who knew him, he won't be playing it any longer.

A good friend of mine, with whom I share many political sympathies, directed me to this Bill McKibben editorial in the LA Times. Sensationally titled "Civilization's Last Chance", the author talks about the growing and empirically-documented problem of increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. I'm unusually conflicted.

I agree with the author's premise without hesitation. I have serious reservations about his tone and method of delivery, though. Using the "Sky is Falling" approach to increase awareness of environmental issues seems ineffective at best or counterproductive at worst. Let's use an analogy, because I love analogies.

You have a friend who is seriously overweight. Concerned, you decide to tell him that losing some weight might be good for his health. You tell him that he is in imminent danger of dropping dead and doing irreversible damage to his body if he doesn't lose 100 pounds right away. That message could have a powerful impact and inspire positive changes. Conversely, it could be overwhelming, creating a feeling of hopelessness and resignation. "I can't lose 100 pounds right away. I guess I'm fucked. Pass the Ho-Hos." Even worse, you could be dismissed as a serial exaggerator, especially if, for example, the person was not inclined to believe that weight affects health in the first place.

McKibben's message will generate responses that fit into three broad categories. First, he could scare a reader into becoming very concerned. This is his goal. Second, he could create a feeling that the problem is as dire, overwhelming, and incomprehensibly large as he suggests. The likely results are apathy and resignation. Third, people who are inclined to believe that climatology and global warming are "junk science" could find all of the keywords they'd need to disregard him as a crank or a tinfoil-hatted cult leader predicting the apocalypse. Hell, just looking at the alarmist title might be enough.

Going back to our overweight friend analogy, let's say you take a different approach. You tell him that it might be good for his health if he cut out soft drinks.
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Sugar's bad, after all. He finds that living without Coke and Sprite really isn't too awfully hard. Hell, he barely even misses them. And he loses 5 pounds. He feels good about the fact that he lost some weight. So you suggest getting more exercise or maybe cutting out fast food. Since losing a little weight no longer seems impossible, he's willing to give it a try. He keeps building on small victories until, at some point in the near future, he has what could be described as a healthy lifestyle.

I wonder why people like McKibben don't spend more time presenting these problems in a way that doesn't overwhelm readers' feelings that they can do something concrete about it. Not "write your Congressman" or "vote for environmentalists" but actually do something measurable. When he says "The planet is going to die and you have to fix it" there aren't many people who think that's a realistic goal. Maybe, for example, he could write a column about how re-usable canvas grocery bags can save 300-500 plastic (made from oil, of course) or paper bags per shopper every year.
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Even though suburban America is resistant to anything that asks for a lifestyle change or suggests that profligate consumption is not our birthright, most people will read that and think "Well that's not so fucking hard.
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" I mean, honestly, how hard is it to use a different bag to carry groceries? It isn't. At all. It's so goddamn easy that….people might actually do it.

So we wean ourselves off of plastic grocery bags as a nation.
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McKibben has a tangible victory. An example toward which to point. "See? We changed something. And it was easy! Now let's try….." Because the problem here is not SUVs or lack of public transit or McMansions. Those are symptoms. The problem is that our entire national mindset is fucked up. We simply do not think about conservation, waste, or efficiency at all. We ask only two questions: What do I want? What is easiest/most convenient for me?

Telling people, as the author does, that they have to run out to buy a $35,000 hybrid tomorrow does nothing to alter that mindset. It's just overwhelming. People will have an excuse to ignore it. We need to start at the bottom of the mountain and get people to put one foot in front of the other, not point at the mountain and say "Get to the top by tomorrow or you're fucked." This isn't about CO2 or the urgency of climate change. It's about tricking people into changing the way they think, to replace their standard modus operandi – doing whatever is most convenient for them as individuals, be it driving everywhere, throwing out 12 plastic Evian bottles per day, or running the furnace at 80 while no one's home – with a new set of questions. Is this efficient? Is this wasteful? It can be done, just not overnight.

We all know that gasoline is plowing toward /gal.
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I bet you didn't know that the price of corn, which was $2/bushel in 2005, is now over $6/bushel. Part of that is increased fuel and transportation costs. And part of it is in your gas tank.

One of my particularly conservative friends asked me recently why dirty liberals don't get excited about ethanol the same way they get excited about recycling, hybrids, and David Sedaris. A superficial understanding of the issue suggests that we should be excited – it's renewable, it gives farmers an expanded market for their commodities, it aids in "energy independence" or whatever, and so on. Unfortunately my response is pretty straightforward: no one gets excited about ethanol because it is a monumental crock of shit and a terrible product. By the time we wrap up this ludicrous half-century experiment it will hold its own against the greatest boondoggles in history, somewhere between the Concorde and the Iraqi Reconstruction.

Ethanol has been the "fuel of the future" for about 40 years, enjoying a surge in popularity every time the cost of gasoline shocks America. It remains "the next big thing" for the same reasons it never actually becomes the present big thing: it's a quick-fix, politically expedient solution that promises not to make Americans change their habits. We can drive the same idiotic vehicles, only with different fuel in the tank. This is why foot-dragging behemoths like General Motors (and Congress) are pimping E85 like it cures cancer. It's "clean", it subsidizes the idealized vision of rural America, and requires a minimum of mechanical changes in gasoline combustion engines.

Corn grown in the United States may be the single most heavily subsidized commodity on the planet. Since 1995, corn farmers have received over $60 billion in Federal subsidies. The vast majority of corn still goes into the food chain (either directly or as feed) but the amount diverted into the ethanol white elephant has grown five-fold since 2003. Despite banal promises that "new technologies" and more research will suddenly turn ethanol into a miracle cure for our energy needs, nearly four decades' worth of effort have yet to overcome the fundamental flaws in the product. Yet Congress has mandated that by 2022 we have to increase our production of this shit from 6 billion barrels per year to 36 billion (and remember, we're using 150 billion gallons of fossil fuels every year according to the DoE). You're welcome, Iowa Farmers / Welfare Queens.

What's wrong with ethanol? First, ethanol evaporates when mixed with gasoline. Mandating a blend of the two products (almost all gas sold today is E10, i.e. 10% ethanol) dramatically increases the costs of refining to compensate for this problem. Second, ethanol costs more energy per gallon to produce than is contained in the gallon of ethanol itself. Third, a gallon of E85 contains almost 1/4 less energy than a gallon of gasoline, so you need to use more of it. It kills fuel economy. This more than offsets the fact that E85 costs less at the pump. Fourth, it is only cheaper (or economically competitive with gasoline) because of a truly staggering level of government subsidy; almost $1.40 per gallon, compared to subsidies of 0.3 cents per gallon for gasoline.
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In other words, without Uncle Sam underwriting every stage of the process from planting to pumping, the cost of ethanol would make regular gasoline look cheap. Real cheap.

A deep flaw in the American character is the blind faith that technology is going to save us. In the 1950s nuclear power was going to be too cheap to meter. Then hydrogen power was going to be more abundant than air itself. Now biofuels are the magic ticket.
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Ethanol is nothing more than a fad – one whose staying power is attributable to the enormous political influence of agribusiness (and ethanol king ADM in particular). But ethanol, which is nothing more than the grain alcohol you put in fruit punch to make weddings more bearable, is a terrible product with absolutely no potential to replace gasoline. To replace our gasoline usage gallon-for-gallon, we'd have to plant corn on every square inch of the United States – and part of Canada. And more efficient ethanol crops ("cellulosic ethanol" produced from switchgrass or sugarcane) are nothing more than pipe dreams at the moment. We are to believe, of course, that shoveling money into this black hole for another 20 years will make cellulosic ethanol a reality. And that's our national neurosis – our behavior doesn't need to change because the solution to all our problems is (always) right around the corner.

I am not going to sit here and tell you that gasoline is a good product or that our use of it is sustainable.
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But suitable replacements should be things that pollute less, cost less, and are more efficient. Since ethanol is inefficient to produce, pollutes just as much as gasoline, and costs far more, this endeavor amounts to little more than Chuck Grassley, ADM executives, and a bunch of Iowa farmers breaking it off in your ass while exchanging high-fives and lighting cigars with government cash.