This Week in Viewpoints, I decided to take aim at people missing the point, or writing themselves into absurd positions by ignoring the obvious. It has long been my opinion that the best journalists are educational generalists with a wide knowledge base and a curiosity that prompts them not just to point out disconnected facts but note trends.
Richard Greenwald at The Daily Beast doesn’t see trends. In a recent article called “The Right’s New Higher Ed Target: Community College,” he heaps opprobrium on right-of-center politicians (and constituencies) for their “attack” on higher ed. Starting out with an anecdote about tensions between the Board Chair and the President of Northern Idaho Community College in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho. As Greenwald frames it, the President is under pressure for the perceived leftist political slant of higher ed. As he goes on to cite from The Chronicle of Higher Ed, this is symptomatic of a nationwide attack on all of higher ed by conservatives:
…in counties across America, disdain for colleges is thriving among people on the right and far right. For years, locals have made bogeymen out of the faculty, characterizing them as radicals with leftist agendas, committed to indoctrinating students.
It may be worth asking: are college staff radicals? Well, compared to the general population, yes. That’s according to The Chronicle itself, which upholds the idea of a marked left-slant to America’s college professors. Are they committed to indoctrinating students?
Well “indoctrinate” is a tricky word because of its negative connotation, but I would argue yes. All it means is to “instill doctrine,” and a doctrine is just a stated principle or belief. Do Christian seminaries “indoctrinate” their students to believe in Christ’s Resurrection? I sure hope so. Do mainly progressively-tilted sociology and ethnic studies programs teach people to believe in Critical Race Theory as a doctrine? Well, yeah. Is that doctrine, as Greenwald pantomimes the conservative concern, making people “hate their country”? Well yeah. Hard not to hate something that is racist to its very core.
So in short, conservatives are basically right about this. It’s just that Greenwald happens to think progressive indoctrination is good, which is fine. I think Christian indoctrination, as described above, is good.
It’s true that even small colleges in rural, conservative areas replicate, for much of the peasants, what it must have felt like if a medieval lord came and plopped a castle down on the commons and declared himself their sworn enemy. Greenwald can be against conservative attacks on colleges, just like I am. I happen to think liberal arts education is extremely important, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered to get one. He should just, maybe, get a little perspective.
Another article that caught my attention was this one from PsyPost entitled “Religion is a driving force behind the gender wage gap, study finds” by a Mr. Eric Dolan.
First of all, anytime an article title ends with “study finds” or “researchers say,” you know you’re in for some grade-A non sequitur. This one is no different. It focuses in on the problem of the “wage gap,” which, as any person from 2014 can tell you, is the overall, aggregated gap between all the wages that men make minus those that women make. The reason you don’t hear about it very much anymore is because, I think, feminist activists have realized its a stupid argument. It simply does not say what they think it does. Mr. Dolan, it appears, hasn’t done any research on the wage gap since the Malaysia Airlines 370 went down.
The main thrust of the article is in this paragraph:
“In nations where more than 95% or more people said religion was important in their daily lives, such as Pakistan and the Philippines, women earned around 46% as much as men. In countries where fewer than 20% of people said religion was important to them in daily life, such as Sweden and Estonia, women averaged around 75% of men’s wages,” Sitzmann told PsyPost.
And the conclusion is:
“Our research is instrumental for documenting that religiosity has a systematic effect on women’s wages, suggesting that businesses should toe a fine line between permitting religious freedom and ensuring that freedom does not infringe upon the rights of others,” Sitzmann said.
To be fair, it’s this Sitzmann guy colossally missing the point, but Dolan doesn’t call him out on it so I’m considering him culpable. What’s wrong with this article?
The findings of the study hold that, in more religious societies, women earn less then men averaged, overall. And in less religious societies, women still earn less than men, but without as great of a gap. So the question is, why?
Well, more religious societies have, on average, less female workforce participation. This is, partly, because more religious societies have higher birthrates. In the analysis of Sweden versus Pakistan, Swedish women are, by and large, less likely to have any children at all than Pakistani women. Ergo, there are more single Swedish women who have no childcare obligations and, thus, more free time for paid employment.
The difference in workforce participation, as the study obliquely claims, is causally related. More religious people, generally, place greater emphasis on childcare and homemaking than more secular people, and that holds true for men and women, and in the United States as well as elsewhere. Religious societies just don’t prioritize women working outside the home. They can be presented with evidence of a gender wage gap and just shrug, because they don’t care, it’s not important to them.
But if these are just systemic differences in how religious and secular societies approach female workforce participation, why oh why do businesses need to “toe a fine line” about permitting religious freedom in the workplace? Is a devout Muslim desk worker at a Pakistani call center making his female colleagues make less money by saying the Bismallah before he eats his halal lunchwrap? No, his personal religious expression has literally nothing to do with this, we might think.
That’s just a sample of the kinds of journalism that grinds my gears. It’s helpful to remind the audience that, even in regards to my writing, just because someone is a published writer doesn’t mean everything they type is Gospel.
