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What I Learned in Secretarial School
There are many paths to discipline and confidence. 
I typed my way there.
Aug. 11, 2018

The teenage Frank Bruni. Ben Wiseman

I hate to break it to parents who just sent their college-admission-minded progeny to the Tibetan Plateau to churn yak butter, but the smartest summer I ever spent was in secretarial school.
This was back when I was 17, and it wasn’t grist for an essay about a transformative communion with people outside my clique. I wasn’t ripping the blinders from my eyes. I was typing — hour upon hour, day after day, with my shoulders back and my spine straight and my hands just so.

My mother had decided that she could no longer bear the tortured stutter of my peck-peck-pecking at her electric typewriter and my histrionic begging that she, with her superior dexterity, take what I’d composed in longhand and type it for me.

“You like to write?” she said. “Then learn to write.” She meant type, and she told me that she was willing to pay for a proper course if I was willing to go. I’d be in a sunless room with strangers. I’d have nothing exotic to brag to my friends about, no grand tales to tell.

But I’d have a skill, she said, and it would be more useful than I expected, not just in college but beyond. I’d be able to catch all those sentences and phrases swirling in my imagination and pin them down before they floated away.

So I accepted her offer — or, really, took her dare. More than 35 years later, my memory is foggy, but I recall that I was in school from something like 8:30 a.m. to noon and had my afternoons free, so my summer tan wasn’t an entirely lost cause. The course lasted four weeks, I think. The dozen or so other students were all women and all older, and I was too shy to do more than exchange greetings with them. They regarded me with obvious bafflement before they stopped noticing me at all.

What’s not foggy is what I gleaned, which was even more than a skill. It was a mind-set. It was an understanding that mechanics sometimes matter as much as fancier, loftier stuff. It was a discipline in the truest, best sense of the word.

I’d later trip across such best-selling books as “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” which predated my secretarial summer, and “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” which postdated it, and realize that typing was my motorcycle maintenance, my shop class, the humdrum exercise that I performed to a classical, exacting standard, getting the details right.

That standard is outmoded. Today, few children are prodded toward typing classes, and that’s for the very sane reason that few children need to be. They use computers in lieu of typewriters and have grown up on smartphones and tablets and laptops, developing an organic fluency with keyboards.

In a 2011 essay for the M.I.T. Technology Review, Anne Trubek bemoaned how far out of favor typing instruction had fallen. Then, a few years later, she gave a typing test to her students in a writing class at Oberlin College. “They all scored incredibly high,” she told me. She revised her thinking and currently feels “absolutely no nostalgia at all” for the extinction of formal typing
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I’d argue that she should still feel some — not for the typing but for what it represents, which is an act of fierce concentration in counterpoint to the stimulation-promiscuous, staccato nature of many children’s lives now, especially online.

“Learning a rote skill, learning how to be bored — that doesn’t happen much anymore,” said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor who whipped up a storm of debate with her 2017 book “iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.” She questioned whether childhood still includes enough activities that cultivate attention span and nurture focus. A binge of “13 Reasons Why” on Netflix doesn’t count. “Having to sit for more than half an hour or an hour doing one thing — that’s gone by the wayside, and that concerns me as an educator and as a parent,” she told me.

I was bored to the bone during typing class, and then I was liberated by it. To this day I can’t name any discrete revelation or block of knowledge — nothing from a book, nothing from a lecture — that was a mightier boost to my particular career than “home row.” That’s where your fingers are supposed to rest when you’re typing: your left pinkie on the “A,” your right pinkie on the semicolon, your thumbs chillaxing together on that long bench of a space bar. You memorize home row first and then the rest of the keys, and you do this by seemingly endless repetition.

“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” — you type that sentence a lot, because it’s a pangram, meaning that it contains every letter in the English alphabet. You type other alphabetically eclectic sentences and paragraphs, your fingers darting away from home row and hurrying back, again and again, with the goal of these movements becoming automatic. And at some point they do. You turn a corner and the dance of your hands across the keys is no longer a constipated jitterbug. It’s an elegant ballet.

I brought a tiny electric typewriter with me to college in 1982, and I reliably finished my term papers faster than my classmates did, thanks largely to the velocity of my typing. Computers came along and only quickened my pace: I didn’t sweat errors, which were easily fixed. If only life had a backspace key.

But journalism was where my typing really paid off. I’m sure that Trubek’s Oberlin students were nimble typists, but I doubt that they were like me in my youthful prime. I could take notes almost as fast as the person on the other end of the phone could talk. I could transcribe a televised debate in real time, or just about. I developed a reputation as a fleet writer when really I was a fleet typist. The talents were somehow intertwined. Confidence in my typing gave me confidence in everything else.

And my typing was so very good because my typing was so very correct. I often hear, in these pedagogically permissive times, that there are many routes to solving a problem or mastering a task, and that’s true. But sometimes there really is a right way, and it’s learned through complete submission and unquestioning practice.

The emphasis today is often different, Twenge said: “Do it your own way, everybody’s unique, there are no rules.” It can feed a runaway individualism. My mother, long gone, was all for adventure and personal expression, but she was also for drudgery and humility, and I bet that she trusted secretarial school to acquaint me with both. I’d have plenty of time later to jet off to faraway lands. First, I should sit still and train my fingers to fly.

Frank Bruni has been with The Times since 1995 and held a variety of jobs — including White House reporter, Rome bureau chief and chief restaurant critic — before becoming a columnist in 2011. He is the author of three best-selling books. @FrankBruni • Facebook

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 I Am (an Older) Woman. Hear Me Roar
by Mary Pipher

When I told my friends I was writing a book on older women like us, they immediately protested, “I am not old.” What they meant was that they didn’t act or feel like the cultural stereotypes of women their age. Old meant bossy, useless, unhappy and in the way. Our country’s ideas about old women are so toxic that almost no one, no matter her age, will admit she is old.

In America, ageism is a bigger problem for women than aging. Our bodies and our sexuality are devalued, we are denigrated by mother-in-law jokes, and we’re rendered invisible in the media. Yet, most of the women I know describe themselves as being in a vibrant and happy life stage. We are resilient and know how to thrive in the margins. Our happiness comes from self-knowledge, emotional intelligence and empathy for others.

Most of us don’t miss the male gaze. It came with catcalls, harassment and unwanted attention. Instead, we feel free from the tyranny of worrying about our looks. For the first time since we were 10, we can feel relaxed about our appearance. We can wear yoga tights instead of nylons and bluejeans instead of business suits.

Yet, in this developmental stage, we are confronted by great challenges. We are unlikely to escape great sorrow for long. We all suffer, but not all of us grow. Those of us who grow do so by developing our moral imaginations and expanding our carrying capacities for pain and bliss. In fact, this pendulum between joy and despair is what makes old age catalytic for spiritual and emotional growth.

By our 70s, we’ve had decades to develop resilience. Many of us have learned that happiness is a skill and a choice. We don’t need to look at our horoscopes to know how our day will go. We know how to create a good day.

We have learned to look every day for humor, love and beauty. We’ve acquired an aptitude for appreciating life. Gratitude is not a virtue but a survival skill, and our capacity for it grows with our suffering. That is why it is the least privileged, not the most, who excel in appreciating the smallest of offerings.

Many women flourish as we learn how to make everything workable. Yes, everything. As we walk out of a friend’s funeral, we can smell wood smoke in the air and taste snowflakes on our tongues.

Our happiness is built by attitude and intention. Attitude is not everything, but it’s almost everything. I visited the jazz great Jane Jarvis when she was old, crippled and living in a tiny apartment with a window facing a brick wall. I asked if she was happy and she replied, “I have everything I need to be happy right between my ears.”

We may not have control, but we have choices. With intention and focused attention, we can always find a forward path. We discover what we are looking for. If we look for evidence of love in the universe, we will find it. If we seek beauty, it will spill into our lives any moment we wish. If we search for events to appreciate, we discover them to be abundant.

There is an amazing calculus in old age. As much is taken away, we find more to love and appreciate. We experience bliss on a regular basis. As one friend said: “When I was young I needed sexual ecstasy or a hike to the top of a mountain to experience bliss. Now I can feel it when I look at a caterpillar on my garden path.”

Older women have learned the importance of reasonable expectations. We know that all our desires will not be fulfilled, that the world isn’t organized around pleasing us and that others, especially our children, are not waiting for our opinions and judgments. We know that the joys and sorrows of life are as mixed together as salt and water in the sea. We don’t expect perfection or even relief from suffering. A good book, a piece of homemade pie or a call from a friend can make us happy. As my aunt Grace, who lived in the Ozarks, put it, “I get what I want, but I know what to want.”
We can be kinder to ourselves as well as more honest and authentic. Our people-pleasing selves soften their voices and our true selves speak more loudly and more often. We don’t need to pretend to ourselves and others that we don’t have needs. We can say no to anything we don’t want to do. We can listen to our hearts and act in our own best interest. We are less angst-filled and more content, less driven and more able to live in the moment with all its lovely possibilities.

Many of us have a shelterbelt of good friends and long-term partners. There is a sweetness to 50-year-old friendships and marriages that can’t be described in language. We know each other’s vulnerabilities, flaws and gifts; we’ve had our battles royal and yet are grateful to be together. A word or a look can signal so much meaning. Lucky women are connected to a rich web of women friends. Those friends can be our emotional health insurance policies.

The only constant in our lives is change. But if we are growing in wisdom and empathy, we can take the long view. We’ve lived through seven decades of our country’s history, from Truman to Trump. I knew my great-grandmother, and if I live long enough, will meet my great-grandchildren. I will have known seven generations of family. I see where I belong in a long line of Scotch-Irish ancestors. I am alive today only because thousands of generations of resilient homo sapiens managed to procreate and raise their children. I come from, we all come from, resilient stock, or we wouldn’t be here.

By the time we are 70, we have all had more tragedy and more bliss in our lives than we could have foreseen. If we are wise, we realize that we are but one drop in the great river we call life and that it has been a miracle and a privilege to be alive.







We have created a link below to a fascinating article about women in coding and programming. It is a bit too long to fit on this page but fascinating reading, so click the link and enjoy.
As I look back over 88 years of life, I can see little change in myself. Of course the wrinkles are new, and a mask of sophistication hides many things - but I am the same. I have grown old without really learning: still the same fears, the same vanities, the same lack of a sense of priorities.

Maybe old age comes to some with dignity, but more often it comes with trivialities - the cup put perilously on the edge of the saucer, the forgetting of a familiar telephone number. The supermarkets make one dizzy; let someone else do the marketing.

There is a difference between being ''old'' and being ''elderly.'' When you're old, you relinquish the battle to prolong the appearance of youth. The days of face-lifting and hair-coloring are over. You don't have to try so hard. You cling to things rather than to people. Things express one's personality and ask nothing in return.
To the young, old and elderly seem much alike. But there is a basic difference: The old have given up; the elderly are still in the race. They do have something in common, however. Old and elderly play the same game, a dreary competition: ''I am sicker than you are.'' A cataract operation is measured against someone else's broken hip, a heart attack against a stroke, and so on and on. I find myself in the competition with my bad eyes and ears.

The borderline between old and elderly is indistinct. People on both sides occasionally wander across the line. Sensible old people make few plans. Their day-to-day lives depend on health, unexpected visits from friends, the weather - even favorite television programs. But the elderly have projects: different hairdos, walks around the block to keep their muscles in shape, plans for travel, and visits to their children.

In some ways, the lives of the elderly seem harder than those of the old. The elderly may suffer more jarring disappointments - the lifted face that falls, loss of the license to drive, no more invitations to the best parties; these are all signs that we're going downhill, the elderly feel. But there are other advantages for the elderly: time to plan a fruitful old age.

For me there were two periods of real happiness in life: first, in my late teens, when my father was alive, when he and I were very close; second, between my 60th and 70th birthdays, when my husband, Eddie, and I were strong enough to travel and work hard at our professions. Our responsibilities to our children were over and we could enjoy them. And when I could work, I could put other problems to the back of my mind, but now, grown out of all proportion, they occupy the dark hours of the night.

Ultimately, there's a good side to old age. A very good side if we accept its losses: the loss of power, the loss of looks, the loss of contemporaries - all the things that have been so precious to us. The good side is a renewed relationship with the young people. It is as if we had come full circle in our lives, making a new start. For the young it is sometimes easier to talk to us than to the generation just behind them. There is no competition between us, and we can share whatever wisdom we've gained over the years.

The real problems of human beings do not change. The emotions between men and women, the choice of a life style, the support of a family, are always there. And we old ones should have learned something by this time.

For ourselves, we also learn that wisdom doesn't come automatically with the years, like rings in a tree. We can gain a great deal by listening to the young, and thus with light cast out the shadows of old age.

Elderly, Then Old
by Dorothea Greenbaum
The FX series Mrs. Americn provides a fashion lesson
When Oprah Winfrey selected “American Dirt” by Jeanine Cummins as her January book club pick, the novel seemed poised to be one of the year’s major releases. It follows a mother and son fleeing Mexico for the United States to escape cartel violence and was described by its publisher as a modern-day version of “The Grapes of Wrath.”

But the conversation surrounding the book quickly turned sour. After a scathing review by the writer Myriam Gurba, who said it relied on racist stereotypes, other Latinx writers and community members expressed similar criticism. “American Dirt” became a best seller, but its publisher, Flatiron, canceled a planned book tour and more than 100 writers signed an open letter asking Winfrey to reconsider her pick.

Winfrey decided instead to “lean in” to the conversation, she said. In an episode of her Apple TV Plus series, “Oprah’s Book Club,” that became available on Friday, she addressed the book, her decision to feature it and the backlash to both.

The two-part episode features Cummins in conversation with Winfrey, but in a departure from most “Oprah’s Book Club” episodes, it includes three Latina writers critical of the book: Julissa Arce, an activist and author of “My (Underground) American Dream”; Esther Cepeda, a syndicated Washington Post columnist; and Reyna Grande, who has written several books about her experience crossing the border, including the memoir “The Distance Between Us.”

Opening the show, Winfrey explained why she chose the book and defended the right of Cummins, who isn’t Mexican, to write it. “I fundamentally, fundamentally believe in the right of anyone to use their imagination and their skills to tell stories and to empathize with another story,” Winfrey said.

When asked whether she anticipated the negative reaction to it, Cummins said, “I definitely worried about this moment, about being called to account for having written the book.”
She said she regretted a widely criticized line in the book’s author’s note, in which she wrote that she wished someone “slightly browner” had written the story. Talking with Winfrey, Cummins called it a “clumsy phrase,” adding that it was “indicative of my own sort of grappling with my identity in these pages.”

Cummins also drew criticism for writing about her husband’s immigration to the U.S. from Ireland without noting his ethnicity. During the episode, she said his background was “absolutely relevant in why I was drawn to writing about immigration issues, and I felt like it was a thing that I wanted to mention,” but said she regretted conflating her husband’s experience with that of asylum seekers at the Mexico-U.S. border.

When Arce, Cepeda and Grande joined the discussion, they criticized the book as well as the broader publishing industry and its treatment of Latinx writers.

Reading “American Dirt,” “I felt hurt and I felt undervalued,” Grande said, “because the publishing industry does not have the same attitude with our immigrant stories as they did with your story.” The books by Latinx writers that are published, she said, are “to little fanfare.”

Cepeda said that writers of color are often expected to write solely about issues such as race and immigration, while white writers have much more liberty. “We have lots of other stories to tell than immigration stories,” she said.

Don Weisberg, the president of Macmillan, which operates Flatiron, and Amy Einhorn, the editor who acquired “American Dirt,” were in the audience. Weisberg said that increasing diversity in the company was a priority and that it had hired strategists to help. “Did those people suggest you hire more Latinos?” asked Cepeda. “It sounds simple, but it’s not simple,” Weisberg said, adding that change was required on all levels at the company.

Despite the criticism of “American Dirt,” the book has been a commercial success, spending six weeks on the New York Times best-seller list for combined print and e-book fiction and selling nearly 200,000 copies, according to NPD Book Scan. Being named a book club pick by Winfrey continues to be a boon for writers and typically all but ensures their work will land on the best-seller list.

But after the backlash to her selection of “American Dirt,” Winfrey recently dropped her March pick, “My Dark Vanessa.” Winfrey, through a spokeswoman, declined to say why, but after the taping of the “Oprah's Book Club” episode she told The Associated Press, “I’m not going to play it safer, but I’m not going to wade into water if I don’t have to.”




AMERICAN DIRT
What better way to celebrate the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage than by discussing the way it turned out to be a big flop?

The great champions of the 19th Amendment thought that when America’s women got the right to vote, they’d immediately start to change the nation. Promote women’s issues, like better health care and education. Refocus politics from special interests to the general good.
Then in 1920, for the first time, they went to polls across the nation with their husbands, brothers, fathers and sons and elected — President Warren Harding.

In 1921, Congress, with a wary eye on the newly enfranchised sex, passed the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act. It was a modest effort to improve health care for the poor by training nurses, licensing midwives and establishing clinics for young mothers and their babies.

The physicians’ associations saw it as government-subsidized competition — socialized medicine! — and hated it. During debate on the bill, one opponent claimed the sponsors were pandering to busybody old maids who were always pushing do-gooder causes.
“Old maids are voting now,” a colleague reminded him. But the doctors kept complaining, and as time passed, politicians began to notice that they weren’t hearing much from the new female electorate. In 1929, the act was repealed.

The Sheppard-Towner debacle was one of the best examples of how the effects of women’s suffrage turned out to be more complicated than its champions had imagined. Everything worked great when it came to the title cause of giving women the right to vote. But the leaders of the movement had expected to use the ballot to transform the nation. For a very long time, nothing happened.

Well, except for Prohibition. Banning the sale of liquor was one cause that really did bring the women together. Most of them didn’t drink, but their husbands did. The upper-class men retired to the study or a club after dinner to sip some liquor and have fun talking among themselves. Poor men went off to a saloon to get soused, spending the family’s much-needed cash.

Many American girls grew up believing that virtually every social evil came from alcohol. Frances Perkins, the New Deal secretary of labor, recalled that she was raised to believe that poverty was just a result of drinking — and laziness.

Once Congress approved the 19th Amendment, the liquor lobbyists stampeded to the state legislatures to try to stop ratification. They won enough battles to leave suffragists one state short of victory and only Tennessee left to vote. All eyes turned to Nashville.

The State Senate voted yes while virtually everybody in the capitol was getting swacked on the lobbyists’ free samples. Then it all came down to the House of Representatives, where the “no” group had a one-man majority. On Aug. 18, 1920, a 24-year-old suffrage opponent named Harry Burn got up and reported to his colleagues that he’d gotten a letter from his mother telling him to “be a good boy” and help the women’s cause. “I know that a mother’s advice is always the safest for a boy to follow,” he told his colleagues. And he switched his vote. Suffrage ruled.

That was a great culmination, and much more fun to report than the slog that preceded it. We will refrain from revisiting what suffragists counted as 480 campaigns to get state legislatures to submit the issue to the voters. Some fights had been much, much easier than others. Lawmakers in Wyoming had eagerly voted for the franchise in 1869, hoping it might be a draw for a territory in which men outnumbered women six to one. “We now expect quite an immigration of ladies to Wyoming,” said The Cheyenne Leader hopefully after the legislature voted for women’s suffrage, as well as women’s property rights and equal pay for women schoolteachers.

(There was nothing like being a rare commodity to raise the bar on women’s opportunities. Back when the first male colonists were settling into the New World, they wrote back advertising for female émigrés, promising they would find a husband in a snap, as long as they were “but civil and under 50 years of age.”)

Wherever suffrage arrived, there were lots of women who resisted the idea of getting involved. Election Day was, in many neighborhoods, a rowdy time when political parties tried to encourage voter turnout with — yes! — free liquor. “Saloons, marching, drinking all day — voting was seen as a very masculine act,” says Debbie Walsh of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

Theodore Roosevelt told a crowd of suffrage supporters he was the only person in his family who agreed with their agenda, and urged them to “go and convert my wife and daughters.” His young niece Eleanor was among the unenthusiastic.

I don’t have to tell you that things changed. Women went to the polls more and more with every generation. But politicians still presumed that they’d vote with their menfolk unless something very unusual cropped up.

When Woodrow Wilson was up for re-election in 1916 his handlers did worry about the “women’s vote” in the states where they already had the franchise. The president’s wife had died during his first term of office and Wilson rather quickly picked up with Edith Galt, the widow of a prominent Washington jeweler. They wanted to marry right away, but Wilson’s aides were afraid of how the news might affect the female electorate. In the end, the answer was: not much.

Perhaps voters didn’t hear the gossip in political circles about what was said to be a hot and heavy premarital affair. (The political columnist Murray Kempton told me he heard a joke when he was a boy in the 1920s, in which when the president proposed, Mrs. Galt was so excited she fell out of bed. “I think my sainted mother told me that one,” Kempton recalled.) After the Wilson engagement became official, The Washington Post printed a social note containing one of the most famous typos in American history: “The President gave himself up for the time being to entering his fiancée.”

 OK, that’s just an interesting diversion. But Wilson won, and the conviction that women were mainly just duplicating the votes of their husbands or fathers held sway.

You have to wonder, as the years went on, how many husbands were actually reflecting their wives’ opinions when they went to the polls. The balance of power within families has shifted dramatically over the last 50 years, mainly because of money. The transformation began when the country’s post-World War II economic boom hit the killer recession of the 1970s, and everyone began to realize that a whole lot of the families of the future would not be able to afford a middle-class lifestyle unless the wives kept working.

The women’s movement combined with the hard facts of the economy created a world in which almost no one envisioned young women with a distinctly different wage-earning future from men. I’ll never forget a visit I made to a community college in Connecticut, back around 1980. I was invited for some reason to speak to a class of young men, and I asked them to describe for me their ideal mate. There were a few polite murmurs about a good sense of humor and fine moral character — then someone called out, “And a good earner!” I cannot tell you how enthusiastic the room became over the “good earner” qualification.

It took professional politicians quite a while to notice there was a change going on. Then in 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated then-President Jimmy Carter, it became clear the country had moved on to a whole new political wave. Analysis of the final tallies showed that both sexes favored Reagan, but the women split very narrowly while the men went Republican 55 percent to 36 percent. The gender gap was born, and it really turned into a canyon in 1996, when Bill Clinton won the women’s vote by a wide margin, while men narrowly favored Bob Dole.

These days, women go to the polls more faithfully than men, and they are more likely to vote Democratic. That doesn’t mean they always win. In 2000, women favored Al Gore for president over George W. Bush, 54-44 percent, while the men went for Bush, 54-43. In 2016, the male voters gave us Donald Trump in an election where the gender gap yawned at 11 points.
But the power is there. Black women, who’ve fought dual battles against racism and sexism to exercise their right to vote, knocked the socks off Democratic organizers in Alabama in 2017 when they gave long-shot Senate candidate Doug Jones 98 percent of their vote and a victory over Republican former-judge-and-pursuer-of-teenage-girls Roy Moore.

If 1920s heroines like Susan B. Anthony and Ida B. Wells were around now, they’d be setting their targets way higher than the voting booth. We live in an era that’s beginning to find women running for office almost as normal as Mom having a job outside the home. Nearly a quarter of our current Congress is female, and the pace is picking up all the time. I still remember in 2001 when Hillary Clinton was sworn in to the Senate and my young niece innocently asked my sister if men were allowed to be in the Senate, too. Susan B. Anthony would have fainted with happiness.

Women who tearily discovered in 2016 that they weren’t going to be able to introduce their daughters to the first woman president have mostly gotten over it. If everything we think we know about the current presidential race is reasonably true — and nothing crazy happens over the rest of the campaign — next January the country will have a female vice president, a woman who the voters trusted as second in command to 78-year-old Joe Biden.

“Women’s issues” — like guaranteed quality health care for all and reproductive freedom — may still not have universal political support. But they’re now political goals for a vast swath of the voting public, both male and female. And maybe it won’t be too long before someone’s little niece in the future innocently asks her mother whether men are allowed to be president, too.




100 Years of Voting Hasn’t Done What We Thought It Would
The unfinished business of the women’s vote.

By GAIL COLLINS
July 30, 2020
​Politicians geared up after the 19th Amendment with programs aimed at the woman's vote.
The Amazing thing was that for many, many years after the 19th Amendment was passed
 there was no "woman's vote".
Women simply voted the way their husbands wanted them to!
Women Would Abolish Child Labor (and Other Anti-Suffrage Excuses)
A century ago, opponents unleashed chaos to try to sabotage the expansion of voting rights. The strange interlude still holds lessons in how backlash works today.
By Elaine Weiss


Last week, on Aug. 18, we celebrated the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave American women the constitutional right to vote. On Wednesday, we are marking the day when the amendment officially entered the Constitution. We pay little attention to what happened during that curious, chaotic week in between. Why the delay?

It took that extra week for women to gain the right to vote because suffrage opponents launched a brute-force campaign to nullify the ratification and cast doubt upon its legality. The tale of this strange interlude involves racism, legal obstruction and political dirty tricks; it also offers an alarmingly relevant glimpse into what can happen when a bitter and well funded faction refuses to accept the outcome of a political decision involving race, sex and voting rights.

The cheers in the Tennessee House chamber following the very narrow victory for ratification — the deciding vote delivered by its youngest member, the 24-year-old freshman delegate Harry T. Burn — were still echoing when the backlash began. The stakes had been high: Tennessee was the last state needed to propel the 19th Amendment into the Constitution. Burn’s aye had extended the vote to women citizens in every state.The young delegate was booed and hissed. The commotion in the chamber grew so heated that the governor ordered the sergeant-at-arms to protect Burn. Burn managed to escape the chamber unscathed, but he wasn’t safe yet: Powerful interests were after him.

Among them were racist forces in the South. The 19th Amendment, in theory, extended the vote to Black women. Most other Southern states had already rejected it, considering it a federally imposed racial equality edict. (Southern Black men, who’d won the right to vote with the 15th Amendment in 1870, were by this time disenfranchised by Jim Crow laws and violent intimidation.)

Corporations, convinced that women at the ballot box would be bad for their bottom lines, were also feverishly at work. Manufacturers feared female voters would want to abolish child labor; liquor interests thought they’d push for stronger enforcement of Prohibition; railroads feared women might derail their influence-peddling efforts in state legislatures and Congress. They all sprang into action. Immediately, opponents tried to discredit the legitimacy of the ratification by accusing Burn of taking a bribe. They manufactured witnesses and affidavits, threatening to publish the smears unless Burn recanted his aye vote. (The plot was eventually exposed, and Burn never budged.)

Meanwhile, anti-suffrage forces in the legislature made parliamentary maneuvers to trap the ratification resolution in limbo, imposing three days of “reconsideration” during which the amendment might be brought up for another vote. If the antis, led by the speaker of the House, Seth Walker, could convince just a couple of delegates to switch to the nay side, Tennessee’s assent could be reversed.

The antis tried to persuade legislators with cash bribes, job offers, blackmail and bare-knuckled threats. They tried to lure pro-ratification delegates away from Nashville with faked telegrams warning of dire family emergencies: Their house was on fire or their wife taken ill.

At the same time, they worked on what today might be called an “AstroTurf” campaign to manufacture grass-roots outrage: Recall petitions were circulated for delegates who had voted for ratification; demands for the governor to resign grew shrill; “indignation meetings” began, which swelled into torch-lit protest rallies around the state fueled by incendiary populist and racist language.

Nevertheless, the ratification coalition held firm. In frustration, more than two dozen anti delegates tried to prevent a quorum for the “reconsideration” vote by absconding in the middle of the night over the state line into Alabama. The ruse failed; ratification held. Now the conflict moved to the courts. Anti-suffragist lawyers obtained an injunction against the governor, restraining him from signing the ratification resolution. When a judge lifted it and the governor signed, the lawyers elevated their attack to the federal level.

First they tried to restrain the U.S. secretary of state, Bainbridge Colby, from accepting Tennessee’s certification of its vote and proclaiming the 19th Amendment fully ratified, but their plea was dismissed. Then they took their petition to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. That appeal was pending as the mail train carrying the certification papers chugged toward Washington on Aug. 25.

Now it was a race against time: If Colby couldn’t make the official proclamation before the Court of Appeals took up the injunction plea in the morning, the injunction might be granted, and the amendment put in limbo again. In many states, voter registration deadlines for the November presidential elections were looming. Anti lawyers warned that if women were allowed to vote, the dispute over Tennessee’s ratification might invalidate the election results, throwing the nation into chaos.

The mail train was expected to arrive in Washington in the early morning of Aug. 26. Post Office headquarters ordered that no matter the time, the envelope should be rushed to the State Department. Employees at State waited through the night. It arrived at 4 a.m., and Colby signed the proclamation of the 19th Amendment in his own home, with only an aide as witness. No suffragists were in attendance; there are no photos.

The fight was over. But anti-suffrage forces still refused to accept the verdict.
“Tennessee has not ratified 19th Amendment,” Speaker Walker insisted in a furious wire to Colby. The official proclamation “will not cause any cessation of the fight in this state.”
Walker made good on that threat. Just days after the 19th Amendment became law, Tennessee actually rescinded its ratification. In a sneaky move, the speaker called his troops home from Alabama and rammed through the repeal while House amendment supporters were at home, then convinced the Senate to join by tying the legislators’ per diem pay to the nullification measure. The governor, facing re-election, signed on, but it was moot: There are no do-overs in the federal ratification process.

But that didn’t stop anti-suffragists taking their legal crusade all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was finally dismissed in 1922. And as we know, Tennessee and the other Southern states would subvert the 19th Amendment by applying Jim Crow voting restrictions — literacy tests, poll taxes, intimidation and violence — to Black women as well as to Black men for 45 more years.

On Wednesday we’ll salute the 19th Amendment with lights and ceremony, but the rage and backlash unleashed by the amendment’s expansion of voting rights and promise of a more inclusive democracy should not be ignored.

A national election is just weeks away, and racial justice and the protection voting and women’s rights are again front and center. We hear murmurs raising doubts about the legitimacy of the election and we see overt moves — including crippling the Post Office — to make voting more difficult. There have been angry rallies and real threats of intimidation at the polls. The president, according to his spokeswoman, is still considering whether he will abide by the results of the election.

In 1920, the nation was deeply divided on questions of voting rights and racial justice; in 2020, we still are, and progress is often met with resistance. That angry week in August a century ago might be a useful warning.



​IN CASE YOU MISSED THIS...
WHY GO TO COLLEGE?
                                               by Pico Iyer
As colleges throughout the United States reopen, facing a weird new landscape of empty rooms and scattered classmates, it’s easy to wonder what these traditional places of learning still have to teach the rest of us. Long before the pandemic, campuses were in the news not so much for opening young minds as for closing down discussions and less for encouraging humanity than for promoting ideologies.

Upon my own return to a university classroom, in the spring of 2019, after a hiatus of 37 years, I imagined that my tastes and values, my very language, might seem out-of-date to many of the students I was instructing, and I’m sure they did. I suspected that these teenagers would be much less concerned with books than I and my old classmates were, and I was right. I assumed that as a writer who had been crisscrossing the globe for 45 years, I’d have wisdom about travel to impart, and I was wrong: Thanks in part to their generous and well-endowed university, the 16 undergraduates in front of me spent the first class speaking of recent trips they’d taken to Nauru and Kyrgyzstan and Hongpo, among other places I’d barely heard of.

In almost every way, the young at this elite university seemed brighter, more mature, more reliable and infinitely more globally aware than I and my pals had been in our radically less diverse day. But the most beautiful surprise was to see how deeply many of them had absorbed lessons not to be found in any textbook. Picking up a campus newspaper one day, I found an article by the person I’d foolishly taken to be our class clown. He went to Mass every Sunday, he wrote, precisely because he had no religious commitment. He wanted to learn about perspectives other than the ones he knew. He admired the discipline and sense of order encouraged by such a practice, which he felt he might lack otherwise. He’d been startled by the open-mindedness of a devout roommate, with whom he used to argue through the night. If someone of religious faith could be so responsive to other positions, he wrote, should not a secular liberal aspire to the same?

I realized, as I read the piece, that I had little to teach such students in a class ostensibly about exploring cultures different from our own. More deeply, I was impressed by how imaginatively a young person was addressing the central problem of the times: the fact we’re all united mostly by our divisiveness. Whether in the context of climate change or the right to life — let alone the ethics of trying to protect others from a killer virus by simply wearing a mask — more and more of us refuse ever to cross party lines. And in an age of social media, when we all imagine we can best capture the world’s attention by shouting as loudly as possible, there’s every incentive to take the most extreme — and polarizing — position around.

Our institutions are not going to solve this; they (and the unwisdom of crowds) are often the problem. As the wise Franciscan priest Richard Rohr points out, the only thing more dangerous than individual ego is group ego. That’s one reason I, driving around blue-state Santa Barbara, Calif., try to listen to Fox News — I can get plenty of the other side from my friends. It’s also why I, though not a Christian, seek out the clarity of Richard Rohr. We’re caught up in an addiction to simplifications for which the only medicine lies within. We need to be reminded that not to be right doesn’t always mean you’re wrong. And that to be terribly wronged does not mean you’re innocent. The world deals in black-or-whites no more than a hurricane or a virus does.

It’s hardly surprising that so many citizens, unable to find wisdom in the political sphere (which, almost by definition, thrives on either/ors), look to religious figures for a more inclusive vision. Pope Francis, in Wim Wenders’s glorious documentary “A Man of His Word,” stresses the importance of not imposing our views on others and never thinking in terms of simplistic us-versus-thems: Would God, Francis asks, love Gandhi any less than he does a priest or a nun simply because the Mahatma wasn’t a Christian? The Dalai Lama, for his part, points out that to be pro-Tibetan is not to be anti-Chinese, not least because Tibet and China will always be neighbors; the welfare of either depends on the other. He begins his days by praying for the health of his “Chinese brothers and sisters.”

Traveling across Japan with the Dalai Lama a year before the pandemic, I heard him say often that after watching the planet up close as a leader of his people for what was then 79 years, he felt the world was suffering through an “emotional crisis.” The cure, he said, was “emotional disarmament.” What he meant by the striking phrase was that we can see beyond panic and rage and confusion only by using our minds, and that part of the mind that doesn’t deal in binaries. Emotional disarmament might prove even more feasible than the nuclear type, insofar as most of us can reform our minds more easily than we can move a huge and intractable government. By opening our minds, we begin to change the world.

Religion itself, of course, can be as sectarian as the enmities it deplores, which is why the Dalai Lama, one of the world’s most visible religious figures, published a book titled “Beyond Religion.” It’s why he puts much of his faith in science, whose laws and discoveries lie beyond human divisions and apply equally to believer and nonbeliever, Muslim and Jew. Yet the same wisdom was apparent to me in 16 students who seemed ready to look beyond convenient dogma and dehumanizing abstraction.

One of them, a sunny and very personable gay athlete, was an unabashed supporter of Donald Trump (whatever, he asserted, the president might say about gay rights). When I handed out an excerpt from Barack Obama’s “Dreams From my Father” for our group to read and discuss, I was properly apprehensive.

The minute we assembled the following week, up shot the hand of the passionate Trumpite. He’d been stunned, he said, by the intelligence, the eloquence and the subtlety of “President Obama,” as he respectfully called him. “I don’t agree with many of his positions,” he said, “and I wouldn’t vote for him.” But how could he not be swayed by the humanity of the man’s command of the word and the power of his prose? He’d been so impressed that after completing the 20-page assignment, he’d spent the weekend going through the entire 442-page book.

Of all the many things I learned in that classroom, perhaps that was the most valuable. If someone barely of voting age could open his mind so expansively, how could I and others a generation or two older continue acting like preschoolers? We alone among the animals, the Dalai Lama regularly points out, enjoy reasoning minds, the capacity to see beyond reflex. The best reason to go to school, even if you’re a so-called teacher, is to find out how much you don’t know.


If there is one message that America sends loudly, clearly, and consistently to our youth, it is this: Go to college. We operate our high schools as college prep academies. We offer more than $150 billion in annual public subsidies to college students. Our culture defines the campus experience as the sine qua non of a successful life, while also advertising it as a veritable amusement park entitlement: a bacchanalia that offers enrichment classes you should attend at least sometimes.

Politicians now argue with a straight face for simply waving away tens of thousands of dollars of student debt per borrower, as if financial obligations incurred in the ivory tower deserve some special status that we would never accord to the lowly car loan or home mortgage.
This message is a bad one. Yes, for people with the academic aptitude to succeed in college and the desire to pursue a career that requires the training only higher education can provide, the college pathway is the right one. But that is not most people.

Indeed, fewer than one in five young Americans move smoothly from high school to college to career. Most will not attain even a community college degree. Around 40 percent of those who do earn a diploma end up in a job that doesn’t require one. Meanwhile, other industries like the skilled trades offer excellent careers and face worker shortages. The mismatch between the cultural narrative and our economic reality is so acute that many college graduates now find themselves going back to trade school.

Rather than lavish resources on college students and leave everyone else to fend for themselves, we should do the reverse. Spending more on building strong, non-college career pathways is vital, but so too is defunding the oversaturated Big Ed boondoggle.
Over 10 years, we should move half of that $150 billion out of higher education and into programs that foster employer-trainee relationships.

For what we spend trying to move someone through college, we could provide excellent career and technical education, subsidized employment or apprenticeship and a savings account for future training. A 20-year-old could have years of on-the-job experience, an industry credential and money in the bank. And a 16-year-old and her family, weighing their options, could have multiple pathways to consider, a full picture of the pros and cons of each, and a better chance of making the right choice for her.

STOP PUSHING COLLEGE
by Oren Cass
If you didn't see Amanda Gorman read her poem at the inauguration here's your chance!
A few months ago I had lunch with a former student named Lucy Fleming, one of the best writers I’ve taught. I asked her what she had learned in her first year out of college. She said she had been forced to think differently.

While in school, her thinking was station to station: take that test, apply to that college, aim for a degree. But in young adulthood, there are no more stations. Everything is open seas. Your main problems are not about the assignment right in front of you; they are about the horizon far away. What should you be steering toward? It requires an entirely different set of navigational skills.

This gets at one of the oddest phenomena of modern life. Childhood is more structured than it has ever been. But then the great engine of the meritocracy spits people out into a young adulthood that is less structured than it has ever been.

There used to be certain milestones that young adults were directed toward by age 27: leaving home, becoming financially independent, getting married, buying a house, having a child. But the information economy has scrambled those timetables. Current 20-somethings are much less likely to do any of those things by 30. They are less likely to be anchored in a political party, church or some other creedal community.

When I graduated from college there was a finite number of career ladders in front of me: teacher, lawyer, doctor, business. Now college graduates enter a world with four million footstools. There are many more places to perch (a start-up, an NGO, a coffee shop, a consultancy) but few of the footstools pay a sustaining wage, seem connected with the others or lead to a clear ladder of rungs to climb upward.

People in their 20s seem to be compelled to bounce around more, popping up here and there, quantumlike, with different jobs, living arrangements and partners while hoping that all these diverse experiences magically add up to something.

Naturally enough, their descriptions of their lives are rife with uncertainty and anxiety. Many young adults describe a familiar pattern. They try something out but soon feel trapped. They drink too much, worry about how to get out of a job or a relationship. Eventually they do, which is often easier than the anxiety beforehand. They put their life on pause, which is lonely, while they re-cohere. Then they try something else.

All the while social media makes the comparison game more intrusive than ever, and nearly everybody feels as if he or she is falling behind. Recently I came across a website with popular message tattoos. The ones people chose weren’t exactly about carefree youth. They were about endurance and resilience: “I will break but I will not fold”; “Fall down seven times, stand up eight”; “Don’t lose yourself in your fear”; “The only way out is through.”

And how do we as a society prepare young people for this uncertain phase? We pump them full of vapid but haunting praise about how talented they are and how their future is limitless. Then we send them (the most privileged of them) to colleges where the professors teach about what interests the professors. Then we preach a gospel of autonomy that says all the answers to the deeper questions in life are found by getting in touch with your “true self,” whatever the heck that is.

I used to think that the answer to the traumas of the 20s was patience. Life is long. Wait until they’re 30. They’ll figure it out. Now I think that laissez-faire attitude trivializes the experiences of young adulthood and condescends to the people going through them.
I’m beginning to side with Meg Jay, who argued in her book “The Defining Decade” that telling people “30 is the new 20” is completely counterproductive.

Jay’s book is filled with advice on how to get on with life. For example, build identity capital. If you are going to be underemployed, do it in a way that people are going to find interesting later on. Nobody is ever going to ask you, “What was it like being a nanny?” They will ask you, “What was it like leading excursions of Outward Bound?”

I’d say colleges have to do much more to put certain questions on the table, to help students grapple with the coming decade of uncertainty: What does it mean to be an adult today? What are seven or 10 ways people have found purpose in life? How big should I dream or how realistic should I be? What are the criteria we should think about before shacking up? What is the cure for sadness? What do I want and what is truly worth wanting?

Before, there were social structures that could guide young adults as they gradually figured out the big questions of life. Now, those structures are gone. Young people are confronted by the existential questions right away. They’re going to feel lost if they have no sense of what they’re pointing toward, if they have no vision of the holy grails on the distant shore.



MIS-EDUCATING THE YOUNG
by David Brooks


The House on Wednesday passed a bill that could clear the way for the nearly-century-old Equal Rights Amendment to be added to the Constitution, providing equal protection under the law regardless of sex.

The bill, which passed 222 to 204, almost entirely along party lines, is largely procedural — it removes a deadline for ratification that expired in the early 1980s. At the time, the amendment was not ratified by the constitutionally required 38 states, and it was left to linger for decades. But last year, on the heels of Nevada and Illinois, Virginia became the crucial 38th state to ratify it, reviving hopes among E.R.A. supporters that it could finally become part of the Constitution. 

“It is time for us to stop with the excuses, it is time to do what’s right and make sure that women are in the Constitution,” Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat of California and the bill’s sponsor, said in a news conference after it passed in the House on Wednesday. She was flanked by other female House Democrats, all dressed in white — the color of the suffragists.

“Just make us equal under the law,” she added.

But the measure faces an uphill battle in the Senate, with backing from just a handful of Republicans. “I wish that I could tell you that we had more Republican support,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, who is working to rally senators from her party around the measure.

The country has been here before. Last year, the House voted to drop the deadline, but the bill failed to move in the Senate, and today America remains one of the few countries in the world without any explicit guarantee of gender equality in its constitution. And several legal wrinkles — most importantly whether Congress even has the power to remove the ratification deadline — still make the amendment’s adoption far from guaranteed.

But what is different this time is a renewed appreciation of the amendment’s importance — and, of course, a Democratic controlled Senate may help. Advocates say the pandemic, the economic crisis and a right-leaning Supreme Court that may be a blocker for women’s rights have highlighted just how vulnerable American women are.

A whole generation of women thought they were protected and already equal, said Kate Kelly, a human rights lawyer and host of the podcast “Ordinary Equality.” But “Covid made visible inequities that to many were invisible before,” she added. “Now that inequality is laid bare, they can see the desperate need for a fundamental, permanent solution.”

The text of the E.R.A., or what would be the 28th Amendment, is succinct: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” If implemented, activists and legal scholars expect that its effects could be sweeping, clearing the way for Congress to guarantee equal pay, for example, or bolster measures to counter domestic violence and sexual harassment.

On Account of Sex’

The amendment was first introduced in Congress in 1923, just a few years after women secured the right to vote. Nearly 50 years later, in 1972, Congress passed a version of the measure, with broad bipartisan support. At that point, Congress set a deadline in the amendment’s preamble, or introduction, for states to ratify it — originally 1979, which was later extended to 1982. Many states were quick to jump on board — Hawaii was the first, just 30 minutes after the Senate passed the amendment. And by the end of 1972, 21 other states had followed suit.

But the initial momentum tapered out, in large part because of the self-proclaimed anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, who mounted a powerful opposition campaign that turned the bipartisan issue into a cultural lightning rod. She argued that the E.R.A. would ruin traditional family structures, diminishing women’s roles as homemakers and child rearers, and strip women of privileges like sex-segregated bathrooms. Later on, opponents also argued that the E.R.A. could invalidate state-level abortion restrictions.

By the 1982 deadline, 35 states had ratified the measure, leaving it three short of success.
To bridge the gap, a crop of pioneering lawyers — most prominent among them, the eventual Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — persuaded the Supreme Court, through a bevy of cases, to expand the 14th Amendment to cover sex discrimination, achieving in many ways what the E.R.A. would have done.

But that approach of tackling discriminatory laws one by one could go only so far. “The reason proponents wanted the E.R.A. was not only to get judges to strike down bad laws but also to empower Congress to write new laws that would address the inequalities that women face in society because of their sex,” said Julie Suk, author of “We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment.”

An Unusual Step

In 1992, the 27th Amendment, an amendment pertaining to congressional pay, was added to the Constitution — 200 years after it was first introduced in Congress.
For E.R.A. supporters, it served as a eureka moment, planting a seed for the idea of simply removing the ratification deadline from the 28th Amendment. “There was a growing appreciation about, you know, what’s the deadline all about anyway? Why do we have to live by the deadline?” Ms. Speier said. “If Congress made the deadline, Congress can change the deadline.”

Several legal scholars agree. Since the deadline is in the preamble, it may not even be legally binding, said Katherine Franke, a law professor at Columbia and faculty director of its E.R.A. Project research initiative. She also noted that, in the past, the Supreme Court has ruled that Congress has full control over the process of finalizing a constitutional amendment, which is how Congress already extended the E.R.A. deadline once.

After years of campaigning and a reignited interest in the wake of President Donald J. Trump’s election and the #MeToo movement, Nevada ratified the amendment in 2017, then Illinois followed in 2018 and Virginia joined in 2020.

Republicans who oppose the measure argue that there is no precedent for retroactively changing a deadline — as the House bill does — and that doing so could be unconstitutional. The Justice Department also issued a memo last year echoing that line of reasoning. Democrats are “trying to turn back the clock,” Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, said on Tuesday of the bill. “This is a highly unusual step.”

Another potential twist is that, since 1982, five states have rescinded their ratification. The question of whether that is allowed is still unanswered, though there is some precedent. Three states rescinded their ratification of the 14th Amendment but were still counted in the yes column when the amendment was adopted in 1868.

Legal questions aside, the E.R.A. remains hugely popular among voters: Almost 80 percent of Americans supported adding it to the Constitution in a Pew Research Center poll last year, and activists believe it is not a question of if, but when. “It’s, in many respects, an embarrassment that we don’t have express sex equality protections,” Ms. Franke said. “The E.R.A. provides an opportunity for a more modern approach to equality — I see it as a kind of modernizing tuneup of the Constitution that is way overdue.”





E. R. A. Clears Hurdle, but Steep Climb Remains
by Alisha Haridasani Gupta
I teach philosophy to college students, and there was no way I was going to give them exams this semester, with our classes being held online. Why not? Simple — cheating. It is nothing personal with these particular students, but I have read enough psychological research to know that it would be very hard for them to resist looking for help in places where they are not supposed to, such as their notes, their friends and the internet.

I am fortunate that papers are a great alternative means of assessment in philosophy courses. But they do not work so well in certain other fields, like the sciences. In this time of widespread online learning and home-schooling, what can be done to curb cheating on exams?

One solution is remote proctoring, where the student is video-recorded during the exam, with any suspicious web browsing reported. That might be effective, but it strikes me as a crude approach, relying as it does on active surveillance, which creates an overt atmosphere of distrust. Naturally enough there are also privacy concerns, as well as some anecdotal evidence that remote proctoring technology encodes racial biases.

Instead I suggest that a practice that has been used widely in other educational contexts be extended to the world of online testing: pledging one’s honor. Honor pledges not only are surprisingly effective in curbing cheating; they also promote honesty. Students who abide by them refrain from cheating not because they can’t, but because they choose not to.

It is easy to be cynical about honor pledges and honor codes. They can seem to be — and sadly too often are — P.R. stunts for schools looking to burnish their image. Or administrative mandates that do not have buy-in from the faculty. Or just a formality, where students check a box on a form during first-year orientation and then never give it any thought for the rest of the year. Honor codes like these are indeed mere facades.

But many schools and programs, from elementary to graduate level, take their honor codes seriously. And for good reason. Empirical research has repeatedly found that schools that are committed to honor codes have significantly reduced cheating rates compared with schools that are not.

Donald McCabe at Rutgers Business School and Linda Treviño at the Smeal College of Business at Penn State found a 23 percent rate of helping someone with answers on a test at colleges without an honor code, versus only 11 percent at schools with an honor code. They reported impressive differences as well for plagiarism (20 percent versus 10 percent), unauthorized crib notes (17 percent versus 11 percent) and unpermitted collaboration (49 percent versus 27 percent), among other forms of cheating.

A serious commitment to the honor code is crucial to its efficacy. As Professors McCabe and Treviño insist, an honor code should be “well implemented and strongly embedded in the student culture.”

When I was an undergraduate at Princeton, every paper we turned in had to have the honor code written out and then signed. Now as a professor at Wake Forest, I make my class recite aloud with me before each exam our entire honor code and then sign it.

Signing an honor code can, among other things, serve as a moral reminder. As we know from both ordinary life and recent experimental findings, most of us are willing to cheat to some extent if we think it would be rewarding and we can get away with it. At the same time, we also want to think of ourselves as honest people and genuinely believe that cheating is wrong. But our more honorable intentions can be pushed to one side in our minds when tempting opportunities arise to come out ahead, even if by cheating. What a moral reminder does, then, is help to place our values front and center in our minds.

This is borne out by recent findings in the lab. In a widely cited study, Nina Mazar at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University and her colleagues had one group of students take a 20-problem test where they would be paid 50 cents per correct answer. It was a hard test — students averaged only 3.4 correct answers. A second group of students took the same test, but they graded their own work and reported their “scores” with no questions asked. The average in this group was 6.1 correct answers, suggesting some cheating. The third and most interesting group, though, began by signing an honor code and then took the test, followed by grading their own work. The result? An honorable 3.1 correct answers. Cheating was eliminated at the group level. Signing the honor code did the job.

Studies of honor codes and cheating have typically been conducted in face-to-face environments. But as we settle into the routine of online instruction, we should consider trying to extend the impact of an honor code virtually as well.

Honor codes won’t eliminate cheating. Deeply dishonest students will not be deterred. But fortunately, the research confirms what experience suggests: Most students are not deeply dishonest.

Christian B. Miller (@CharacterGap) is a professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University, the director of the Honesty Project and the author, most recently, of “The Character Gap: How Good Are We?”








Cheating Students?

When a 50ish woman at my Y learned that I was about to turn 80, she exclaimed, “80 is the new 60, and you set a great example for the rest of us!”
At least, I’m in good company:

Dr. Anthony Fauci, national infectious disease guru, is five months my senior, sharp as a tack even under withering political fire;

Nancy Pelosi, 81-year-old Speaker of the House, also stands up well against fierce opposition;

Anthony Hopkins, 83, Oscar winner for “The Silence of the Lambs” and a frequent nominee, won again this year for “The Father”;

Morgan Freeman, also 83, acts with a voice of distinction bested only by his formidable talent. He has four upcoming movies and a TV series.

Bernie Sanders, former presidential hopeful who will be 80 in September, remains a force to be reckoned with in the U.S. Senate;

Paul Simon, a month younger than Mr. Sanders, has won 12 Grammys as a singer and songwriter in a now six-decade career. He recently sold his songwriting catalog to Sony for around $250 million.)

The list goes on. As my late husband, who didn’t make it to that milestone, would have said, “80 — not a record, but not a bad average.”

Indeed, many have done far better. Every day I read or hear about folks in their 90s who are still remarkably active and productive. Check out this recent feature in The Times on the indefatigable architect Frank Gehry. At 92, his latest project is a spectacular development in downtown Los Angeles. When asked if he’d consider retiring, he replied, “What would I do? I enjoy this stuff.”

That to me is the secret of a happy, vibrant old age: Strive to do what you love for as long as you can do it. If the vicissitudes of life or infirmities of age preclude a preferred activity, modify it or substitute another. I can no longer safely skate, ski or play tennis, but I can still bike, hike and swim. I consider daily physical activity to be as important as eating and sleeping. I accept no excuses.

And, as you can see, I still write, although it often takes me longer than it used to. In my job as a health columnist, I’m paid to be continually educated and inspired by the research and interviews I do for my weekly column. They keep my brain and spirit alive. And when a word or its spelling eludes me, there’s Google and my editors to fill in the gaps.

The cohort of Americans who have lived for eight or more decades is rising steadily and projected to grow faster than the cohort of youngsters under 18 for at least the next 40 years. In fact, as more of us in the late decades of life continue to thrive, morbidity and mortality were rising among middle-aged men and women even before the pandemic. The average newborn today is not expected to make it to 80, thanks largely to poor diet and exercise and rising obesity.

Assuming most people would opt for a long and fulfilling life, Nature permitting, what does this take? What accounts for the growing number of octogenarians and beyond who are accomplished and still accomplishing?

Many clues have emerged during my decades of reporting on health. I’ve already alluded to the importance of regular physical activity, which supports a healthy brain and body. Assuming you don’t smoke, which was my husband’s undoing, Nature will usually take pretty good care of you for about half a century. Thereafter, it’s up to you.
Without regular exercise, you can expect to experience a loss of muscle strength and endurance, coordination and balance, flexibility and mobility, bone strength and cardiovascular and respiratory function. In other words, a sedentary lifestyle is a recipe for chronic disease and decline.

Abandon all excuses, as Todd Balf did after he became partially paralyzed following spinal surgery for cancer. Though he had long shunned being immersed in water, with a physical therapist as coach, he finally took the plunge and discovered that swimming back and forth in a pool buoyed both his body and soul.

Of course, like any machine, to maintain peak levels of activity the human body requires quality fuel. Growing up, most of us who are now 80 and beyond were largely spared the plethora of ultra-processed foods that now line the shelves of every grocery. My father, the family food shopper, was a big fan of oatmeal and shredded wheat, fresh fruits and vegetables.

Eating out was an occasional treat (and for me, still is). Most meals were prepared and eaten family style at home. Fast foods? Maybe a hot dog when we biked miles to Coney Island or celebrated my birthday at a Brooklyn Dodgers game. I was in my early 20s when McDonalds ballyhooed that it had just sold 600,000 burgers! (The company stopped counting in 1994, after it hit 99 billion burgers served.)

But exercise and nutrition are not enough. Studies suggest that motivation, attitude and perspective are equally important to a long, healthy and fulfilling life. I was still in high school when my mother died of cancer at age 49, and her premature loss became a lesson for me to live each day as if it’s my last with a keen eye on the future in case it’s not.

I entered college with plans to become a biochemist and discover lifesaving clues to cancer. But I found working in a laboratory boring and isolating, and in my junior year realized my true love was learning what others discovered and communicating that information to the public. So I married biochemistry with journalism, pursued a fulfilling career in science writing focused on personal and public health and, like a horse with blinders, never looked back.

My advice to students: Try to combine your passion with your talent and you’ll have the best shot at a rich and rewarding career. I also recommend choosing a supportive life partner who’s willing to share the mundane tasks of daily life and step up for extra duty when needed.

Having been raised to save, all my life I’ve shopped sales and bargains and parlayed the monetary rewards into scholarships for deserving students and fabulous nature, hiking and cycling trips for me, family and friends.

Have I any regrets? I regret taking French instead of Spanish in high school and I keep trying to learn the latter, a far more practical language, on my own. I regret that I never learned to speed-read; whether for work or leisure, I read slowly, as if everything in print is a complex scientific text. Although I’d visited all seven continents before I turned 50, I never got to see the orangutans in their native Borneo or the gorillas in Rwanda. But I’m content now to see them up close on public television.

If and when I finally retire, I’d like to work as a volunteer with young children. They lighten my step, warm my heart and enrich my soul. Their joie de vivre and innate curiosity foster hope that the world of the future will be a better one.




The secret to a happy and vibrant old age? 
Strive to do what you love for as long as you can do it.
By Jane E. Brody






“Look to your left, look to your right. One of you won’t be here in the next semester.”
It’s a typical lecture delivered at the start of a semester in the sciences, and one that Ainissa Ramirez remembered hearing early during her undergraduate studies at Brown University.

Now a successful materials scientist and science writer, Dr. Ramirez recalls that she was almost pushed out of pursuing a career in science because of her weed-out classes. As their name suggests, the classes are common especially in the sciences and mathematics at American universities, and are designed to demarcate students who are likely to do well in a given subject from those who are not.

Those who excel in these introductory classes can proceed with completing a major on the topic if they wish. But there’s evidence that weed-out classes disproportionately hinder underrepresented groups including women as well as Black, Native American and Hispanic people from pursuing STEM degrees.

“Everyone should have some science in their life,” Dr. Ramirez said, adding that classes should be tailored toward different students’ needs rather than constantly trying to eliminate them.
“Your life’s path is decided for you based on this weed-out class,” she said. “That’s the problem that I have.”

A study published this month in the journal Science Advances adds to evidence that whether or not students can endure weed-out classes has less to do with innate ability and more to do with their frame of mind and social connections with their classmates when starting a rigorous new course of study.

In an experiment involving 226 biology undergraduate students taking an introductory biology class at Columbia University in New York, the researchers found that a simple psychological exercise improved the chances of all students taking a second semester class, regardless of race or gender. The study highlights how a variety of interventions might help more students stay in the pipeline to become future scientists, engineers and mathematicians.

The study authors asked about half the students to complete a short exercise in the third week of the semester before their first test in which they ranked family, friends, independence, religion, creativity and other aspects of their lives in order of importance. They then wrote an essay on the most important things in their lives for 15 minutes. This is called a values affirmation exercise, and the idea behind it was to make students less defensive and more comfortable when it came to interacting and engaging with their classmates.

 Several previous studies have shown that conducting such a task can help produce positive social attitudes, outcomes and behavior. The remaining students, who served as a control group, also listed values in order of importance to them, and wrote an essay about the things they considered least important, explaining what might be of importance to someone else.

What the authors found was that the group of students who completed the affirmation task made on average 29 percent more friends in the course by its end than those who didn’t complete the task. They were also nearly 12 percent more likely to take the next biology class in the following semester.

“This exercise is really a way to broaden people’s focus in a stressful moment when they might otherwise be very narrowly focused on the test,” said Kate Turetsky, a co-author of the study who is a social psychologist at Princeton University.

Dr. Turetsky acknowledged that the ways affirmation techniques are used needed further study, and that they may not be sufficient to retain more students in STEM education. But the outcomes for students in her experiment hinted at one truth of weed-out classes and how science education can be structured.

“There’s a growing body of evidence that people’s social relationships are really important for these outcomes,” she said. This means teachers and lecturers should redesign their courses to help people maintain relationships and strengthen social networks, perhaps through more collaboration, cooperation, group work and less competition, she said. Andrew Koch, president of the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education, says the new study’s methods are sound. He notes, however, the study is “trying to address the symptom of the illness, not the illness itself.”

The institute has created a “Gateway to Completion” program, which aims to help institutions with high enrollment courses and high failure rates. He said the course exists because race, ethnicity and family income remain the best predictors of success in college.
Ultimately, Dr. Koch advocates abolishing weed-out classes. “I do think we need to have high expectations and high standards for our students,” he said. “But to conflate that with a third to a half of the students failing out of introductory courses really grossly manipulates what rigor means.”

Dr. Ramirez agrees. For her, “the problem is not the student, it’s the class.” She added that she passed that key class because her chemistry professor had a tutorial version of her class, allowing her to study at her own pace and focus her energy on the other subjects. “I also got a lot of tutors and spent a lot of time in the library and had study groups.”

Dr. Ramirez suggests that aligning students with their motivations and connecting them with like-minded people is important, but the concept of a weed-out class is fundamentally flawed.
That’s because weed-out classes were originally created in the 19th century in response to the fact that only limited slots were available on STEM courses. “That doesn’t necessarily apply now,” Dr. Ramirez said. “There’s a disconnect between the culture that established the weed-out course and what’s going on today.”









By Dalmeet Singh Chawla
WEED-OUT CLASSES


Author Gladwell, writer of best-selling treatises on social science and human behavior, is typically sober-minded and eminently respectable, the sort of person who is admired by American presidents and the makers of “Top Global Thinkers” lists. Podcaster Gladwell, host of “Revisionist History,” is much more playful — impish, even. He’s the one who picks fights with elite college presidents, goes to bat for Brian Williams and scripts poignant elegies to McDonald’s bygone beef-fat French fries. Author Gladwell is a crisp white shirt and slacks. Podcaster Gladwell is a bucket hat and flip-flops.

The 10-episode, sixth season of “Revisionist History,” which began last week, is peak Podcaster Gladwell. Over the course of its run, the podcast, about things “overlooked and misunderstood,” has become a more freewheeling vessel for the kind of Gladwellian storytelling — combining research, anecdote and argument — that its creator made famous in books like “The Tipping Point” and “Outliers.”

The typically eclectic season delves into subjects including self-driving cars, Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” and, in a two-part series premiering Thursday, U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings, a longstanding and influential barometer of academic excellence with a mysterious methodology.

In a recent phone interview, Gladwell, 57, talked about the new season, the U.S. News rankings and the moral value of all his mischief-making. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.


How did you get interested in the U.S. News college rankings?

Well, I’ve always been interested in them because I’m Canadian, and I’ve always been overwhelmed with how nuts the American system of higher education is. And it strikes me that the U.S. News rankings are so emblematic of that nuttiness, a marketing ploy 30 years ago that has somehow been lodged in everyone’s brain ever since. And when you interrogate the criteria they use to decide whether one school’s good and one school is not good, it makes no sense. I simply can’t get over the fact that people take this seriously.


People who listen to the show will know that American higher education has long been a favorite target of yours. What about it bedevils you?

There’s one thing America does well, which is it has created some really great high-end research universities. I’d keep that, but everything else is crazy. You take any kid who’s serious about college in their junior and senior year of high school and just completely stress them out in what should be a very happy time in their life. Then, they go to schools, and they are invariably impoverished and come out loaded down with debt. And then, there’s a handful of schools everyone wants to go to, which deliberately exclude as many people as they can, and they’re the ones that get all the money. There’s no part of that that makes any sense.

And you have, complicit in all of this, a ranking system which chooses to reward schools for doing exactly the opposite of what they should be doing. When you start peeling back layers, you discover that baked into a lot of these assessments of higher education is a series of assumptions that are appalling. This thing that they’re relying on, it’s very close to being racist. I don’t want to say it’s active, open racism, but it doesn’t look good.

Was that your suspicion going in? Or what did you expect to find?

Well, I had a couple things in the back of my mind. I’ve always been fascinated by HBCUs [Historically Black Colleges and Universities], and the fact that they do this seemingly impossible thing, which is they take kids from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and they manage to produce this extraordinary educational outcome. So then I connected that to this particular project, because I realized that the systems we use to rank schools are completely uninterested in the thing that HBCUs do well.

The second episode of the series focuses on Dillard University, an HBCU in New Orleans, and its president Walter Kimbrough. What won you over about what they are doing?

The question was: If the function of higher education is to provide opportunity, what does that look like? Kimbrough struck me as someone who has thought deeply about that question, and Dillard has created an answer that is tailored to the population they’re serving. If you’re from the upper middle-class, and both of your parents have graduate degrees, it’s an easy lift to put you in position to make your way in the world. The hard version is where maybe your parents didn’t go to college. Maybe your high school had no A.P. courses, or your family makes so little money that if your dad gets sick and loses his job in your freshman year, you can’t stay in school. Dillard is an institution set up to solve that harder problem.

One of the things that makes the show is hearing just how passionate you become about these arguments. How important is that to your process, finding a subject that gets you fired up?

Really important. I am a creature of enthusiasm. There are things I really love, and there are things that drive me nuts, and I think it’s important in a good season of “Revisionist History” to have a little bit of both. We have three episodes this season on “The Little Mermaid.” “The Little Mermaid,” as it was constructed by Disney, is an abomination. And so that’s what got me going on that one. But the first episode is just a lark about my love of running and how I see in the future a world where I can run wherever I want. One of the wonderful things about audio is it is this insanely powerful and direct way of communicating both positive and negative emotion. That’s been an eye-opening discovery for me: Oh, at last, after decades of ranting in the wilderness, I have a platform.

How do you balance the fun that you have at the expense of something like the college rankings and the seriousness of what you’re advocating for? Do you see yourself as someone who’s trying to change the system? Or is it more just an entertaining story that you’re after?

I think it’s a little bit of both. With Dillard, for example, one very concrete thing that would really help schools like that would be to identify kids at the low end of the income spectrum and substantially increase the size of Pell grants. That’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s not going to happen because of a podcast, but it will happen if we start to have a conversation with the understanding that there is a real need there. I would love to be one little voice in that conversation.

But I think all of us who work on the show feel that it works best when it’s varied. I don’t want it to be seen as a show that has an ideology, that is didactic and is lecturing the news. Our goal is not just to educate or inflame, it’s also to entertain. The serious stuff is also more powerful when you use the platform selectively.

What’s the mix now in terms of the time you’re spending writing books or articles, and the time you’re spending on the podcast?

I think I’m pretty committed to audio now. I’m able to still do a little bit of writing from time to time. In fact, I’m writing a book right now, but it’s going to be audio first, like “The Bomber Mafia”[Gladwell’s recent book about the Air Force in World War II]. It may be the case down the road that I stop doing podcasts and only do audiobooks. I spent many decades in the print world and did a lot of incredibly fun things, but this is my new phase where I want to explore. I think of this as a new chapter of my life.








MALCOLM GLADWELL, UNFILTERED
by Reggie Ugwu
If we Americans listened to one another, perhaps we would recognize how absurd our discourse has become. It is our own fault that political discussions today are hotheaded arguments over whether the hooligans storming the halls of the Capitol were taking a tour or fomenting an insurrection; if we broadened our audiences, perhaps we would see the fallacy of claims that all Republicans are committed to voter suppression and that all Democrats are committed to voter fraud.

It seems like an easy challenge to address, but we lack the incentives to change our behavior. We are all, regardless of where we sit on the political spectrum, caught in a vortex of intoxication. We have fooled ourselves into thinking that our followers on social media are our friends. They aren’t. They are our mirrors, recordings of our own thoughts and images played back to us, by us and for us. We feel good about ourselves, sure, but do we feel good as citizens? Do we feel good as Americans? Are we better off? Is America?

There are many problems in America, but fundamental to so many of them is our unwillingness to learn from one another, to see and respect one another, to become familiar with people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds and who hold different political views. It will take work to repair this problem, but building blocks exist. A good foundation would be a one-year mandatory national service program.

Nearly 90 years ago, in response to the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps, what was then America’s largest organized nationwide civilian service program. About 30 years later, President Lyndon Johnson brought to fruition President John Kennedy’s “domestic Peace Corps” initiative, the Volunteers in Service to America program, known as VISTA. Today, domestic civilian service is dominated by AmeriCorps and nongovernmental programs like Teach for America.

Taken together, these programs have been enormously successful at putting people to work, broadening the reach of basic social services related to education, health and welfare. Most important, they have helped citizens see the crucial role that they can play in strengthening our democracy. Given that we know service programs can be so effective in shoring up the nation in moments of crisis, the time has come for a broader initiative, with higher aspirations and goals. The time has come for compulsory national service for all young people — with no exceptions.

Universal national service would include one year of civilian service or military service for all adults to be completed before they reach the age of 25, with responsibilities met domestically or around the world. It would channel the conscience of the Civilian Conservation Corps and put young people in the wilderness repairing the ravages of environmental destruction. It would draw on the lessons of the Peace Corps and dispatch young Americans to distant lands where they would understand the challenges of poor countries and of people for whom basic health and nutrition are aspirational goals. It would draw on the success of our military programs that in the past created pathways toward financial stability and educational progress for those with limited resources, while also serving as great unifiers among America’s races, religions and social classes.

These are but three examples. A one-year universal national service program could take many other forms, but it is easy to imagine that it could be a vehicle to provide necessary support to underserved urban and rural communities, help eliminate food deserts, contribute to rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, enrich our arts and culture, and bolster our community health clinics, classrooms and preschools.

Furthermore, because service would be mandatory, it would force all of our young people to better know one another, creating the opportunities to learn about and appreciate our differences. Speaking as an educator, I know that we get better answers to complex problems when we assemble teams from a wide range of backgrounds. Once these teams realize that they share a common purpose, their collective differences and diversity in race, gender, expertise, faith, sexual orientation and political orientation start to emerge as a strength. If you look at the state of our civic culture, it is clear that we have a long way to go before we can claim that we are doing the best that we can. The kind of experiential education I am advocating could change a life, could open a mind and could save a democracy.

A sensible system of compulsory national service would build bridges between people and turn them into citizens. It would shore up our fragile communities and strengthen us as individuals and as a nation. Compulsory national service would make us more self-reliant and at the same time more interdependent. It would help us to realize our remarkable individual strengths and would reveal the enormous collective possibilities when we pull together instead of rip apart.

At its core, we need to heed the call for citizenship. We need to take the natural inclination to help out our friends and families and turn it into a willingness to support strangers. We need to inspire people to answer the call to serve because in so doing they will discover ways to have their voices heard and their communities seen and respected.

This is neither a new nor a partisan idea. This call to serve and inspire is written into the preamble of the United States Constitution. When the founders sought to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty,” they were talking about establishing an ethos of citizenship and participation.

Compulsory national service is not a panacea, but neither is it a mere placebo. It could be a very real solution to a very real problem that already has wrought havoc on our democracy and that threatens our future as a nation, our viability as a culture and our very worth as human beings. This nation and its democratic principles need our help. We can and must do better.






Enlist the Young
by Jonathan Holloway

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