ONE THING about right-wing critics of academia: the facts just don’t matter to them.According to this morning’s Inside Higher Ed, a new study has compared young people who do and young people who do not attend college with regard to loss of faith.
Here are the facts (evidently): decline in faith among young people is more common among those who don’t attend college than among those who do.
Jeez, what’s it all mean?
…The more you pursue a higher education, the more likely you are to abandon your faith — at least that’s what conventional wisdom holds.
“Actually we’ve just been wrong about this for quite a while,” said Mark D. Regnerus, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the authors of a new study that suggests students who attend and graduate from college are more likely than others to hold on to their faith.
It’s not that colleges necessarily encourage faith, he said, but for all the talk about how intellectuals are out to destroy students’ relationships to their religions and God, the main obstacles to such relationships have to do with maturing and how young people spend their time. “Some kids were bound to lose [their faith] anyway and they do,” Regnerus said. But the evidence suggests that college isn’t responsible.
…The data were mined for trends on three factors of religious activity: attendance at religious services, relative importance of religion, and disaffiliation from religion. A substantial majority of young adults report a decline in attendance at religious services, while a minority report that religion has become less important and that they have completely dropped their religion. But the greatest drops come from those who are not in college. [My emphasis.]
So with all the talk about supposedly liberal, anti-religious professors, why do the young adults who don’t go to college suffer more of a religious loss?
Regnerus said that what the study suggests — and his personal experience confirms — is that while there are plenty of non-religious professors around, they aren’t trying to discourage any students from practicing their faith. “Of course there are some who are hostile to religion. But they don’t teach that. They teach their discipline,” Regnerus said. The attitude, he added, is: “Whatever I think about evangelicals, when I go to teach quantum physics, I teach quantum physics.”
…Behavioral factors, he said, are a better way than college status to predict whether young adults will become less religious. Those who don’t have sex before marriage are also those who don’t experience as much of a drop in religious connection. Those who have smoked pot experience more of a drop. Those who increase alcohol consumption during their young adulthood experience more of a drop in religious connection.
Those who blame college for declining religious activity by students don’t understand that it is these factors, among others, that are the influence, Regnerus said. “This is about this period of the life course where freedom and choice become paramount,” he said. “What diminishes religiosity is freedom and choice, not intellectual engagement.”
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Boring subject, Chunk. Here's one that is far more interesting:
Women Dreaming of Sex More Often
Thursday, June 14, 2007
By Marrecca Fiore
A new study says women are either having more sexual dreams than they were 40 years ago, or have just become more comfortable admitting to them.
The Universite de Montreal study focused on more than 3,500 home dream reports from both men and women. The results showed the both men and women dream of sex about 8 percent of the time.
Sexual intercourse was the most common type of sexual dream content, followed by sexual propositions, kissing, fantasies and masturbation.
The percentage of women dreaming of sex is considerably higher than it was 40 years ago, which led researchers to believe that females are either dreaming of sex more often than they were in the past or are now comfortable reporting such dreams because of changing social roles and attitudes.
Although men and women are dreaming of sex in equal proportions, the type of sexual dreams experienced by the two genders often differs, according to the findings presented Thursday at SLEEP 2007, the 21st annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS).
The study found that both men and women reported experiencing an orgasm in about 4 percent of their sexual dreams. Orgasms were described as being experienced by another dream character in 4 percent of the women's sexual dreams, but in none of the men’s dreams.
Women identified current or past lovers in 20 percent of their sexual dreams, compared to 14 percent of the men’s dreams. Public figures were twice as likely to be the object of women’s sexual dreams than in men’s, while men were twice as likely to dream of multiple partners, according to the findings.
"Observed gender differences may be indicative of different waking needs, experiences, desires and attitudes with respect to sexuality," said the study’s author Antonio Zadra, PhD, of the Universite de Montreal, in a press release. "This is consistent with the continuity hypothesis of dreaming which postulates that the content of everyday dreams reflects the dreamer's waking states and concerns.”
Blogger doesn't let you block comments by IP range, does it? If I were you, I'd switch to WordPress.
Bye, bye liberalism!
June 14, 2007
Antioch College, R.I.P.
By Henry P. Wickham, Jr.
According to a statement released on June 12, 2007 by the Antioch College Board of Trustees, the College in Yellow Springs, Ohio will suspend operations on July 1, 2008. The Trustees announced that the "College's resources are inadequate" to continue its operations in Yellow Springs.
The statement from the Trustees refers to the College's "low enrollment and lack of adequate funding." It refers to all of the cutbacks that the College has made, which have "eroded the confidence students and parents have in the College's academic program."
The statement mentions the long-term goal of reopening the campus at some point in the future. However, given the College's declining enrollment, decrepit facilities, and low endowment, one wonders how the College can resurrect itself, absent a sugar daddy like George Soros.
I grew up within ten miles of Antioch College. To step onto its campus was to experience something of a time warp. In the 1960s, it was 1950's beatnik. Since then, it was and always will be 1968. There was something about Antioch's campus that was like one of those colonial villages in Williamsburg where everyone dresses in colonial costumes. Antioch students certainly dressed their part with their studied shabbiness. The Bohemianism at Antioch was always a little too self-conscious and self-congratulatory, and the radicalism conventional and, dare I say, boring.
If you were a high school student with a strong left-wing political philosophy, and if you desired to spend four years at a college that will confirm all of your political prejudices and reward certain righteous attitudes, Antioch College was the place to go. The PC orthodoxies on campus were always stifling and predictable. There was no political, social, or economic issue where anyone could doubt where the Antioch students stood. One could almost mouth the clichés and slogans as they were being spouted.
"Boot camp for the revolution" was how one student described Antioch to me. I wonder how much of their assigned reading students were able to buy at "Big Bill's Revolutionary Book Store" that used to be located on Xenia Avenue?
I was once told by a student that they could get classroom credit for partaking in public political demonstrations. I remember one demonstration outside of the Federal Courthouse in Dayton, Ohio in 1978 after the Supreme Court issued University of California Regents v. Bakke. This is the case where the Court somewhat restricted racial preferences in public university admissions. The Antioch students were demanding unfettered racial preferences. That the U.S. District Court in Dayton had absolutely nothing to do with the case, and that no court of law should be ever influenced by public demonstrations, of course meant nothing to them. What are mere facts and separation of powers when there is moral and political exhibitionism to tend to.
Antioch always touted itself as "innovative," it never being clear to me at Antioch the distinction between innovative and trendy. Who can forget that most notorious innovation, Antioch's sexual harassment policy?
This policy was published in Antioch College's Student Survival Guide. There is something precious in that title, Survival Guide, as if Yellow Springs were Afghanistan or the darkest reaches of the Amazon. By way of a preface, those so-hip administrators advised students as follows:
"This spirit [behind Antioch's policy on sex] is about a fully affirmative YES. Not an ambiguous yes, or a ‘well-not-really-but-OK-I guess, yes,' certainly not a ‘silent-no,' ‘yes,' or an ‘ouch' or ‘yuck-but-I'm-afraid-to-hurt-your-feelings-yes.' This is about YES, UM HUM, ABSOLUTELY, YIPPEE YAHOO YES!" [Emphasis in the original.]
No, dear readers, I do not have the talent to make this up. Did Mr. Rogers write Sex for Dummies for the Neighborhood? Is this a training manual for six year olds learning to play "doctor"?
Then, things get even more serious. Down from Mount Sinai with the tablets, Antioch College's administrators laid down the law:
"-All sexual contact and conduct between any two (or more!) people must be consensual;" [which is worse here, the "or more" or the "!"?]
"-- Consent must be obtained verbally before there is any sexual contact or conduct;
"-- If the level of sexual intimacy increases during an interaction (i.e. if two people move from kissing while fully clothed, which is one level, to undressing for direct physical contact, which is another level), the people involved need to express their clear verbal consent before moving to that new level;"
And so on and on.
I am not sure which is more hilarious: imagining the discussion that led to this twaddle or imagining the actual implementation of this policy in the dormitory.
Antioch College: so hip, so innovative, so politically active, so relevant. This is yet another case where the American public has shown more sense than its supposedly intellectual superiors. Antioch College was selling, and the people (as in "Power to the People") were not buying. The packaging shouted "Relevance!", and the people, voting with their feet and pocket books, proclaimed Antioch's titanic irrelevance.
As that other, far more gratefully dead once put it, "What a long strange trip it's been."
oh no, Mr. Cut and Paste needs to get his own blog!
I promise to visit and post loooooong articles that only I find interesting - really, I will.
'til then, dump him, Chunk.
So by disapproving of this activity, we can assume that you're opposed to the Bible thumping and anti-choice zealots demonstrating outside the Supreme COurt, then, demanding that prayer and creationism be part of the curricula in public schools, and that women are to be denied reproductive choice, correct?
"That the U.S. District Court in Dayton had absolutely nothing to do with the case, and that no court of law should be ever influenced by public demonstrations, of course meant nothing to them. What are mere facts and separation of powers when there is moral and political exhibitionism to tend to."
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