My Vote's Important?

            Hi Everyone. I’ve been busy over the last couple of weeks. Have I ever. Since I posted last time, six job applications have gone out. In my September 15 post I described how this job search works, and it is just as difficult as it appeared then. Though I am thankful to God to be able to say that a number of positions have popped up and if I was offered all or even a couple of them, I’d really have to think and pray about which one to accept. Now it’s time to finish up the dissertation’s data write-up and move on.

 

            As I write, Election Day is one week away. In some districts such as my own here in Champaign County Illinois, you can take advantage of early voting. I am registered here and I’ve already voted. The voting terminal had the same screen-reading software on it that my computer uses, and the buttons were labeled in braille. I found the electoral commission guys friendly and helpful, and they even let me in a bit early so they could orient me to the machine and leave me to it.

Yet, as I contemplate the vote I cast, I ask myself how much it really mattered. How much does my presidential vote truly matter? It matters, I conclude, more than the cynics think it does, but a bit less than we were told in high school civics class. The reason is the electoral college. Frankly, and here we come to the heart of the matter, the electoral college is outdated and unnecessary. It may, in fact, be harmful as regards the nation choosing its president. I’m going to briefly overview how it works, just how our president is elected, and propose getting rid of the thing. As a side note, you won’t be able to gather from reading this who I voted for. I don’t mind telling you if you ask at some point, but that’s not my focus here today.

 

How The President Is Elected:

            If you are already well-informed about the finer points of this process, you can skip this section or let me know if I have made a mistake in laying out the procedure. Though since this is a blog post and not a course in constitutional or election law, I’m going to skip some of the more minute details. As a side note consider this. What topic has been the subject of the greatest numbers of proposals for constitutional reform? If you said ‘the electoral college,’ you’d be right. Over 700 constitutional amendments have been proposed over the past two centuries that have aimed to reform this system; that means there have been more proposed amendments on this subject than any other.

 

After the ballot scandal in the election of 2000 I heard of this bumper sticker, “Welcome to Florida! Where your vote counts, and counts, and counts …” Judging by the uproar over ‘hanging chads’ and miscounts, you’d think the people had something to do with the election. They do, but only just.

            The electoral college was established by the framers of the Constitution as a compromise between a popular vote (which would have been a difficult thing to efficiently coordinate in the late 18^th century) and having the president elected by state legislatures (which would have eliminated a people’s vote altogether). So, when you cast your vote, your vote is counted up and used to decide which set of state electors will cast votes for your state. The electors are the ones who actually decide the presidency. Your state’s number of electors is based on its population. My home state of Tennessee has 11 electors. Illinois where I live now has 20. No state has fewer than three including Washington D.C.  Texas and California have the largest numbers of state electors with 38 and 55 electors respectively. So, to become the president, Romney and Obama don’t need to win fifty or sixty million votes, certainly not yours or mine strictly speaking. Rather, one of them has to win 270 electors out of 538, a majority by a single vote, and it absolutely doesn’t matter which 270 the  winner gets as long as he does get them. For all practical purposes, only 538 votes really count in this country.

            Here’s a timeline of just what happens after Election Day. These dates and procedures are taken from the site of the Federal Archives, which has extensive material on the electoral process:  http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/key-dates.html. After Election Day November 6, your state’s governor will prepare a ‘Certificate of Ascertainment,’ a document that basically lists who the electors were for your state and which president on the state’s ballot won its vote. These certificates are all sent to Washington D.C. This year, states have until December 11 to finalize their decisions, do recounts if need be and so on. On December 17, each state’s set of electors will meet (probably in your state capitol) and they will actually vote. On January 6, Congress will sit in session to count up the received Electors’ votes, and the President of the Senate will declare the president and vice president of the United States. That’s how it works in a trouble-free election. You elect the electors. The electors choose the president according to your votes. … Question, am I the only one who sees a problem with this setup?

 

Throwing The Game:

            You’ll notice in these last paragraphs that I said not a word about what would happen if electors didn’t vote according to how they were supposed to, that is,  according to what the people in your state decided. That is because electors are held to an honors system when it comes to voting as they’re supposed to. They don’t go to jail or pay hefty fines or anything else if they actually get to your state capitol on December 17 and say, “you know what? Screw X. I’m voting for Y, popular vote be damned.” Aside from being sentured, what amounts to your boss saying, “tisk tisk,” nothing will happen to an elector who chooses not to vote as he or she is authorized. It doesn’t happen often, but it can. If 10 out of your 20 electors through their votes away, that can change the whole election and dishonestly represent what the people of your state wanted. As you might expect, tracking down occasions when particular electors broke with the state’s vote and did something else is not easy. It’s not the sort of thing you’d want to publish, but it is possible and even legal in many places, though it’s neither ethical nor honest as I said before. The one instance I found was that of Barbara Lett-Simmons, an elector (or is that an electresse?) for Washington D.C. who cast a blank ballot in the 2000 election. Essentially, she didn’t vote. Her reasons aren’t particularly important for our purposes, but it is a real example from history.

 

The People’s Vote:

            In an election that runs normally, the electoral college ought to reflect the people’s vote. It doesn’t always do that, however. It’s perfectly possible for a president to get elected and not have received the majority vote. The people’s vote or popular vote has no legal bearing on the outcome. Like I said, only those 538 votes truly matter. There have been several elections where the popular vote didn’t reflect what happened in the electoral college. The most recent was the election of 2000, where Gore got half a million more votes than Bush did. So, if your vote really mattered, Al Gore would have been president. As a side note, the other elections when this happened were those of 1824, 1876 and 1888. There are Wikipedia articles on all of these.

 

Conclusion:

            This isn’t a political science class, and I’m not interested in talking about how the electoral system could be misused if we went to popular voting. Corruption is part of human nature, and any system is subject to rigging or abuse. The current system is no exception, and if you don’t believe me, research the election of 1876 and get back to me. Also, I’m uninterested in spouting numbers. Telling me that this state has proportionally equal electoral power with this other state because it has yay electoral votes and we have such a fine electoral college is a numbers game. The fact is, Alaska has fewer electoral votes than Texas because Alaska has fewer people! If we went to popular voting, that wouldn’t change. Here are some things that might change, however.

            In Illinois, your vote truly doesn’t matter. Illinois has voted democratic in most of the presidential elections over the past century. I think it went republican for Reagan, but that’s more an exception than the rule. The reason is Chicago. That city and its surrounding suburbs contain about three fourths or nine million of the state’s twelve million residents. If Chicago votes democrat, Illinois is going democrat. Thus, if I voted for Obama today, my vote’s unnecessary because Chicago took care of it. If I voted for Romney, my vote’s useless because Illinois’s electors will be given to Obama. Because Illinois always goes democrat, campaigning doesn’t really happen here. The republicans know they can’t take Illinois and the democrats know they don’t have to.

            So, how would this be different if we went to popular voting? Well, in Illinois’s case, it might or might not be. TO use this election as an example, Romney might have hit south and central Illinois hard, where republican sentiment is strong, and Romney and Obama would have battled it out in Chicago for the votes of that city. I also think that smaller states would get more of the candidates’ time. Just now, no one gives a crap about what North Dakota wants or how Nebraskans will vote. That’s the hard truth. Those two states combined only have a small number of electors. No one cares. But if every vote counted, then a million votes either way would make a difference, and if those million votes came from North Dakota, New Mexico or Idaho, they would see candidates trying hard to win them over.

            Finally, I think voter turnout would increase dramatically. As it stands, how can you expect people to care a fig for the election when only the electoral college is directly involved? If I knew that my vote directly contributed to the president’s election, I’d care a lot more. How would elections have been different if, for example, 85 or 90% of eligible voters turned out rather than the 40 or 50% that actually tends to show up? I submit that the presence of the electoral college gives people the distinct impression that their vote just isn’t that important. I wonder why. … Last but not least, how is it that I can elect my mayor and my governor based on a popular vote, but not my president? Come on, now.

            The American people are more capable than they’ve ever been of choosing who they want to lead them. This doesn’t mean we will always choose wisely or well, but that’s the way of things. We have the technology to implement computer-recorded voting and to tally it up efficiently. In short, what we can do at the city or state level can be done nationally. I don’t want to elect electors. I want to elect a president, please and thank you.

 

 

Who Teaches the Teachers?

            Hello Everyone. I hope I find you, whoever you are, doing well today. First, an update. Since my last post my list of college teaching positions has expanded. I’m applying to a number of schools that are looking for applied linguists such as myself as well as to a few more generalist positions. Those are the ones where, as I said last time, the school doesn’t specify a particular field of focus they’re looking for in a new hire. So, I am applying to eight places at last count. I think that’s as big as the list will get for now. If I had to pick a number one wish for right now, I’d say Kalamazoo College. They’re a small liberal arts college in Michigan, and they asked for someone who does what I do and who specializes in the sort of teaching methods we use here at Illinois. That is to say, it’s the kind of school I would love to teach at, and it seems to be seeking someone who is qualified in the things I do. So it’s a good fit on both counts. Now I pray that they think the same or that God shows me what he thinks. Meanwhile, the dissertation continues, crushing deadlines loom, the usual. Now I come to my subject for today, professors. What I’m going to say about the duties of teachers will be discussed with reference to college professors in America, but I hope that if you are a teacher elsewhere or at some other level of education, you can and will make the application to your own life. So, I’m going to discuss truth and relativism in our classrooms and offer a solution, something I’d like to see more of at any rate.

 

A Little Linguistic History:

            The noun ‘professor’ is also connected to the verb ‘profess.’ ‘Professor’ came into English from Latin by way of Old French. It comes to us from  the original Latin verb ‘profitieri,’ meaning to lay claim to or to declare. So, a professor is a person who claims knowledge of one sort or another. They also declare that knowledge, ‘professing’ it. We don’t think of college faculty as professing their knowledge, but when you get down into the meaning of the words themselves, that’s just what they do. Distributing and furthering their knowledge  is just what we pay professors to do, and we often times respect them for their knowledge and expertise. That process of knowledge distribution is often what we mean when we talk about another Latin-derived word, ‘education.’ Even in their older Latin forms,  ‘education’ and the verb ‘educate’ evince notions of instruction, leadership and the like. So then, what is it we are supposed to be teaching and professing? At first glance there are myriad answers to this question. Some would answer with engineering, others with philosophy, still others with biology, linguistics, psychology, etc. In short, the answers you’d get cover all the subjects you’d expect to find in college classrooms and coincide with the professor’s training and interests. That’s perfectly fine. Yet—and here we reach the jumping off point of this essay—there is only one thing we should really be teaching and professing no matter our expertise. It is a thing that manifests itself in every discipline and subject from the most obvious to the ones you’d never think people get doctorates in. That thing is the truth. No matter what we teach, we are called upon to teach truthfully, and I’m talking about a little bit more than ‘truth’ as it may be defined in the college code of conduct manual. It means more than getting the facts of one’s area of expertise right or more than not plagiarizing.

 

The Place of Truth:

            Truth, absolute, unshakable truth, is so critical because professors often serve as role models for young students. As students we tend to start out by assuming that our professors have the answers. When you’re a freshman or sophomore and you ask a prof a question, you expect an answer and you assume that answer to be accurate to the best of the professor’s ability whether it concerns reworking a differential equation or what Kant thought about an issue. That’s not an unreasonable expectation given that you’re probably 18 or 19, just starting out in college, and maybe you’re even taking this class because you have to, a class that has nothing to do with what you want to study. So you often take the professor’s answer and go on to write your essay or your term paper.

By the time  you’re a junior or senior, you’ve come a bit further. You’ve developed an interest in something and you’ve started to gain deeper knowledge about it. Maybe you want to go on to grad school, maybe not. By this point your professors are people with whom you have conversations that involve more than you just asking questions and their answering them. You’ve begun to penetrate into the deeper matters of what you’re studying. Finally, as a graduate student, you’re taking the specialized seminars and courses, dialoguing with professors and students about the deepest questions, the uncertainties and gaps in your field of study, and possibly, you’re beginning to find that area of the field you want to stake a claim to and make a contribution to. By the time you’ve staked your claim, you’re probably writing a doctoral dissertation. This, in a very small nutshell, is how learning progresses in college and grad school, and at every stage professors are guiding you, instructing you, correcting you, mentoring you and training you. You’re being trained not only in the knowledge of engineering or English lit or sociology, but also in the methods of critical thinking and analysis that are part of those disciplines. Your professors can and often do shape much of your adult thinking after college.

 

            Truth, however, is a commodity that is all too often in short supply in America’s college classrooms. That’s quite a statement to make, I know. I’m not saying all college professors are liars, and you know me well enough to know that. Nor do I mean that college professors are insincere. In fact, I don’t mean any negative criticism of the characters of those who are, or who become, college professors. Yet, truth is lacking in our classrooms.

            It’s lacking because of the cultural air we breathe in this postmodern age. We find ourselves not wanting to disagree with anyone about anything, lest someone feel slighted or lest some value system be questioned. We find ourselves striving to include everything that everyone believes and holding up everyone’s belief in anything and everything as valid lest we be viewed as other than tolerant. This atmosphere that I’m describing is, of course, the atmosphere produced in a culture of relativism, and nowhere is relativism more passionately advocated and defended than in the college classrooms of America. To give you an idea of what this atmosphere often looks like, allow me to repeat an analogy I made in another blog post in March of last year:

If you are presented with a chocolate cake, you expect certain things to be present, namely chocolate. But our universities would teach you that it is wrong of you to dispute someone else who says that their carrot cake or their fruit cake is also chocolate. You might hear this: “Brad, now that’s pretty insensitive and exclusivist of you. my fruitcake is just as much a chocolate cake to me as yours is to you. You need to be more considerate of my culinary position. Who are you to say that this isn’t a chocolate cake!”

 

            You might argue the point in that post by saying that there’s a difference in my example between fact and opinion. Chocolate, you might say, has certain physical and chemical properties and is what it is even if someone else is mistaken about it. To take my absurd little example just one step further, in today’s climate someone could respond with, “ah, but you see, Brad, chocolate is about much more than the coco and the process that refines it into what you call chocolate. There’s a sense to chocolate, an ineffable experiential quality and relational dynamic between consumer and product that makes their piece of cake as much chocolate in their worldview as that cake is to you in your worldview.”

            I’ll grant you that it’s an absurd example, but it makes my point nicely. On such a basis as the one I just presented, the true chocolate lover is left wrong-footed. You can now hardly defend real chocolate and its genuineness without seeming to call into question the views and thought processes of that other person, something we are enjoined not to do at universities. Rather, our western university training would compel us here to concede that my notions of chocolate are ethnocentric and limited. As any honest person will tell you, however, only one of those people in that made up conversation is right, the one holding the thing that is actually chocolate. Discussions like this one take place every day on hundreds of college campuses concerning any number of topics and questions. Still, I’m not here to go on about relativism itself. I’ve said plenty on the subject in other posts, and you know what I think of it if you’ve read them. Rather, it’s time to consider remedies to it.

 

Talking to the Faculty:

            Campus ministries aren’t news. The University of Illinois has a number of churches close to it that send bible-believing students and youth ministers out to talk to all comers about the claims of Christ on our quod and in our dormitories. The church I attend makes it a special point to set up a table on quod day when everyone’s out and about celebrating and getting moved in and organized. These movements have been around for a good while and have undoubtedly accomplished a great deal. They have, however, one limitation that I see. No one talks to the people teaching these students.

            The general thinking behind school student movements is that those who accept Christ today will be the teachers of tomorrow. Generally, I understand and agree with the thinking. Still, it strikes me as one-sided. What about today’s teachers, I ask? Shouldn’t they have the chance to give the case for Christianity a fair hearing?

            Over the years our news media has been filled with stories about extremists or fringe groups on the margins of the Christian faith. David Koresh for the one and Harold Camping for a more recent example of the other come to mind. Our professors, of whom I may soon become one, are people like anyone else, people who observe these goings on and draw conclusions from them. Unfortunately, they don’t always see Christianity represented in both love and truth. My experience with my professors, spanning as it does three universities and over a decade thus far, suggests that your average college professor is exceptionally skeptical of most religious claims and particularly the claims of Christ. Reasons for that skepticism are numerous. Negative personal experiences with churches or people, exposure to certain modes of biblical criticism which we don’t have time to take apart here, doubt about religion’s place in a scientifically minded world, the list goes on and on. There are so many reasons because there are so many professors.

            Those professors deserve to have someone talk with them, give their doubts a full hearing and answer them point for point. The trouble is that professors are seen as being in the vanguard of the intelligentsia today. They can be seen as intimidating to most folk. Even I, who am not yet a professor and who don’t yet hold a doctorate, have been told that my level of education can be intimidating. That’s never been my intention, and I’m sure most professors would say the same. We academics don’t mean to intimidate the average person or in this case the average Christian.

            One important consequence stemming from the difference in education between your average professor and your average American is, therefore, that most well-meaning churchgoers don’t feel themselves able to discuss and debate the claims of Christ with us academics. It can often also be the case that most people lack the specialized knowledge that forms the basis of, say, a biology professor’s objections. For example, you may not agree with the claims of evolution as it’s presented today, but how many of us could sit down with a biologist and take on Darwin’s theory in specific detail, thesis for thesis and term for term? Not many. Another example, you may know and fervently believe that God created the world, but how many of us would be able (assuming we wanted to in the first place) to sit down with a philosophy professor and discuss questions of epistemology, ontology and theodicy? Not many.

            The truth is, professors’ objections to the claims of Christ are much the same ones people have been raising for at least a couple centuries now. They’re still answerable, but I find few people who want to try. Perhaps it’s easier for a youth minister to sit down with a student who may be closer to their own age and level of education. That student may have the same objections, but the words used to express them are shorter. That’s a joke, by the way. I’m not saying it takes a doctorate to be able to talk to professors intelligently and fluently about Christ, but I sense that most people think it does.

 

A Few Notable Names:

            Take a moment and look up some of these people:  Francis Collins, Alvin Plantinga, Marilynne Robinson, Martin Nowak, Michael McConnell, Simon Morris, and Henrey Schaefer. They’re all professors or retired professors. You probably guessed that. Most are scientists. Admittedly, I put the list together that way and it’s not exhaustive by any means. Schaefer is credited as the inventor of quantum computational chemistry. Collins is a geneticist, a physician and the head of the human genome project to map out all of the genes found in our DNA. Nowak is another biologist, a professor of biology and mathematics. Plantinga is a philosopher with multiple volumes to his name. The list goes on. Each one of those professors is known for being an outstanding scholar, many of them world-renowned in their fields. Every one of them is also a practicing Christian.

            I’ve met people on campus who would be happy to tell you that only fools would believe in the soundness of religious ideas. So, are these people fools? Somehow I just don’t think so. The problem remains, however, that they constitute a small minority among college and university faculties in America.

 

More Participants:

            Most people living in college towns, I’d think, have heard of Campus Crusade for Christ or CRU as it’s known since its recent name change. If you haven’t, I’m talking about the large ministry effort started by Bill Bright and his wife at UCLA in 1951. However, how many have heard of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship USA in general or its Graduate and Faculty Ministries in particular? InterVarsity (spelled just that way with the capital V in the middle) is another organization devoted to college and university ministries. What’s interesting about them is their development of a graduate and faculty ministry. They recognize that graduate students and professors face unique challenges in the field of academia, and their purpose is to found, encourage and sustain Christians in the halls of our colleges and universities.

            Only trouble is they’re not well-known. For my part, I’d never had an inkling about their existence until yesterday as I prepared this post. What does that tell me? It tells me there need to be more people, whether in a given organization or not, willing to go to our professors and our aspiring faculty and sit down with them to talk about truth and the God who is the God of truth. These need to be people who are knowledgeable about the bible, knowledgeable about the professorial mindset and who can rise to the challenge of answering the hardest and sometimes the most vehemently posed of questions.

            How often in your average applied ethics class will you see professors defending the unborn? How often will you see professors in those classes defending the right and correcting students’ misconceptions about what is wrong. Isn’t that what ethics is for? And where there is legitimate ambiguity about the rightness or wrongness of something, how often do you see professors taking a bible-based, principled stand for an ethical position? You do see those things happen, but I’d like to see more.

 

 

Concluding Comments:

            “The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth. Whether it be scientific truth or historical truth or personal truth.” (Jeanluke Picard). Relativism and skepticism reign at present. The skeptic says, “de omnibus dubitandum,” or, “doubt everything.” This sort of skepticism is nowhere applied with less hesitation than in the realm of religion in general and, among American academics, the realm of Christianity in particular. What I say back unflinchingly is that if you disbelieve everything, you believe nothing. I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis, a professor by the way, who had this to say about our skepticism and our rejection of values, and I’ll let his remark, which is taken from the end of Lewis’s book The Abolition of Man, serve as my closing comment:

‘’’ the kind of explanation which explains things away may give us something, though at a heavy cost. But you cannot go on 'explaining away' forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.