THE ARCH CONSERVATIVE, Spring 2016

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SCALIA’S LEGACY by

Michael Duckett

THE OTHER PRIMARY, p. 6 • YOUTH VOTE, p. 12

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THE EDITORS

On Student Leadership

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he presidential race still has several months to go, but campus elections are upon us. The annual process selects undergraduates who will serve in the Student Government Association. It also serves as a recurring reminder of the issue of student leadership on campus.

Administrators love to talk about “student leaders” — a term which has also trickled down into student usage. Usually, they refer to a particular ideal: A student leader participates in many extracurricular activities, preferably holding executive office in several campus groups. She belongs to honor societies and has honed her campus-wide network of colleagues and acquaintances. Her resume is polished, her credentials impressive relative to her peers.

Some undergraduates are eminently suited to the position of “student leader” at UGA. We the Editors count ourselves fortunate to know several who have genuinely improved campus through time-consuming acts of service. Indeed, a few of them are members of SGA. Beyond these notable exceptions, however, we believe that administration is selling a specific product in promoting the idea of student leadership.

The skeptical onlooker could even view their pitch as a weak adaptation of Foucault’s philosophy. In The Use of Pleasure, he writes that every moral action has two aspects — the moral prescription itself and the individual who “defines his position relative to the precept he will follow, and decides on a certain mode of being that will serve as his moral goal.”

Morality is not at issue here. Yet arguably most students in executive positions on campus have not only internalized a top-down message of what is a proper “mode of being” for the successful student leader. They have also decided to follow this prescription for what to say, what to believe, and with whom to associate.

The cynic notes that too often the message which reaches the larger undergraduate population is not, “Are you interested in leadership?” but, “Why indeed aren’t you a leader yet?”

Yet The Arch Conservative must give those who peddle the idea of “student leadership” the benefit of the doubt: We concede that the popularity of this term is an attempt to encourage undergraduates to become good leaders during their time at the University of Georgia.

Our question then becomes, is this perhaps too much to ask of a four-year undergraduate education? Arguably, exceptional leaders — those whose skills expand beyond a particular place (campus), with a particular population (millennials in their early 20s)— emerge from decades of experience in the workplace, at home, and in the civic community.

In a 2009 plebe address at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Dr. William Deresiewicz — author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life — noted that today our nation suffers from a notable lack of leaders in these areas. He observed, “What we don’t have…

2 / The Arch Conservative

are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army — a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.”

Deresiewicz asserts that the key to this type of effective leadership is solitude, the ability for an individual to separate his thoughts and convictions from the ideological trends of the present day. The person who achieves this attitude is able to see beyond transient, contemporary events to a larger view of the future.

Here, Deresiewicz speaks explicitly of the qualities of good leaders. We suggest, however, that the solitude he praises is also the possession of a good follower — and that a university does better to develop this type of person than to create a cookie-cutter “student leader.”

What, then, do we mean by a “good follower”?

Predictably, Plato can help clarify our case for the importance of the good follower to campus and beyond. His depiction of the ideal city in the Republic is not the story of one group of citizens attempting to master another, struggling to keep power and rule over those they have subjugated. Instead, it is the tale of philosophers who, by coming to understand and follow The Good, incidentally fit themselves to assume leadership in the polis. Intellectual freedom is key here — only by leaving the cave of native prejudice and ignorance is an individual at liberty to understand the principles which order a happy life.

Historically, education in the liberal arts — engaging the question of what humanity is, why we are this way, and what we should be — has helped students earn this intellectual freedom. Above all, the undergraduate who studies the philosophy, science, and literature of the West learns to question convention — to “think critically,” even of the authorities who exhort her to do so. Eventually, she may arrive at the conclusions her forefathers drew, but she does so freely. Her education has given her the tools to discern for herself what ideas — and what people — are best to follow.

On page 10, The Arch Conservative remembers a man who achieved the freedom to follow well. Justice Scalia spent decades protecting Americans’ liberty to do good according to individual conscience. He was, in the words of National Review, the Great Dissenter. Yet he was also the Great Follower of the Constitution, the document he pledged his honor to uphold.

We draw a noteworthy lesson from Scalia’s career: That is, the man who was good at following was also well-equipped to lead when his God and his country called him to do so.

So, we find that by training good followers, an institution of higher education may train good leaders as well. If the University of Georgia is able to give graduates the tools to achieve Deresiewicz’s solitude and Plato’s intellectual freedom, it will enrich their futures with far more than a few lines on a resume.

— The Editors

SPRING 2016

COVER IMAGE COURTESY LEVAN RAMISHVILI

We reassess today’s campus wisdom.

Spring 2016 THE EDITORS

On Student Leadership. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

THE CAMPUS INFORMANT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 COLUMNS

The Forgotten Syrian Crisis

Jake Shumard.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Connor Kitchings. .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Considering HB 677 and HB 2

Rejecting Donald Trump Evaluating the New SAT

FEATURES

Honoring Scalia

Youth Vote 2016

Cecilia Walker

Michael Duckett.

Sydney North .

The Other Primary

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

CULTURE

Review: The Conservative Heart Fantasy Meets Reality

14

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Elizabeth Ridgeway .

HUMOR

. . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Nick Geeslin.

Corporate Academy

Baylee Culverhouse. .

Rebel Lord.

Connor Kitchings

. . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

A quarterly journal of opinion raising the standard at the University of Georgia.

Elizabeth Ridgeway, Connor Kitchings, Marian Young,

MANAGING EDITOR

BUSINESS MANAGER

Baylee Culverhouse,

IMAGES COURTESY GUOGUO12 AND GAGE SKIDMORE

Sydney North,

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

archconuga.com archconuga@gmail.com TWITTER: @ArchConUGA MAIL: P.O. Box 1181 Athens, GA 30603

ON THE WEB: EMAIL:

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

PUBLIC RELATIONS Michael Duckett

Cole Calfee

Rebel Lord

Bill Davison

Jake Shumard

CONTRIBUTORS

Nick Geeslin

Cecilia Walker

Tristan Bagala

Ben Grayson

THE COLLEGIATE NETWORK

The Arch Conservative is a member publication of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Collegiate Network. Special thanks go out to Mr. Philip Chalk of The Weekly Standard for his inestimable help.

SPRING 2016

The Arch Conservative / 3

CAMPUS

Dawgs — as fans know the team — came out strong with a commanding 4-1 win. Junior Robert Tyler had a stellar performance on the mound with a career-high 13 strikeouts and five scoreless innings.

Although the Dawgs lost the second matchup to a homer in the 10th inning, they claimed the series the next day with a 5-1 victory over Georgia Southern. With this early success, the baseball team looks continue their competitive momentum into the season.

—Nick Geeslin

Concealed Carry on Campus

New laws in Georgia and Texas have implications for UGA students.

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he Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that on February 22, the Georgia state House passed HB 859, otherwise known as the “Campus Safety Act”. The bill allows Georgia college students Widespread Panic comes home to Athens. who are 21 years or older and possess appropriate permits to niversity of Georgia students are well aware that Athens is carry concealed firearms on campus, excepting certain restricted a hotbed for good rock music. Over decades it has generareas like student residences. At time of printing, the bill is headated such classic bands ing to the state Senate. as The B-52’s and There, it will likely little R.E.M., groups whose resistance in its path devoted fans now span before it becomes law. generations.

Meanwhile, a similar In the second week of bill has passed into law February, Widespread in Texas. Students at the Panic — another of University of Texas will Athens’ beloved homesoon be able to carry grown bands — visited concealed weapons on the Classic City for the campus with the proper first time in five years. licenses. The law, passed in 2015 by the RepubliFormed in 1986, can-led state legislature, Widespread Panic curalso gives colleges the rently features musidiscretion to allow stucians John Bell, John dents 21 years and older, “JoJo” Hermann, Jimmy who obtain designated Herring, Domingo Orpermits, to enter camtiz, and Dave Schools.

The group returned pus while armed.

Members of Athens-born band, Widespread Panic.

In Texas, whether or to Athens to commemnot a school decides to allow concealed carry on campus is at the orate their 30th anniversary with some of their original fans at the discretion of the university president. Meanwhile, there is a good Classic Center downtown. chance that concealed carry for purposes of self-defense may Thanks to frequent touring and and a consistent, recognizable sound to their music, Widespread Panic has thrived well past soon be permitted on the University of Georgia main campus. its prime in the 1990s. 20 years ago when the band played a free The Arch Conservative will continue to follow the developconcert in Athens, a reported 100,000 people flooded into town to ment of House Bill 859 in the Georgia legislature. see “Panic in the Streets.”

—Ben Grayson —Connor Kitchings

Return to the Classic City

U

The Dawgs face off against Georgia Southern.

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n February 19th, the Georgia baseball team kicked off their 2016 season at Foley Field with a three game series against Georgia Southern University.

A full house turned out for opening day, and the Diamond

4 / The Arch Conservative

A Fundraising Feat

Student org raises over one million dollars for charity.

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uring their annual Dance Marathon event on February 20th, UGA Miracle raised an impressive $1,068,000 for Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

UGA Miracle currently boasts 1,600 members, many of whom are also involved in Greek life on campus, and has hosted an

SPRING 2016

KILROY WAS HERE.

Baseball Season Begins

CAMPUS

annual dance marathon every year since 1995.

Since the inception of UGA Miracle’s Dance Marathon 21 years ago, the philanthropic student organization has donated $4.7 million to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

During the marathon, participants are given the option to stand for 24 hours straight. According to the UGA Miracle website, the extra physical effort honors “the struggle of the kids we raise money for, some of whom will never be able to stand again.”

Over 300,000 children are treated annually at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, with 17 million are treated nationwide in other Children’s Miracle Network hospitals.

Both Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and UGA Miracle are part of larger national networks that raise money for and give hope to young patients and their families.

—Sydney North

Free Speech and the University The Arch Conservative hosts David French.

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AC is pleased to announce its Spring 2016 Liberty Lecture featuring keynote speaker David French of National Review.

The lecture will take place at 7 p.m. on March 17th, 2016, in

Room 150 of the Miller Learning Center. Refreshments will be served at 6:30 p.m., and the event is free and open to the public.

Today, French is known as a staff writer at National Review and as the New York Times-bestselling co-author of Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can’t Ignore.

He is also a graduate of Harvard Law School, veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and currently serves as a major in the United States Army Reserves Individual Ready Reserve (IRR).

His work routinely covers foreign and military policy, as well as the status of free speech in the U.S. and national politics and elections.

In March, French will address the topic, “Free Speech and the University.” His talk promises to be timely in light of recent developments on campuses across the nation, including the University of Georgia’s recently amended campus speech code and student activists’ disruption of a free speech conference at Yale University in November 2015.

As the lecture approaches, please do not hesitate to contact coordinator Marian Young with any questions at archconuga@ gmail.com.

We look forward to welcoming you to this exciting event.

—The Editors

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SPRING 2016

The Arch Conservative / 5

COLUMNS

The Forgotten Syrian Crisis America has stopped discussing an important issue.

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n a recent article, Dr. Narayan Janakiraman, Professor of Marketing at the University of Texas, writes, “The need for instant gratification is not new, but our expectation of ‘instant’ has become faster, and as a result, our patience is thinner.” His statement applies well to news media patterns in modern America.

In 2016, the United States is a country built on fast-paced news cycles, fueled by print and video journalism. These media fuel a variety of different news outlets, including reporting channels like CNN and MSNBC and opinion publications like National Review.

All news media agree on one convention, however: News stories only tempt public curiosity when they are breaking and relevant to viewers’ and readers’ daily lives.

In an age of immediacy, media-centered Americans see many of the greatest challenges we face as a nation drop out of conversation and into oblivion once the next interesting event arises. We place more emphasis on what is new than what is truly important to national security, personal liberty, religious freedom — the list goes on. Consequentially, national debates about important issues are often unsuitably short-lived.

As media blitz surrounds the presidential primaries, Americans should ask the question, What happened to the conversation about Syrian refugees?

Whether or not we allow Syrian refugees greater access to asylum within our borders should remain at the forefront of the foreign policy and national security debates.

A hot topic at many Thanksgiving tables in November 2015, the Syrian refugee crisis involved and still involves the fate of Jake Shumard is a sophomore studying agricultural science and environmental systems. He is a regular contributor toThe Arch Conservative.

6 / The Arch Conservative

millions of innocent victims of a seemingly never-ending Civil war.

Syria, like many countries in the Middle East, has been struggling to evolve into a stable, legitimate government after the Arab Spring in 2011.

The nation had long been controlled by the Assad family. When revolutionaries from the northern part of the country destablized the government, it left three

“The need for instant gratification is not new, but our expectation of ‘instant’ has become faster, and as a result, our patience is thinner.“

—Dr. Narayan Janakiraman

major factions to fight over the region: the Assad regime, moderate but largely unknown rebel groups, and ISIS. The latter group became a major player on the world stage when it captured the city of Raqqa in June of 2014. Its violent takeover of the city incited a mass migration of millions of civilian men, women, and children who fled the chemical weapons of Assad as well as the medieval barbarism of ISIS. In 2015, many top political officials publically endorsed the idea that United States should host a number of these refugees.

Some even endorsed plans which would recieve upwards of 100,000 Syrian refugees into our national borders.

Hillary Clinton added her opinion to the cacaphony of political voices: “We’re facing the worst refugee crisis since the end of World War II, and I think the United States has to do more. I would like to see us move from what is a good start with 10,000 to 65,000 and begin immediately to put into place the mechanisms for vetting the

people that we would take in.”

The former Secretary of State later gave her rationale for accepting Syrian refugees: In traditional progressive fashion, she linked her support for an open-door policy to the United States to our obligation to serve as a role model for the rest of the world.

Given the severity of the crisis and the Democratic Party’s almost unanimous support for permanent asylum just a few months ago, it is disappointing that today the conversation about Syrian refugees has quieted to a whisper.

One would think that Democrats would at least use Syrian Refugees to gain leverage against their Republican counterparts. phrases like “model for the world” and “the right thing to do” are effective with voters.

Yet to date there has been a surprising and noticeable absence of this once hotlydisputed topic in 2016 primary debates.

The easiest explanation for this silence is the inability of America and its media to focus on issues that matter. Our attention spans are short and move promptly from one headline to the next.

For example, searching the topic “Syrian crisis” on CNN.com in late February revealed only single a mention of the Syrian civil war in their 11 top stories.

Unfortunately, the Syrian refugee crisis seems to have lost its public appeal, though danger to refugees remains real. It seems that America is more interested in the antics of a reality TV star like Trump than focusing on finding a solution to the plight of millions of people.

In a world which values novelty over gravity, significant national debates have become lost in the public’s case of mediainduced attention deficit disorder.

Matters of the utmost significance, like the Syrian crisis, should be the topic of not just Thanksgiving dinners, but lasting national debate.

After all, it is only through the strength of joint conversation on important issues that we will reach a consensus on our most formidable challenges. B

SPRING 2016

COLUMNS

Considering HB 677 and HB 2 The state House debates whether gambling should fund public education in Georgia.

IMAGE COURTESY JEFF KUBINA

A

s midterms approach, many UGA six “destination” casino resort licenses to be residents?

Secondly, there is the question of students will be cramming for ex- issued in five specified zones throughout ams to keep their GPAs within the the state: Atlanta, Columbus, Macon, Sa- how accurate the revenue estimates are guidelines for Georgia’s HOPE scholarship vannah, and South Georgia. According to and where the money would actually go.

Would the majority of program. Enacted in the money go to out-of1993 by Governor Zell state companies instead Miller, HOPE is funded of helping Georgians? by the Georgia Lottery Since there are curand is currently available rently no gambling comto high school students panies based or operatwith a 3.0 or higher aving in Georgia, there is erage GPA upon gradugrowing concern among ation as long as they Georgia legislators over maintain this minimum whether the bills would average throughout their actually garner revenue college years and atfor the state or simply tend an in-state public send citizen money to university. other states that have According to the deep gambling roots.

Georgia Budget Primer, Groups like the Georthe Georgia Lottery gia Horse Racing Combrought in almost $948 mission have formed in million in 2015. Howsupport of the bill, emever, the HOPE Scholarphasizing the economic ship has been expensive benefits that such an atto maintain as more and Is legalized gambling the answer to funding the growing HOPE scholarship? traction would bring to more students decide to stay in-state for access to a lower-cost edu- the bill, casino gambling would be allowed the state.

While there are still questions surroundcation. A 127-hour cap was added in 2004 for the sake of preserving the “HOPE in an effort to ease the high costs of the scholarship program and other educational ing the two bills on the specifics of revenue purposes in a manner consistent with the whereabouts and estimates, I and others program.

In an effort to help support the grow- health, safety, and welfare of the people.” In argue that Georgians will be missing a huge ing financial strain that HOPE is putting a recent Atlanta Journal–Constitution poll, revenue opportunity if our General Ason the state’s budget, two proposals were 62% of registered Georgia voters favored sembly chooses not to pass the bills. While introduced to the Georgia General Assem- the idea of legalizing casinos in our state Governor Deal has in the past voiced opposition to the bills, a two-thirds majority bly at the beginning of the year: a bill to for the sake of educational funding.

Passage of the horse racing bill, H.B.2, could override a gubernatorial veto. legalize casinos and a bill to legalize horse The argument that introducing casinos racing in Georgia. Advocates of the bills would allow “pari-mutuel wagering” — estimate that the two bills together could that is, betting on horse racing — in the and horse racing to Georgians puts citizens at risk to gambling addictions is primarily bring in hundreds of millions of dollars state of Georgia.

Proponents of the bill estimate that HB weak due to the already significant presof tax revenue to fund the growing HOPE 2 could bring as many as 5000 jobs to the ence of the Georgia Lottery. Also, accordscholarship program.

The casino bill, HB 677, calls for up to state and approximately $15 million a year ing to the National Council on Problem solely for the HOPE scholarship. However, Gambling, only two to three percent of much dissent has arisen from the introduc- Americans meet the criteria to be considBaylee Culverhouse is tion of the two bills into the Georgia Gen- ered gambling addicts. a sophomore studying While gambling is not the ideal way to eral Assembly. political science and First, there is the moral debate over fund our education system, the passage English. She is Aswhether or not Georgian citizens should of these two bills is necessary to continue sociate Editor of The Arch Conservative. exposed to the supposed slippery-slope funding the current HOPE scholarship tendencies of gambling. Does the bill program. b encourage gambling addiction for state SPRING 2016

The Arch Conservative / 7

COLUMNS

Rejecting Donald Trump The presidential candidate peddles a caricature of conservatism.

S

ince the birth of his campaign in June 2015, Donald Trump has fought a significant obstacle to his presidential candidacy: He has had to convince Republican voters that he is a conservative.

At the Republican presidential debate in New Hampshire on February 6th, moderators gave Trump a chance to explain what conservatism means to him.

The candidate explained: “Well, I think I am [a conservative], and to me, I view the word conservative as a derivative of the word ‘conserve.’ We want to conserve our money. We want to conserve our wealth.

We want to conserve. We want to be smart.

We want to be smart where we go, where we spend, how we spend. We want to conserve our country. We want to save our country. And we have people that have no idea how to do that and they are not doing it, and it’s a very important word and it’s something I believe in very, very strongly.”

Go ahead — read Trump’s statement over another time. And again, if you dare.

You will find that there is not a shred of ideological coherence or sincerely-held belief in his string of buzzwords.

Initially, saving money is the concept the Republican presidential candidate uses to explain conservatism as a worldview. Then, he pivots and talks about being “smart” about where we spend money (whose money is left unclear) and how stupid the current people spending it are.

Audience members conclude that conservatism must be all about dollar signs.

The rub, though, is that nothing Trump says here is explicitly wrong, per se. If asked to critique Washington, D.C. in the past 20 years, I would likely say something similar about how we as a nation have handled our finances.

The problem arises from what the

Connor Kitchings is a junior studying political science and economics. He is Managing Editor of The Arch Conservative.

8 / The Arch Conservative

moderators requested of Trump: he was asked to explain conservatism, the ideological bedrock that is supposed to shape any Republican candidate’s approach to governing the nation.

Instead of giving the tenets of his beliefs, or even an affirmation of American liberty and tradition, Trump responded with a narrowly-focused rant about fiscal decision-making.

The opaque and jumbled statement Trump gave in New Hampshire reveals the heart of his problem as a presidential candidate: By portraying himself as a conservative, Trump is attempting to speak a second language. Conservatism does not come naturally to him, while authoritarianism and progressivism do.

In the past year, Trump has proposed solutions for many of our nation’s major issues, including healthcare, presidential overreach, and gun control. There’s just one trouble: Nearly all of these proposals invoke government aid to resolve the problem in question, a method which conservatives traditionally reject.

Concerning healthcare, Trump has repeatedly promised to “repeal every word” of the Affordable Care Act. Nevertheless, when it comes to finding a replacement program, his plan starts to sound eerily familiar to the system he denigrates as Obamacare.

On CBS’ 60 Minutes, Trump explained, “I am going to take care of everybody…Everybody is going to be taken care of a lot better than they’re taken care of now…the government is going to pay for it.”

Furthermore, Trump has expressed disapproval of some of President Obama’s executive actions, criticizing those which concern climate change and immigration as presidential overreach.

Yet he admits that he would use the tradition of executive orders similarly. He argues, of course, that his executive orders would be only for “the right things.” It is obvious though that for Donald Trump, executive power is — as the adage runs — “for me, but not for thee.”

On the issue of gun control, Trump’s book The America We Deserve is

noteworthy. Released in 2000 while he was considering his first bid for the White House, the book revealed that Trump supported policies for restricting firearms, including an assault weapons ban and longer waiting periods for people who are trying to buy guns.

By contrast, since the beginning of his current campaign, Trump has contended that he is a very strong supporter of Second Amendment rights. He gives little to no explanation for his flip-flop on the issue.

Moreover, on the small number of issues where he puts forward conservative preferences, Trump sounds like he is trying to emulate talk radio, although not the positive parts of it.

He was a leading voice in the pre-2016 “birther movement,” going so far as to claim credit when President Obama finally released his birth certificate in 2011. Yet in an illogical disconnect, Trump has still refused to definitively recognize that our current, elected president was born in the United States.

On immigration, the presidential candidate throws the reddest of red meat to his fawning fans: Not only does he claim that his administration will build a physical wall to stop the flow of illegal immigration, but he will also make Mexico pay for it.

Announcing this plan in July 2015, Trump went so far as to say, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best…They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some, I assume, are good people.”

Here, the degree to which Trump generalizes a group of over eleven million people is — to say the least — unbecoming for a man hoping to be elected leader of the free world in November.

Whether he is simply trying to appeal to the angriest portion of the Republican electorate, or whether he truly believes everything he says, Donald Trump confirms every caricature of conservatism which liberals have put forward for decades.

His nominal and confusing ideology will be the “conservatism” of the Republican Party unless another candidate is able beat him to the nomination by July. B SPRING 2016

COLUMNS

Evaluating the New SAT Cosmetic changes cannot fix an underlying problem.

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igh school students love to hate the SAT. For the past 90 years, the college admissions test has fueled the hopes, dreams, and tears of ambitious students. Soon, however, the SAT we all know and love will no longer exist: Beginning March 5, 2016, College Board will officially unveil a test “more focused on the skills and knowledge at the heart of education.”

The current SAT, soon to be outdated, has been subject to decades of criticism from students and parents alike. Acknowledging these complaints, the new SAT has been redesigned with the real world in mind. No longer will high school students scramble to learn archaic vocabulary terms — like antediluvian or misanthrope — from tiny flashcards. No longer will they relearn skills from precalculus and geometry in their free time.

Instead, the new SAT replaces the current 2400-point scale with the more traditional 1600 by combining the reading and writing sections. The test also makes the essay portion a separate and optional component, though individual colleges may turn it into a requirement.

Overall, the test has been shortened from 225 to 180 minutes. The expanded reading portion has changed from three 25-minute sections to one 65-minute section.

The new reading section contains 154 multiple-choice questions, and College Board has reduced the number of answer choices for each question from five to four.

Further, the redesigned test eliminates its predecessor’s fractional point deduction for wrong answers.

Meanwhile, the new essay option asks students to evaluate an argument in the provided passage. This writing section extends the test by 50 minutes.

Cecilia Walker is a freshman studying political science. She is a regular contributor to The Arch Conservative.

SPRING 2016

The math portion of the test remains recognizable but has been redesigned to align with national Common Core standards: Two sections, one allowing the use of a calculator and one prohibiting it, assess students’ skills in problem solving and basic arithmetic.

College Board claims that its revisions to the SAT remove the structural tricks and gimmicks which plagued the previous version. Yet test-takers past and present remain skeptical that these cosmetic improvements can resolve deeply-rooted issues in standardized testing.

Standardized test scores remain key to college admissions processes. There are an increasing number of “test-optional” policies at American universities, including Decatur’s Agnes Scott College.

Neverthless, the country’s largest and most competitive schools still rely on standardized tests to winnow their application pools. SAT and ACT scores are the criteria which distinguish thousands of students, most of whom apply with high GPAs and long lists of extracurriculars. Although these schools claim that GPA is weighted more heavily in the assessment process, the likelihood that a well-rounded student with mediocre test scores is able to enter one of the top U.S. fifty colleges is very slim.

Furthermore, in 2016 an increasingly high percentage of high school students heads to college nationwide. The more competitive the admissions race becomes, the more difficult it is to wade through an expanded applicant pool without relying on the metric of standardized test scores.

It seems, however, that not every high school student has an equitable chance to earn high SAT scores.

Money, as always, is the primary obstacle. It is perhaps unsurprising that standardized test scores have a positive correlation with family income. The National Center for Fair & Open Testing has calculated that, on average, there is almost a 400-point difference between the lowest and highest income bracket of test-takers.

Test-preparatory services like Kaplan and The Princeton Review accrue $4.5 billion annually by teaching clients specialized

strategies for decoding future tests.

Attempting to close this gap, College Board has teamed up with Khan Academy to offer free online tutorials for the updated SAT content.

The free Khan academy tutorials can certainly help economically-disadvantaged students. Those with sufficient time and resources, however, will still pay the premium for prep courses and private tutoring. For every parent who is able to invest thousands of dollars in test preparation for her high schooler, there are several students who cannot afford external support and fall behind in the college admissions process.

College Board claims that they have updated the SAT to correlate with new realities for students in 2016. Yet teenagers who genuinely live in the “real world” are not those who have access to the luxury of external test preparation. They are students who work part-time jobs before and after school to help their family pay bills. They are the high schoolers who are expected to spend their “extracurricular” time caring for younger siblings while parents work long hours.

These students’ “real world” stretches beyond the bubbles on a scantron form, beyond SAT reading, writing and math.

Their realities require compassion, creativity, strength, and grit.

Arguably, students who stand to gain the most from a college education are those who take on the family- or hardship-related obligations which look bare on resumes.

No SAT score can convey to an admissions officer the passion or dedication of these students. No 1600-point figure can accurately represent the challenges and sacrifices that disadvantaged applicants have overcome.

In short, it is time that we finally stop evaluating an applicant’s intelligence or potential for success at a particular university based on three hours of choosing A, B, C, or D on a standardized test. Despite College Board’s best efforts to update their product, is time for us to reject the idea that a “new” SAT can solve old problems in the college admissions process. b The Arch Conservative / 9

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Honoring Scalia The Arch Conservative commemorates a venerable legacy.

T

he sun has set on Reagan conservatism within the American judiciary. On February 13, 2016, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia passed away from natural causes at a ranch in Texas. The owner of the ranch said when Scalia did not show up to breakfast, he went to his guest’s room.

There he found the justice “peacefully in bed.”

After graduating as valedictorian from Georgetown University and receiving a law degree at Harvard, President Reagan appointed Scalia to the Supreme Court bench in 1986. He was unanimously confirmed by the Senate, making him one of the most respected justices in our nation’s history.

A devout Catholic and father of nine children, Scalia fought for traditional American values for almost 30 years, setting a national record of service. He leaves behind his wife of 48 years and dozens of grandchildren, all of whom can be proud of Justice Scalia’s legacy.

Justice Scalia supported numerous conservative causes while on the bench, including the Second Amendment, private sector healthcare, and traditional marriage.

The case District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) demonstrates Scalia’s efforts to guard Second Amendment rights. In the opinion of the court, he writes that the Michael Duckett is Public Relations Director of the arch conservative.

10 / The Arch Conservative

Constitution and other legal precedents “guarantee the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation,” guaranteeing this right for for millions of Americans.

In Memoriam: 1936-2016.

Further, in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992), Scalia’s dissent is worth noting: He writes that the judiciary “should get out of this area, where we have no right to be, and where we do neither ourselves nor the country any good by remaining.”

As a Catholic, Scalia was staunchly prolife in his personal views. As a justice, he argued that the issue of abortion should be left up to voters, not a nine-person,

unelected body.

Most recently, Scalia fought a battle for traditional marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). Here, he also favored limiting federal involvement in social issues.

His scathing critique of the majority opinion declares, “Except as limited by a constitutional prohibition agreed to by the People, the States are free to adopt whatever laws they like, even those that offend the esteemed Justices’ ‘reasoned judgment.’ A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.”

These quotations are only a few examples of Scalia’s voluminous contributions to American public life. No one will ever accuse the justice of failing to state his opinions with deliberate force.

He will continue to be revered not only by Americans of the 80s, 90s, and the new millenium — those for whom he was a conservative champion — but by later generations who encounter his striking words.

Meanwhile, Scalia’s sudden passing adds to already-high tensions between Democrats and Republicans. At 79 years old, his death was relatively unexpected and brings a new element to the 2016 presidential election. President Obama’s successor will have to appoint up to four Supreme Court justices, an opportunity for either party to gain firm control of the court.

On February 13th, President Obama made a statement offering his sympathy SPRING 2016

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

by MICHAEL DUCKETT

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to the nation and condolences to Scalia’s family.

He then proceeded to address Republicans in the Senate: “I plan to fulfill my constitutional responsibilities to nominate a successor,” he claimed.

Republican officials and candidates have a different plan, however. A Supreme Court nominee is approved by Senate vote: the nominee must pass with a supermajority — 60 votes. As it stands now, Democrats and Independents only make up 46 of 100 total senators. Lack of even a simple majority could prove an insurmountable obstacle to the individual nominated by the current White House.

To make matters worse for President Obama, Republicans could refuse to even vote or hold hearings on his nominee.

Whatever their strategy, delaying the nomination process until after November 2016 gives conservatives hope that a Republican president may be in office before the vacated bench seat is filled. Presidential candidate Donald Trump has urged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to “delay, delay, delay.”

In short, as long as Republicans are in charge of the Senate, the odds are not in President Obama’s favor.

February 13th, the date of Scalia’s passing, was also the final Republican presidential debate scheduled before the South Carolina primary. Of course, moderators took advantage of the breaking news story to question candidates about the future of the Supreme Court.

Donald Trump opened the debate, observing that Scalia’s death “is a tremendous blow to conservatism, it’s a tremendous

“A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.“ —Justice Antonin Scalia

SPRING 2016

blow...to our country.”

Fellow Republican candidates echoed Trump’s sentiments. Though most agreed that the president had the authority to make the appointment, each encouraged the Senate to delay confirming any appointments until the presidential election is over.

Some candidates also seized an opportunity to criticize the Obama administration for previous judicial actions and appointments.

Governor John Kasich of Ohio wished that the president “for once, would put the country first,” and either not nominate someone or select a candidate who would receive unanimous approval — like Scalia when he was first appointed.

In the months ahead, President Obama’s critics will do everything in their power to derail his plans for an increasingly liberal court.

When asked about the Constitutional solution to the current debate, neurosurgeon Ben Carson replied that “the Constitution actually doesn’t address that situation.”

Carson’s response was surprising since he recently published a book on Constitutional liberties. Nevertheless, he maintains that voters should indirectly decide the Supreme Court nominee through their votes in the upcoming election.

The two lawyers among the candidates gave more precise responses. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida staunchly advocated for a justice “who understands that the Constitution is not a living and breathing document. It should be interpreted as originally meant,” he added.

His statement, which proposes a clear contrast to the fluid approach taken by many liberal judges, earned a huge ovation from the debate audience. Rubio also pointed out that no justice has been appointed by a “lame-duck” president in over 80 years.

In similiar fashion, Senator Ted Cruz mentioned the same statistic, legitimizing Rubio’s claim. He summarized the general feedback from candidates, calling Scalia “a legal giant” who “changed the arc of American legal history.”

Cruz, considered one of the more farright candidates, can use Scalia’s open spot on the court to appeal to his conservative base. The senator previously argued before the Supreme Court as a lawyer and has the greatest judicial experience of any

“He was eminently quotable, his pungent opinions so clearly stated that his words never slipped from the reader’s grasp.”

—Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

candidate commenting on the situation.

Finally, wrapping up what seems to be a never-ending list of candidates, former Governor Jeb Bush emphatically pleaded for the next president “to appoint someone with a proven conservative record, similar to Justice Scalia, that is a lover of liberty, that believes in limited government...that didn’t try and legislate from the bench, that was respectful of the Constitution.”

Bush’s words expressed the wishes of his competitors as well: Scalia embodied the heart of conservative America. Every Republican candidate dreams of rallying the justice’s supporters and acquiring a core group of conservative voters.

Justice Antonin Scalia will be remembered fondly by his family and country-including those on both sides of the political aisle. On February 13th, America lost one of the leading legal scholars of the century. His departure leaves a legacy which will endure for centuries within American courtrooms.

If anyone questions Justice Scalia’s commitment to the Constitution, the United States, or American liberty, remember what the leading liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said about her friend.

She observed in memoriam, “He was a jurist of captivating brilliance and wit, with a rare talent to make even the most sober judge laugh. The press referred to his ‘energetic fervor,’ ‘astringent intellect,’ ‘peppery prose,’ ‘acumen,’ and ‘affability,’ all apt descriptions. He was eminently quotable, his pungent opinions so clearly stated that his words never slipped from the reader’s grasp.”

We will long be grateful for Justice Scalia’s service to our nation. b

The Arch Conservative / 11

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Youth Vote 2016 Presidential candidates court Generation Y.

by SYDNEY NORTH

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he youth vote is a coveted prize in politics. The reasoning is simple: Win the youth vote, win the election. In the contemporary political arena, it has proved difficult to gain electoral victory without significant time spent wooing the youngest mass of American voters.

In the post-Reagan era, young voters have preferred Democratic candidates.

Despite President George H.W. Bush’s consistently high approval ratings, this unpredictable coalition of voters gave the conservative president the boot in the 1992 election.

Earning the Generation-Y vote — that is, winning voters who came of age within the Bush and Obama era — has largely been a losing battle for the right. For two decades, conservative elites have depended on votes from a rapidly aging base — a practice that serves the party ill in a changing outside world.

In turn, young voters have vehemently rejected conservative ideas. In the 1980s, Republicans were winning young voters in presidential elections with a 20 percent lead over opponents. In the 2012 election between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, however, the Democratic incumbent won the millennial vote by a stunning 37 percent.

Nevertheless, in 2016, many younger millennials seek to disprove the narrative that progressivism dominates their voting peers.

According to Pew Research Center, the newest voting bloc — young adults who will cast their first presidential vote this year — lean significantly farther to the right than do their older millennial compatriots.

Although a majority of millennials still identify as liberal, the gap between young conservatives and young liberals is undoubtedly narrowing: The young, conservative base has grown by over 12 percent since the 2008 election.

The midterm elections of 2010 and 2014 foreshadowed this trend: With the help of the youth vote, Republicans swept up a vast majority of congressional seats. In the most recent midterms, the conservative youth vote grew to nearly 45 percent of the base nationwide.

The most striking evidence of a narrowing gap between parties comes when a race pits two popular candidates against each other: Consider, for example, the contest between Republican Sen. Marco Rubio and Democrat Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State.

Both candidates are political opposites.

Despite her gender, however, there is little

unique about Hillary’s candidacy. As part of the Clinton Dynasty, Hillary ticks the boxes of a traditional contender, both in age and personal wealth.

In 2008, Hillary failed to win the Democratic nomination largely because she lost the youth vote to then-candidate Barack Obama. She is attempting to regain millenial support in 2016. In particular, social media for Hillary’s campaign has made several obvious attempts to court youth.

In August 2015, Hillary appealed to college-age supporters through Twitter: “How does your student loan debt make you feel?

Tell us in 3 emojis or less.” Her target audience did not favor the attempt: One user, CervanzaJen, tweeted back, “I’m a college grad 2 times. I’ll use words.”

Meanwhile, Democratic opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders is also proving an unforeseen obstacle to the youth vote. An Iowa entrance poll reported that Sanders

Sydney North is Associate Editor of The

Arch Conservative.

12 / The Arch Conservative

Clinton has thus far failed to regain the youth vote.

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PHOTOS COURTESY GAGE SKIDMORE

Rubio is a striking contrast to Clinton, but millenial voters are also recognizing other charismatic figures within the conservative movement. garnered support from 84 percent of college-age voters — a strong contrast to Hillary’s mere 14 percent.

Across the aisle from Clinton, Marco Rubio is gaining new ground as a presidential candidate. The Hispanic senator, born to Cuban immigrants, grew up in relative poverty and remains even now a member of the economic middle class.

Rubio’s campaign slogan, “New American Century”, is a direct shot at Clinton: In his words, Clinton spews “big-government policies that have never worked, work less now than ever before, and do nothing to position us for 21st century success.”

Traditionally, Republicans have been criticized for pandering disproportionately to older generations of voters. Yet, Rubio seems to be running a campaign in stark contrast to this stereotype, hammering in the idea that “this election is a generational choice about what kind of country we will be in the 21st century.”

Both Clinton and Rubio tie the millennial vote in polls, each receiving 45 percent of the vote. Whether we will see these two contenders face off in the general election remains in doubt. With an election cycle as unusual as 2016 has turned out to be, it is too soon to count anyone in or out.

Rubio is a striking contrast to Clinton, but millennial voters are also recognizing other charismatic figures within the conservative movement.

Former candidate Rand Paul falls on a very different end of the Republican Party than Rubio; his libertarian stances on criminal justice reform, constitutionalism, drug laws, and anti-interventionism have attracted minorities and young people, two groups who in recent years have felt disenfranchised from the Republican Party.

Although Paul recently left the SPRING 2016

Presidential race after a surprisingly disappointing showing in Iowa, he garnered large youth support throughout his bid for presidency.

Even Ted Cruz, a hardline, far right, traditionalist conservative, has seen youth coming out in significant numbers to support his campaign. Attracting new, young voters to the Republican party is not Cruz’s strong point. Nevertheless, he excites many millennials who find themselves already on the right.

In Iowa, Cruz surprised onlookers by claiming a victorious 26 percent of the young conservative electorate’s vote — a greater figure than any other Republican on the ballot.

Though many factors contribute to the ideological development of young conservatives, Pew Research Center credits the

Rubio at CPAC 2015. shift in youth electorate to the overall ineffectiveness of the Obama presidency.

Voters who came of age under former President George W. Bush were inclined to be more liberal, a reaction against what they perceived as a failed presidency.

Now, millennials who have grown up under President Obama share similar sentiments: They believe that they have been let down by the progressive policies of the past eight years.

If the current presidency is one cause for ideological changes in today’s youth electorate, the shift in preference of youth voters may have less to do with the actual platforms of either party. Instead, it may represent the backlash of growing discontent with the stagnant economy and lack of

unity amongst the nation as a whole.

In short, young adults may be searching for anything but what they have now. This narrative aligns with the anti-establishment feeling of the electorate as a whole.

Furthermore, as more and more youth embrace the Republican Party, its platform is adjusting to embrace the culture of 2016 — the culture of youth.

In January, three GOP senators — Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Illinois), and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) — became the first nationally elected conservative politicians to sponsor LGBT anti-discrimination bills.

Additionally, the Republican Party in recent years has become more open to the idea of accepting anthropogenic climate change as a legitimate concern, with conservative organizations such as RepublicEN, Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, and others promoting free-market solutions to address global warming and green energy.

Environmental issues remain lowpriority within conservative circles when compared with terrorism, tax cuts, and religious liberty. Yet acknowledging the issues that generally appeal to the millennial electorate can be an important factor in continuing to draw significant numbers of youth over to the Republican party.

In all, the effectiveness of conservatives in winning the youth vote in the 2016 presidential election will largely depend on the comparative charisma of our opponent’s nominee. If conservatives want to continue gaining support for their principles in years to come, they would do well to adapt their traditional ideals to the quicksilver society of millennial America.

“The 2016 election really is a generational choice about what kind of country we want to be,” Andrew Mitchell, a UGA freshman, plays on Sen. Rubio’s words.

“The new brand of Republicans makes me feel good about the future.”

Erich Reimer is a millennial who formerly worked for both Obama presidential campaigns. In 2016, he has publicly switched his allegiance to the Republican Party. He says, “The Republican Party is not perfect, but it is the party that is right for our generation.”

According to recent trends, Reimer’s words ring true for many millennials: youth voters seek to find genuine “hope and change” in the 2016 election. b The Arch Conservative / 13

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The Other Primary The Arch Conservative examines left-wing candidates on the issues.

by NICK GEESLIN

EXPERIENCE CLINTON Hillary Clinton has accomplished a handful of “firsts” for women in politics.

She graduated from Yale Law School 1973.

In 1977, Jimmy Carter appointed Nick Geeslin is a junior studying international affairs.

14 / The Arch Conservative

Clinton the first female chair of the Legal Services Corporation, a non-profit organization created by Congress to ensure equitable access to judicial process.

Later, Clinton became the first female associate at Rose Law Firm. At the time,

Party in the USA. the Arkansas-based firm represented WalMart and Tyson Foods, among others.

Hillary served as the First Lady during Bill Clinton’s presidency from 1993 to 2001. She is said to have wielded the greatest influence on public policy by a First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt.

Furthermore, she served two terms as the first female senator of New York, winning her first election in 2000. She ran a presidential bid, an ultimately unsuccessful one, against Barack Obama in 2008.

Though Clinton lost the close primary race, she subsequently served as Secretary of State under President Obama from 2009 to 2013.

SANDERS Sen. Bernie Sanders began the Democratic primary race in April 2014, and has since emerged as a formidable opponent to Clinton.

Like Donald Trump on the right, Sanders pulls unusually strong support from atypical ideological groups. In fact, for about a decade or so in the beginning of his political career, Sanders was part of the Liberty Union Party, which explicitly supported a socialist agenda.

He declared himself an independent in 1979, likely when he realized people were not going to elect a labeled socialist into any public office.

Since then, Sanders has enjoyed much political success, serving as the mayor of Burlington, Vermont in the 80s, a representative in Congress in the early 2000s, and as Senator of Vermont since 2007.

POLICY Policy differences between the two candidates run a gamut of issues, including gun control, criminal justice, foreign policy, gender inequality, the regulation of Wall Street, and the national economy.

GUN CONTROL Clinton takes the traditional progressive stance when it comes to gun control. Her SPRING 2016

PHOTO COURTESY GAGE SKIDMORE

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ith all the buzz surrounding Republican presidential candidates, it is easy for right-leaning voters to forget the importance of knowing their opposition in the Democratic Party.

At best, such knowledge fosters productive dialogue across the political spectrum. At worst, conservative citizens know what may be in store for them should November’s election go to a candidate on the left instead of the right.

This primary season, significant differences lie between the two Democratic candidates, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Below, THE ARCH CONSERVATIVE compares the candidates on experience and policy positions.

PHOTO COURTESY MARC NOZELL

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platform attempts to mixe “legitimate” Second Amendment rights with “common-sense” regulations like stronger background checks.

She aslo supports measures to hold “irresponsible” gun dealers and manufacturers accountable — whatever that platitude means.

Hillary sees the issue of gun control as an opportunity to win votes away from Sanders, accusing him of being too lenient on firearm laws. In reality though, Sanders simply does not politicize the issue to Hillary’s level. In most cases, he supports just as stringent measures as Hillary, including banning semi-automatic assault weapons.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE Furthermore, Sanders believes that we should “demilitarize our police forces so they don’t look and act like invading armies.”

Both he and Hillary often refer to the “broken criminal justice system” and seek to decrease incarceration rates by abolishing mandatory minimums. Each also favor decriminalizing marijuana, increasing the use of body cameras for police, and increasing funding for drug rehabilitation.

FOREIGN POLICY The two candidates differ widely in their positions on public policy, however.

In 2002, Sanders voted against entering Iraq while in the House of Representatives.

His foreign policy proposals are typically structured around the principle that the American government should involve itself less militarily around the world and more diplomatically.

Hillary has the advantage of experience when it comes to foreign policy. Her performance as Secretary of State was indeed controversial. Nontheless, her plan for defeating ISIS involves more than just diplomacy: She supports increasing the number of air strikes and supporting groups who oppose ISIS. This is in contrast to Sanders, who has stated before that he thinks Saudi Arabia SPRING 2016

She has some explaining to do. should assume the burden of the fight.

CAMPAIGN THEME When forced to narrow her message, Hillary runs with one of progressivism’s favorite topics: gender inequality. Ambitious to make history as the first female president, Hillary uses her position as a powerful, well-educated woman to her utmost advantage. She has tirelessly advocated equal pay for women for years, helpng to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act during her stint in the Senate. Clinton also ties the minimum wage debate to women’s rights, claiming that raising the minimum wage will primarily help women, majority of its recipients.

Meanwhile, Sanders is famous for attacking big banking on Wall Street. An observer can easily see why: His rally crowds erupt at every mention of offshore bank accounts, corporations, or the one percent.

Recently, he has become more aggressive in his opposition to Clinton’s well-known connection with big business: He has repeatedly called her out as the democratic candidate most highly funded by Wall Street.

FEDERAL SPENDING Sanders additionally has a long list of ideas for federal spending, including publicly-funded elections, free public universities, and a federal investment of one trillion dollars in the expansion of Social Security and socialized healthcare, guaranteed to all citizens “as a right and not a privilege.”

In light of our current national debt, which is nearing 19 trillion, Sanders

proposes to raise these funds by cutting military spending and creating a “per trade” stock trading tax.

In the wake of her rival’s overtly socialist yet popular stance on public education, Hillary has felt pressure to address the issue of rising college costs for potential voters. She wants access to world-class education and free tuition “for those who truly need it.”

At the February 11th debate in Milwaukee, Clinton tried to put Sanders on the defensive by asking how we would fund free tuition nationwide.

Sanders did not answer the question question directly: Instead, he reverted back to listing his reasons why college tuition should be free in the first place, avoiding discussion of how colleges could practically cover these costs.

CONCLUSION The paragraphs above represent a few of the most drastic policy differences between Cliton and Sanders. Naturally, there are a number of issues on which they share similiar stances, including immigration, abortion, and environmental policy.

In short, the 2016 primary is perhaps one of the most polarized for Democrats in recent decades. Clinton is more moderate, and arguably more experienced, but has proven herself to be politically dishonest.

Bernie, on the other hand, has a political record characterized by genuineness but supports far left, extremist policies based on his socialist ideology.

The next few months promise to be an interesting race. As those of us on the conservative end of the political spectrum head to the polls, it is important to consider how any Republican candidate will fare in the general election against either Clinton or Sanders. b

The Arch Conservative / 15

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Corporate Academy Events at Mount St. Mary’s reveal an attitude facing the modern university.

by ELIZABETH RIDGEWAY

I

n past months, right-leaning opinion media — including The Arch Conservative — have lamented the state of free discourse in the modern academy.

Illiberal speech policies are not the only danger which it faces, however. Recent events at Mount St. Mary’s University show that a mercantile approach to higher education also fails to understand the telos of the American university.

Mount St. Mary’s, located in Emmitsburg, Maryland, calls itself “Catholic in a contemporary way, aware of the world in which we live and at the same time proud... of our Catholic heritage.” In the 2015-2016 academic year, its undergraduate enrollment is just over 1500 students total.

The university flashed onto national news in mid-January, when its campus newspaper, the Mountain Echo, exposed an administrative plan to improve undergraduate retention rates.

Students Rebecca Schisler and Ryan Golden open their article: “Even before this year’s freshman class arrived on campus in August, President Simon Newman was developing a plan to dismiss 20-25 of them before the end of September”.

Newman, who holds degrees from the University of Cambridge and built a 30year career in private equity and strategy consulting, took office at Mount St. Mary’s in 2015.

Schisler and Golden’s article continues to assert that the university administration intended to use the results of a student survey to dismiss low-performing freshmen before the federal government calculated university retention rates in late September 2015.

The Echo reports that the survey’s Elizabeth Ridgeway is Editor-in-Chief of The

Arch Conservative.

16 / The Arch Conservative

introduction told first-years that they were being assessed on “personal motivation and key factors that determine motivation, success, and happiness.” It further instructed: “We would like you to answer [these questions] as honestly as possible. There are no wrong answers.”

Provost David Rehm expressed concern about the ethics of the survey when Newman failed to specify beforehand how university administration would act on any resulting data.

The president responded to Rehm in an email obtained by the Echo: “My short term goal is to have 20-25 people leave by the 25th [of September 2015]. This one thing will boost our retention 4-5%.”

Rehm forwarded Newman’s email to a number of faculty and administrators, many of whom strongly opposed his plan.

When the president asked the university’s freshman program, the Veritas Symposium, to identify students who seemed likely to drop out within the year, professors stalled until Newman’s October deadline had passed.

Eventually, no Mount St. Mary’s students were dismissed in accordance with the intentions the president had expressed.

On February 8th — several months after the retention plan became public, and a month after the Echo story ran — Newman fired Edward Egan, the paper’s untenured faculty adviser and Mount St. Mary alumnus.

Inside Higher Ed reports that university trustees have accused Egan of helping Schisler and Golden to break the retention plan story using leaked emails.

Further, Egan allowed students to print a comment of Newman’s which has attracted national attention. Addressing Dr. Greg Murry of the Veritas Symposium when requesting freshmen names, Newman reportedly said, “This is hard for you because

you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies...put a Glock to their heads.”

Newman also fired tenured philosophy professor Thane Naberhaus at the same time as Egan, censuring him for failing to uphold his “duty of loyalty” to the university. The president additionally relieved Rehm of his duties as provost, though he remained a faculty member.

Newman dismissed both Egan and Naberhaus without prior notice or administrative review.

University faculty across the United States reacted by drawing up a formal petition against his decision. The petition’s introduction states that “the manner and circumstance of [Egan and Naberhaus’] dismissal raise serious questions about the respect given to moral conscience and intellectual freedom at Mount St. Mary’s.”

Signers also express strong concern that Newman disregarded standard conventions of faculty tenure and “academic due process as required under AAUP [American Association of University Professors] guidelines.”

The petition is undated, but presumably originated before Newman reinstated both professors to their regular duties on February 12th.

The names of several University of Georgia professors appear on the petition, including Professor Michael Usher of mathematics and Professor Susan Thomas of musicology and the Institute for Women’s Studies. At the time of printing, these professors have not verified their electronic signatures on the petition or responded to requests for further comment.

In the aftermath of the Echo story and faculty firings, several interpretations of the incidents have surfaced.

On the one hand, Newman’s flippant “bunny” comment makes his plan to SPRING 2016

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PHOTOS COURTESY GREENHONDA

Bradley Hall at Mount St. Mary’s University, Maryland. improve retention rates seem especially heartless, a scheme to boost the college’s prestige at the expense of educating individual minds.

On the other, an article by Christopher Gunty in the National Catholic Reporter speculates that Newman acted to dismiss students before “they paid a lot of tuition or incurred significant student debt.”

Further, the Washington Post reports that although Mount St. Mary’s faculty voted 87 to 3 on February 12th to request Newman’s immediate resignation, a survey of student opinion issued by the Student Government Association a few days after found over 75 percent in favor of Newman’s administration.

Newman issued a statement published in the Echo on February 17th, restating his administration’s approach to Mount St. Mary’s future as a Catholic university.

The events at the Maryland college primarily demonstrate what can result from a mercantile approach to higher education.

In the past few months, Newman’s actions have been those of a keen businessman — that is, he took measures which reflect his prior career in private equity.

By attempting to cull the ranks of the freshmen class, he sought to improve the Mount St. Mary’s “performance” with minimal waste of student or insitutional resources.

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By firing faculty who opposed his initiatives, the president tried to keep his university efficiently unified under his leadership: When team members proved to be obstacles to achieving company goals, they were simply removed from the collaboration.

In other words, as Rod Dreher of The American Conservative tersely observes, Mount St. Mary’s trustees “hired Gordon Gekko to run a small Catholic liberal arts college”.

In short, Newman has thus far managed his university like a corporation. His plan to improve retention rates was one step toward a larger goal: making Mount St. Mary’s profile more competitive in the market of American universities.

His approach raises questions about the proper role of competition in higher education.

Outside the academy, free enterprise promotes societal flourishing: Competition on the market makes the production of individual wealth more efficient, raising the overall standard of living for citizens.

The gain which the free market promotes is not without loss however: as Friedrich Hayek writes in The Road to Serfdom, “We all know the tragic plight of the highly trained man whose hard-learned skill has suddenly lost its value because of some invention which greatly benefits the rest of society.”

College students are not employees, however, and they do not peddle a skill for which their university receives compensation.

Instead, they are relatively untrained minds, still receptive to ideas which will enrich their understanding of the human condition and give good purpose to their future careers. At Mount St. Mary’s and other universities, they evaluate the truth of another observation from Hayek: that “the ultimate ends of reasonable beings are never economic.”

The academic inquiries college students pursue are valuable in themselves, not merely as stepping-stones to a vocation which boosts the professional reputation of their university.

Applying principles of the free market to collegiate governance is a fast track to favoring technical instruction over the liberal arts’ tradition of educating the whole person.

In short, events at Mount St. Mary’s demonstrate that the creeping utilitarianism of free market principles endangers the integrity of the modern academy.

It remains to be seen whether this trend is irreversible. Certainly, students, faculty, and administration must collaborate to preserve the American university as an institution of education, not mere transaction. b The Arch Conservative / 17

CULTURE

Review: The Conservative Heart Arthur Brooks gives a winsome conservative message.

O

ne obstacle that conservatives face is how to explain our principles without sounding cruel or corrupt.

Why do we want to cut taxes for millionaires? Why do we want to force struggling welfare recipients to get a job? Why are we critical of single mothers when most are doing the very best they can?

Fair or not, political conservatives must field questions like these all the time — particularly from those on the left whose only contributions to the debate are tired platitudes and ad hominem criticisms of new ideas.

The debate surrounding important issues like poverty has become mean-spirited and partisan to the degree that many Americans today perceive voting as a choice between the ineffective compassion of progressivism and the heartless pragmatism of conservatism.

Increasing polarization has created problems for both ends of the political spectrum, but conservatives in particular must grapple with voter apathy: Liberals’ emotional arguments seem to inspire better voter turnout better than conservatives’ logical ones.

Arthur Brooks, president of the rightleaning think tank the American Enterprise Institute, has discovered a way forward for activists looking to expand the conservative movement: simply show people your conservative heart instead of your conservative head.

In The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America (Broadside Books, 2015), Brooks argues that conservatism has the ideas that have been proven to govern effectively and truly help people. Now, its proponents just have to explain why.

At the beginning of his work, Brooks

Connor Kitchings is a junior studying political science and economics. He is Managing Editor of The Arch Conservative.

18 / The Arch Conservative

makes clear that what he is now outlining is not an unconventional vision of conservatism — he is simply providing a different way of explaining traditional principles.

Conservatism itself does not need to be tinkered with or given qualifying appendages. While George W. Bush was successfully able to brand himself as a “compassionate conservative” and win the presidency, this phrase has done undue damage to the conservative brand ever since.

As Brooks explains, “Setting aside a host of policy problems, even the phrase ‘compassionate conservatism’ is problematic. It validates those who falsely claim that conservatives are uncompassionate in the first place.”

Properly explaining the conservative movement is not about simply making conservative principles sound better. It is about “reclaim[ing] the mantles of fairness and compassion for the movement that truly lives up to them.”

Since the end of World War II, the globe has undergone an economic transformation even greater than that of the Industrial Revolution. The exportation of free enterprise principles, such as free trade, property rights, entrepreneurship, and the rule of law, by the United States led to “the greatest anti-poverty achievement in human history.”

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, more than one in four people lived under the starvation-level poverty line. Today, this statistic is about one in 20, a drop of 80 percent!

As Brooks writes, “It was the free enterprise system that not only attracted millions of the world’s poor to [American] shores and gave them lives of dignity, but also empowered billions more worldwide to pull themselves out of poverty.” Here, he gives a tangible example of success achieved by implementing free market ideas.

But what about here at home? What has the United States done for those in poverty since the end of World War II? From 1950 to 1966, the beginning of President

Johnson’s Great Society and America’s War on Poverty, the poverty rate in the United States fell by ten percent.

Since 1966, however, the poverty rate has been stagnant. After spending more than $15 trillion, the United States now sees about one in three of its citizens receiving some form of public aid. This figure is down from one in 30 in 1950.

For all of this government intrvetion, we have seen the poverty rate fall by just 0.2 percent.

Even though history seems to be on his side, Brooks is reluctant to declare victory for conservatism simply on the record of statistics. Economic standing is not everything when it comes to America’s pursuit of happiness.

He peppers the book with insights like, “People are assets, not liabilities” and, “Help is important, but hope is essential.”

In these valuable lessons, Brooks makes the moral case that truly helping people is not about helping them collect possessions or things. Instead, it is about helping them accrue the experiences and ideas that acknowledge human dignity.

The final chapter of The Conservative Heart is devoted to the idea that “conservatives are happy warriors with a moral mission — to fight for the people who need us most, whether they vote for us or not.”

Brooks calls his principles “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Conservatives,” lessons which serve as a roadmap for political activists who wish to see conservatism win not only elections, but also the hearts and minds of people who are currently skeptical of partisan ideas.

The Conservative Heart makes the case for conservatism the right way: That is, conservatism is not about conquering the other side. It is not about simply appealing to a narrow class of people while pushing away large groups who stand to gain from the conservative message. Instead, it is a movement with ideas that have been proven to facilitate human flourishing.

In this seminal book, Arthur Brooks has shown the way forward for conservatism. Now, we just need to listen. b

SPRING 2016

HUMOR

Fantasy Meets Reality Fans who live in the real world do not seem to know it.

F

PHOTO COURTESY OSSEOUS

antasy novels are enjoyed by scores of people the world over. The reason is simple: Readers are enthralled by the stories of characters who live outside of our reality. (Unless of course said characters come from the mind of George R. R. Martin, in which case they do live – but ultimately die tragically.)

Themes of good versus evil — magic — romance — adventure, they resonate with bookworms and fans seeking to add a bit of whimsy to their own mundane lives.

In many cases, fantasy novels borrow from real-world concepts and make subtle observations about modern human society. This should not be much of a revelation since the authors are human, after all — perhaps with the exception of L. Ron Hubbard.

Several well-known series play with connections between fantasy and reality.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth is not so different from medieval Europe. Population districts in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games are based on existing regions of the United States. J.K. Rowling creates the “Wizarding World of Harry Potter”, a separate, concealed domain within the borders and norms of the world with which we are familiar.

Fantasy is born of reality. Why, then, do we hold our real-life heroes to high moral standards but make excuses for our favorite fantasy characters?

When Robin Hood steals from the rich to give to the poor, we do not only understand why — we even cheer as he robs the Sheriff of Nottingham. What happened to the rule of law?

When the gallant knight defends his lady-love by slaying a dragon we cheer at the reunion between the damsel and her rescuer.

Rebel Lord is a senior studying political science. He is a regular contributor to The Arch Conservative.

SPRING 2016

Reading Alexandre Dumas, we root for the subversive D’Artagnan — not the French king (who rules by divine right, obviously).

Further, the advent of the World Wide Web has added a new element to this phe-

Harry Potter at Universal Studios. nomenon. To some degree, lovers of fantasy and its many subgenres now preside as judges over the actions of each character in a book.

The Internet is an interesting place and in some regards, an alternate reality in its own right. Chat rooms and forums which focus on literature provide the curious cultural observer with particular insight into the minds of fantasy fiction enthusiasts.

These discussion boards are the expanses where defenders and detractors of various series do battle with their keyboards.

Of course, debates are carried out with the utmost civility and mastery of the English language. (A world where people express themselves online with basic decency is fantasy indeed.)

Rejecting etiquette, the brave fanatics of the chat rooms immerse themselves in the mythoi of their beloved fiction. They turn into virtual orcs and werewolves who use fevered keyboard-pounding to satisfy their base desire for barbarism toward fellow men.

In these forums, anonymous users — as

well as brazen individuals with usernames like YoMamasAMudBlood or JediHedwig2375 — argue over fan theories and book-to-film casting choices.

In short, one observes a great deal of strident contention in today’s literary community — at least the younger half of it. All chat room users can find an interpretation of their favorite book which they despise. It is what these Web Warriors seem to agree on that is worth noting.

Recall the tale of Harry Potter and his friends — the supporting cast whom J.K. Rowling did not deem worthy to be “The Chosen One”. The stories’ antagonist, Lord Voldemort is a power-hungry dark magician who kills scores of good witches and wizards.

Meanwhile Harry, an orphan with a sweet lightning bolt scar, is raised by family members who do not love him. He grows up, goes to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, makes friends, learns some spells, and finds out that only he can stop Voldemortl.

In the Harry Potter saga, Rowling gives readers a stirring battle of good against evil.

Evil is winning for most of the series, but ultimately — spoiler alert — Harry and other courageous magic folk defeat Voldemort at great cost.

Concerning all seven books in the series, perhaps the one thing which chatroom users — indeed, all readers — agree on is the fitness of Voldemort’s demise. They do not lament the loss of the evil wizard. Instead, they mourn for beloved characters who sacrifice themselves to destroy him. There is little moral relativism about their response to Rowling’s imaginary — and yet somewhat realistic — world.

Many of the same fans who buy wands or swords and pretend to fight imagined evil — a hobby known as Live Action Role Play, or LARPing — chastise those who actually live the action in our neighborhoods, cities, and globe. We understand why Harry needs a wand in a wizarding world of imagination. Yet ultimately the workings of our acutal, imperfect world — the true connection between fantasy and reality — remains beyond our grasp. b The Arch Conservative / 19