The ASUC Senate’s deeply misguided vote to divest UC funds from companies affiliated with the Israeli military is, in one sense, utterly irrelevant. Despite its best efforts, the coterie of far-left activists that dominates student politics rarely influences university policy — Chancellor Birgeneau helpfully reminded us that the regents’ investment portfolio will not change. Or, to use the melodramatic language of the divestment bill, the University of California will continue acting as “a complicit third party” in Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. And this chapter of anti-Israel theatrics has been largely ignored by the media — at least compared to Students for Justice in Palestine’s failed 2010 bid for divestment.

For the record, I should say that I have been quite critical of the Israeli right’s suicidal push to expand settlement construction in the West Bank. I believe Israel’s future as a democratic Jewish state will be in jeopardy if it cannot reach a two-state solution in the near future.

But I was appalled by the degree of radicalism — and venom — on display at the senate’s marathon meeting last Wednesday, during which divestment advocates took control of the night. Frenzied speakers charged Israel with unspeakable atrocities as their supporters roared. Residents of Israel were smeared as European colonialists. The Holocaust was brushed aside. Some speakers defended terrorism against civilians as legitimate resistance, and the pro-divestment audience appeared to endorse the odious chant — “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — that implicitly negates the Jewish State’s right to exist. Perhaps this shouldn’t have surprised me, seeing as the Cal Students for Justice in Palestine website calls for “struggle against the apartheid regime that has consolidated itself” not only in the West Bank or Gaza, but in “1967 Israel.”

I was also surprised that pro-Israel students, who were clearly on the defensive, failed to affirmatively defend the Middle East’s only democracy on its merits — perhaps because the sense of hostility toward Israel was so palpable they considered it a lost cause. With some exceptions, arguments against the divestment initiative centered on campus climate. The only reason not to cut ties with Jewish State, an uninformed observer might think after attending the meeting, is that it would hurt the feelings of UC Berkeley’s Jewish students.

Like many political debates that take place in the ASUC Senate chambers, divestment doesn’t register in the rest of the country, where popular support for the Jewish State has risen substantially over the last decade and now matches its all-time high. Still, I found myself wondering whether what I saw at the senate meeting reflects any emerging fractures in Israel’s traditionally deep and durable coalition of American supporters.

There are some indications that it does. A report released earlier this year by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies found that support for Israel in the United States is weakest among young people, social progressives and the nonreligious. Chemi Shalev, a columnist for the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, notes that these are the very groups that are ascendant in the culture wars. Meanwhile, support is strongest among older, religious and more conservative Americans, whose influence in U.S. politics is on the decline. “Given the speed with which American attitudes are changing on other issues,” a realignment of U.S. opinion toward Israel “may be lurking just around the corner,” Shalev warns.

I would not be surprised if Millennials’ support for Israel proves to be more qualified and conditional than my parents’ and grandparents’ generations. After all, we don’t remember World War II or the Cold War and therefore don’t have as deep a sense of moral commitment to promote and defend American values abroad. One of our formative experiences was the disastrous Iraq war, which discredited neoconservatism as a foreign policy.

And then there are Middle Eastern politics. Decades ago, Israel was the underdog, perpetually under siege from powerful Arab armies seeking its annihilation. Today, thanks to Israeli ingenuity (and generous American aid), the Jewish State’s military dominates the Middle East. And as of late, hard-line Israeli leaders, empowered by Hamas terrorists, are seriously damaging Israel’s reputation — and endangering its future — with their uncompromising stance toward the Palestinians.

A generational shift in attitudes toward Israel would be welcome if it meant that America would do more to pressure Israel to make the painful territorial concessions that will be necessary to any peace agreement. This would be an act of friendship.

But Israel supporters of all political stripes must continue to do all they can to make sure that our generation isn’t won over by the destructive attitudes expressed in the senate chambers last week, where divestment activists chose militancy over moderation and demonization over dialogue.

Jason Willick is the assistant opinion page editor. Contact him at jwillick@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter: @jawillick.

Correction(s):
A previous version of this article misspelled the name of Ha’aretz columnist Chemi Shalev.

The post After divestment appeared first on The Daily Californian.

In her provocatively titled new book “The End of Sex,” noted religion and sexuality scholar Donna Freitas does something rather unusual — she attacks the notorious college “hookup culture” from the feminist left.

Commentators sometimes nostalgically lament the supposed collapse of courtship among young people. But as of late, feminists have generally been more sanguine about the culture of casual sex on campus. Hanna Rosin articulated the argument best when she wrote last year that “feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture,” because “an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.”

Broadsides against promiscuity, on the other hand, are typically associated with puritanical social conservatism. They frequently rely on the idea that too much sex is inherently sinful or that it damages our integrity as human beings. New York Times columnist David Brooks, for example, once proclaimed that “anyone who has several sexual partners in one year is committing spiritual suicide.”

But today’s elite college students couldn’t care less about religious, spiritual or moral arguments against casual sex. And it’s not just that we are less religious than older generations. Educated Millennials have a distinctively libertarian social outlook. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote, “there’s something about the process of becoming comparatively well-off and educated that seems to shrink the moral domain down to its bare minimum — I won’t hurt you, you don’t hurt me, and beyond that, to each her own.”

Freitas’ book could prove to be more influential than past treatises on hookup culture because she recognizes the socially libertarian ethos that pervades college campuses. Though Freitas has a background in theology, she eschews rhetoric about abstract moral concepts like sanctity or degradation, opting instead to make a detailed case that casual sex does real, tangible harm. She appeals to socially progressive priorities, like rape and gender inequities, rather than conservative concerns about debauchery and moral collapse. In other words, she argues that casual sex violates even Haidt’s minimalist definition of morality.

Her commentary on the complex relationship between hookup culture and sexual assault is especially lucid. She describes the experience of one young woman who “was so out of it that not only was she unable to consent, she was too drunk to move away when someone was ‘masturbating into her mouth.’ That this sexual assault went unreported by her is a given — a big part of what hookup culture teaches both women and men on campus is that ‘sex just happens,’ especially when you’re drunk.” She suggests that sexual assault is inextricably linked to the culture of casual sex and that the two must be addressed together.

Gender inequalities also feature prominently in Freitas’ indictment. She enumerates a number of themes for campus parties she observed during her research: “CEOs and their Secretary Hos,” “Superheroes and Supersluts,” “Bussinessmen and Office Sluts” — you get the idea. Women are expected to show up drunk and half-naked to these events, where many hookups take place. According to Freitas’ surveys, women believed participating in these parties was “the only way to get the male attention they craved — male attention that has become extremely fraught and hard to win in any other way within the context of hookup culture.”

Resistance to the hookup culture has emerged on some elite college campuses. Students at Harvard, Stanford and Princeton founded “Anscombe Societies,” socially conservative groups dedicated to “a proper understanding for the role of sex and sexuality,” as Princeton’s puts it. But these groups use an outdated moral lexicon that relies on stigma and taboos that have been largely dismantled in the decades since the sexual revolution. It’s no wonder that, even though Freitas’ surveys indicate that many students are uncomfortable with the hookup culture, the Anscombe societies have failed to attract a serious following.

Freitas’ book isn’t perfect. Her tone might at times seem retrograde to some college students, who do not object to a level of laxity toward sex even if they are uncomfortable with the hookup culture as it currently exists. And she fails to put forward any solutions that could plausibly have a noticeable impact on the problem she so vividly describes. The best she can come up with is having parents and professors educate students more about the emotional harm wrought by the hookup culture.

But maybe she doesn’t need to explicitly offer solutions. “The End of Sex,” with a bevy of data and anecdotes, builds a powerful practical case against excessive casual sex — one that will speak to Millennials’ libertarian social and ethical outlook. Maybe that’s enough.

Jason Willick is the assistant opinion page editor. Contact him at jwillick@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter: @jawillick.

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Progressives are bracing for a devastating defeat in the Supreme Court’s upcoming ruling on the affirmative action case Fisher v. University of Texas. If the justices restrict race-based affirmative action, they will “erase 50 years of progress,” one activist declared in The Nation. That’s an overstatement, but there is wide agreement that such a ruling would decrease the number of black and Hispanic students enrolled at many U.S. universities.

According to a new study conducted by Stanford’s Caroline Hoxby and Harvard’s Christopher Avery, however, the college admissions and recruitment regime currently in place is hardly a paragon of fairness. In fact, it is utterly failing America’s most promising low-income students.

The study’s disheartening findings are summarized simply in the first sentence of the abstract: “The vast majority of very high-achieving students who are low-income do not apply to any selective college or university.” Poor kids — especially in rural areas — often don’t know about financial aid opportunities or want to stay close to home or have never met anyone who went to a top college.

As a result, just 34 percent of high-achieving students (defined as those with test scores in the top 10 percent and an A-minus grade-point average or higher) in the lowest income quartile go to any of the country’s 238 most selective institutions, compared to 78 percent of high-achieving students in the top income quartile.

But where does affirmative action come in? All things being equal, studies show that admissions officers at selective institutions do not give a boost to low-income applicants. But it could be worse than that: There are some indications that the current admissions and affirmative action regime actually creates barriers that prevent low-income students from even applying, contributing to the grim situation Hoxby and Avery present in their study.

Most selective colleges that practice affirmative action currently seem content with achieving cosmetic racial diversity within largely upper-income student bodies — “a version of diversity,” The New York Times’ David Leonhardt wrote last year, “focused on elites from every race.” However, if top colleges were explicitly barred from using racial preferences, they might be forced to weigh socioeconomic status, geographic location and other factors more heavily in the admissions process. They would also be likely to recruit in low-income areas more aggressively.

Referring to the Fisher case, the dean of admissions at the University of Virginia told the Times that “if there are changes to how we define diversity, then I expect schools will really work hard at identifying low-income students.”

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two of the most selective colleges that do not use racial preferences — UCLA and UC Berkeley — also have higher enrollments of Pell Grant recipients (generally, students with family incomes below $40,000) than any other U.S. institutions. The UC system, which voters barred from using racial preferences in 1996, has developed an effective model for attracting low-income students that other colleges, including Amherst, have drawn from.

I have generally been skeptical — but agnostic — on the question of affirmative action. If, however, a disruption of elite universities’ present affirmative action system is needed in order to pressure them to better serve America’s brightest economically disadvantaged students, I would unequivocally support it. Diversity isn’t just about skin color, and racial justice is not the only type of justice worth striving for.

Social mobility in America is at one of its lowest levels in our country’s history. Canadians and most Europeans enjoy more social mobility than we do. Americans born to poor families have an unacceptably high probability of being poor as adults. The collapse of upward mobility is nothing less than an affront to the notion of equal opportunity that has been central to our national consciousness since de Tocqueville.

By showing why tens of thousands of bright, low-income high school seniors each year don’t go to good colleges, the Hoxby and Avery study helps illuminate the obstacles to mobility in America. And as Slate’s Matt Yglesias points out, the study is in one sense a cause for optimism, because it shows how much potential could theoretically be unleashed with relatively straightforward reforms.

Perhaps doing away with race-based affirmative action should be one of those reforms. Perhaps an aggressive ruling against affirmative action in the Fisher case is needed in order to pressure colleges to recruit and admit low-income students in greater numbers. Racial balance is not as important an imperative as the restoration of the promise of upward mobility in America.

Jason Willick is the assistant opinion page editor. Contact him at jwillick@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter: @jawillick.

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The Republican Party’s best possible argument against government intervention in the economy is that it has negative unintended consequences — in particular, that it harms the vulnerable.

Of course, this isn’t usually the case — government programs, from Pell Grants to food stamps, have helped expand opportunity and lift millions of Americans out of poverty. But historically, Republicans have done better when they emphasized the adverse effects government programs could have on the poor, not the undue burdens they place on the rich.

This was how economist Milton Friedman, the libertarian icon and public intellectual who helped move public opinion to the right during the Reagan years, framed conservative economic policy proposals. “The fact is that programs that are labeled as being for the poor, for the needy, almost always have effects exactly the opposite of those their well-intentioned sponsors intend them to have,” he once said. The reason the Republican Party is in such dire straits is that it can no longer credibly deliver this message.

Consider President Obama’s proposal to increase the minimum wage to $9 per hour. This is, from an economic perspective, a questionable proposal, as Christina Romer, a UC Berkeley economics professor and former chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, argued in Sunday’s New York Times. “It’s far from obvious what an increase would accomplish,” she wrote, calling a minimum-wage hike a “half-measure” and pointing out that there are far more effective anti-poverty measures available.

In other words, there are doubts among experts on both sides as to whether a $9 minimum wage will actually help the poor or at least as to whether it is the best way to do so. But do any voters seriously believe that the Republican Party opposes a minimum-wage increase because it cares about the well-being of low-skilled workers? Of course not. Republicans appear to only oppose a minimum-wage hike because they care about the well-being of managers and CEOs.

After all, this is a party whose presidential nominee derided 47 percent of Americans as moochers. This is a party whose House majority leader, Eric Cantor, tweeted last Labor Day, “Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.” (As Paul Krugman noted, “on a day set aside to honor workers, all Mr. Cantor could bring himself to do was praise their bosses.”) The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which effectively speaks for the party’s business and financial wing, has a long-running view that taxes should be decreased on the wealthy and raised on the poor and lower-middle class, whom it has called “lucky duckies” because of their lower tax burden. It’s clear to voters that the Republicans don’t oppose a minimum-wage hike because they believe they are protecting the poor from a well-intentioned but harmful regulation.

To be clear, though I share Romer’s caution, I don’t have a strong position as to whether Obama’s proposed minimum-wage hike is sound policy. But it is a sweeping proposal, one that would affect millions of Americans, and it deserves, at the very least, careful scrutiny from an intelligent center-right party. Instead, it is being stonewalled by an insular, far-right party that refuses to offer any alternatives. And our democracy suffers for it.

The minimum-wage debate — which I think Republicans are likely to lose in the long run — is emblematic of a need for the Republican Party to adopt a more populist message through changes in style and substance. Instead of talking about how a minimum-wage hike would harm heroic job-creators, they should focus on the very real risk that it will increase unemployment rates for low-skilled workers by artificially raising the cost of labor. Of course, for this argument to be credible, it would need to be delivered in the context of a broader, genuinely populist conservative agenda, like a more family-friendly tax policy, an expanded child tax credit and a less Wall Street-friendly economic regime.

Our parties exist to check one another’s excesses. Friedman was at least partially right that for all progressivism’s good intentions, it sometimes backs economic policies that have harmful, unintended consequences. The Republican Party is currently not a serious party. But it has in the past and can in the future perform the essential function of checking liberal over-reach. Unfortunately, if its response to the minimum-wage debate is any indication, this won’t happen anytime soon.

Jason Willick is the assistant opinion page editor. Contact him at jwillick@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter: @jawillick.

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Last month, the gatekeepers to some of America’s top colleges gathered at a four-star hotel in Los Angeles to discuss what The Chronicle of Higher Education called “the next frontier” in college admissions: the evaluation of applicants’ “noncognitive” attributes.

Put less glamorously, the assembled admissions experts brainstormed ways for the admissions process to put more emphasis on the personal qualities of applicants — and, implicitly, to deemphasize academic measures of merit.

I’ve long been skeptical of the so-called “holistic review” process, in which college admissions offices attempt to pass judgment on the personalities of high school seniors. In a column last semester, I speculated that admissions offices insist that they conduct a mysterious holistic evaluation process to justify their value at a time when admissions decisions often appear to be arbitrary as well as to encourage more students to apply.

But what if there is a more unsettling explanation for admissions offices’ emphasis on applicants’ personalities? What if “holistic review” is just a politically correct term designed to give colleges license to achieve a desired ethnic makeup among admitted students — in particular, to cap Asian enrollment?

After all, the nebulous, subjective criteria that admissions officers claim to look for — “maturity,” “originality,” “responsibility” — are eerily similar to the traits that the Ivy League sought in the 1920s in order to cap Jewish enrollment: “character,” “vigor,” “manliness” and “leadership.”

As New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote in a review of UC Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel’s authoritative 2005 book on the history of American college admissions, administrators at elite colleges restricted Jewish enrollment in order to avoid alienating themselves from the elite Protestant establishment. This discrimination was framed in euphemistic language about the meaning of merit.

Harvard University’s provost wrote after World War II that Harvard should look for students of the “healthy extrovert kind” rather than “the sensitive, neurotic boy.” Yale University’s president in 1950 promised alumni that future students would be “well-rounded,” not “highly specialized intellectual(s).” Are Asians the new Jews of college admissions?

It’s common knowledge among those familiar with the admissions process that Asian students applying to Ivy League schools are at a disadvantage. Indeed, many Asian applicants try to conceal their ethnic backgrounds from admissions committees.

Late last year, in a 30,000 word article in The American Conservative, Roy Unz marshaled overwhelming evidence to validate Asian students’ concerns. A summary of his findings: First, the strength of Asian students’ academic performance is staggering, and has grown more impressive over the years. Though they make up only about 5 percent of the population, Unz estimates that Asian students represent about 28 percent of National Merit Semifinalists — the top 0.5 percent of scorers on the PSAT — far higher than their enrollment at Ivy League schools.

According to Unz, in the 1980s and 1990s, the percentage of Asian students at Ivy League colleges steadily increased. But in the last decade or so, even as the Asian population steadily increased (it roughly doubled since 1993), and Asian academic performance continued to improve, the proportion of Asians enrolled in Ivy League colleges reached a plateau or declined. More suspiciously, it has converged to roughly 16 percent at each Ivy League school for the past five years.

Meanwhile, according to Unz, at elite schools like UC Berkeley, UCLA and the California Institute of Technology — which use race-neutral admissions processes — the proportion of Asian students has risen to about 40 percent of the student body, tracking the increase in the population of college-age Asians. To Unz, this disparity is strong evidence of an unofficial quota system at elite private universities.

Ivy League administrators, of course, dismissed Unz’s claims. Harvard’s director of communications wrote in response that the ethnic composition of Harvard’s undergraduate student body is (surprise) simply a result of the admissions committee’s consideration of applicants’ “strength of character, their ability to overcome adversity and other personal qualities.”

In other words, admissions officers are suggesting that Asians’ superior academic performance is outweighed by their inferior personal qualities compared to other races. The parallels with the Jewish quota system are unmistakable.

In his review of Karabel’s book, Brooks wrote, “Karabel’s thorough and definitive look at elite college admissions is fascinating because he doesn’t just treat his narrative as a civil rights tale, as the story of anti-Semitic and racist institutions slowly giving way to the forces of justice and decency,” but rather as “‘a history of recurrent struggles over the meaning of merit.’” Similarly, I don’t think that it is productive to chalk up discrimination against Asians in the admissions process to simple xenophobia. It is better described as a complex struggle over the meaning of merit in our generation. But years from now, I don’t think we will look back fondly at this episode in the history of elite admissions.

Though I’m skeptical of affirmative action as it is currently practiced, I am sympathetic to some of the arguments for race-conscious admission policies. In particular, I think there may be something to the idea that it would be stabilizing to have an elite that looks like the rest of the country. Still, Ivy League colleges’ current mechanism for using racial preferences is infuriating. At the very least, admissions offices should admit that they disadvantage members of some races and favor members of other races. They shouldn’t couch this discrimination in feel-good language about desirable personality traits — traits that, apparently, Asian students just don’t have.

Jason Willick is the assistant opinion page editor. Contact him at jwillick@dailycal.org or on Twitter: @jawillick.

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In an interview during the 2012 election season, a prominent American politician spoke highly of advocates of traditional marriage. They are motivated by an impulse to “preserve and strengthen families,” he said.

He avoided framing the debate over gay marriage as a civil rights issue, calling it instead a disagreement over “what the word ‘marriage’ should mean.”

More than once, he endorsed the argument that gay marriage foes will make before the Supreme Court this March — that there is no federal constitutional right to gay marriage. “I think it is a mistake to try to make what has traditionally been a state issue into a national issue,” he said.

The views expressed by this politician — who, by the way, happens to be Barack Obama, speaking in the interview in which he became the first president to back gay marriage — seem to no longer be popular among gay rights advocates.

As the constitutional challenge to Proposition 8, California’s 2008 ban on same-sex marriage, hurtles toward the Supreme Court, progressives have increasingly called for the justices to legalize gay marriage in all 50 states by judicial fiat.

This would be a terrible mistake. Even those of us — myself included — who back gay marriage legalization should recognize, as the president did, that this issue is not one that should be resolved by the Supreme Court — or, more precisely, by Justice Anthony Kennedy, America’s de facto philosopher king.

Consider the state of the same-sex marriage movement. Conservative attorney Paul Clement has been mocked for writing in a brief that “gays and lesbians … have attained more legislative victories, political power, and popular favor in less time than virtually any other group in American history.” But on that point, at least, he’s right, and it’s a testament to the strength of the appeals they have made to the public and the worthiness of their cause.

A majority of Americans now support gay marriage, up from about a third 10 years ago. That includes almost two in three young voters but a minority of seniors — as George Will has said, “Quite literally, the opposition to gay marriage is dying.” In 2012, gay marriage advocates won all four state referenda on ballots across the country. The question isn’t whether gay marriage will become legal — only how.

One problem with a sweeping judicial decree is that it could erode the enormous progress gay marriage advocates have earned with the public over the past decade. The Prop. 8 case could suffer the same fate as Roe v. Wade, which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg— hardly a reactionary — said, “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby … prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue.”

The type of ruling for which proponents are agitating would effectively require the justices to find that Prop. 8 “can be explained only as designed to dishonor gays and lesbians as a class.” Such a declaration by the Supreme Court would play into one of the most destructive characteristics of our politics: the tendency of partisans to insist that their opponents are driven by sinister, ulterior motives.

The right suggests that a more progressive tax code is “class warfare” or that modest gun control proposals are just the beginning of a sweeping effort to confiscate all guns. To some on the left, meanwhile, any effort to restrict abortion is part of a misogynistic “war on women,” deficit reduction is always a convenient cover for those who would allow poor children and the elderly to starve — and skepticism of gay marriage can only represent undiluted bigotry and hate.

It is impossible to debate any issue on its merits when you believe you are the only one negotiating in good faith. The fact is that while some of the remaining opposition to gay marriage is colored by homophobia, people of good will can come to different conclusions about the issue, as President Obama eloquently acknowledged.

The argument, as columnist Ross Douthat put it, that heterosexual monogamy “can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition” may be unpersuasive or outweighed by other considerations. But it deserves our respect nonetheless.

A sweeping gay marriage ruling, by suggesting that gay marriage opponents are necessarily bigoted, would in a sense represent the Supreme Court’s endorsement of the toxic moral absolutism that pervades our politics. Moral absolutism is the enemy of compromise. It hardens political divisions and reduces the public’s willingness to recognize complexity and nuance.

As gay marriage activist Jonathan Rauch wrote, “Real civil rights … come from consensus, not from courts.” This is especially true for marriage, an institution “that takes place not just in the eyes of law but in the eyes of the community.”

I oppose Prop. 8, but the justices should let it stand. We’ll repeal it in 2014 by appealing to the decency and common sense of our fellow citizens.

Jason Willick is the assistant opinion page editor. Contact him at jwillick@dailycal.org or on Twitter: @jawillick.

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“Generations, like people, have personalities,” wrote the Pew Research Center in an introduction to its detailed 2010 report on the characteristics of young voters, “and Millennials — the American teens and twenty-somethings who are making the passage into adulthood at the start of a new millennium — have begun to forge theirs: confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change.”

Indeed, we are quite liberal — at least for now. We are more racially tolerant, secular and open to alternative lifestyles and family structures than any other generation, according to Pew. We came out in force for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

And the fact that we are projected to nearly double as a percentage of eligible voters by 2020 has Democrats buoyant about their political future and Republicans (appropriately) scrambling to become culturally and socially modern. Some commentators have suggested that the rise of the Millennials will contribute to a long-term leftward realignment in American politics.

This may well be accurate. But another reading of the Millennials’ political views is also plausible — one that should be sobering to Democrats still celebrating their 2012 victory. Namely, that Millennials are first and foremost individualists and that our current allegiance to the Democratic Party is merely a product of our libertarian tendencies on cultural issues, not a broad embrace of the liberal vision for the country. There is evidence suggesting that once Millennials achieve our social objectives — when, for example, gay marriage is universally accepted, marijuana is legal and access to birth control is no longer debated — we could move swiftly into the Republican camp.

For example, Millennials are somewhat less likely than members of any other generation to say that the government favors the rich, according to a 2011 Pew study. And on entitlement spending, arguably the most important budgetary issue the government will need to grapple with in the coming years and decades, Millennials are also quite conservative.

A whopping 86 percent of us support some degree of privatization of social security. This is striking when you consider the ease with which Democrats massacred President Bush’s 2005 social security privatization proposal. In the same vein, Millennials are more likely than members of any other generation to prioritize low taxes and deficit reduction over preserving benefits. And 74 percent of Millennials told Pew they support “changing Medicare so people can use benefits toward purchasing private health insurance” — the essence of Paul Ryan’s failed Medicare plan, which Democrats successfully painted as extreme.

Some of the Millennials’ apparent indifference toward strong social insurance programs can probably be explained by the illusion of invincibility that tends to accompany youth. But there is also, I think, a cultural reason — an underlying sense of individualism and that is unique to my generation.

Psychologist Jean Twenge, the lead author of a study on the behavior and character traits of Millennials published earlier this year, told The Chronicle of Higher Education that Millennials have been raised to place “more focus on the self and less focus on the group, society and community.” This culture, she said, “emphasizes individualism, and this gets reflected in personality traits and attitudes.” Among other things, Twenge’s study found that in 1971, college students placed financial success at No. 8 on their list of priorities, but that it has consistently topped the list since 1989.

We also think quite highly of ourselves. As New York Times columnist David Brooks has pointed out, “College students today are much more likely to agree with statements such as ‘I am easy to like’ than college students 30 years ago. In the 1950s, 12 percent of high school seniors said they were a ‘very important person.’ By the ’90s, 80 percent said they believed that they were.”

In other words, the data don’t suggest a generation that should be naturally sympathetic to a progressive, communitarian economic message. I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt the Democrats’ rallying cry that “we are all in this together” will resonate with self-assured, independent Millennials in the long-term.

None of this is to say that the Democrats’ advantage with Millennial voters is limited exclusively to social issues. Millennials are more environmentally friendly, more supportive of school funding and more open to cuts in military spending than older voters.

Nevertheless, it is quite likely that once the Republicans drop their 1950s social sensibilities, many Millennials will be won over by the party’s message of economic individualism. So Democrats, I hate to say this, but don’t count on us.

Contact Jason Willick at jwillick@dailycal.org and follow him on Twitter: @jawillick.

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Dear Nicholas Dirks,

Congratulations on your selection as UC Berkeley’s next chancellor. Your reputation will rise or fall depending on your ability to navigate an unpredictable and sometimes explosive political environment, win the trust of students who are notoriously wary of authority and guide the world’s leading public university through a period of fiscal uncertainty and upheaval in higher education. In other words, as I’m sure you are aware, this is likely to be the most difficult job of your life. I urge you to consider the following three suggestions to strengthen your prospects for a successful tenure.

First, cut your salary. I’m sure that UC President Mark Yudof offered you a handsome salary to lure you to the West Coast from your comfortable perch as executive vice president and dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Columbia University. (Current chancellor Robert Birgeneau made about $445,000 last year, according to The Sacramento Bee.) You’ll have very few living expenses because you get to live for free in the University House — a spectacular mansion with 2.6 acres of manicured land. You won’t exactly be starving.

You ought to voluntarily — and publicly — give up 10 percent of your annual salary and direct it instead to financial aid for low-income students. This would, of course, have a trivial effect on the campus’s ability to provide financial aid — but it would be a powerful gesture. Cutting your own salary would show that you take the university’s financial woes seriously, earn you some goodwill among faculty and students and give you more credibility if and when you are forced to cut other parts of Berkeley’s budget.

Second, be smart about protests. Your predecessor’s reputation took a beating (no pun intended) for his response to last year’s Occupy Cal protests. One professor wrote in a Daily Californian op-ed at the time that “as MIT’s Dean of Science, (Birgeneau) used to command universal adoration and respect. Sadly, today’s Chancellor Birgeneau appears largely divorced from the Dean Birgeneau that I once admired while a graduate student at MIT” because of his mishandling of the Occupy drama.

How can you prevent that from happening to you? To the extent that you can, keep the riot police off campus. The threat of overwhelming force doesn’t calm protests at Berkeley; it tends to escalate them. And it should go without saying that should you need to call in the police, it would be almost suicidally crazy to allow them to use batons against nonviolent protesters. That would be the most effective way to unite the campus against you, as your predecessor learned the hard way.

Also, focus on your PR. Make sure everyone knows that you are a champion of public higher education — and that responsibility for the university’s fiscal woes lies with Sacramento legislators, not your administration. That said, be aware that some protesters are more interested in tearing the place down than actually articulating grievances. They will vilify you no matter what you do. Don’t take it personally.

Third, protect free speech on campus. American university administrations have increasingly been restricting free speech rights to try to enforce “civility” — a term that has sometimes become code for political correctness. A few years ago, New York University threatened to shut down a panel on Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad if the images were displayed. In 2009, Yale University barred students from making a shirt with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quotation, “I think of all Harvard men as sissies.” Earlier this month, the president of Fordham University excoriated (or, arguably, intimidated) the campus’s college Republicans after they invited the controversial pundit Ann Coulter to speak — prompting the group to disinvite her.

UC Berkeley has a strong commitment to equity and inclusion. This commitment is admirable, but it also makes the campus more vulnerable to the types of trends I just described. In 2011, Birgeneau issued a statement claiming that the shooting of then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was precipitated by Arizona’s controversial immigration law and an environment where “hateful speech is tolerated.” The chancellor’s statement had a chilling effect on speech by implying that opponents of progressive immigration policy were somehow complicit in an attack, which, as it turns out, was carried out by a psychotic person. It’s not always the administration that threatens free speech: When the Berkeley College Republicans held an affirmative action bake sale, the student government threatened to revoke the group’s funding.

One of your most important missions as chancellor, in my view, must be to ensure that UC Berkeley is able to sustain its reputation as an incubator of dissent and free expression, even as other universities restrict speech rights. I wish you the best of luck.

Contact Jason Willick at jwillick@dailycal.org and follow him on Twitter: @jawillick.

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Jill Wong/Senior Staff

Nearly all high-skill jobs are rapidly becoming digital and quantitative. Doctors and health care providers are scrambling to adapt to new electronic medical record databases. Journalists are increasingly expected to be proficient in Web design and computer graphics. The finance industry has been taken over by mind-twisting mathematical models. Even political campaigns are beginning to rely on sophisticated data science to figure out how to best woo donors and undecided voters.

When you consider the magnitude of these trends, it’s somewhat surprising that very few states offer K-12 computer science education and that no states require it for graduation.

But it’s even more surprising that many universities, including UC Berkeley — which happens to be a stone’s throw away from Silicon Valley — do not require that students are digitally literate before getting their bachelor’s degrees.

To graduate from UC Berkeley’s College of Letters and Science, students must satisfy an array of breadth requirements, which range from arts and literature to philosophy and values to physical sciences. There is no requirement that students take a course in computational thinking. And Berkeley’s one introductory computing course for nonmajors does not satisfy any of the Letters and Science breadth requirements — further discouraging non-computer science majors from taking a computing class.

“Computing is the new literacy,” said Dan Garcia, a senior lecturer in the electrical engineering and computer sciences department who sits on a number of national computer science education boards. “Every single field is being transformed by computer science. How is it that in this day and age someone can graduate with a four-year diploma and actually be clueless on a computer?”

Other computer scientists share Garcia’s disillusionment with the status of computer science in the college curriculum. Jeannette Wing, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, has argued, “Computational thinking is a fundamental skill for everyone, not just for computer scientists. To reading, writing and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child’s analytical ability.” And UC Berkeley EECS department chair David Culler said in an email, “We lag behind many leading universities in putting computing on par with math and English.”

Why doesn’t UC Berkeley require — or at least strongly encourage — nonmajors to take computer science? For a few reasons, none of which are particularly compelling. The computer science department would need to accommodate many more students. And the department would likely need to create a suite of introductory courses, rather than simply dramatically expanding its existing course for nonmajors, according to Garcia. This would be a challenge, Garcia says, but it’d be a worthwhile one.

Some people will no doubt charge that requiring a computing course would undermine the ideal of a liberal arts education by making the Letters and Science curriculum too focused on vocational preparation rather than intellectual exploration. But the terrible job market has already put the concept of a pure liberal arts education under scrutiny. If the liberal arts are to retain their credibility, they must be adapted to reflect changing economic realities. Not to mention the fact that, as Garcia and others have argued, computational literacy is a fundamental skill in the 21st century — it has nearly as strong a claim to a place in the liberal arts curriculum as reading or writing.

This debate could have far-reaching consequences — there is a broad consensus that science and technology education is key to America’s economic future, and UC Berkeley’s policies are influential. If the campus changed its course requirements to ensure that students from all majors are computationally literate before they graduate, other UC campuses might follow suit. This could, in turn, encourage more high school students to take computer science classes.

As Garcia said, “Things would start rolling.”

Contact Jason Willick at jwillick@dailycal.org or on Twitter: @jawillick.

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“If the Republican Party cannot win in this environment,” declared conservative luminary George Will in September, “it has to get out of politics and find another business.” Fox News host and Tea Party darling Laura Ingraham agreed, telling Republicans, “if you can’t beat Barack Obama with this record, then shut down the party.”

Tuesday’s election results have not yet caused the Republican Party to vanish into thin air. They did, however, sow the seeds for a reckoning between the Republican Party’s radical wing and its more moderate establishment.

Two competing narratives for the Republicans’ defeat, which are already quietly emerging within the party, will come to the fore over the coming days. The first, championed by members of the Tea Party, will hold that President Obama’s victory was a consequence of Mitt Romney’s lack of ideological purity. According to this line of argument, Republicans might have won if only they had nominated an authentic conservative as their standard-bearer instead of a flip-flopping Massachusetts moderate. The implications of this argument are clear: Republicans must continue to purge moderate elements from their party and stonewall any and all of Barack Obama’s policy proposals.

The second (much more accurate) narrative will contend that the Tea Party’s ideological rigidity is the cause of the party’s weakness, not the answer to it. In other words, Romney was seriously damaged by the extreme positions he was forced to take in the primary campaign — on everything from tax cuts to reproductive rights. Some in the Republican establishment might also argue that the party’s radical wing devastated Republicans’ chances of taking back the Senate by ousting moderate candidates in favor of unelectable hard-liners like Richard Mourdock and Todd “legitimate rape” Akin. This explanation for the party’s defeat suggests that if the party is to survive, it must offer more to minorities, women and the middle class — and, yes, maybe even try to work with President Obama.

Republicans hate losing. They hate losing so much that for the past several weeks some have insisted that the polls were skewed rather than admit that their candidate was behind. But now the party will be forced to accept that it lost fair and square (conspiracy theories about voter fraud aside) and design a single path forward. The relationship between the establishment and the Tea Party is already strained, however, and reconciling their conflicting impulses in the wake of a bitter election defeat will be no easy task.

If the Democrats and President Obama aggressively take advantage of Republican disunity, they might be able to push their agenda more effectively than they did for the last two years. The Republican Party’s tight discipline and ability to act as a single voting block have always been powerful weapons against the Democrats — such as during the debt ceiling crisis of 2011, when House Republicans forced a Democratic Senate and President to capitulate to their demands. Heading into the fiscal cliff negotiations, however, the Republican Party will be internally divided and Democrats will be in a much stronger position to poach Republican moderates.

So even though this election gave us the exact same government as before — a Democratic Senate, a Republican House, and, of course, a Democratic president — it might not give us the same level of gridlock and paralysis we have suffered through for the past two years.

Finally, I will say this: if the radical wing of the party emerges victorious from the Republican civil war, then George Will is right. The party will need to get out of politics altogether.

Contact Jason Willick at jwillick@dailycal.org and follow him on Twitter: @jawillick.

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