Category Archives: General

The Living Word

In my experience, evangelical Christianity seems enamoured with the belief that it is ‘biblical’ in ways that other groups are not. Generally, there is an implicit vitriol for Catholicism (as well as mainline Protestant groups such as the Episcopal Church and Presbyterian Church USA) which are seen as somehow not ‘biblical’. It is as if ‘the Bible’ is a static, unchanging document which can be understood fully without plumbing the depths of its roots, contexts, and history of transmission (to name but a few elements!). However, I have become fairly sceptical of such language because ‘biblical’ is almost always encoded and encapsulated with a pre-existing structure of beliefs. It’s amazing that ‘biblical’ in today’s context almost always means a brand of conservative American evangelicalism which believes women are ‘equal but different’ (meaning they can serve the congregation as, say, ‘children’s pastor’ or ‘worship leader’ but not as ‘pastor’), same-sex marriage is an ‘abomination’, and baptism must be done only to adult-ish converts fully immersed in water (and sometimes even with a specific language without which the baptism is somehow invalid). What many of those who purport a ‘biblical’ Christianity don’t realise is that it meant something completely different two hundred years ago (women couldn’t serve, full stop), four hundred years ago, and so forth. Eight hundred years ago, ‘biblical’ Christianity meant either western Catholicism or eastern Orthodoxy depending on where one lived.

So, let’s assume that ‘biblical’ Christianity means some kind of adherence to some ‘broad stroke’  concepts and/or principles which can be interpreted through some systematic approach to the biblical texts. Which approach? There are many; and throughout history, there are many different methods and interpretations which can be seen as plausible — some even contradictory or mutually exclusive. However, even if we take the bigger assumption that there is only one ‘ultimate’ set of principles (and all the others are classified in terms of acceptable deviations which is often none). Even within the Bible, that which is considered ‘scripture’ is frequently recontextualised for new meanings and interpretations. There is a slew of good scholarship (e.g. Brevard Childs’s The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture) which show how Christianity over two thousands years has recast just one of the biblical texts over time. Other scholarship has shown how, within the collection of biblical texts, intertextual relationships have modified or recontextualised older texts (e.g. Richard Hays’s Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul). I bring these up not to suggest that the biblical texts can be absolutely anything as in some sort of relativism, but rather there is a  degree of give and play in the interpretation of those texts.

However, this wiggle room in the practise of interpretation is rendered mute by the evangelicals who speak about the ‘obviousness of scripture’. For them, not only is there a single interpretation to the text, but the current one must have always been the only interpretation (even when the history above shows otherwise). This also ignores the great amount of work which goes into producing a translation of the texts which render them in contemporary language. By ignoring this process, adherents to this practise construct an artificial ‘Bible’ through which their own beliefs and traditions are masked as being directly handed down by God, through Christ, the original disciples, and early Christianity.

Interestingly, the problem does not end there. Instead, many evangelicals who speak about ‘biblical’ Christianity include Judaism from its beginning through the Second Temple period. For some evangelicals, even the Jewish figures in the HB/OT were closet Christians who believed in Christ, a triune God, and so forth. However this is done only by exploiting the terminology of ‘Judeo-Christian’ and reading early Judaism as a thoroughly Christian venture which just happened to have been called Judaism. In other words, there is no double identity  of Jewish-Christian to mediate in the early Church (e.g. the first disciples), but a single identity of Christianity made double through a virtual colonisation of Judaism. To put it bluntly, then, ‘biblical’ Christianity is nothing more than the same oppressive Christianity of history masquerading itself as some kind of new development which has recovered some imagined ‘golden era’ of the past which is no more ‘biblical’ than the other Christian groups which are cast as failing to be ‘biblical’.

 

The Meaning of 9/11

Unlike some people who have said so, I am quite excited to celebrate on September 11. No, I do not condone the destruction which occurred on that day in 2001. Rather, I celebrate because 9/11 is the day my first child was born. For me, 9/11 never meant the commonplace ‘religious fundamentalism attacks freedom’. Now, however, I have a better reason to remember the day. Additionally, two people who I have known also celebrate their birth on that day as well. Granted, I was really hoping for the 6th of September, but only because 4 close family members were born on that day.

On Vaccines

I am going to be a parent soon. One of the (many) big debates in parenting for the past decade or so has been whether or not vaccinate a child. There’s a lot of talking points, but there tends to be little in the realm of hard data and evidence in the discussions (at least from my experience of them). Fear not, however, for I am doing the research. I wish to divide this post into three parts: outlining the main positions, outlining the quality research I can find, and discussing the two groups of points. At the very least, I hope this remains a useful starting point for others’ research. While I do not expect everyone to accept my opinion, I would like to hear others’ arguments and evidence — perhaps I’ve missed something.

 

The Contenders

For the sake of simplicity, I am reducing the main positions to three: (1) standard vaccination, (2) delayed vaccination, and (3) withheld vaccination.

Standard Vaccination

The standard vaccination programmes* (US, Canada, UK) are pretty intimidating. One interesting bit from looking at just these three programmes is that Canada apparently allows a few types of delayed vaccination in addition to the early infancy schedule. The UK’s recommendations are a bit accelerated (main vaccines done at months 2, 3, and 4 while the US and Canada do them at months 2, 4, and 6). The primary reason for vaccinating a child is the obvious one: to prevent diseases (the CDC’s answer repeats this five times — the same reason is repackaged). Considering that some countries are only just seeing the end of some of these diseases (in February 2012, India was able to claim that it hadn’t had a new case of polio in the wild for a year — the US crossed that threshold in 1979). The main criticism of this programme is that there are serious — sometimes fatal — reactions to the vaccinations. According to one post by John Snyder, the following are adverse reactions just to the measles vaccine (other vaccines have similar reactions):

One in 1000 cases of measles results in encephalitis, with a high rate of permanent neurological complications in those who survive.
Approximately five percent develop pneumonia.
The fatality rate is between one and three per 1000 cases…
[D]eath is most commonly seen in infants with measles.
Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) is a rare complication of measles infection that occurs years after the illness in approximately 10 of every 100,000 cases.
It causes fever and a mild rash in 5-15% of recipients.
0.03% will have a febrile seizure – likely not a result of the vaccine itself, but simply a child’s individual predisposition to febrile seizures.
One in 10,000 children will have a more serious event following the vaccine, such as a change in alertness, a drop in blood pressure, or a severe allergic reaction.

Delayed Vaccination

The argument to delay vaccination centres on the criticisms outlined above regarding the standard vaccination programme. Many people have heard that there was a link between the MMR vaccination and autism, and they have used this link to delay (or withhold) vaccines. The primary objection to delaying vaccinations hinge on the importance of vaccines: they prevent the spread of disease (see John Snyder’s post linked above). The criticism brings out a contradiction in the concept: the only way one can safely delay vaccines is if the majority of others follow the standard programme, but delaying vaccination decreases the number and subsequently increases the chance of the diseases for those who have delayed vaccinations.

Withheld Vaccination

Similar to the delayed vaccination position, the argument to withhold vaccinations focuses on the criticisms to the standard vaccination. However, this argument follows the delayed vaccination argument to its extreme: it is better to delay vaccination forever rather than risk the adverse reactions associated with vaccinations. Such an argument is especially true in some relatively rare situations. Because the argument for withholding vaccinations is similar to the argument to delay vaccines, it should be no surprise that the criticism is similar: withholding vaccinations increases the chance of diseases and, more importantly, the possibility of new strands and mutations to occur which would affect more than just those who have not been vaccinated.

 

The Data

The main question of concern should  be clear: do the risks involved with vaccines outweigh the benefits and do the risks involved with withholding or delaying vaccines outweigh the benefits? To answer these questions, an investigation requires at least a risk assessment of individual children and a risk assessment of society.

To see where problematic side effects occurred, I used the VAERS database maintained by the CDC and ran a query for all serious (hospitalisation and above) events since 2000 reported for the recommended vaccines for children under the age of 2. There was a total of 43,000 reports.

The risks of not having vaccines varies by location. For example, Hepatitis B is recommended in the US, yet the number of cases is minimal (there are only 350 million worldwide, and 600,000 deaths per year worldwide). The primary manner of infection is as an STI or through shared needle use (i.e. in certain drugs). Of the adults who contract it, 95% have a full recovery, though children and newborns have a much lower recovery rate — and they generally contract it from their mother during birth. Diptheria is a more serious disease (the fatality rate is 5-10% and it is airborne), but widespread vaccination has reduced it to less than 5 cases in the US over the past decade (and Canada, Europe, and other industrialised nations have similar levels). Likewise, pertussis is a another serious disease (responsible for 17 deaths in 2001 alone) which has seen an increase in cases since 1980 largely because of parents not vaccinating their children against it. Tetanus is yet another serious disease (over 66% of cases tend to be fatal), but it is eliminated in many countries (especially Western and industrialised ones). The story continues similarly with other immunizations — especially those recommended in many countries.

 

The Discussion

Given that the birth rate has averaged at least 4 million per year since 2000, one can safely assume that a third of those born are vaccinated according to the standard programme. That gives a total of 16 million children vaccinated over the 12 years. To continue the conservative streak, even doubling the number of reported serious effects occurs in one out of 184 children vaccinated will have some degree of a serious reaction (a half of one percent). The main offenders (over 5% of or 1000 reports) are DTaP, the combo 5-in-1 [DTaP, Hep-B, IPV] (only during first 6 months), PCV-7 (but not PCV-13), MMR (before 6 months and after 12), IPV (before 6 months), Hep-A (after 12 months). The odds of having an adverse reaction from vaccines is 183 to 1  – one is more likely to commit suicide within one’s life than have an adverse reaction. It seems that the risks of immunisation are minimal.

Returning to the MMR-autism link mentioned above, the majority of those who have heard of it do not know that (1) the journal which published it has retracted it, (2) almost all of the thirteen authors have disowned it, (3) further studies have not corroborated the link, (4) the original study did not find evidence of such a link, and (5) the primary author (Andrew Wakefield) was barred from practising medicine. Attempts to find links between immunisations and other diseases/conditions (such as autism) simply do not pan out regardless of what celebrities and a very small minority of physicians (some who have questionable qualifications). Not only that, but studies have suggested that delaying (or withholding) vaccination does not improve mental faculties. As a result, I cannot find a strong argument against vaccinating children according to the recommended schedule; but this is not the end of the discussion. In fact, I have not yet found a strong argument for the recommended immunisation schedule — most, if not all, of those arguments work strictly against withholding vaccines. Why? They argue that there is a strong chance of an unwelcome (to say the least) outcome if one encounters one of the diseases in the wild. They also argue that it is necessary for the healthy well-being of human society for its members to be vaccinated. However, the two arguments do not imply that one must be vaccinated as early as possible after birth — especially in the context of a society which has nearly eradicated the virii in question. In other words, the anticipated risk of encountering a disease in a country like the US are rare, provided that the general population does vaccinate at some point.

To bring these strands together, there is enough research and educated medical opinions to accept that (1) immunisation does prevent some horrible diseases and (2) it is a good idea for society that individuals are vaccinated against at least some of the more serious diseases. This means that withholding vaccinations completely is a horrible gamble because it places a person at risk of contracting one of these diseases  as well as weakens the communal protection of others. This leaves a parent’s choices to either the recommended schedule or a delayed schedule. Since I have not found a convincing argument to require one over the other, I will leave the issue open at that.

——

*NB: Basic data for recommended vaccinations is as follows for the first 18 months (all numbers represent age in months):

US Canada UK
Hep-B 0,2,6 4 (total of 3 after month 4) (None)
DTaP (Diphtheria, Tetanus, and Pertussis) 2,4,6,15 2,4,6,18 2,3,4,15
IPV (Polio) 2,4,6 2,4,6,18 2,3,4
PCV 2,4,6,12 2,4,6,12 2,4,12
HIB 2,4,6,12 2,4,6,18 2,3,4,12
RV (Rotavirus) 2,4,6 (None) (None)
Varicella (Chicken Pox) 12 12 (None)
Hep-A 12 (None) (None)
Men-C (None) 2,4,6,12 3,4
MMR 12 12 12

 

Education for Profit

Open admissions sounds like a good thing. Who doesn’t want to enable people a chance to get a university education? However, this has two major flaws: most students are underprepared academically and, at least in the case of a for-profit institution, there is a distinct cycle of abuse. I will address both of these flaws dealing from my own experience from within an open admission, for-profit university (OAFPU).

Underprepared

The first is fairly straightforward: most students (from my experience) who attend open admissions universities do so because they are unable to gain admission at a ‘normal’ (i.e. selective admissions) university. This in and of itself is not a bad thing. Many community colleges are geared towards taking in underprepared students and building up an underprepared student’s knowledge. Some might require a student to first complete remedial courses before enrolling in other courses. This is a good thing because it prepares students for higher education and it prevents the (further) ‘dumbing down’ of courses. However, when remedial courses are prescribed as ‘optional but recommended’, students only harm their own education. For example, at one of the for-profit universities where I have taught, I have found students who are unable to cite material in any format, double-space a paper (in MS Word), or even properly format a header. That’s in addition to having little to no grasp of grammar and spelling. The result is that these students do poorly in written assignments despite having some intriguing content (the university’s grading rubrics require a dedicated grammar component). What’s sad, though, is that this includes students in their third and fourth years of their education.

Connected to being underprepared, I have noticed that most of these students simply do not have the time or effort to do their assigned work. Students rarely, if ever, read the assignments beforehand. In order to fit their schedules, many classes at the OAFPU meet just once per week for four hours each meeting. Oftentimes, the material for one intro-level course is compressed further so that one meeting might cover what other universities might have made into an entire course by itself (e.g. the Mathematics course covers trigonometry in one week, statistics in another, etc). Add into that mix the fact that most students want to leave an hour early because they have to wake up early (as early as 6 hours from the end of class) for work, family, etc. The result of this mix is that the OAFPU has reduced its educational goals to overly-simplified ideas which do not resemble those of a university. For example, it is an institutional requirement that students upon completion of intro level (100/1000) courses are merely able to identify concepts. For a world religions course, this means being able to correlate a pantheon of deities (with names, of course) to Furballism.

Again, this might sound practical, but the way in which it gets executed is horrendous. The tests, as mandated and planned by the institution (i.e. instructors are not supposed to go rogue and make their own examinations), really focus on how well a student can look up the information in their textbook. To suit this end, the institution has created the tests online in their learning management system (LMS) and indicated that these tests are open book and have a very generous time limit (roughly one hour for every twenty multiple choice answers). If an instructor wants to do these in-class (many of my students ask for this because they claim to not have time outside of class to do the tests outside of class), that’s one to two hours less of lecture material. When I have asked about the open book tests, the response from the administration has been that students really only need to learn how to look up information rather than waste their time learning Hamster Fur Weaving or Gerbil Literature (despite these being required general education courses). Oh, and I should not forget that many students arrive late — despite any penalties attached to it. An instructor might only have 30 minutes of good class time in a week if she were to follow the institutional requirements and wait for students to appear.

At the OAFPU, instructors are expected to be engaging and provide a good educational service to their students. This means that instructors should not lecture for more than fifteen minutes at a time, should incorporate ’30-minute documentaries’ (read that as ‘shows from Discovery and History channels’), lengthy group discussions about students’ opinions on the material, and anything else which might involve students. The rationale behind this is based on the theory that ‘adult learners’ are different from other learners and do not wish to ‘suffer through traditional lectures’ but rather want to add their own insight and discuss the material (the same material which they have not read). The institution uses the process of administrative observation to verify that instructors aren’t ‘boring the students with a lecture’. The wondrous observation occurs randomly and consists of the observer counting to see which students are concerned with the class session, regardless of content (i.e. even if the ‘presentation’ is ‘engaging’ according to their plan, students which can’t be bothered to be engaged count against the instructor).

Abused

I now wish to turn to the more important aspect of this post: the cycle of abuse. It is deeply connected to the OAFPU’s ‘commitment’ to educating the underprepared. For students to attend the great OAFPUs, they must, of course, spend money. Tuition at these institutions tend to run much higher than the local public/non-profit open access institutions. Places like the University of Phoenix charge around $10,500* a year for a full-time load over five years in a BA/BS program in business marketing (total is $53k provided that the student does not repeat any classes). In contrast, local open admissions schools cost a third of that price (even their out-of-state/non-resident costs are lower) despite these schools providing the same degree of education with the same schedule flexibility.

Instead, the primary site of financial abuse is through student loans. Like many universities, the OAFPU accepts federal financial aid (loans and grants) as well as other education benefits (e.g. GI Bill). Many students enroll at OAFPU because they will get a refund check from their financial aid. The attendance policy at an OAFPU is very liberal (a student is dropped only if she is marked absent for four consecutive weeks), and the academic integrity policy is a joke (the worst consequence listed is a F for the course in which the student was caught plagiarising — and that’s only if the student is a repeat offender with a major infraction). However, these two policies keep students enrolled so that the university gets profits. This is in addition to the OAFPU’s aggressive policy of getting students to enroll in future terms (regardless of academic standing) and to attend often enough to evade being dropped from their courses. Some of these activities include the administration phoning absent students weekly, the requirement that instructors are also to communicate with the absent student, and paid academic advisers who spend two-thirds of each term phoning students either to enroll or encourage students to communicate with their instructors and attend class.

The worst case of students are those who enroll and attend until they receive their financial aid check. Chances are, these students have no intention of paying back any loans. Rumours have circulated that there is a subset of students who transfer from OAFPU to OAFPU until they are expelled after the many generous probationary terms. However, the generous and liberal nature of university policies which allow these students to persist leads me to suspect that the primary purpose of these policies is so that the university can extract as much profit from these students rather than to attempt to educate them (or remove them if they are not interested in acquiring an education). I believe that is the danger and harm in corporatising education: the goal of profit will always supersede the goal of education often at the expense of education.

To take underprepared and uninterested people as students and cater to their desires (e.g. a degree without any difficult academic work) is a great recipe for profits. However, it is also a horrible recipe for a university; and this is where the corporatised university leads us: the decision to provide education as an institute of higher learning versus the decision to make profits as a ‘student-oriented’ corporation selling an ‘education product’ through ‘engaging lectures’.

 

*NB: Phoenix seems to have two different prices: a nationwide cost per credit hour for ‘lower-level’ courses and a regional cost per credit hour for ‘upper-level’ courses, so the price may fluctuate a bit. I compared the prices for New Orleans, LA; Philadelphia, PA; and Denver, CO; I used the least expensive of the three.

Privatising Knowledge

As I have begun to enter the world of academic publishing, one thing hit me hard: the cost of subscribing to journals. While journals in the humanities tend to be on the cheap side compared to some major STEM-subject journals (e.g. Nature), the cost is still significant. Recently, an article in The Guardian (link) pointed out that there has been a growing discontent with publishers charging high fees for what amounts to very little work. For the most part, the publisher’s paid staff does makes connections (i.e. gets authors, editors, and reviewers). However, the articles are written (for free) by academics. They are reviewed (again, for free) by other academics. The editors (who are generally unpaid) construct the CFP for an issue, make sure the contributions are anonymous before peer review, and then finally pass complete, edited, reviewed articles to the publisher who then prepares them for print, prints issues, and mails them to subscribers. Nobody doubts that the publishers should be paid for the cost of the work they produce (and, perhaps, a profit if one is so inclined). However with the advent of internet publishing platforms (from WordPress to Open Journal Systems), the extent to which that process can be automated is clear. Add in some technical geekery through Pandoc and a well-prepared LaTeX (or some word processor) template and a printable document is ready.

I’ve worked in the print industry, so I have an idea of what it might cost to print and even mail a given quantity of journals. That number, by the way, is nowhere near the $50 an issue journals charge. Even at retail cost, a journal like the Jornal of the American Academy of Religion (roughly 300 pages of black-and-white text, cut to roughly 9″x6″, then bound with glue and a cover) can be printed for $26 a pop. With 12 issues per year, the $228 annual subscription sounds like a steal. However, given the sheer number of subscriptions, that $26/book cost gets significantly reduced even if still done at retail (I’d guess a place like FedEx Office would charge ~$18 a book for just 100 books to print and mail). If there’s any additional discounts (e.g. corporate deal, larger volume discount, etc), and we’re looking at even cheaper production costs which make the $228 subscription sound quite high.

The Powers That Be in Nature would like us to think their paid staff does a lot of work by making the data interactive, perhaps creating graphics, and maintaining a website. The exact list of staff contributions are: ‘identifying the author and the article’s aim, assessing and editing the draft, selecting peer reviewers, working with the author to build on their advice, developing illustrations, rendering the article into print and online forms, maintaining it online and including links, citation statistics and other enhancements’. Yet, in most cases, these are done by the unpaid academics. In many cases, the author must provide keywords and an abstract of the article. Does the publishing staff simply make sure those things are present (something which an automated online system like OJS does). The staff assesses the draft? Makes sense if the paid staff member is knowledgeable in the particular field. Otherwise, that task is given to peer reviewers. I’ll allow that the paid staff does copyediting (a very useful service). The staff selects peer reviewers? Oh, so you mean the staff looks up which peer reviewers (who have identified what areas they are competent for reviewing) have expertise close to the article’s field (something which an automated system can do). The staff ‘work[s] with the author to build on their advice’ sounds a bit like the staff ‘passes on comments from the peer reviewer’. Developing illustrations. I’ll give that one. Render the article into print and online forms? So easy a program can do it for you (see Pandoc, above)! Maintain the online form including links and citation statistics? Ah, so they copy-and-paste from one form to another, then perhaps add links to other articles already published in their journal, then let the system count the journal equivalent of pingbacks/trackbacks. Oh wait, there’s a program which already does that. I’m not sure what ‘other enhancements’ are and if they even exist, so we’ll take that one out for now. So, the reason why Nature charges $32 per article for online access and requires an unlimited and exclusive license from authors is to have a copyeditor, and graphic designer, a manager to oversee them (or perhaps two: one for each department), a middle manager to oversee the lower managers, upper management to oversee the middle managers, and (finally) their profit. Again, Open Access Journals have shown that they can do all of the above (minus, perhaps, the rendering into print) at no cost for readers (though they may charge for printing and delivery if one wants that).

Strangely enough, one intention behind the original development of the internet was to allow easy and unfettered access to research for universities. Somehow, though, academics have let publishers erect paywalls to keep their hold on research as a marketable product. I, for one, support the move towards Open Access, full stop. There is no reason why major publishing companies should be able to dictate the terms on which research is produced, published, and accessed except that academics have been either ignorant or uncaring that their own research is often locked away and, in some cases, taken from them. Academics, as the ones who do the research and produce the articles, are the rightful copyright owners (since publishers defend their actions along the lines of copyright law) and should not need to give unlimited, exclusive access to their work in order for other academics to see it. I can respect the fact that publishers want to make a profit, but forcing academics into a give-or-go scenario must be stopped. What academics seem to not understand is that without their work, the publishers will suffer while academics can freely share their work. In other words, there is nothing to lose for academics but the chains which bind them.