Marshmallow Peeps and Irrational Hatred

In their baskets this Easter morning, my children once again found one of their favorite candies: marshmallow Peeps. Fortunately, the Easter Bunny knew not to put any of those in my basket. He knows I have an undying hatred of Peeps.

Before the spring of 2003, I simply disliked them. Even as a child, marshmallows were generally too sweet for my taste and I didn't like their gritty layer of sugar. But in April 2003, Brigham Young University's newspaper, The Daily Universe, turned my dislike into something more.

To be honest, I never really cared for the paper. The Daily Universe obviously focused on the activities of humanities majors at the expense of the hard sciences. The paper would gloss over or entirely ignore impressive and internationally recognized accomplishments from BYU's engineering, physics, chemistry, and biology students and professors while articles about life as a [enter title of humanities major here] would make the front page. The journalist brother of a fellow engineering student actually told him that those who served as editors and writers for the newspaper had little interest in the hard sciences and paid almost no attention to what happened on our side of campus.

In April of 2003, I was a member of BYU's Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) team. At the time, we were developing some of the world's smallest airplanes, several of which were equipped with tiny cameras and could act as surveillance drones (this was before such things were ubiquitous). We had just returned from the annual Micro Air Vehicle Competition held at the University of Florida, having competed against 20 other schools, one of which was from Germany and another from South Korea. Despite stiff competition, we placed first in the design and surveillance portions of the competition and fifth in the endurance portion, giving us second place overall.

Our advisor, Dr. Bowman, was very proud of the team and called The Daily Universe, encouraging them to interview us about our work and the competition. He had a preliminary phone interview with one of the writers and expected that the team members would soon speak to one of their reporters. But the team was never contacted and the phone interview served as the sole source of an April 7, 2003 article that appeared around page 15 of the day's paper. The 585 word article included no photos and mentioned no other names beyond that of our advisor.

A mere two days later, the entire top half of the front page of The Daily Universe was taken up by an article on life as a male ballet student (yes, this was considered to be front page material). The 992 word article had a large, full color photograph and included interviews with several dancers. Needless to say, the difference between this article and the treatment the MAV team received further proved what we all suspected about the University paper. We were annoyed by being upstaged by an article on men in tights, but we thought we could take it in stride.

But the very next day, a small color photo of a yellow Peep appeared just above The Daily Universe's title, along with the line "Peeps heat up Easter traditions" and the page number of the article. On the referenced page was found an enormous color photo of a marshmallow Peep. I still remember that absurd picture; a disgusting, stale, gritty mockery of a chicken stretching nearly 3/4 of the page's height. The 753 word article included interviews with several students and alumni on the role of Peeps in their Easter traditions.

An article on chicken-shaped marshmallow novelties was accompanied by an image almost twice as large as any of the MAV team's airplanes, showed more interest in actual individuals, and ran 168 words longer than a perfunctory story about engineering students' accomplishments in an international competition involving experimental technology. Peeps. The tacky and barely edible seasonal treat.

I hate those things

In the end, we could only assume that the editors' bias allowed an article about an inanimate object with no real connection to BYU to receive more attention than one about students studying a field in which the paper's staff happened to have little interest. While I'm certain there was no offense intended, the absurdity of the episode annoyed me to an unprecedented degree. (It's a good thing I missed their 2004 article on Peeps; I simply stopped reading the paper after 2003.) Eventually this annoyance focused not on any human being, but entirely on the face of the whole incident: Peeps.

Yes, I have a fiery hatred for Peeps.

(But, even if I hadn't been on the MAV team at all, I still would have thought the article was stupid.)

The Rising Cost of Education

Cartoon by John Fewings

Today I was reading a PajamasMedia article by Roger Kimball about the rising cost of higher education, particularly in the upper tier schools (e.g., Yale or Harvard). The article links to a post by Paul Caron, who believes that higher education represents a bubble that's even bigger than the notorious housing bubble. Immediately beneath a graph comparing the rise in the cost of homes to the rise in tuition, Caron says the following:

Note that the housing bubble resulted from about a 4-time increase in home prices between 1978 and 2006, and college tuition has now increased by more than twice that amount since 1978 - it's gone up by more than a factor of ten times. The college tuition bubble makes the housing price bubble seem pretty lame by comparison.

Apparently Yale's tuition next year will be $52,900. While most colleges won't be charging quite that much, over the past thirty years tuition costs throughout the United States have soared at a rate far in excess of inflation. Glenn Reynolds, writing in the Washington Examiner, cites a report saying that "After adjusting for financial aid, the amount families pay for college has skyrocketed 439 percent since 1982."

Kimball continues by pointing out that the sort of politically correct nonsense that is currently taught in so many universities will never allow heavily indebted graduates to ever pay off their loans. He specifically refers to the case of a young woman "who graduated from some name school with a degree in Women’s Studies and Religious Studies and debt of $100,000. That’s about 3 times her current annual income." As parents (who pay most of the average student's tuition) realize that the education their child is receiving is less and less likely to pay for itself, they will become less willing to foot the bill. As Reynolds reminds us, "Bubbles burst when there are no longer enough excessively optimistic and ignorant folks to fuel them. And there are signs that this is beginning to happen already."

Given what the Ivy-League schools have given us lately (e.g., most of the Obama Administration), I look forward to the day when this bubble bursts.

Cheating in School

Commentary on joannejacobs.com directed me to an article on cheating in school and youth ethics. The numbers presented by the article were not encouraging:

"_Cheating in school is rampant and getting worse. Sixty-four percent of students cheated on a test in the past year and 38 percent did so two or more times, up from 60 percent and 35 percent in a 2006 survey.

"_Thirty-six percent said they used the Internet to plagiarize an assignment, up from 33 percent in 2004.

"_Forty-two percent said they sometimes lie to save money — 49 percent of the boys and 36 percent of the girls.

"Despite such responses, 93 percent of the students said they were satisfied with their personal ethics and character, and 77 percent affirmed that 'when it comes to doing what is right, I am better than most people I know.'"

And what do some educators give as the reason why these students are cheating?

"The competition is greater, the pressures on kids have increased dramatically... They have opportunities their predecessors didn't have (to cheat). The temptation is greater."

and...

"This generation is leading incredibly busy lives — involved in athletics, clubs, so many with part-time jobs, and — for seniors — an incredibly demanding and anxiety-producing college search."

That's a pretty lame excuse. Can we honestly say, in this day of declining student performance and educational standards, that today's kids have it harder than students in the past? What about this finding:

"The survey found that 35 percent of boys and 26 percent of girls — 30 percent overall — acknowledged stealing from a store within the past year. One-fifth said they stole something from a friend; 23 percent said they stole something from a parent or other relative."

I think it's a lot more likely that many parents and schools are utterly failing to instill honesty and integrity into kids. What about students' 'stressful' lives and 'overly demanding academic standards' is driving them to lie to save money, steal from friends and family, or shoplift? The cheating is obviously a symptom of a larger problem; our society as a whole, and our youth in particular, are becoming unethical and unprincipled (e.g., rampant fraud is believed to be one of the major causes of the current mortgage crisis).

It's too bad our modern culture kicked God and traditional morality out as "old fashioned" and "oppressive"; we could use some of that morality right about now.