Too Many Friends

Stosh,

We were talking a little while ago about the extent to which going away to college does or doesn't provide an opportunity to reinvent oneself. I came across an article today in the New York Times Magazine proposing that social networking sites might actually make this more difficult, since it's harder for, say, a Facebook user to make a clean break with his high school buddies.

I quote liberally from a passage that resonated strongly with me:

As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?

As Sean rightly pointed out, the pressure of one's past can be shut out from the present just by unplugging from one's old friends. I think the reason why in practice nobody ever does this is because, unlike friends who fade away in the real world just because you fail to contact them, Facebook friends hang around until you take the affirmative step of un-friending them. Nobody wants to have to take a step to affirmatively sever a social tie, except in extraordinary circumstances.

So is the mythos of college as a place for self-reinvention totally contingent upon the inconvenience of keeping up with one's old friends? And do social networking sites disrupt that inconvenience to such an extent that self-reinvention becomes too onerous to consider?

Bride of Pseudoscience

It's in my nature neither to pay attention to, nor to write about stories as sordid and rubbernecky as this Rihanna-Chris Brown domestic violence story. But upon encountering this gem of a study, I couldn't help but bring it to your attention for your collective ridicule.

The Boston Public Health Commission surveyed 200 Boston youths between ages 12 and 19, "using the Chris Brown-Rihanna case to gauge their attitudes toward teen dating violence." All of the study participants had heard about the incident. Here are some of the results:

• 71% said arguing was a normal part of a relationship
• 44% said fighting was a normal part of a relationship
• 51% said Chris Brown was responsible for the incident
• 46% said Rihanna was responsible for the incident
• 52% said both individuals were to blame for the incident, despite knowing at the time that Rihanna had been beaten badly enough to require hospital treatment
• 35% said the media were treating Rihanna unfairly
• 52% said the media were treating Chris Brown unfairly

A few of these numbers are troubling. For example, how is it possible for 51% to think Brown is responsible, and for 46% to think Rihanna is responsible, but somehow, for 52% to think both are to blame? Mathematically and logically, it's impossible for more people to affirm the proposition "A & B" than the proposition "A." Does this turn on a subtle connotative difference between "responsibility" and "blame"? Or did the interviewers just ask one too many questions?

Secondly, how is the extent of a person's injuries relevant to determine their responsibility for them? I am right in reading that implication into the fifth statistic, aren't I? I didn't have to go to law school to figure out that the two issues are independent, but I did gor to law school, and we had this pointed out to us a lot of times in Torts. Just commonsensically though, if you step off the curb in front of an oncoming car, your injuries are your responsibility whether the vehicle runs over your foot and breaks your toe, or whether it sends you flying twenty yards and lands you in a full body cast. Liability and damages are independent issues.

Thirdly, and more in line with the presumed intent of the study, who are these 98 idiotic Boston teenagers wandering the streets thinking that a person isn't really to blame if he beats another person so badly that they wind up in the hospital? Are you kidding me? Newsflash, in case any of you happen to be reading: you actually are in control of whether or not you curl your hand into a fist, and hurl it with a high velocity into another person's cheekbone. Strange but true.

As irate as I am about this last statistic, you'd think somebody in the media would be talking about it as well. Wrong. See here and here. What's the most cited statistic culled from the study? I thought you'd never ask:

Of those questioned, ages 12 to 19, 71 percent said that arguing was a normal part of a relationship; 44 percent said fighting was a routine occurrence.

This is the news that has us fretting thusly?:

The results of the survey, conducted by the Boston Public Health Commission across the city and equally among boys and girls, are startling for local health workers who see a generation of youths who seem to have grown accustomed, even insensitive, to domestic violence."

I think you'd have to be pretty jaded if you weren't startled by it," said Casey Corcoran, director of the health commission's new Start Strong program.

I'm appalled. I'm appalled by the implication of these supposedly responsible adults that it is not "normal" to "argue" when you're in a relationship. Conflating disagreement with domestic abuse? Somebody should be ashamed. Woe to the teenager who buys into this crock of shit.

"Fight"? I just can't get too excited about 44% of youth thinking it's normal to "fight" with your significant other, in light of how broad the meaning of "fight" can be. It runs the gamut from simple disagreement, to heated argument, to knock-down-drag-out, to hurling a vase at the wall, to giving your better half two black eyes, and beyond. This continuum spans both acceptable and unacceptable behavior, so it's not very surprising that some kids think fighting is normal. If 44% had said that "physical violence" was normal in a relationship, I could see myself joining the chorus. But that's not what happened here. This study is plainly the unholy spawn of pseudoscience and tabloid publishing, so why are there people taking it seriously?

Sexting, Suicide, and So-called Sluts, but mostly just Sympathy

Three weeks ago or so, I posted a critique of Dahlia Lithwick's Slate opinion piece about teen "sexting." Today, MSNBC reports that a high school girl has committed suicide following her decision to send a nude photograph of herself to her boyfriend. Apparently, after Jessie Logan sent the picture, her boyfriend forwarded it to others, and it eventually made the rounds to literally hundreds of students. Jessie was harassed at school for months, and eventually hung herself in her closet.

I feel bad about this, I really do, but isn't it totally predictable? This is what teenagers are like. The idea that this "private picture" would have remained private is hopelessly naive. Boys who possess nude pictures of girls show them to their friends. This I know from experience, except that in my case, it was just a seventh grade friend of mine sneaking a Playboy into the back of the electronics lab. Teenagers love a victim, and they particularly love to call slut when it stands a chance of doing real damage.

Maybe there was a time when a girl could get away with this without major fallout. Like in the age of Polaroids. She could have snapped a photo and slipped it in her boyfriend's locker. Still, it might have been passed around among his friends, but no way it would have been seen by hundreds. It might have passed by word of mouth, but it would have just been plankton floating in the deep blue sea of the high school gossip, and most importantly, it would have been hearsay. She would have been teased, but she'd be able to plausibly deny having done it, and it would all blow over.

Digital media makes this sort of thing that much more dangerous because it's so easily copied and transmitted to others (and without sacrificing one's own copy). Furthermore, the ease of duplication makes the meme practically immortal for anyone who wants to get his hands on it.

What distressed me most was this passage:

The school resource officer at Sycamore [High School] said he tried to do something about Jessie’s case. He said he confronted the kids who were harassing Jessie and even took Jessie's case to the prosecutor to see if he could press charges. But he said that because Jessie was 18, there were no laws to protect her. He said he'd like to work with the Logans to have the laws changed.

She was eighteen. She was so close to college, the part of your life where you really can, if you want to, reject everything that was ever said about your high school self, and start over fresh. You can reject the prudish but titillated clique that would torture you for something like this. You can lay down roots where they've never heard of you before. And you can conduct your naive, not-even-debauched forays into sexuality with relative impunity. Put it this way: I knew sluts in college, but I didn't know anybody with "a reputation." Even if a girl was objectively easy, she wasn't a victim of that fact; she owned it, and this was true to such a degree that (since, for me anyway, the centre hasn't held) it often registered more as a strength than as a weakness. Not in every case, but often enough to warrant my saying so.

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Unrelated, but I wanted to welcome a new contributor, S. Not sure if you're going for anonymity or style on the name front. If it's the former, I need you to say so, because I don't want to accidentally "out" you by using your name, which I will most assuredly do eventually in the absence of specific instructions otherwise.

Also, good luck to Stirling at FCW.

Four reasons to wonder whether race plays a role in head coach hiring decisions

Sean,

Just throwing out a few reasons why I think it's plausible that racism plays a significant role in keeping black head coaches out of head coaching positions in FBS college football.

1. You're right that the kind of probabilistic reasoning that I was engaged in will never prove that a particular decision not to hire a black man is racially motivated. The fact that African Americans are represented in lower numbers among the ranks of FBS head coaches than they are among the population at large doesn't prove anything. But it does lead us to ask for reasons why such a disparity might exist. It could be that white guys generally possess qualities that would make them better college head coaches, just as nobody seems to bat an eyelash if you draw a conclusion that young black men must generally have qualities that make them better football players than young white men, since they are overrepresented on the football field. But I don't think that my concern has been answered just because other possibilities are plausible. Speculation is all we have at this point, but I'd prefer to answer the question with data, if it were available.

2. You write that you can't think of a single instance in which a head coach hiring decision stuck out to you as being racially motivated. I think it would be surprising if one had. Your observation is salient for what it is, but it doesn't preclude use of race as a "tiebreaker." That is, assuming that a black candidate and a white candidate are relatively equal in terms of merit, a hiring committee still might systematically choose the white candidate. As long as the true basis of the decision is hidden, no one could reasonably accuse that particular hiring committee of racism. But if the same methodology is applied at a number of schools, the numbers would begin to look suspiciously like the ones we in fact encounter.

3. Racism could be outsourced to smaller schools or less pressworthy positions. Everybody knows that hiring a new head coach at a major conference school attracts lots of press scrutiny. This is less true at mid-major schools or in the FCS, and also of coordinator positions, position coaches, and the rest, on down the line. If race is used as a factor at those levels, it is less likely to be detected since people are less likely to crunch those numbers. But the results would still be felt at the head coach level because policies like these would yield fewer qualified black candidates at the coordinator level, or as head coaches at mid-majors.

4. You write that it's inconceivable to believe that anything matters to a hiring committee more than W's. Actually, I think you mention something that could matter more to them: $$$. You write as though there's a one-to-one correspondence between wins and profits, and certainly that correlation is very strong. But money comes from other places; in particular, from booster fund raising. If the hiring committee fears that the boosters will not take well to a black head coach (which would not be an unreasonable concern here in the South), then they might pass over a more qualified black coach on that basis alone, unless the expected profits from his greater number of wins would outstrip the losses the school would suffer from decreased booster support.

More on racism in college football.

Much has been made of the relatively small numbers of black head coaches in NCAA 1A football. While I remain skeptical of how much racism is a factor, I certainly concede that it's a possibility, and despite my skepticism, I generally don't make much of this discussion. The big difference between this case and the Auburn case is that even though fingers were pointed in both, nobody was targeted specifically, and since there's no target, it's hard to make a case one way or the other.

As evidenced by the last three Super Bowls, there are clearly good black head coaches (although it might be a stretch to assuming good NFL coaches are roughly equivalent to college coaches). Like the Auburn case though, I started looking for other instances in which possibly more qualified black coaches were overlooked. Several web searches later, I hadn't come up with anything substantial.

About 25% of Americans are black, so you'd expect around 30 black coaches based solely on that. Furthermore, only six coaches in division 1A haven't had college playing experience, and easily more than 25% of college football players are black. It wasn't always this high, but in 2001, over 55% of college football players were black. Honestly though, it's a little strange to be talking about racial breakdowns at all in my opinion. If it were that simple, we could also say that black players actually benefit from racism. Saying that blacks are more fit to become football players isn't entirely different than saying whites are more fit to become coaches.

Being an SEC fan, I rarely pay attention to up and coming coaches. Most SEC schools don't have the patience to take chances on unproven coaches, although it happens on occasion. Looking just over the major conferences, no recent coaching hires have stuck out to me, at least from a racial perspective. Most schools take a conservative approach and hire the most successful head coach they could land from Div 1A. Occasionally, a top coordinator gets a head coaching shot. For the most part though, new coaching blood comes from the non-BCS conference schools, and I don't really know where those coaches are coming from.

One thing that I have noticed though is that there haven't been many decent black coaches in the mid-major schools lately. I can list several of the most successful mid-major programs of the past few years, and none of them have had black coaches. On top of that, perhaps the two black coaches with the most impressive resumes were fired last season. I think I'd still rather have Tyrone Willingham or Sylvester Croom than Turner Gill.

Perhaps I'm naive, but it still seems strange to me that head coaches could be chosen by any other criteria than the number of games they would be expected to win. I know there are academic considerations, but race has nothing to do with that. If I'm an athletic director, the one thing I'm asking is, "How many wins can you get for my program?" With most football programs more than paying for themselves, more wins equals more money and more prestige for the university. If there's a coach that can get one more win every couple of seasons, or even every fourth season, than the next best guy, I don't care what his race is. As far as I'm concerned, if he's black, you even get good press coverage as a bonus.