USA: +1(669)289-8683 
Sign in
700 to 1050 word essay, need access to film on demand if not I have attached transcripts for each section. Need by Sunday January 7th, no plagiarism.
1/4/2018 Print Preview
1/3
Print This Document
The numbers tell the story. In 1950, 22% of American adults were single. 4 million lived alone. They accounted for 9% of all households.
Fast-forward to today. More than 50% of American adults are single. 31 million, about one out of every seven, live alone. They make up 28% of all
households.
These so-called “singletons” are the focus of a new book by Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University, Going Solo– the Extraordinary
Rise and Surprising Appeal of Going Alone. Well, from all those numbers, it’s obvious something’s happening. What?
Well, my view is that this is the biggest social change of the last 50 or 60 years that we have failed to name or identify. It’s not just that so many
Americans are unmarried, which is something we’ve talked about, but that people are living alone and for long stretches of their lives.
But so many people get there in different ways.
That’s right.
There are people just starting out, finishing college and living on their own, people who are perhaps just divorced and, perhaps, didn’t intend to ever
live alone but find that they are, people who are widowed, and of course, a group of people who are living alone and liking it. With all these different
roads to getting there, is there anything that we can say about this very diverse group of people?
Absolutely. One thing we can say is that people who live alone are opting to do so. Now they might not aspire to be on their own. But they all have
other choices available to them, really regardless of what age they are.
So for instance, you can go to craigslist and find roommates. Most people have some family members they could live with, parents or children.
There are all sorts of institutional homes available to elderly people.
100 years ago, even 60 years ago, that’s how we would have lived. But today, we don’t. People are opting to go alone.
Is this something that only rich societies can aspire to? When you get up to that scale, one out of every four households, just one person– I was
thinking of perhaps a Manhattan apartment building with 150 studio apartments in it. That’s 150 refrigerators, 150 microwave ovens, 150 televisions.
This isn’t something that every country can pull off.
That’s right. In fact, you see very little living alone in poor nations or in poor neighborhoods. On the other hand, there are some affluent societies
where virtually no one lives alone, for instance, Saudi Arabia. One big difference in a place like Saudi Arabia is that women don’t have the kind of
independence they have in the United States or in other countries where there’s high levels of living alone. So there’s a cultural side to this as well as
an economic one.
Has the United States adjusted? This may be something where the numbers and individual choice is way out ahead of supermarkets, the way we
build the places where we live, the laws that we use to govern it. It may have outpaced the arrangements we make around this part of our lives.
1/4/2018 Print Preview
2/3
I think it has. I think this is a transformation that we haven’t fully come to terms with. We haven’t had a language for coming to terms with it, also.
Right now, 27% of US households are one-person households. But in cities, the numbers are far higher than that. Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis,
Seattle, San Francisco, these are places where more than 40% of all households have just one person. And in Manhattan, where I live, and
Washington, DC, it’s almost half of all households.
Cities are largely not equipped for this kind of situation. And I think we have a lot of adjusting to do.
Or cities are uniquely equipped for that situation by creating a way of life where it’s possible to live alone without feeling isolated, lonely, and so on.
Well, cities are better equipped than other places. And you’re right. It’s the interdependence of people who live in cities that makes their
independence possible.
So you can live alone in a city and not be alone for all the reasons you mentioned. At the same time, especially as our society ages and when the
boomer generation begins to age alone, we will find that our housing is not quite up to the challenge of giving people what they want, which is a
place of their own, if they can’t have their right partner, but also connection to other people and to all kinds of care and support. We have a long ways
to go there.
Well, as you mentioned, the people turning 70 are going to break like a tidal wave on this society. And it doesn’t seem like we’ve really thought that
through very much, have we?
I think that’s right. We haven’t. Now, I should say that people who live alone, whether they’re 30, or 40, or 75, are actually more likely than people
who are married to spend time with friends and with neighbors, to go out in the city and spend time and money in bars, and restaurants, and cafes.
They’re more likely to go to public events. They’re even more likely to volunteer in civic organizations.
So we shouldn’t get carried away with the idea that living alone means being isolated. But there are a lot of older people who are at risk of growing
isolated if they don’t have the right kinds of housing. And at the moment, we just haven’t invested in that in the way that other nations have.
Well, in an earlier book, Heat Wave, you examined how it was that very living alone among a lot of low-income elderly that led to a terrible death
toll during a tragic heat wave in Chicago in the 1990s. So could that be the downside of living by yourself?
It is the danger if we don’t find ways to adjust. But the one thing I discovered in the course of writing this book is that the very vulnerable and
isolated people do represent a small minority here, that for the most part, people who live alone are engaged in the world in ways that we don’t
appreciate. And I grew concerned, actually, that this kind of language we have for talking about our bowling alone, and our disconnection, the way
we’ve grown too individualistic as a society has somehow misrecognized the ways in which we’re actually connected with each other. So it’s
important to tell both sides of that story.
Well, implicit in a lot of the reporting you did for this book was this finding that we aren’t totally sold on the idea yet, even though 28% of our
households consist of one person.
That’s right. And let’s be clear. This is not the case against marriage. I’m not trying to persuade anyone that they should live alone.
1/4/2018 Print Preview
3/3
But I am trying to come to terms with the fact that so many people are opting to live alone when they have other options available to them. Again,
they’re not aspiring to it. But they’re not going to settle with living with the wrong person in a way that they might have 50 years ago.
We’ll continue this conversation online. In the meantime, the book is Going Solo. Eric Klinenberg, good to talk to you.
It’s nice to be here. Thanks.
1/4/2018 Print Preview
1/7
Print This Document
Like many of you, I’m one of the lucky people. I was born to a family where education was pervasive. I’m a third generation Ph.D, a daughter of two
academics. In my childhood, I played around in my father’s university lab. So it was taken for granted that I attend some of the best universities,
which in turn opened the door to a world of opportunity.
Unfortunately most of the people in the world are not so lucky. In some parts of the world, for example, South Africa, education is just not readily
accessible. In South Africa, the educational system was constructed in the days of apartheid for the white minority. And as a consequence, today
there’s just not enough spots for the many more people who want and deserve a high-quality education.
That scarcity led to a crisis in January of this year at the University of Johannesburg. There were a handful of positions left open from the standard
admissions process. And the night before they were supposed to open that for registration, thousands of people lined up outside the gates in a line a
mile long hoping to be first in line to get one of those positions.
When the gates opened there was a stampede. And 20 people were injured. And one woman died. She was a mother who gave her life trying to get
her son a chance at a better life.
But even in parts of the world, like the United States, where education is available, it might not be within reach. There’s been much discussed in the
last few years about the rising costs of health care. What might not be quite as obvious to people is that during that same period the cost of higher
education tuition have been increasing at almost twice the rate for a total of 559% since 1985. This makes education unaffordable for many people.
Finally, even for those who do manage to get a higher education, the doors of opportunity might not open. Only a little over half of recent college
graduates in the United States who get a higher education actually are working in jobs that required that education. This, of course, is not true for the
students who graduate from the top institutions. But for many others, they do not get the value for their time and their efforts.
Tom Friedman in his recent New York Times article captured in a way that no one else could the spirit behind our effort. He said, “the big
breakthroughs are what happens when what is suddenly possible meet what is desperately necessary.”
I’ve talked about what’s desperately necessary. Let’s talk about what’s suddenly possible. What’s suddenly possible was demonstrated by three big
Stanford classes, each of which had an enrollment of 100,000 people or more.
So to understand this, let’s look at one of those classes, the machine learning class offered by my colleague and co-founder Andrew Ng. Andrew
teaches one of the bigger Stanford classes. It’s a machine learning class. And it’s had 400 people enrolled every time it’s offered. When Andrew
taught the machine learning class to the general public, it had 100,000 people registered. So to put that number in perspective, for Andrew to reach
that same size audience by teaching a Stanford class, he would have to do that for 250 years. Of course, he’d get really bored.
So having seen the impact of this, Andrew and I decided that we needed to really try and scale this up to bring the best quality education to as many
people as we could. So we formed Coursera, whose goal is to take the best courses from the best instructors at the best universities and provide it to
everyone around the world for free.
1/4/2018 Print Preview
2/7
We currently have 43 courses on the platform from four universities across a range of disciplines. And let me show you a little bit of an overview of
what that looks like.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-Welcome to calculus.
-50 million people are uninsured.
-Help us design more effective institutions and policies.
-We get unbelievable segregation.
-So Bush imagined that in the future, you’d wear a camera right in the center of your head.
-Mills wants the student of sociology to develop the quality of mind.
-Hanging cable takes on the form of a hyperbolic cosine.
-For each pixel in the image, set the red to zero.
-Vaccine allowed us to eliminate polio virus.
-Does Lufthansa serve breakfast in San Jose? Well that sounds funny.
-So this is which coin you pick, and this is the two–
-So in large [INAUDIBLE] learning, we’d like to come up with computation–
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[APPLAUSE]
It turns out, maybe not surprisingly, that students like getting the best content from the best universities for free. Since we opened the website in
February, we now have 640,000 students from 190 countries. We have 1.5 million enrollments. Six million quizzes in the 15 classes that have
launched so far have been submitted. And 14 million videos have been viewed.
But it’s not just about the numbers. It’s also about the people. Whether it’s Akash, who comes from a small town in India and would never have
access, in this case, to a Stanford quality course and would never be able to afford it. Or Jenny, who is a single mother of two and wants to hone her
skills so that she can go back and complete her master’s degree. Or Ryan, who can’t go to school because his immune deficient daughter can’t be
risked to have germs come into the house. So he couldn’t leave the house.
1/4/2018 Print Preview
3/7
I’m really glad to say– recently we’ve been in correspondence with Ryan– that this story had a happy ending. Baby Shannon– you can see her on the
left– is doing much better now. And Ryan got a job by taking some of our courses.
So what made these courses so different? After all, online course content has been available for a while. What made it different is that this was a real
course experience. It started on a given day. And then the students would watch videos on a weekly basis and do homework assignments. And these
would be real homework assignments for a real grade, with a real deadline. You can see the deadlines in the usage graph. These are the spikes
showing that procrastination is a global phenomenon.
At the end of a course, the students got a certificate. They could present that certificate to a prospective employer and get a better job. And we know
many students who did. Some students took their certificate and presented this to an educational institution at which they were enrolled for actual
college credit. So these students were really getting something meaningful for their investment of time and effort.
Let’s talk a little bit about some of the components that go onto these courses. The first component is that when you move away from the constraints
of a physical classroom and design content explicitly for an online format, you can break away from, for example, the monolithic, one-hour lecture.
You can break up the material, for example, into these short, modular units of 8 to 12 minutes, each of which represents a coherent concept.
Students can traverse this material in different ways depending on their background, their skills, or their interests. So for example, some students
might benefit from a little bit of preparatory materials that other students might already have. Other students might be interested in a particular
enrichment topic that they want to pursue individually. So this format allows us to break away from the one-size-fits-all model of education and
allow students to follow a much more personalized curriculum.
Of course, we all know as educators that students don’t learn by sitting and passively watching videos. Perhaps one of the biggest components of this
effort is that we need to have students practice with the material in order to really understand it. There’s been a range of studies that demonstrate the
importance of this. This one, that appeared in Science last year, for example, demonstrates that even simple retrieval practice where students are just
supposed to repeat what they already learned gives considerably improved results on various achievement tests down the line than many other
educational interventions.
We’ve tried to build in retrieval practice into the platform as well as other forms of practice in many ways. For example, even our videos are not just
videos. Every few minutes the video pauses and the students get asked a question.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-Prospect theory, hyperbolic discounting, status quo bias, base rate bias, they’re all well-documented. So they’re all well-documented deviations from
rational behavior.
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
So here the video pauses and the student types in the answer into the box and submits. Obviously they weren’t paying attention. So they get to try
again. And this time they got it right. There is an optional explanation if they want. And now the video moves on to the next part of the lecture.
This is kind of simple question that I, as an instructor, might ask in class. But when I ask that kind of a question in class, 80% of the students are still
scribbling the last thing I said. 15% are zoned out on Facebook. And then there’s the smarty pants in the front row who blurts out the answer before
1/4/2018 Print Preview
4/7
anyone else has had a chance to think about it. And I, as the instructor, am terribly gratified that somebody actually knew the answer. And so the
lecture moves on before, really, most of the students have even noticed that a question had been asked.
Here, every single student has to engage with the material. Now, of course, these simple retrieval questions are not the end of the story. One needs to
build in much more meaningful practice questions. And one also needs to provide the students with feedback on those questions.
Now, how do you grade the work of 100,000 students if you do not have 10,000 TAs? The answer is you need to use technology to do it for you.
Now, fortunately technology has come a long way. And we can now grade a range of interesting types of homework.
In addition to multiple choice and the kinds of short answer questions that you saw on the video, we can also grade math, mathematical expressions
as well as mathematical derivations. We can grade models, whether it’s financial models in a business class or physical models in a science or
engineering class. And we can grade some pretty sophisticated programming assignments.
Let me show you one that’s actually pretty simple but fairly visual. This is from Stanford’s Computer Science 101 class. And the students are
supposed to color correct that blurry, red image.
They’re typing their program into the browser. And you can see they didn’t get it quite right. Lady Liberty is still sea sick. And so the student tries
again. And now they got it right. And they’re told that. And they can move on to the next assignment. This ability to interact actively with the
material and be told when you’re right or wrong is really essential to student learning.
Now, of course, we cannot yet grade the range of works that one needs for all courses. Specifically what’s lacking is the kind of critical thinking
work that is so essential in such disciplines as the humanities, the social sciences, business, and others. So we tried to convince, for example, some of
our humanities faculty that multiple choice was not such a bad strategy. That didn’t go over really well.
So we had to come up with a different solution. And the solution we ended up using is peer grading. It turns out that previous studies show, like this
one by Sadler and Good, that peer rating is a surprisingly effective strategy for providing reproducible grades. It was tried only in small classes. But
there it showed, for example, that the student assigned grade on the y-axis are actually very well correlated with the teacher assigned grade on the x-
axis.
What’s even more surprising is that self-grades, where the students grade their own work critically, so long as you incentivize them properly so they
can’t give themselves a perfect score, are actually even better correlated with the teacher grades. So this is an effective strategy that can be used for
grading at scale and is also a useful learning strategy for the students because they actually learn from the experience. So we now have the largest
peer grading pipeline ever devised where tens of thousands of students are grading each other’s work and quite successfully I have to say.
But this is not just about students sitting alone in their living room, working through problems. Around each one of our courses, a community of
students had formed, a global community of people around a shared intellectual endeavor. What you see here is a self-generated map from students
in our Princeton Sociology 101 course where they have put themselves in a world map. And you can really see the global reach of this kind of effort.
Students collaborated in these courses in a variety of different ways. First of all, there was a question-and-answer forum where students would post
questions and other students would answer those questions. And the really amazing thing is because there were so many students, it means that even
if the student posed the question at 3 o’clock in the morning, somewhere around the world there would be somebody who was awake and working on
1/4/2018 Print Preview
5/7
the same problem. And so in many of our courses the median response time for a question on the question-and-answer forum was 22 minutes, which
is not a level of service that I have ever offered to my Stanford students.
And you can see from the student testimonials that students actually find that because of this large online community they got to interact with each
other in many ways that were deeper than they did in the context of the physical classroom.
Students also self assembled, without any kind of intervention from us, into small study groups. Some of these were physical study groups along
geographical constraints and met on a weekly basis to work through problem sets. This is the San Francisco study group. But there were ones all
over the world. Others were virtual study groups sometimes along language lines or along cultural lines. And at the bottom left there you see are
multicultural, universal study group where people explicitly wanted to connect with people from other cultures.
There’s some tremendous opportunities to be had from this kind of framework. The first is that it has the potential of giving us a completely
unprecedented look into understanding human learning. Because the data that we can collect here is unique. You can collect every click, every
homework submission, every forum post from tens of thousands of students.
So you can turn the study of human learning from the hypothesis driven mode to the data driven mode, a transformation that, for example, has
revolutionized biology. You can use these data to understand fundamental questions like what are good learning strategies that are effective versus
ones that are not. And in the context of particular courses, you can ask questions like what are some of the misconceptions that are more common
and how do we help students fix them?
So here’s an example of that, also from Andrew’s machine learning class. This is a distribution of wrong answers to one of Andrew’s assignments.
The answers happen to be pairs of numbers. So you can draw them on this two-dimensional plot. Each of the little crosses that you see is a different
wrong answer. The big cross at the top left is where 2000 students gave the exact same wrong answer.
Now, if two students in the class of 100 give the same wrong answer, you would never notice. But when 2,000 students give the same wrong answer,
it’s kind of hard to miss. So Andrew and his students went in, looked at some of those assignments, understood the root cause of the misconception.
And then they produced a targeted error message that would be provided to every student whose answer fell into that bucket. Which means that
students who made that same mistake would now get personalized feedback telling them how to fix their misconception much more effectively. So
this personalization is something that one can then build by having the virtue of large numbers.
Personalization is, perhaps, one of the biggest opportunities here as well. Because it provides us with the potential of solving a 30-year-old problem.
Educational researcher Benjamin Bloom, in 1984, posed what’s called the 2 Sigma problem, which he observed by studying three populations.
The first is the population that studied in a lecture-based classroom. The second is a population of students that studied using a standard lecture-
based classroom but with a mastery-based approach so that students couldn’t move on to the next topic before demonstrating mastery of the previous
one. And finally, there was a population of students that were taught in a one-on-one instruction using a tutor.
The mastery-based population was a full standard deviation, or sigma, in achievement scores better than the standard lecture-based class. And the
individual tutoring gives you two sigma improvement in performance.
To understand what that means, let’s look at the lecture-based classroom and let’s pick the median performance as a threshold. So in a lecture-based
class, half the students are above that level and half are below. In the individual tutoring instruction, 98% of the students are going to be above that
1/4/2018 Print Preview
6/7
threshold. Imagine if we could teach so that 98% of our students would be above average.
Hence, the 2 Sigma problem. Because we cannot afford, as a society, to provide every student with an individual human tutor. But maybe we can
afford to provide each student with a computer or a smartphone. So the question is, how can we use technology to push from the left side of the
graph, from the blue curve, to the right side with the green curve?
Mastery is easy to achieve using a computer, because a computer doesn’t get tired of showing you the same video five times. And it doesn’t even get
tired of grading the same work multiple times. We’ve seen that in many of the examples that I’ve shown you. And even personalization is something
that we’re starting to see the beginnings of, whether it’s via the personalized trajectory through the curriculum or some of the personalized feedback
that we’ve shown you. So the goal here is to try and push and see how far we can get towards the green curve.
So if this is so great, are universities now obsolete? Well Mark Twain certainly thought so. He said that “college is a place where professor’s lecture
notes go straight to the student’s lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.”
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
I beg to differ with Mark Twain though. I think what he was complaining about is not universities but rather the lecture-based format that so many
universities spend so much time on.
So let’s go from back even further to Plutarch, who said that “the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.” And maybe
we should spend less time at universities filling our students mind with content by lecturing at them and more time igniting their creativity, their
imagination, and their problem solving skills by actually talking with them.
So how do we do that? We do that by doing active learning in the classroom. So there’s been many studies, including this one, that show that if you
use active learning interacting with your students in the classroom, performance improves on every single metric, on attendance, on engagement, and
on learning as measured by standardized tests. You can see, for example, that the achievement score almost doubles in this particular experiment. So
maybe this is how we should spend our time at universities.
So to summarize, if we could offer a top-quality education to everyone around the world for free, what would that do? Three things. First it would
establish education as a fundamental human right, where anyone around the world with the ability and the motivation could get the skill that they
need to make a better life for themselves, their families, and their communities.
Second, it would enable lifelong learning. It’s a shame that for so many people learning stops when we finish high school or when we finish college.
By having this amazing content be available, we would be able to learn something new every time you wanted, whether it’s just to expand our minds
or it’s to change our lives.
And finally, this would enable a wave of innovation. Because amazing talent can be found anywhere. Maybe even the next Albert Einstein or the
next Steve Jobs is living somewhere in a remote village in Africa. And if we could offer that person an education, they would be able to come up
with the next big idea and make the world a better place for all of us. Thank you very much.
1/4/2018 Print Preview
7/7
[APPLAUSE]
1/4/2018 Print Preview
1/5
Print This Document
Nine years later and very suddenly and very loudly, a new national conversation has grown around questions of tolerance, trust, and religious and
cultural values. We get four voices on these matters now. Reverend Janet Vincent is rector of St. Columbus Episcopal Church in Washington, DC.
Nine years ago, she ministered to rescuers, workers, and families of those killed at the site of the World Trade Center.
Bishop Harry Jackson is pastor of Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Maryland. His books include Personal Faith, Public Policy, and The Truth in
Black and White. Reza Aslan is author of No God But God, The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam. He is also a contributing editor to the
website The Daily Beast. And Nick Gillespie is editor in chief of reason.com and previously served as editor of Reason magazine.
Welcome to all of you. I’ll start with you, Reverend Vincent. We heard the president refer to the country as being anxious. He said fears can surface,
suspicions, divisions. How much of this to you goes back to 9/11?
I think it all goes back to 9/11. I was interested to hear him say today that we’re in a time of anxiety, but I think the anxiety has never left us since
9/11. There are deep, deep wounds, psychic and spiritual, as well as the physical wounds, and they haven’t gone away.
Bishop Jackson, all from 9/11 or responses to specific new events and real concerns?
Yeah, some from 9/11. I believe we never fully grieved out in the mainland, if you will, and grieving is a process where we acknowledge our hurt
and pain. Further, it’s not politically correct at this particular juncture to talk about the fact that tolerance is a twofold thing. We could be tolerant, but
the people that we deal with also have to be tolerant. And very often, preachers are not willing to say, hey, you may be feeling angry, upset. Here’s
how we deal with this.
Explain that. What do you mean by the political correctness?
Well, if America is still majority Christian, I’m going to put some of the blame for this problem at the feet of us clergy people. And perhaps we are
not talking about the fact that there can be a sense of anger and outrage that someone will blow themselves up in a particular setting. In DC, we may
feel very intimidated. We know that we’d be high on the target list. The 9/11 Mosque controversy is one that I don’t think that we’ve helped people
process their feelings. So as a pastoral counselor for many years and one who trains ministers, I think you’d agree with me, Reverend Vincent, that
there needs to be a voice, a pastoral voice, that helps people deal with how they feel positively as opposed to explosively.
Let me bring Reza Aslan in. What do you see? Has something changed? Are we a less tolerant society then we were nine years ago?
Well, as far as the polls go, it seems that that is the case with regards to Islam. The Washington Post recently released a poll that showed that almost
half of Americans have a negative view towards Islam. What’s remarkable about that is that is about a 7% or 8% jump from the months immediately
after the attacks of September 11. Now, I think the president’s right. Some of this has to do with the economy. Some of it has to do with fear of
President Obama. After all, 20% of Americans believe he himself is a Muslim. But as far as the polls indicate, there’s no question that anti-Islam
sentiment is at unprecedented levels in the United States.
And Nick Gillespie, bringing you into this, do you see a rising Islamophobia or a vocal minority?
1/4/2018 Print Preview
2/5
Yeah, it’s clear it’s not even a minority. I mean, when you look at somebody like Terry Jones, he is a nutcase who has a constituency of essentially
zero people. What’s he got, maybe 50 people in his flock? I think people, the reaction over the 9/11 Mosque, as it’s called, or Ground Zero Mosque is
more complicated, but even that has more to do with the proximity to Ground Zero.
And I would offer this up. When you look at the number of hate crimes that are attributed to anti-Islamic sentiment, it’s way down from where it was
in 2001, and there’s no sign that there’s going to be an uptick of that. I think that Americans have actually processed 9/11 pretty well in the same way
that they processed a lot of other natural and man made disasters. What we see here I think coming up in a lot of this stuff is more anxiety about the
lack of leadership in America.
When you look at somebody like Barack Obama– and I’m not picking on him. I think the Republicans were terrible in their time in power. But
Obama has not even come clear with what he thinks about the Ground Zero Mosque. He immediately invokes abstract notions and principles and he
doesn’t just say what people want to hear. Yeah, I think it should go forward or not. And I don’t even think people care that much about the decision.
What they’re looking for are leaders who are somewhat decisive.
We’re nine years into a war in Afghanistan with a very hard core religious background. It shows no sign of ending. There is a lot of religious tinged
violence in Afghanistan coming our way. These are the problems that people are dealing with. I don’t think anybody has a problem with Muslims in
America.
Well, Reverend Vincent, you started this by saying that we had not processed 9/11 and that was a very contrary view.
I agree with Nick that the lack of leadership, I think the lack of leadership in helping us to process the trauma of 9/11, we’re paying a big price for. I
also agree that being at war for nine years causes constant anxiety. This anxiety that so many people experience but have no reasonable outlet for,
how do we deal with that?
I think we do need to deal with it politically and pastorally. Our leaders need to stand up and say who we are. In this time of anxiety, when we’re
fearful, when we’re afraid for our lives, for our safety, for our children, our highest values go out the window, the things we hold onto.
But we say we’re Americans. We say we love liberty. We say that we love equality. We say we love freedom. Then we have to stand up and show
examples of that.
Well, but do you think we are not? I mean, to put it bluntly, do you think that we– not the leaders, but we the American people– are less tolerant
today than we were 9/11.
I think we can be less tolerant. I think we often are less tolerant because we’re afraid. I think at heart, though, I think we want to be more tolerant. I
think we want to be good people. We see ourselves as a good people. But our political leaders across the aisle must stand up and demonstrate that
they are good people so that we can be good people. Our religious leaders need to stand up and say that we will not be intolerant. In fact, we need to
go beyond the debate about tolerance and intolerance. We must talk about acceptance.
Bishop Jackson, I just want to read you part of an email we received. This in response to a story we did yesterday about the Florida pastor. So it’s
from a viewer, a man or woman, I’m not even sure. “This nation has Judeo-Christian roots. Muslims have gained a tremendous foothold in this
country since the 1970s, and they are very, very public about their religion in a way Christians are not. Why should the American people not be
1/4/2018 Print Preview
3/5
distressed by all this? Also many, if not all, of the plots foiled in this country involve domestic Muslims. Millions of plain, ordinary Americans have
disquiet about the growth of Islam.” Now, do you understand that? Where is that coming from?
I understand it. But again, I agree that there needs to be leadership, religious leadership. I pastor a church in DC that has 22 different nationalities–
black, white, Hispanic, first generation Africans, people who have come from all kinds of walks of life and faith. I think there needs to be some
specific teaching on this, and the next generation may be less tolerant if we don’t do something.
Think about what happened with Al Sharpton versus Glenn Beck on the Mall, all the hubbub. Is the Tea Party racist or is it not? We are in a time that
unless we give clear leadership, as Reverend Vincent said, we can slip away from our professed values, and our leaders are supposed to lead the way
in exemplifying the American dream.
Reza Aslan, I’ll bring you back in here. Pick up on all this. Where do you see it coming from?
Well, look. I think the important thing to understand here is that it’s not so much that Islamophobia is on the rise is that it’s becoming increasingly
mainstream. I mean, there are fringe figures, figures like Stop Islamization of America, the group that is going to take over Ground Zero tomorrow
for an anti-Islam rally that six months ago would never have received the kind of mainstream media attention that they are receiving these days. Six
months ago, it would have been impossible to think of some of the words that have come out of GOP presidential front runner Newt Gingrich’s
mouth in which he’s completely associated American Muslims with al-Qaeda.
So I think what we really need to worry about is the mainstreaming of this kind of religious bigotry, the idea that it could actually become a wedge
issue in the mid-term elections. But nevertheless, we do need to pull back for just a moment and remember that in the 19th century, we had the anti-
Catholic know nothings who thought that Catholics couldn’t be Americans, that Catholicism itself was an evil religion. We look back at them now
with shame and derision.
In the 20th century, you had people like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford and politicians like Louis McFadden talking about the Great Jewish
Conspiracy and the conspiracy to pull the United States into the Second World War. Again, we look back at them with derision. And I’m certain that
decades from now, maybe not that long, we will look back at the Pamela Gellers and the Robert Spencers of the world with the same kind of derision
that we think of. The foundation of this country, the religious liberties of this country, they can be challenged but they cannot be overcome.
And Nick Gillespie, come back here. Your first round here, you were talking about you think that we are still fundamentally a tolerant people. So
you don’t even see the problem that some of the other guests here are talking about? Well, there’s no question that somebody like Newt Gingrich has
been abominable in this discussion, I think. Easy equations of all Islam with al-Qaeda terrorists, things like that, the fact that he is supposedly a
proponent of property rights and he was talking about using eminent domain to keep the people from building a mosque or a cultural center near
Ground Zero.
But what I would argue is that more fundamentally, I don’t think that there’s any reason to believe that people are less tolerant, that religion is on the
rise. Over the past 10 years and even the past 20 or 30 years before that, people have been embracing different types of lifestyles, whether you’re gay,
whether you’re from a foreign country, et cetera. It’s much easier to be different in America than it was 20 years ago, and I think that includes being
Islamic.
The real question on a certain level about anxiety is, why are we still talking about Ground Zero in the sense that nothing has been built there? And I
think that that’s actually in a lot of ways the displaced narrative of grieving or of healing of 9/11 and moving on is the fact that the political
1/4/2018 Print Preview
4/5
leadership, and in many ways, the economic leadership, hasn’t gone back on track. If the Liberty Tower had been built by now, this would not even
be an issue because people wouldn’t be talking about a scarred lower Manhattan anymore. These are the types of things.
And even more than the wars, I would argue, what we’re seeing is this has been a very long and difficult recession which people haven’t been
acknowledging and politicians haven’t been acknowledging in any kind of real way, and a lot of weird stuff bubbles up when you have long time
economic pain. Realistically, the people who have been bearing the brunt of a lot of inarticulate or inchoate anxiety are really illegal immigrants or
immigration more generally, which illegal immigrant entries are down but people seem to be much more hyped up about the threat of illegal
immigrants taking their job. It’s not a real fear, but it’s a very harshly, palpably felt one.
All right, Bishop Jackson. I know you’re eager to get back in here. That was a lot on the table, right? Politics, economics, immigration, all kinds of
anxiety. But put it in the context we’re talking about.
Well, I wanted to talk about the 9/11 Mosque issue. I think there, there’s an opportunity for the Islamic community perhaps to show tolerance
themselves, to say, look, I don’t have to build there since it’s causing so much trouble, and I’m going to get a higher bid. I understand there’s money
on the table that would give them a profit. That kind of offering an olive branch could, in fact, multiply a sense of forgiveness and peace.
You’d like to see it moved?
I’d like to see it moved only because that’s the spirit of reconciliation in my view.
But you’re shaking your head. I mean, the other side of that, the other spirit, is no, let them build, right?
No, I think we must let them build. I think we must deal with the anxiety of it. We’re a culture that’s afraid of conflict and anxiety. We need to deal
with it. We need to allow that mosque to be built. You know the comments before about different groups, Catholics and other groups who were
persecuted in our country, Islam is now being persecuted and we need to stand up for them as we would stand up for groups who have come before
them.
Reza Aslan, is there a way forward that you see or propose? Even right at this table, we’re having the conflict over what to do at Ground Zero?
Well, let me first of all just say to what was said by Bishop Jackson is that we do not in this country hold our constitutional rights hostage to people’s
sensitivities, regardless of what those sensitivities are. So this isn’t an issue necessarily just about location, though there are some good people who
do feel that the location is the issue.
The same people who are gathered at Ground Zero to protest the building of this multi-faith center that would be essentially modeled upon the
YMCA and which has Jews and Christians on its board, are the same people who are protesting the creation of mosques all around the country. And
I think the question to those people who say that it should be moved is, well, how far is enough for you? Is four blocks enough, because there is
already a mosque four blocks away?
So I think that this issue of the Islamic community center has allowed some of these marginalized groups and some of these anti-Muslim views on
the fringes to come out into the center, to come out into the mainstream. And that’s what we need to push back on because in this country, we do not
tolerate this issue of treating some religious communities differently even if it’s temporary, even if it’s just in one particular occasion. That’s not how
we do things around here.
1/4/2018 Print Preview
5/5
All right, we just have to have a very short response, Bishop Jackson.
I was in a situation recently where we had land, we could build in a certain community here, and the neighborhood rose up and said, it’s too much
traffic, you’re too busy. The way you want to help people is not appropriate. We chose to move because we want a friendship and a relationship with
the community we’re seeking to serve. I think now we’re fighting on principles instead of saying maybe, where is your heart concerning the
individuals you want to serve in the nation?
All right, I know this is going to continue. I know you all have a lot more to say, but we have to end it there. Reverend Janet Vincent, Bishop Harry
Jackson, Reza Aslan, and Nick Gillespie, thank you, all four.
Thank you.
Review
the list of Films on Demand: Sociology Collection: Social Institutions to select and watch one video from each of the following categories listed: family, education, and religion.
Select one of the following options to deliver your assignment:
Option 1
Write a 700- to 1,050-word essay.
Format your assignment according to appropriate course level APA guidelines.
Submit your assignment to the Assignment Files tab.
Include the following in your paper:
· Prepare an introduction that identifies the major social institutions in society and why they are important.
· Describe each video and the social institutions it addresses.
· Identify any relevant models of power structure or political behavior that might be influential.
· Explain the functionalist, conflict, and interactionist perspectives on the family, religion, and education. Which perspective does each film use to discuss the institution? Explain specific examples from the videos.
· Provide a conclusion that summarizes the main ideas of the essay and describes how these institutions have influenced you.
Format your references according to appropriate course level APA guidelines. Include citations in a separate reference list.
|
Title ABC/ 1 23 Version X |
1 |
|
Films on Demand SOC/100 Version 5 |
University of Phoenix Material
Films on Demand: Sociology Collection: Social Institutions
Week 4 Individual Assignment
Resource: Films on Demand located in the University of Phoenix Library under the Multimedia Resources.
Select and watch one video from each of the following categories:
Family
Family & Social Changes. Films On Demand. Films Media Group, 2014. Web. 19 Dec. 2014.
Why More Americans Are Living Alone. Films On Demand. Films Media Group, 2012. Web. 22 Dec. 2014.
Why Are Fewer Americans Getting Married? Films On Demand. Films Media Group, 2011. Web. 22 Dec. 2014.
Religion
TEDTalks: Alain De Botton. Atheism 2.0. Films On Demand. Films Media Group, 2012. Web. 22 Dec. 2014.
Heaven: How Five Religions See It. Films On Demand. Films Media Group, 2011. Web. 22 Dec. 2014.
Nine Years After 9/11: Has Religious Tolerance Changed in America? Films On Demand. Films Media Group, 2010. Web. 22 Dec. 2014.
Symbol: Should We Still Fear the Swastika? Films On Demand. Films Media Group, 2010. Web. 22 Dec. 2014.
Education
The Education of Michelle Rhee. Films On Demand. Films Media Group, 2013. Web. 22 Dec. 2014.
Unbreakable: One Girl Changing the World: The Story of Malala. Films On Demand. Films Media Group, 2013. Web. 22 Dec. 2014.
TEDTalks: Daphne Koller. What We’re Learning from Online Education. Films On Demand. Films Media Group, 2012. Web. 22 Dec. 2014.
Lessons from the Real World: Social Issues and Student Involvement. Films On Demand. Films Media Group, 2011. Web. 22 Dec. 2014.
Copyright © XXXX by University of Phoenix. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2016, 2015 by University of Phoenix. All rights reserved.
