Tag: academe (page 1 of 2)

July 16, 2025

viewpoint diversity revisited

Conservatives have criticized identity-based affirmative action because, they suggest, it imposes an expectation on students of color that they will represent what is presumed to be, say, the Black or Latino view on any given issue, which discourages freethinking. Admitting students for viewpoint diversity would turn the holding of conservative ideas into a quasi-identity, subject to some of the same concerns. Students admitted to help restore ideological balance would likely feel a responsibility to defend certain views, regardless of the force of opposing arguments they might encounter.

For professors hired for their political beliefs, the pressure to maintain those views would be even greater. If you had a tenure-track position, your salary, health insurance and career prospects would all depend on the inflexibility of your ideology. The smart thing to do in that situation would be to interact with other scholars who share your point of view and to read publications that reinforce what you already believe. Or you might simply engage with opposing ideas in bad faith, refusing even to consider their merits. This would create the sort of ideological echo chamber that proponents of viewpoint diversity have suggested, often with some justification, leads to closed-mindedness among left-leaning professors.

I think this argument is exactly correct: I have often said that if I were offered a job because I represent a certain position I would ask, “What happens if I change my mind?”

But the argument is also a useful strategy for ensuring that the academic humanities remain an ideological monoculture. Morton’s view is: It’s okay if all the professors are progressives as long as they assign some non-progressive books. And if you find that convincing, then turn it around: What if all the professors were rock-ribbed conservatives but told you that that’s fine, since they assign Marx and Fanon?

So, acknowledging the validity of Morton’s warning, I still think that seeking more ideological diversity among faculty is less bad that her plan to keep things just as they are. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, every progressive becomes profoundly conservative once they’re in power.

And while we’re on the subject, I like this from Justin Smith-Ruiu:

One great difference anyhow between the diversity statements of the past years and the loyalty oaths of the McCarthy era is that the McCarthyites were accommodating enough simply to force you to sign their oath; the DEI offices, by contrast, forced you to write your own, and then to sign it…. It is in some sense a shame that the diversity statements they were coercing out of us until recently met their demise at the moment fully functional LLMs hit the market — there was an instance, if there ever was one, where it really did make sense to outsource our writing tasks to the machines. I hope that if the Trumpists succeed in their efforts to impose viewpoint-based scrutiny of our job applications in the coming years, AI will likewise rise to the occasion and enable us to say whatever it is we are supposed to say, simply in order to be able to make a living, without having to waste any of our precious human cognitive energy on it.

June 2, 2025

peers

With the old institutions of knowledge collapsing all around us — something I write about occasionally, e.g. here — I want to pay brief tribute to one: peer review of academic writing.

When I was working on my biography of Paradise Lost — pub date: tomorrow! — I came to believe that Milton’s view of Eve was more ambivalent than I had previously thought. (You’ll need to read my book for the details.) But, I reasoned, it is a truth universally acknowledged that Milton was an absolutely unreconstructed misogynist who couldn’t possibly have portrayed Eve, at any stage of the story, in a positive light. So I suppressed my own inclinations and went on with the book.

Then, when PUP sent the finished text out for peer review, I received from one reviewer a pretty scathing report. He or she liked much of the book, but thought that my neglect of a more positive interpretation of Eve was a damning oversight: even if I did not share that view myself I should certainly have acknowledged it as a possibility, since it is well-represented in the critical literature on the poem. This criticism, by the way, while quite severe, was expressed without rancor or insult or snark, and was accompanied by equally thoughtful praise for other elements of my book.

Had I never entertained the idea that Milton commends Eve, this criticism would still have been very useful to me, because I do not know the critical literature on Paradise Lost as well as a Miltonist does. (Remember, my book is not about Paradise Lost itself so much as about its reception history, how people have read it and responded to it — an assignment much better suited to a generalist like me.) But the response was especially welcome to me because it gave me permission to write something I wanted to write but had believed I shouldn’t.

The moral of this story: Honest peer review, even or especially when it’s highly critical, is a real gift to the scholar being reviewed.

June 1, 2025

Ben Sasse:

Higher education’s failures are high-profile case studies in our larger crisis of civil society. In institution after institution, in sector after sector, center-left leaders in recent decades went from understanding that most Americans are in the middle on most debates to making the bizarre misjudgment that the loudest voices on the culture-war left were the constituencies to which they were accountable. The result has been that the center-right plurality of Americans understandably judge normies as under assault, and thus they fearfully drift toward greater tolerance of meat-ax approaches from the right, whose illiberalism seems preferable to the illiberalism of the left. This “choice” between two illiberalisms is tragic because it is false.

Yes, intellectually it is false — but practically it may be the only choice available. What major American university can claim to be liberal in its intellectual orientation, can legitimately claim to prize intellectual diversity and to expose students to a wide range of ideas? Maybe the University of Chicago.

May 29, 2025

the plusses and minuses of Gioiatopia

I don’t think Ted Gioia seriously means everything in this post about ending AI cheating, but let’s go through it as though he does — as though he is seriously outlining the Academic Gioiatopia. He makes five points about the AI-proof experience he had at Oxford:

(1) EVERYTHING WAS HANDWRITTEN — WE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE TYPEWRITERS.

A number of my colleagues in the Honors College here at Baylor are doing just this: using good old-fashioned blue books to administer in-class exams. Other colleagues are handing out spiral-bound notebooks — they buy them cheaply at Wal-Mart or Office Depot — and asking students to use them to keep commonplace books. But these are all seminar classes in the humanities, which are a tiny percentage of the overall offerings of a university. What would be the equivalents for Microeconomics, or Sociology 101, or Organic Chem?

(2) MY PROFESSORS TAUGHT ME AT TUTORIALS IN THEIR OFFICES. THEY WOULD GRILL ME VERBALLY — AND I WAS EXPECTED TO HAVE IMMEDIATE RESPONSES TO ALL THEIR QUESTIONS.

Again, while this makes sense for the humanities and some versions of the social sciences — and is basically the only way to teach musical performance and some of the other arts — it’s hard to see how it translates into many other disciplines. And to implement something like it across the university would be enormously costly.

Ted knows this, sort of: he says, “US colleges could replace their bloated administrative bureaucracies with more teachers. If they did that, there would be plenty of tutors, and every student could receive this individualized attention.” Yes, they could do this, but that would require enormous changes to the way universities function, and you can’t do it just by snapping your fingers. (Though I guess Thanos could get rid of half the deans and deanlets that way. Hmmm….) Many current employees would have to be given notice; administrators would have to be asked to return to the classroom, probably with pay cuts; new searches would have to be initiated, pursued, completed; offices would have to be converted to classrooms.

And of course many disciplines would be required to change everything about how they teach. Think of those Intro to Sociology classes now held in big lecture halls with 200 students, featuring lots of PowerPoint slides, students responding to polls on their laptops, etc. In the academic Gioiatopia, where instead of one 200-student section of SOC 101 we now have 10 20-student sections, there would no longer be any use for those lecture halls … but the department would now need ten seminar rooms. Are those lying around unused? No they are not. So an enormous investment would have to be made in redesigning existing buildings and perhaps building new ones. Oh, and also you now need several more people to teach SOC 101.

Multiply this situation by a factor of 50 or so in each university and you have an idea of what Gioiatopia would require. How many American universities could muster the cash needed to do it — even if they were sure of a significant return on investment?

One more note here: Ted says that “professors in the US would refuse to spend so much time face-to-face with students. They would complain that the Oxford approach is too labor intensive, too demanding on their precious time.” I know many professors who would strongly prefer to spend more face-to-face time with their students — if they could be delivered from the responsibilities of regular publishing. Their time is precious: professors who take their teaching responsibilities seriously, even in the current regime, and also do the amount of scholarship required for tenure and promotion don’t have a lot of time left over. A regime in which teaching was given greater priority and the treadmill of publication slowed or halted altogether would be welcome to a great many academics. But those who have suffered through the current system seem disinclined to reduce the sufferings of the people who succeed them.

(3) ACADEMIC RESULTS WERE BASED ENTIRELY ON HANDWRITTEN AND ORAL EXAMS. YOU EITHER PASSED OR FAILED — AND MANY FAILED.

(4) THE SYSTEM WAS TOUGH AND UNFORGIVING — BUT THIS WAS INTENTIONAL. OTHERWISE THE CREDENTIAL GOT DEVALUED.

I’m treating these two together because they depend on the same context: One in which the credential offered by the university is scarce and hence valuable; one in which far more people desire such a credential than can possibly receive it. Indeed, the credential is perceived as so valuable that one would risk failure and no credential at all rather than forego it for something less precious. Of how many universities today can that be said? If, say, Princeton were to implement such a system but the other elite American universities did not, how many prospective students would think a Princeton degree so much more valuable than any alternative that they would take the risk of attending Princeton rather than choose another elite university where, thanks to grade inflation, they could only with difficulty end up with a GPA lower than 3.5?

Now add to that the simple fact that, if once upon a time university places were scarce and prospective students plentiful, we now have precisely the opposite problem: too many universities competing for a shrinking pool of applicants. And no possibility of that ratio altering for the better anytime … well, any time.

Which takes me back to my point above on “return on investment.” No university in need of students would restructure its curricula and pedagogical structures in order to ensure that more people fail. Today’s universities think about little other than recruitment and retention, because they desperately need the money: you’re going to tell them to adopt a system with the express purpose of producing less retention? — and at the same time tell them to find tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to reinvent their infrastructure?

Even the richest universities would find those recommendations nuts, because they know that even their massive endowments could very quickly be depleted by such a strategy (especially when they’re faced with a Presidential administration determined to cut off their access to federal funding).

(5) EVEN THE INFORMAL WAYS OF BUILDING YOUR REPUTATION WERE DONE FACE-TO-FACE — WITH NO TECHNOLOGY INVOLVED.

I’m gonna ignore this one because it’s not about preventing AI cheating, but rather about the equally important but distinct matter of one’s university years as a time not just to make social connections but to learn social skills.

One final question, and then its answer: Do students want the kind of experience Gioiatopia would provide? Some would, certainly — but how many? I would guess considerably less than one percent of the pool of applicants. For the overwhelming majority Gioiatopia would be a dystopia. Why?

Most young people today feel, with considerable justification, that they live in an economically precarious time. They therefore want the credential that will open doors that lead to a good job, either directly or (by getting them into good graduate programs) indirectly. Their parents want the same thing, and perhaps want it even more intensely because they tend to be making an enormous financial investment in their children’s education.

But those same young people also want to have a good time in college, a period of social experience and experimentation that they (rightly) think will be harder to come by when they enter that working world. Many people sneer at universities that build lazy rivers and climbing walls, and devote every spare penny to their athletic programs — I’ve curled my lip at such things a few times over the decades — but the fact remains that such amenities are significant factors in recruitment. Many students like them; they’re part of the [insert university name here] Experience.

Here’s the key thing: what most people call AI but what I call chatbot interfaces to machine-learning corpora (yes, we’ve finally gotten around to that) do a great deal to facilitate the simultaneous pursuit of these two competing goods. Yes, students understand — they understand quite well, and vocally regret — that when they use chatbots they are not learning much, if anything. But the acquisition of knowledge is a third competing good, and if they pursue that one seriously they may well have to sacrifice one of the other two, or even both. Right now they can have two out of three, and as Meat Loaf taught us all long ago, two out of three ain’t bad.

The people who run universities understand all this also, even if they have their own regrets; and they’re not going to impede their income stream any further than it’s been impeded already by demographic realities. They will make the necessary accommodations to a chatbot-dependent clientele, because, especially when customers are scarce, the customer is always right. Those departments and programs that push back will be able to to do so only imperfectly, and probably at the cost of declining enrollments. So it goes.

And the kind of learning that Ted Gioia and I prize will still go on. However, it will primarily thrive outside the university system — as it did for many centuries before universities became as large a part of the social order as they are now.

May 8, 2025

sadness

Clay Shirky:

I am an administrator at New York University, responsible for helping faculty adapt to digital tools. Since the arrival of generative AI, I have spent much of the last two years talking with professors and students to try to understand what is going on in their classrooms. In those conversations, faculty have been variously vexed, curious, angry, or excited about AI, but as last year was winding down, for the first time one of the frequently expressed emotions was sadness. This came from faculty who were, by their account, adopting the strategies my colleagues and I have recommended: emphasizing the connection between effort and learning, responding to AI-generated work by offering a second chance rather than simply grading down, and so on. Those faculty were telling us our recommended strategies were not working as well as we’d hoped, and they were saying it with real distress.

“Sadness” is the correct term — and, as Shirky shows later in his essay, students are feeling it too.

See also Phil Christman’s recent essay, which touches on themes I’ve written about also, for instance here and here.

April 14, 2025

Orange Man v Harvard (2024)

The Promise of American Higher Education – Harvard University President:

The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.

I certainly hope that Harvard and any other universities that take the same path of resistance win … but: The question is not whether private universities can determine their own identities, but rather whether private universities can determine their own identities while receiving government funds. If Harvard didn’t take federal funding, the Trump administration would have no leverage over it. (Except possibly the threat to end its tax exemptions, which would be unlikely to survive in court.)

Without federal funding, of course, even Harvard would struggle to afford certain vital scientific and medical research, which is why I hope they win. But I also hope that they’re serious when they say that they plan to “broaden the intellectual and viewpoint diversity within our community.” I very much doubt it, though.

(Take my views on that with a grain of salt, though: as I’ve often said, no matter how much I publish or where I publish it, I am, as a vocal Christian and disposition ally if not programmatically conservative, absolutely unemployable outside the Christian college/university world. So I have a beef.)

The letter from Harvard’s counsel makes two main arguments, both of which will probably be adjudicated in court: that Harvard has already been making the changes to its institutional culture that the Executive Branch is demanding — which is interesting as an acknowledgment that changes need to be implemented — and that the government cannot cut funding without due process. We’ll see whether the courts endorse or reject those claims. I’ll be watching closely.

UPDATE: I like this from the WSJ editorial board:

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the government may not use federal benefits or funds to coerce parties to surrender their constitutional rights. This is what the Administration is doing by demanding Harvard accede to “viewpoint diversity.”

The Administration is also overstepping its authority by imposing sweeping conditions on funds that weren’t spelled out by Congress. The Justices held in Cummings (2022) that “if Congress intends to impose a condition on the grant of federal moneys, it must do so unambiguously” to ensure the recipient “voluntarily and knowingly accept[ed] the terms.”

Congress can pass a law to advance Mr. Trump’s higher-ed reforms, such as reporting admissions data. But the Administration can’t unilaterally and retroactively attach strings to grants that are unrelated to their purpose. President Trump has enough balls in the air without also trying to run Harvard.

And this:

The demands were designed to blow up negotiations, not move the two parties closer to a deal, said Jeffrey Flier, a former dean of the Harvard Medical School and member of the Council on Academic Freedom, which has been working toward expanding viewpoint diversity on campus.

“You can’t suddenly turn a switch and things change overnight,” he said. Many in the Trump administration “have said that they don’t think the institutions can be reformed from within, and they need to be burned down and rebuilt from the edges.”

This sounds right — but what does “burned down” mean? Presumably not closed; I guess it means a complete organizational restructuring, with all-new top administrators and a replacement for the Harvard Corporation. Presumably also this new leadership would restructure the academic programs of the university. But perhaps no one in the Trump administration is thinking that far ahead. This may be not a plan but rather just another example of what Steve Bannon calls “flooding the zone with shit.”

If anyone associated with the administration does have a plan, though, it would definitely be Christopher Rufo.

UPDATE 2: This from John O. McGinnis provides some vital long-term context:

Ironically, the left, now alarmed by the federal government’s intrusive reach, bears direct responsibility for crafting the very legal weapons wielded against the universities it dominates. Almost four decades ago, progressive legislators demanded sweeping amendments to civil rights law, expanding federal oversight over higher education. The sequence of events reveals a cautionary tale of political hubris: progressive confidence that state power would reliably serve their ends overlooked the reality that governmental authority, once unleashed, recognizes no ideological master. Today’s circumstances starkly illustrate how expansive federal control over civil society, originally celebrated by progressives, returns to haunt its architects. The left’s outrage ought to focus not on this particular administration but on its own reckless empowerment of the state.

And this from Edward Frame:

Yet for all its courage, Harvard’s response stopped short of making the argument that would best protect the values for which it was fighting. It defended the university’s independence without explaining why that independence deserves protection. It invoked values like “pluralism” and “inquiry,” but it did not fully explain why those values are essential to a liberal democratic society. The letter therefore missed an opportunity to articulate what a university is for — not just to students or donors, but to the country. And this matters, because Trump’s attack against this and other universities is not only about the balance of power between universities and the government. It is, at bottom, about the legitimacy of higher education as a public good.

January 28, 2025

persuasion

Recently I responded to a post by the historian Tim Burke, and today I’m going to return to Tim’s writing. This is from a recent post of his:

I think public and private institutions are going to slow-roll any shifts in their policies and in the process they’re going to have to abandon compliance as the predominant logic of policy-making. That is not just a change for administrations. It’s also a necessary, maybe even overdue, change in how campus progressives and liberals (students, faculty and staff) think about their institutions. The long intertwining of left-liberal goals and regulatory activity (whether governmental regulations or institutional rules) has made most of us unaccustomed to articulating our motivating values in clear and transparent ways and in trying to tie those values to our voluntary practices and our persuasively-articulated expectations for others. We’ve all fallen into the habit of demanding a policy for this and a policy for that, of insisting that we restrain and restrict, that we require and sanction.

But as administrations have rested on compliance most, they will feel the shock of its loss most intensely. The articulation of values has become unfamiliar for some of us, but for many administrators, it has wholly atrophied into oblivion except as a strategy for placating or as a component of crisis communication.

The passages I’ve highlighted lead nicely into this post I’ve just written for the Hedgehog Review on trying to get Management to take your side — and the alternative, which, meme-maker than I am, I have called persuasion.

January 24, 2025

one more round on politics and the university

Re: this 2022 piece from Tim Burke — an outstanding historian and cultural critic whom I’ve been reading for a long time, and both like and respect — I think, first: Is it ever possible to issue warnings about unwelcome right-wing governmental influence without invoking the Nazis? I’d like to see a different historical comparison, just for once. (I think what Christopher Rufo wants is something a little more like the Communist Party’s takeover of Chinese universities.) But Tim has in later posts used other analogies, so I shouldn’t complain.

Anyway, I’m responding to this older post because it seems to me to sum up some ideas, assumptions, and perspectives that I’ve been having to deal with all my career. Tim writes,

This kind of turn can begin anywhere, anytime — like right this moment, here and now — wearing the mask of pragmatism and accommodation: let’s not make waves, let’s not use words or make speeches that draw attention, let’s make friendly connections to state legislators, let’s rename that program, let’s quietly defund that one center. Let’s not grant tenure to that person. Let’s encourage that professor to retire. Let’s look for a leader who is acceptable to interests that really hate the university and its values. Let’s take the money for an independent institute that pushes far-right economic philosophy. Let’s take away some governance from faculty, because they tend to provoke our enemies too much. Let’s compromise. Let’s be realistic.

Change the word “right” in that paragraph to “left” and you have a reasonably accurate account of what happened when leftist academics began their “long march through the institutions” of academe — especially in the humanities and social sciences. (Things are a little more complicated elsewhere, but for the purposes of this post, I’ll be using “the academy” loosely, to mean primarily the humanities and social sciences and to a varying extent the other disciplines.)

The leftward drift of the academy has been going on for a long time, but it clearly accelerated when the students shaped by the campus activism of the Sixties became professors. Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals is an alarmist screed but the title, at least, has some merit — a fellow professor of English once told me that if the phrase hadn’t been co-opted by Kimball he’d have been glad to own it, and several others around the table nodded agreement. When committed leftists gained a majority in departmental and institutional committees, then they made a point of not granting tenure to that person — the person whose politics might have been slightly to the right of Elizabeth Warren’s — and encouraging the professor to retire who thought that English majors should be required to take a course on Shakespeare, or that maybe the History department should offer some courses in military history. They renamed programs and defunded centers. One of the chief proposals of Ibram X. Kendi was to diminish faculty governance and give the power instead to administration-created “antiracism task forces.” And so on.

When Tim tells professors to ask if “the university president who yesterday argued for more attention to the diverse expressions of religious faith within the classroom argue[s] tomorrow for more attention to the case for carrying guns or the case for restrictions on abortion,” he’s assuming that the American university should be a place in which everyone thinks that the Second Amendment (as interpreted by SCOTUS at least) is a terrible thing and that no stance on abortion is conceivable other than abortion-on-demand. After all, for his whole professional life, and mine, that’s been the case: if you had different views on those topics, you certainly kept them to yourself.

The point of Tim’s post, I think, is to say that the political status quo in the academy is what should be, world without end, and any change to it must be resisted. Thus his conclusion:

That is what we now must do. Watch for those who will come forward with the aim of making us easier to deliver on a platter to some future monstrosity, and block their path whenever they step forward. Start building the foundations for a maze, a moat, a fortress, a barricade, for becoming as hard to seize as possible. Time for the ivory tower to take on new meaning.

But here’s the thing: It seems to me that Tim wants is an academy in which people like me — people who are profoundly and passionately anti-MAGA but not doctrinaire leftists¹ — are unemployable. Because that’s exactly what the status quo is and long has been. This is an old topic with me, but: I have had a wonderful career, but I have had it only because in this country there are a handful of religious colleges and universities, which (among other things) are more politically diverse than their secular counterparts. No matter how much I publish or where I publish it, my open religious beliefs and social-conservatism-on-some-issues make me persona non grata at almost every university in the country. If the entire American university system had been what Tim wants it to be, I’d have been forced to find a different career.

So even though the prospect of a MAGA march through the academic institutions fills me with absolute disgust, I also think that maybe, just maybe, if academics with Tim’s politics had been somewhat more tolerant of academics like me, it needn’t have come to this. Tim himself has said some really nice things about my work in the past, but I do wonder, if he and I happened to be in the same discipline, he could support the idea of having me as a colleague. (But of course, even if he could, I’d lose the departmental vote.)

Tim tells us: “Ask that your institution write a mission statement, a values declaration, a promise for the future that no matter what happens, your institution stands for democracy, for freedom, for rights, for openness, for truth.” But I don’t think that the humanities departments in American colleges and universities have recently stood for any of those things: they have instead stood for a distinctively Left interpretation of some of those things. (“Openness” certainly never meant openness to me, or any number of other Christian and/or conservative scholars I could name.) A university whose direction is set by Christopher Rufo certainly won’t be concerned with democracy, freedom, rights, openness, and truth — but then neither would be a university whose direction is set by Ibram X. Kendi. And if the choice were between Rufo and Kendi, then we’d all lose — all academics, and all Americans.

So I’m hoping that won’t be the choice — that, or anything like it. I hope that MAGA attempts to conscript and/or control universities fail utterly. But I also hope that strategies to keep universities ideologically unanimous fail. I’d love to see the clash between these two intolerant visions lead to some kind of compromise, some toleration (however uneasy) of diverse political views. Sometimes bad people wear what Tim calls “the mask of pragmatism and accommodation,” but pragmatism and accommodation are genuine options also, in a politically diverse environment, and typically not evil ones. But sometimes I feel that I’m the only academic who thinks so.

December 14, 2024

intellectual furnishings

The photograph above features Victor Brombert, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton, who rates an obituary in the NYT not because of his academic career but because of what he did during the Second World War.

His personal story is a great one, but I like this photo as an exercise in the archeology of what Shannon Mattern calls “intellectual furnishings.” What might have been on a literature professor’s desk in 1985? In this case:

Books
Academic journals
Pen
Pencil (I think that’s a pencil he’s holding, but it’s really thick — maybe some kind of editorial pencil?)
Coffee mug serving as pen/pencil holder
Ink blotter
Home-style lamp
Small Rolodex (or other brand) to hold cards with addresses
Daily calendar (that’s the thing with the little stand on the back, next to the Rolodex: it shows what day it is and when you come in the next morning you tear off Yesterday and throw it away, revealing Today)
Sponge for wetting postage stamps
Paperweights (at least two)
Magnetic box for holding paperclips
Mail (under the scissors-paperweight)
Envelope containing photographic prints, probably picked up from a drugstore on Nassau Street
Small personal notebook (under a sheet of paper next to the coffee mug)
A loop handle (next to his right forearm), presumably attached to something — a small instant camera, perhaps? The camera with which he took the snapshots he had developed at the bookstore?

What’s absent? There’s no computer — there’s not even a typewriter, though there may be one elsewhere in the room. It’s possible, though, that Brombert had a secretary to type up, when necessary, his handwritten texts. I mean, the guy is wearing an ascot, and it is a truth universally acknowledged that men who wear ascots do not do their own typing.

November 1, 2024

just asking questions

Jessa Crispin:

Is it important to read Faulkner? Probably not, but I think you should do it anyway. (I don’t like Faulkner, just fyi.) Because it’s good to do difficult things. Because hating something can be as interesting, sometimes more, as loving something. Is reading Faulkner going to make you a better person? Absolutely not, but the whole universe wants you to be optimized, productive, monetized. And sitting around and reading a work of art when it is not your job to do so is a rebellious act that insists I am a human being, actually, and not a cog, not a good little worker, not a cozy girl eating the slop that is fed to me. And developing the parts of myself that are unproductive, ugly, and a drain on resources is a beautiful act of rebellion.

But — and I think Crispin would agree with this — we should be clear that the value of rebellious self-development is not a reason to read Faulkner. That’s a reason to “do difficult things,” or perform “a rebellious act that insists I am a human being, actually, and not a cog.” There are ten thousand ways to achieve that other than reading Faulkner — other than reading literature — other than reading.

Crispin’s post confuses several different things, I believe. In the passage I’ve quoted she asks whether it’s important to read Faulkner; but the prompt for the post is a controversy about whether a white teacher should have read aloud to his class a passage from a Faulkner story that uses the n-word. If you read the report in the NYT, you’ll see that the black student who complained to the teacher did not argue that her teacher shouldn’t have assigned the story. “I don’t take issue with reading stories with the N-word in them. I understand the time period and that it’s a work of fiction. I do take offense when non-Black people say the N-word.” (The professor replied that he didn’t get the difference between reading the word and hearing a white person say it aloud, which strikes me as … obtuse.)

If you look at the entire context for this debate, you might ask the following questions:

Should white professors avoid uttering racial slurs in class, even when they’re quoting someone else?
Should professors assign fiction that uses racial slurs?
In what kinds of classes should professors assign fiction that uses racial slurs? For instance, might it be something to avoid in compulsory general-education courses, but permissible in courses for a major, or pure electives?
Does it matter whether the writer who employs the racial slur is a member, or not, of the group insulted by the word? That is, should we evaluate the use of the n-word by Faulkner differently than we evaluate its use by James Baldwin or Richard Wright?
Is the racist language employed by characters in Faulkner’s fiction one of the reasons to read his fiction — because he is the faithful portrayer of a particular social world — or are we reading him for other reasons, the power of his prose for instance, or his grasp of the tragic character of human life?
How important is it for professors to assign Faulkner, and in what kinds of courses?
If Faulkner should be assigned in at least some courses, which students really need to read him?
If you’re not a university student but want to be well-read, is Faulkner an important writer to encounter?
Is Faulkner worth reading?

You will, I trust, notice that each of those questions leads to further questions, but we need to figure out which one is our starting point, because the issues involved in these various cases can be radically different. So many of our arguments are fruitless because we’re not clear on what we’re arguing about.

October 21, 2024

trustfulness

I know some people who teach at Columbia University, and I’ve been worried about them. Reading the reports of student unrest there, and especially of the surge in antisemitism, I’ve wondered how they have been holding up in what must surely be impossible conditions for teaching. Feeling guilty for my neglect, I decided I needed to check in.

Turns out they’re doing just fine. Yes, they have to show their ID cards to be admitted to what had previously been an open campus, but that simply revealed just how many of the protestors last spring had no connection to Columbia. On the first day of classes a protest was held just outside the gates, and the local TV stations — thinking like old-time movie directors on severely constrained budgets — placed their cameras to make the crowd look enormous. But one of the professors I know happened to be arriving on campus at that time and paused to count them: forty-two people. And after an hour or so they all wandered away.

This fall there have been rallies on campus — pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel — but it appears that those have been both brief and relatively uneventful. Yes, there are a handful of extremely noisy and aggressive student protestors, but one professor tells me that a number of students who got involved in the protests last spring are now feeling embarrassed about the whole business and glad to be able to return their focus to their classes. Indeed, for some, and maybe for a great many, classrooms where serious ideas can be explored and discussed provide a welcome refuge from overheated political tribalism.

Reading such reports, I started laughing — ruefully — at my naïveté. I realized that, though I know perfectly well the almost inevitable over-dramatization of events by journalists desperately for eyeballs and clicks, I had somehow suspended my usual skepticism in this case — maybe because it’s New York City, which on other grounds is typically described as a city in crisis. I was, I realized, imagining professors navigating the life-threatening horrors of the subway only to arrive at the second hellscape of Morningside Heights, where police in riot gear marched through clouds of tear gas to break up roving gangs of masked (and possibly armed) protestors.

I slightly exaggerate. And I don’t mean to suggest that New York doesn’t have real and serious problems. But I’m reminded that several New Yorkers have complained to me that the whole subway system is frequently described as broken, when in fact the problems are largely confined to certain lines at certain times. Now, to be sure, they themselves may be downplaying the seriousness of the issue — people who have invested their lives in a place don’t often want to think the worst of it. But when you hear only reports from an industry principially devoted to alarmism, even a little civic boosterism can be a useful corrective, and a reminder not to be overly trusting in news reports.

And in the case of Columbia University, I am grateful to have on-the-ground evidence that many students and faculty, while they know perfectly well that protests continue, manage without much difficulty to keep their focus on the studies that brought them to the university in the first place. Others may feel the effects of the protests more strongly, of course; but consider this as an account from actual insiders who have been watching and reading news reports with bemusement and annoyance. I was told, “Come and see for yourself!”

To be sure, one correspondent reports that a fresh-vegetable stand has popped up just outside the gate where he typically enters the university. But, he says, he just walks boldly past the looming asparagus and mushrooming mushrooms. New Yorkers are made of stern stuff.

September 10, 2024

the Jane Harrison show

Mary Beard:

Harrison’s reputation rested on her public performances, where she stripped away the technicalities and was (as she put it herself in Reminiscences) ‘almost fatally fluent’. Flamboyantly dressed and armed with what were hailed as the most up-to-the-minute visual aids, in the form of stunning lantern slides, she drew vast crowds to her open lectures – on one occasion, so she said, attracting 1600 fans in Glasgow to a presentation on the topic of Athenian tomb sculpture. She even created something of the same atmosphere in her university lectures. ‘The hushed audience would catch the nervous tension of her bearing,’ wrote one of her academic colleagues about her teaching of classical archaeology. ‘Every lecture was a drama.’ Several years ago, some of Harrison’s slides were rediscovered, buried in a cupboard in Newnham. They didn’t quite live up to the hype, but they were exquisitely painted on glass, with key words etched onto them (almost the equivalent of a modern PowerPoint).

This is interesting just as an entry in the history of instructional technology — I am tempted to visit Cambridge just to investigate those slides — but of course I am intrigued because, as I have already mentioned, my work on Dorothy L. Sayers has gotten me deeply interested in the place of women at Oxford and Cambridge in the first decades of the twentieth century. Here’s a telling little item from Mary Beard’s essay:

One of the most chilling pieces of trivia preserved in the Newnham archive is a copy of a note written to the university librarian by a senior classicist (the otherwise very liberal Henry Jackson) pointing out that he had spotted ‘Miss Harrison’ with a library book in her possession. As women were not allowed to enter, let alone borrow from, the library, he concluded that some male friend must have illicitly borrowed it on her behalf and that an investigation should ensue. Such casual surveillance and such officious, sneaky betrayal seem almost worse than the exclusion in the first place.

Portrait of Jane Harrison by Augustus John

September 4, 2024

unshelved

Over the summer the Honors College moved: we have new digs, and my students who lived in the Honors dorms have, after a year away, moved back into a thoroughly renovated space. But many of us have a problem: bookshelves. Or the lack thereof.

Before the move, we faculty were informed that each office would be provided with two bookcases. When I pointed out that my then-current office had eight bookcases, all of which were full, I was told that, okay, I could have three in my new space. And, I was reminded, there really wasn’t room for any more; the new office isn’t a big one.

(I ended up taking a good many books home, where I don’t really have room for them either … but when I retire all my books will have to fit in our house, so I, and my poor wife, might as well get prepared for the forthcoming challenge.)

I don’t mind moving into a smaller office. My former one was bigger than I needed, and the new one is better situated and is a pleasant, comfortable space — I’ll be happy there. But when I moved in I was a bit surprised to find that the bookcases — and yeah, it would’ve been hard to fit in any more than three — are thin-industrial-steel things instead of the well-made cherrywood ones I had had in my former office.

Yesterday I spoke to one of my students who had just moved back into the Honors dorm and discovered that his room had no bookshelves at all. And one of my colleagues had talked to a project manager (the “project” being our move) and was told that in assigning two bookcases to each office they thought they might be buying too many — so many other departments in the university seem not to use books any more. It’s all screens all the time for them.

Maybe someday soon people taking tours of the university will be brought to the Honors College faculty offices. “And look: professors who still use books. But don’t worry — there aren’t many of them.”

(View from my office window through the scrim of my blind)

July 1, 2024

Will Republicans Save the Humanities?

Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey:

At public colleges in red and purple states like Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah, about 200 tenure- and career-track faculty lines are being created in new academic units devoted to civic education, according to Paul Carrese, founding director of the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL) at Arizona State University. These positions are being filled by faculty members trained in areas including political theory, history, philosophy, classics, and English. Since there are only about 2,000 jobs advertised in all those disciplines combined in a typical year, the creation of 200 new lines is a significant event. […]

Criticism of these new programs is both understandable and premature. Most of them have just been founded and have yet to demonstrate exactly how they intend to fulfill the mandates that have set them in motion. They have not had time to create a track record by which they might be judged, and they will each develop in different ways. For now, understanding the motivations of the faculty members who join them may be the best way to discern where those programs are headed. Who are the academics working in these programs? Why have they moved from other colleges? How do they think about their responsibility to the legislative mandates that created these projects? And how do they plan to build academic programs with integrity under intense and conflicting political pressures, from both on and off campus?

A sharp and fair-minded report. I would add that almost all of these endeavors are rooted not in conservatism but in classical liberalism — which is how they attract non-conservatives. This is not a MAGA project but an Enlightenment project, especially the Enlightenment of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. (Thus the centrality of political philosophy — literature and the other arts just come along for the ride, but they seem to be welcome.)

I especially appreciate this paragraph from late in the piece:

The final challenge these schools face, in our view, is to articulate their programs as a renaissance rather than a reaction. Many of the faculty members moving to these schools bring with them powerful memories of elements of their own academic training that are underappreciated: great books programs at the University of Chicago and Columbia University, courses in grand strategy at Yale University, curricula that focus on the American founding or British constitutionalism. To be part of a renaissance that endures, efforts to revive neglected subfields and forgotten courses must resist the temptation of nostalgia for a lost golden age. The Renaissance we remember did not simply revel in old texts of Cicero, it gave birth to novel forms of art and thought that focused on the distinct challenges of its moment.

I’ve seen a number of comments from LPC* academics about these new programs, and their view, unsurprisingly, seems to be that they’d rather see the humanities destroyed altogether than see such programs succeed. I get it; it’s hard, when one has wielded unchallenged power for so long, to deal with resistance.

* Left Purity Culture

January 28, 2024

a small parable

Occasionally I find myself in groups populated by business people, technologists, consultants, people who work in nonprofits, practitioners of various kinds — and academics. Such groups gather to figure out how to respond to certain major social problems. Because the participants come from various professional worlds, it can sometimes be difficult to discover a common language, but one theme is always quickly settled on: It’s totally fine to talk about how useless academics are — especially academics in the humanities.

I’ve experienced this so many times over the years that I have to make a point of reminding myself of how curious it is. I mean, why invite people to a gathering only to tell them that they have no contribution to make? But I never respond to the dismissal and mockery; I just sit there and smile. I am only tempted to reply in one situation: When people say that academics “have their heads in the clouds.” Or that we humanists are always taking “the view from 50,000 feet.” That’s when I want to say: No. We’re not taking the view from 50,000 feet, we’re taking the view from ten feet underground, and from long long ago.

Once there was a man named Jack who owned a nice house. One day, though, Jack noticed that one end of the house was a little lower than it had been. You could place a ball on the floor and it would slowly roll towards that end. Jack was a practical man, so he called Neil, another practical man he knew, who worked in construction. Neil said that he could jack up that end of the house and make everything level again. Jack agreed, and Neil got to work.

Jack had a neighbor named Hugh. Hugh was interested in many things, and watched closely as Neil jacked up the low end of the house. With Jack’s permission, he looked around the basement of the house. All this made him more curious, so he walked down to the town’s Records Office and got some information about Jack’s house: when it had been built, who had built it, and what the land had been used for before. Hugh also learned a few things about the soil composition in their neighborhood and its geological character.

Hugh paid Jack a visit so he could tell Jack about all he had learned. He stood at Jack’s door with his hands full of documents and photographs, and rang the bell. But when Jack answered he told Hugh that he didn’t have time to look at documents and photographs. He had a very immediate problem: that end of his house was sinking again. In such circumstances Jack certainly couldn’t attend to Hugh’s ragbag of information and discourses about ancient history. After all, Jack was a practical man.

January 25, 2024

a note on plagiarism

The Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal — or, depending on your point of view, “plagiarism” scandal — has me thinking about How We Write Today. John McWhorter has recently written that there really is a meaningful distinction between plagiarism and “duplicative language,” and I suppose there often is, but it’s all because of technology, innit?

That distinction arises because of what people do when they read as well as write on a computer. “Duplicative language” arises when scholars (presumably in something of a hurry) see something in a digital book or article that they want to use, copy the relevant text, and then paste it into Word with the intention of editing it later to in some sense make it their own. (Part of McWhorter’s argument is that maybe we don’t need to do that, or do it as often. I don’t think I agree, but I’ll waive the point for now.)

At least some of these issues arise from a general sense that one’s work should not contain too many long quotations, an idea that Adam Roberts has explored and questioned here. (I might disagree with Adam also, but I’ll waive that point as well as McWhorter’s.) The tendency to overquote becomes a problem when professors don’t have a lot to add to an existing scholarly conversation but need publications for tenure or promotion. In such circumstances, the bulk of any given article will likely be the collecting of other scholars’ work, and if you quote too much, it might become obvious that there’s not a lot of you in your article. So you need to rework the quotations to make the extent of your debts less obvious.

But note that all of this is a result of the pressure to publish, a pressure that people might feel especially strongly if their stronger interests are in teaching or administrating. That Claudine Gay has never written a book, and has produced only eleven journal articles in twenty years, one of those co-authored, and moreover moved quite early in her career into administration, all suggests that we’re dealing here with a person whose primary calling is not the production of scholarship. And that’s totally fine! By all accounts Gay has been an effective administrator, and Lord knows academia needs more of those. Heck, maybe Gay even has some scholarly humility, something I have heard of, occasionally.

So if you’re a person who is publishing under pressure, and not really extending the scholarly conversation in dramatic ways, and perhaps not even very excited about writing, then you’ll probably be more prone to (a) copy and paste that digital text and (b) forget later to make the necessary changes.

I don’t think I do this? I hesitate to assert too strongly, because I may be deficient in self-knowledge. But I will say this: whenever I copy and paste from some existing text, primary source or secondary, I paste it as a quotation. I never ever paste it into the body of my work. When I’m drafting an essay or article or book chapter I just don’t worry about whether I have too many quotations or whether the quotations are too long. That’s something I assess in revision.

Which makes me wonder whether some of the plagiarism (or “duplicative language”) we’re now seeing so much of is a result of one small habit common to digital writing: pasting wrongly. Pasting as body text and not as quotation. Maybe this should be part of what we teach our student writers: If you think you can just drop a quotation into the body of your text and and then go back to fix it later, you’re may well be fooling yourself.

December 13, 2023

multiple social diseases

18 Warning Signs of a Deadly New Lifestyle – by Ted Gioia: — but they’re not all symptoms of the same disorder — or anyhow not in the same way.

“Anthropophobia — the fear of other people — is on the rise” is the chief theme, and “Time spent alone is rising for all demographic groups” and “People no longer build friendships” are related phenomena. But others may reflect quite different motives and concerns.

For instance: “After centuries of intense urbanism, more people now want to live in the country — away from bustling cities, suburbs, or even small towns.” This could be a symptom of anthropohobia, but it also could arise from a desire to reconnect with the natural world, a world our social order hopes to make irrelevant. (“Why move to the country when you can watch this YouTube video of snow falling in a wilderness cabin? — and without ads for a nominal monthly fee!”) So a desire to move to the country might be related to a settled and well-earned suspicion of Technopoly’s ability to meet all our needs.

(I know some folks who left big cities for small towns or the countryside during Covid and now couldn’t be brought back at gunpoint — and it’s not because they dislike people. They meet fewer people in the course of any given day, but the ones they know they know better, more meaningfully, than they knew the people they saw on a daily basis in the city.)

And: “Even humanities professors don’t want to deal with human beings.” The essay that Ted links to discusses, among other things, the difficulty that editors of academic journals have in getting peer reviewers for the submissions they receive. Until fairly recently, here’s how that worked: A journal editor wrote to me and asked me to review a manuscript. If I said yes, he sent me the manuscript and I wrote back with my thoughts. But now? An editor writes to me, tells me that he or she has taken the liberty of assigning me a username and a password at a website that manages a “reviewer database,” and at which I may fill out various forms and click various checkboxes on my way to providing a review that meets certain pre-specified criteria.

To that I say: Oh hell no. And my refusal is the opposite of not wanting “to deal with human beings”; it’s my declining to accept a transaction from which the humanity has been surgically removed by robots.

(Also: Why do editors have recourse to such semi-automated systems? Because they get so many submissions. Why do they get so many submissions? Because publish-or-perish is still the core principle of academic employment, and in an ever-shrinking academic job market humanities professors are cranking out scholarly articles at an unprecedented pace to try to make themselves viable candidates for the tiny handful of jobs still available. The real problem lies far, far upstream of my refusal to become another entry in someone’s database.)

So the various examples that Ted gives of this “deadly new lifestyle” point in varying and in some cases opposite directions. Some of these developments show people succumbing to Technopoly; others involve resistance to Technopoly. And that’s a big difference.

November 21, 2023

Jennifer A. Frey:

When Zena Hitz explains the Catherine Project (a series of online and in-person seminars) or when Nathan Beacom describes a revival of the Lyceum movement for adults, the reader is left to wonder whether the liberal arts need to be tied to our universities at all. This is no idle concern — the average annual cost of tuition at a liberal-arts college is $24,000 a year. If one can engage in liberating learning for a small donation to the Catherine Project, doesn’t it make more sense to learn in one’s leisure time rather than bother with an expensive four-year degree? Even if such study is liberatory, is it worth the student debt, especially when its own practitioners agree that it can be pursued just as profitably on the side for a pittance? In Ms. Hitz’s own words, “universities are wonderful, but they are not necessary for human flourishing.”

If liberal learning does not need the university, we might ask whether the university needs liberal learning. One might worry that, in trying to prove that the liberal arts are not elitist, we have only shown that we can uncouple them from universities and be no worse off for it. If liberal learning is for everyone and can be pursued anywhere — in prison, in elementary schools, by people in poverty — why would anyone pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for it? Is it because, as Don Eben argues, a habit of learning and analysis makes students better future white-collar workers? Or, as Rachel Griffis argues, because a liberal-arts education complements professional training, thus becoming a good financial investment? Is the only good argument for liberal learning in universities, ultimately, instrumental?

Jennifer Frey is the dean of an Honors College at a private university; I teach in an Honors College at a private university. You could say that we both have an investment in keeping that flame burning. But I think even we ought to be asking the questions Frey asks here. As I have often written, these are good times for the humanities; they’re just not good times for humanities programs in universities. This is why I keep thinking about Emily St. John Mandel’s Traveling Symphony. Even as we try to keep the humanities-in-the-university afloat, I think we need to spend a lot of time imagining the humanities without the university.

October 23, 2023

the nature of the transaction

Ross Douthat addressing prospective donors to universities, the kind who keep giving to Harvard and Yale:

If you want actual influence over American academic life, you’re just much better off finding a smaller or poorer school where your money will be welcomed, your opportunities to effect real transformation will be ample and your millions can build something dynamic or beautiful without always fighting through the thicket of powerful interest groups that grows up around powerful institutions. And to harp again on a frequent theme, if you’re absurdly, obscenely rich and care about higher education, you should Google “Leland Stanford” and then go and do likewise.

Ross goes on to talk about donors who are motivated by the warm, fuzzy memories of their undergraduate days at such institutions — and tells them that they need to get over that — but I wonder: How many big donors are in fact thinking of their Happy College Days? Maybe they were happy, maybe they weren’t; maybe they appreciated the education they received, but more likely they don’t think about that at all. And how many genuinely desire to influence American academic life? Almost none, I suspect. I tend to think that the situation is more purely transactional:

Assuming that these donors did attend an elite university, attending an elite university was for them a ticket to social capital and financial capital;
Having acquired more financial capital than they could ever spend in a dozen lifetimes, they nevertheless find themselves longing for ever more social capital, more cultural approval, more cachet;
And so they contribute to the universities that can give them that, which is to say, the most elite universities — no lesser school can provide what they’re willing to pay for. (How many of them have even had one instant’s thought about the future students they could help along the way? You don’t get that rich by thinking about other people.)

Maybe in some general and theoretical sense they’d like to have influence over those universities, and maybe they complain when they discover that they don’t have it, but that’s like discovering that there’s no valet parking at the elegant restaurant where you’ve booked a table: annoying, but hey, you’re not there for the parking.

September 30, 2023

I’m with “the bloggers”

Noam Scheiber’s report on the controversies surrounding the work of Francesca Gino is … well, it’s terrible. Let me count (some of) the ways.

Let’s start with the title: “The Harvard Professor and the Bloggers.” Now, journalists typically don’t title their own pieces, but throughout the report Scheiber refers to the people who run Data Colada as “the bloggers.” The point seems to be to contrast a Figure of Recognized Authority (“the Harvard professor”) with her online critics (“the bloggers”) — a tactic reminiscent of the days when journalists sneered at people who sit around in their pajamas typing on their laptops. But these critics are also professors, at ESADE Business School in Barcelona, the Wharton School at Penn, and the Haas School of Business at UC-Berkeley. It’s only late in the report, after an extensive and fawning portrait of the suffering Professor Gino, that Scheiber acknowledges the academic credentials of those who have called attention to apparent anomalies in Gino’s research. But he still calls them “the bloggers.”

Second: Scheiber writes, “Even the bloggers, who published a four-part series laying out their case in June and a follow-up this month, have acknowledged that there is no smoking gun proving it was Dr. Gino herself who falsified data.” What does “even the bloggers” mean? There’s nothing unusual or noteworthy about “the bloggers” not directly accusing Gino of dishonesty, because that’s not what they do. They point to apparent anomalies — often, inconsistencies between (a) the conclusions drawn by scholars and (b) the data they claim to be drawing on — in research papers; it is not their job to figure out how the anomalies got there. They aren’t looking for a “smoking gun” in the hands of Professor Gino.

In general, Scheiber seems to have seen it as his job to take up Gino’s sense of outrage. He says very strange things, like “She did not present as a fraud.” Well, of course. One cannot succeed in deceiving people if one presents as a fraud. The statement is an irrelevance. Similarly, Scheiber says that Gino often provided “a plausible answer” when he questioned her. But what his questions were, what her answers were, why he found them plausible, and how all that relates to the evidence provided at Data Colada — we’re not told any of that.

Finally: Scheiber seems not to have asked what, to me, would be the single most obvious question: Why is she suing “the bloggers”? Apparently the cause is “defamation,” but how does the think they have defamed her simply by pointing to anomalies in her published research papers? The closest Scheiber comes to approaching the issue is in this passage:

… the bloggers publicly revealed their evidence: In the sign-at-the-top paper, a digital record in an Excel file posted by Dr. Gino indicated that data points were moved from one row to another in a way that reinforced the study’s result.

Dr. Gino now saw the blog in more sinister terms. She has cited examples of how Excel’s digital record is not a reliable guide to how data may have been moved.

“What I’ve learned is that it’s super risky to jump to conclusions without the complete evidence,” she told me.

Nothing about this makes sense. First of all, what is “sinister” about noting a manipulation of data in an Excel sheet? If that’s wrong, what’s wrong about it? What “conclusions” did the Data Colada investigation “jump to”? And above all, even if all of her criticisms are correct, why not offer a rational refutation rather than file a lawsuit? Suing her employer, Harvard, makes obvious sense, since Harvard has suspended her from her job without pay and is seeking to revoke her tenure. Faced with similar circumstances I might also sue. But suing people for writing that the data meant to support certain conclusions seems to have been manipulated by person or persons unknown? That requires some explanation.

Scheiber doesn’t ask any of these questions. He’s not interested in anything except a profile of a wounded person. But I agree with the lawyer for “the bloggers” who says that such a lawsuit is “a direct attack on academic inquiry.” What Gino is doing certainly looks like a straightforward attempt to intimidate into silence anyone who might ask hard questions about her research. I came away from Scheiber’s pseudo-inquiry thinking that I need to contribute to Data Colada’s legal defense fund. I don’t believe that’s what Scheiber intended.

August 11, 2023

outreach and generativity

Over at the Daily Nous, Alex Guerrero, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers, argues that the traditional three branches of academic work — teaching, research, and service — needs to be augmented by a fourth: outreach or engagement.

Colleges and universities are supported (1) by the general public, through government funding; (2) by students and their families, through tuition and fees; and (3) by rich people, through donations. What education and what knowledge will be pursued in colleges and universities is not set in stone; it is, rather, a function of what those three groups want and demand. If we want philosophy to be part of the education and part of the knowledge that is pursued in the years to come, we need people in those three groups to want and demand philosophy. And for people in those three groups to want and demand philosophy, we need to reach out to them, engage them, make them aware of what philosophy is and why it is wonderful and valuable. Given what philosophy is, and given our contemporary situation, that task is monumental, and must be undertaken at many different levels, in many ways. No small number of us can do it on our own. Therefore, it should be a part of all of our jobs — quite literally — to do this work.

Such outreach can be accomplished in several ways:

There are obviously central enterprises: exposing children and adolescents to philosophy and serious humanities in K–12 education, for example, something that many are already doing. Writing “public facing” philosophy that appears in newspapers, broad circulation prestige venues, trade books, and so on. Creating online philosophy courses and videos and other broad access materials like podcasts. There are also more local, more intimate efforts: organizing a public philosophy week at a public library, running a philosophy club or ethics bowl team at the local high school, organizing community book groups and “meetups” to discuss philosophy, running “ask a philosopher” booths at the train station, farmers’ market, or mall. These activities bring philosophy to people outside of the academy and bring people into philosophy, giving them entry points and a better sense of what the subject is and why it is of value. They also are a lot of fun. And a ton of work to do well. And, for the most part, they are treated as outside of one’s job, falling outside of the big three: research, teaching, and service.

Obviously this idea would apply to many other disciplines (most of them? all of them?) and it certainly applies to mine. When I write here on my blog, or for non-academic magazines and websites, I am certainly and quite consciously practicing such outreach — but none of it has any value in the eyes of Baylor University. My position at Baylor is wholly due to my academic work. You could of course argue that that’s as it should be, that strictly academic work is what universities ought to value and support; but for what little it’s worth, I think that’s shortsighted.

I could cite several reasons for my view. For instance, some students want to attend the Honors College here at Baylor because they have encountered the public work, the outreaching work, that I and several of my colleagues do. We can in a similar way help with the recruitment of faculty also. But I suspect that there may be other benefits to my kind of public-facing work, benefits that are more strictly academic — even if the work itself isn’t academic, or not in the familiar ways.

Consider the career of the great computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra. Cal Newport recently wrote about Dijkstra’s work habits in a post that’s interesting in several ways — but I just want to call attention to one thing: what Dijkstra did after he received a research fellowship from the Burroughs Corporation. Newport quotes one colleague of Dijkstra’s: “The Burroughs years saw him at his most prolific in output of research articles. He wrote nearly 500 documents in the EWD series.”

But hang on a minute. His entries in “the EWD series” were not in any conventional academic sense “research articles.” They were, basically, letters, originally typewritten and later handwritten with a Mont Blanc pen, which Dijkstra photocopied and mailed to colleagues. (He numbered and labeled them, and each label began with his initials, EWD, thus their familiar name. “I got a new EWD today!”) The initial recipients numbered only in the dozens, but since they had photocopiers too, it’s estimated that each EWD had hundreds or even thousands of readers.

Sometimes EWDs developed into proper research articles, but, as the home page for his archives notes, “the great majority of his manuscripts remain unpublished. They have been inaccessible to many potential readers, and those who have received copies have been unable to cite them in their own work.” The archive was created precisely in order to enable proper academic citations, since “personal communication from the author” is not a recognized form of documentation in the CS world.

So Dijkstra’s EWDs were not proper academic research, were not the sort of thing that one can put on a CV or include in a year-end report; nor were they “outreach” in Alex Guerrero’s sense, since they were directed to Dijkstra’s colleagues and peers rather than to the general public. Yet, as thousands of computer scientists over the decades have testified, the EWDs were enormously generative: they inspired and guided research throughout the field of computer science.

Universities know how to reward the dissemination of ideas through standard peer-reviewed publication; what they do not know is how to reward generativity. And, to be fair, that’s true at least in part because it’s hard to know in advance what ideas will generate other ideas, what projects other projects. It took a corporation to risk supporting Dijkstra, not knowing what the results would be; but perhaps there are expansive and stimulating thinkers in disciplines that no current corporation would care to support. Maybe that “fourth branch” should, in addition to outreach or engagement, also seek to discover and reward generativity.

The best service I could provide through this blog is to stimulate others (and not just, or even primarily, academics) to pursue ideas that I don’t have time to pursue myself, and while I don’t expect Baylor to reduce my teaching load so that I might have more opportunity to hand-write letters to twenty or thirty colleagues — or, um, blog a lot — a guy can dream, can’t he?

July 31, 2023

on technologies and trust

Recently, Baylor’s excellent Provost, Nancy Brickhouse, wrote to faculty with a twofold message. The first part:

How do we help our students work with artificial intelligence in ways that are both powerful and ethical? After all, I believe that the future our students face is likely to be profoundly shaped by artificial intelligence, and we have a responsibility to prepare our students for this future.

ChatGPT can be used as a research partner to help retrieve information and generate ideas, allowing students to delve deeply into a topic. It can be a good writing partner, helping students with grammar, vocabulary, and even style.

Faculty may find ChatGPT as a useful tool for lesson planning ideas. For those utilizing a flipped classroom approach, AI tools may be used to generate ideas and information outside the classroom for collaborative work inside the classroom.

Finally, and most importantly, faculty have the opportunity to engage students in critical ethical conversations about the uses of AI. They need to learn how to assess and use the information ethically.

And the second part:

I am interested in how YOU are already using artificial intelligence. I am thinking now about how we might collectively address the opportunities afforded by AI. I would appreciate hearing from you.

So I’ve been thinking about what to say — though of course I’ve already said some relevant things: see this post on “technoteachers” and my new post over at the Hog Blog on the Elon Effect. But let me try to be more straightforward.

Imagine a culinary school that teaches its students how to use HelloFresh: “Sure, we could teach you how to cook from scratch the way we used to — how to shop for ingredients, how to combine them, how to prepare them, how to present them — but let’s be serious, resources like HelloFresh aren’t going away, so you just need to learn to use them properly.” The proper response from students would be: “Why should we pay you for that? We can do that on our own.”

If I decided to teach my students how to use ChatGPT appropriately, and one of them asked me why they should pay me for that, I don’t think I would have a good answer. But if they asked me why I insist that they not use ChatGPT in reading and writing for me, I do have a response: I want you to learn how to read carefully, to sift and consider what you’ve read, to formulate and then give structure your ideas, to discern whom to think with, and finally to present your thoughts in a clear and cogent way. And I want you to learn to do all these things because they make you more free — the arts we study are liberal, that is to say liberating, arts.

If you take up this challenge you will learn not to “think for yourself” but to think in the company of well-chosen companions, and not to have your thoughts dictated to you by the transnational entity some call surveillance capitalism, which sees you as a resource to exploit and could care less if your personal integrity and independence are destroyed. The technocratic world to which I would be handing you over, if I were to encourage the use of ChatGPT, is driven by the “occupational psychosis” of sociopathy. And I don’t want you to be owned and operated by those Powers.

The Powers don’t care about the true, the good, and the beautiful — they don’t know what any of those are. As Benedict Evans writes in a useful essay, the lawyers who ask ChatGPT for legal precedents in relation to a particular case don’t realize that what ChatGPT actually searches for is something that looks like a precedent. What it returns is often what it simply invents, because it’s a pattern-matching device, not a database. It is not possible for lawyers — or people in many other fields — to use ChatGPT to do their research for them: after all, if you have to research to check the validity of ChatGPT’s “research,” then what’s the point of using ChatGPT?

Think back to that culinary school where you only learn how to use HelloFresh. That might work out just fine for a while; it might not occur to you that you have no idea how to create your own recipes, or even adapt those of other cooks — at least, not until HelloFresh doubles its prices and you discover that you can’t afford the increase. That’s the moment when you see that HelloFresh wasn’t liberating you from drudgery but rather was enslaving you to its recipes and techniques. At that point you begin to scramble to figure how to shop for your own food, how to select and prepare and combine — basically, all the things you should have learned in culinary school but didn’t.

Likewise, I don’t want you to look back on your time studying with me and wonder why I didn’t at least try to provide you with the resources to navigate your intellectual world without the assistance of an LLM. After all, somewhere down the line ChatGPT might demand more from you than just money. And you – perhaps faced with personal conditions in which you simply don’t have time to pursue genuine learning, the kind of time you had but were not encouraged to use when you were in college — may find that you have no choice but to acquiesce. As Evgeny Morozov points out, “After so many Uber- and Theranos-like traumas, we already know what to expect of an A.G.I. [Artificial General Intelligence] rollout. It will consist of two phases. First, the charm offensive of heavily subsidized services. Then the ugly retrenchment, with the overdependent users and agencies shouldering the costs of making them profitable.” Welcome to the Machine.

That’s the story I would tell, the case I would make.

I guess I’m saying this: I don’t agree that we have a responsibility to teach our students how to use ChatGPT and other AI tools. Rather, we have a responsibility to teach them how to thrive without such tools, how to avoid being sacrificed to Technopoly’s idols. And this is especially true right now, when even people closely connected with the AI industry, like Alexander Carp of Palantir, are pleading with our feckless government to impose legal guardrails, while thousands of others are pleading with the industry itself to hit the pause button.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that AI will destroy the world. As Freddie DeBoer has noted, the epideictic language on this topic has been extraordinarily extreme:

Talk of AI has developed in two superficially opposed but deeply complementary directions: utopianism and apocalypticism. AI will speed us to a world without hunger, want, and loneliness; AI will take control of the machines and (for some reason) order them to massacre its creators. Here I can trot out the old cliché that love and hate are not opposites but kissing cousins, that the true opposite of each is indifference. So too with AI debates: the war is not between those predicting deliverance and those predicting doom, but between both of those and the rest of us who would like to see developments in predictive text and image generation as interesting and powerful but ultimately ordinary technologies. Not ordinary as in unimportant or incapable of prompting serious economic change. But ordinary as in remaining within the category of human tool, like the smartphone, like the washing machine, like the broom. Not a technology that transcends other technology and declares definitively that now is over.

So, no to both sides: AI will neither save not destroy the world. I just think that for teachers like me it’s a distraction from what I’m called to do.

If I were to speak in this way to my students — and when classes resume I just might do so — would they listen? Some will; most won’t. After all, the university leadership is telling a very different story than the one I tell, and doing things my way would involve harder work, which is never an easy sell. As I said in my “Elon Effect” essay, the really central questions here involve not technological choices but rather communal integrity and wholeness. Will my students trust me when I tell them that they are faced with the choice of moving towards liberation or towards enslavement? In most cases, no. Should they trust me? That’s not for me to decide. But it’s the key question, and one that should be on the mind of every single student: Where, in this community of learning, are the most trustworthy guides?

July 11, 2023

academic bullshit

My estimable friend Dan Cohen:

Maybe AI tools can help to combat their unethical counterparts? SciScore seeks to improve the reliability of scientific papers by analyzing their methods and sources, producing a set of reports for editors, peer reviewers, and other scientists who want to reproduce an experiment. Ripeta uses AI trained on over 30 million articles to identify “trust markers” within a paper’s dense text. Using new AI computer vision tools, Proofig takes aim at falsified images within academic work.

But fighting AI with AI assumes a level of care and attention that are increasingly scarce resources in academia. As scholarly publishers will admit, peer reviewers are harder and harder to come by, as journals proliferate and there are greater pressures on the time of every professor. It’s more productive to crank out your own work than to correct the work of others. Professors who are concerned about their students using ChatGPT to create plausible-sounding essays might not look over their shoulders at their own colleagues using more sophisticated tools to do the same thing.

If they — and we — fail to stem the tide of AI-generated academic work, that very work will come into question, and one of the last wells of careful writing, of deep thought, of debate supported by evidence, might be fatally poisoned.

All of Dan’s concerns here are legitimate and serious … but I also think there’s another side to this, at least potentially. I’ve written before about the ways that ChatGPT and the like are revealing the unimaginative, mechanical nature of so many assignments we college teachers create and administer. In that post I wrote, “If an AI can write it, and an AI can read it and respond to it, then does it need to be done at all?“ Might we not ask the same question about our research, so much of which is produced simply because publish-or-perish demands it, not because of any value it has either to its authors or its readers (if it has any readers)?

Countless times in my career I have heard people talk about their need to publish research — to get tenure or promotion — in an AI-like pattern-matching mode: What sort of thing is getting published these days? What terms and concepts are predominantly featured? What previous scholarship is most often cited? And once they answer those questions, they generate the appropriate “content” and then fit it into one of the very few predetermined structures of academic writing. And isn’t all this a perfect illustration of a bullshit job?

Yes, I’m worried about what AI will do to academic life — but I also see the possibility of our having to face the ways in which our work, as students, teachers, and researchers, has become mechanistic and dehumanizing. And if we can honestly acknowledge the conditions, then maybe we can do something better.

July 7, 2023

more on SCOTUS and university admissions

Just a few random thoughts about the Harvard opinion. (On this blog I tend to avoid opining on current events, but I am endlessly fascinated by the law, by legal reasoning, and by the various strategies of legal interpretation. As Stanley Fish discovered a long time ago, there’s much overlap between literary and legal interpretation. I caught the bug from him.)

In Sotomayor’s dissent, she describes the majority opinion in this way:

Today, the Court concludes that indifference to race is the only constitutionally permissible means to achieve racial equality in college admissions. That interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment is not only contrary to precedent and the entire teachings of our history, see supra, at 2–17, but is also grounded in the illusion that racial inequality was a problem of a different generation. Entrenched racial inequality remains a reality today. That is true for society writ large and, more specifically, for Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC), two institutions with a long history of racial exclusion. Ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal. What was true in the 1860s, and again in 1954, is true today: Equality requires acknowledgment of inequality.

The problem is that this description is wrong. Indeed, later on she walks some of this back, admitting that “The majority does not dispute that some uses of race are constitutionally permissible. See ante, at 15. Indeed, it agrees that a limited use of race is permissible in some college admissions programs.” So the majority opinion does not demand “indifference to race” (even if Justice Thomas would probably like it to).

But unless I missed it — and I may have; her dissent is lengthy — she doesn’t walk back the baldly false claim that the majority holds to “the illusion that racial inequality was a problem of a different generation.”

Thomas in his concurrence: “I, of course, agree that our society is not, and has never been, colorblind.” Gorsuch in his concurrence: “In the aftermath of the Civil War, Congress took vital steps toward realizing the promise of equality under the law. As important as those initial efforts were, much work remained to be done — and much remains today.” Kavanaugh in his concurrence: “To be clear, although progress has been made since Bakke and Grutter, racial discrimination still occurs and the effects of past racial discrimination still persist.“ (Probably not great for collegiality when one justice forcefully accuses her colleagues of holding views that they have explicitly disavowed. It’s disappointing to see Sotomayor writing in such open disregard for the truth of her statements — but that’s the world we live in.)

Only Roberts, writing for the Court, doesn’t make any such statement, because in his legal reasoning it doesn’t matter. Racial inequality could be better than it used to be, about the same, or worse — it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is whether the policies employed by Harvard and UNC are legally justifiable. That’s his whole argument.

By contrast, what matters to Sotomayor is that the policies work:

The use of race in college admissions has had profound consequences by increasing the enrollment of underrepresented minorities on college campuses. This Court presupposes that segregation is a sin of the past and that raceconscious college admissions have played no role in the progress society has made. The fact that affirmative action in higher education “has worked and is continuing to work” is no reason to abandon the practice today.

Justice Jackson’s dissent operates under a similar logic: racism is an ongoing social problem, these policies are remedies for racism, therefore these policies are justifiable. But that’s a strange argument for a jurist to make. Many practices work — I could list a thousand tactics police departments have used to reduce crime — but that doesn’t make them legal. So these arguments by Sotomayor and Jackson seem to be outside the scope of their duties. But then, the same is true of Thomas’s dissent, which devotes a great deal of time to arguing that such policies do not work, do not accomplish their goals. That’s actually the chief burden of his concurrence, in which he directs much of his fire towards Jackson: You think policies like this help people like us, but they don’t.

The funny thing about all this is that Harvard and UNC in their briefs and oral arguments explicitly denied that their policies attempt to remediate the consequences of past and ongoing racism — they say that it’s all about creating “diversity.” They did so because SCOTUS precedent wouldn’t have worked in their favor if they had admitted that remediation of injustice is their goal. (Too long a story to get into here.) But the fact that, except for Roberts, the justices largely ignore the explicit justification and instead argue about the role that university admissions play or do not play in remedying injustice indicates that they know what the real reasons for these policies are.

Again and again Sotomayor and Jackson say Racism is bad, why is the majority denying that racism is bad? And again and again the majority say, Of course racism is bad, but our task is not to end racism, our task is to decide this case. (Kagan’s silence on this case is disappointing, since she joined Sotomayor and Jackson, and is an infinitely superior thinker and writer. My guess is that she has her own reasons, quite different from Sotomayor’s and Jackson’s, for dissenting; I’d like to know what they are.)

If even Supreme Court Justices don’t know what their job is, how can the rest of us be expected to? Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been tweeting that if the court really believed in color-blindness it would have ended legacy admissions. But nobody brought a suit against legacy admissions. Does AOC really think that the Supreme Court can just decree at any time the end of any practice they think unjust? Actually, she might; it’s perfectly possible that she has no idea how the Supreme Court, or the legal system more generally, works. But I think it’s slightly more likely that she’s just performing rage for her social media audience. That’s perhaps to be expected. What’s less expected is for Supreme Court justices to be doing the same thing.

June 7, 2022

How to give university lectures | Mary Beard:

The second [lecturing tip I picked up from colleagues] was from Keith Hopkins, who asked students at his first lectures on the Roman empire: What was the most important thing to happen in the reign of the emperor Augustus? All kinds of answers came in, from the “settlement of 27” to the return of the Roman standards from the Parthians. You could bet anything, he used to say, that no one (not even the committed Christians) would say “the birth of Jesus”. He used this to point out to them how narrow their vision could be, and how rigid the boundary was between the history of Rome and the history of Christianity, even though they were part of the same world.

This is a fascinating point in itself, but it reminds me that Hopkins was notorious for his frustration with academic lecturing, in all venues. He felt that very few academics took seriously their responsibilities to their audiences — or, really, were even aware that they have such responsibilities. Long ago a British academic told me about listening to a lecturer drone his way through an hour, never looking up from the paper in front of him, basically talking into his chest. As it happens, Hopkins was also in the audience. At the Q&A time, Hopkins stood up and said, “I have three reactions to your talk and the first is boredom.”

May 14, 2022

I was very interested in this Jonathan Malesic essay on how college students are or are not coping with the stresses of Covidtide. For what it’s worth — all such reports are anecdotal, but, despite what people say, the plural of anecdote is data, when there are enough anecdotes and they’re read with sufficient intelligence — my Honors College students have been much more like those at the University of Dallas than the ones at SMU, where Malesic teaches. I have been consistently surprised and gratified by how cheerfully and competently my students have navigated the various complexities of this era. Indeed, they’ve handled it all with considerably more grace than I have. I can’t be sure why they’ve managed so well, but I think it has something to do (in many cases anyway) with Christian formation and something also to do with the sense of community and common purpose fostered by Doug Henry, the Dean of the Honors College, and those support staff who work regularly with the students.

March 9, 2022

original thinking and academic codes

Kant clung to his university, submitted himself to its regulations, retained the appearance of religious belief, endured to live among colleagues and students: so it is natural that his example has produced above all university professors and professorial philosophy. Schopenhauer had little patience with the scholarly castes, separated himself from them, strove to be independent of state and society – this is his example, the model he provides.

— Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator.” It is interesting to think of other examples of this distinction — and especially other major thinkers who share this inability to function within standard institutional structures. In a long essay about Kierkegaard in the New Yorker in 1968, Auden wrote,

Like Pascal, Nietzsche, and Simone Weil, Kierkegaard is one of those writers whom it is very difficult to estimate justly. When one reads them for the first time, one is bowled over by their originality (they speak in a voice one has never heard before) and by the sharpness of their insights (they say things which no one before them has said, and which, henceforward, no reader will ever forget). But with successive readings one’s doubts grow, one begins to react against their overemphasis on one aspect of the truth at the expense of all the others, and one’s first enthusiasm may all too easily turn into an equally exaggerated aversion.

(Auden wrote this essay specifically to ensure that his own earlier fascination with Kierkegaard did not pivot to “an equally exaggerated aversion.”) Such thinkers don’t fit in universities because they can’t or won’t obey the codes of the academy. Almost all successful academics are code fetishists, for good reasons (e.g. the maintaining of professional and disciplinary standards) and bad (turf management and the performing of power). Truly original thinkers will either shun environments so code-dominated or will be driven out of them.

But: not only original thinkers. One can be not original at all but rather unoriginal in the wrong ways, usually in outdated ways, and be equally in violation of the codes. Exhibit A: Jordan Peterson, who was comfortable enough (if neither productive nor influential) in the academy until he started vocally resisting recently developed guidelines of academic life in favor of defending some ideas that he thought had been unjustly forgotten.

March 7, 2022

education, more or less

Andrew Delbanco:

There is a third — and perhaps the deepest — problem with the futuristic vision of education advanced by “technologically enabled delivery”: the debilitating fact that it rests on a narrow, positivistic conception of knowledge. In this view, all teaching is training, and all learning is a quest for competence: the mastery of some field whose practitioners can expect compensation for their proficiency or expertise. No one should dispute that colleges have a vital responsibility to prepare students for the world of work — to provide them with what the political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg calls “more or less sophisticated forms of vocational training to meet the needs of other established institutions in the public and private sectors.” In fact, preparation for economic productivity has been the main aim of universities since the decline of prescribed curricula in the 19th century, when the introduction of electives and, later, majors aligned what students chose to study in college with the work they planned to do after. Over the past 50 years, as students from economically insecure families entered college in growing numbers, this alignment has only become tighter, including at elite institutions that serve predominantly affluent students. “It is a shame,” Ginsberg writes, “when that is all that the university offers.” “All” is an exaggeration, but at more and more institutions it’s a fair approximation.

What’s increasingly rare in higher education, and almost entirely missing from writings about its future, is a more than nominal commitment to the value of learning undertaken in the hope of expanding the sympathetic imagination by opening the mind to contesting ideas about nature and history, the power of literature and art, and the value of dialectic in the pursuit of truth. These aspirations — traditionally gathered under the term “liberal education” — are in desperate need of revival. To advance them requires teachers and institutions committed to a more capacious vision of education than the prevailing idea of workforce training and economic self-advancement.

There will always be many people who want more from their education than “workforce training and economic self-advancement,” but they may not want it from universities. They may perceive — and surely one could not blame them for coming to this conclusion — that the modern Western university is incapable of providing anything else. And in that case they’ll continue to seek credentials from universities but look to private instruction or para-academic organizations for education.

November 8, 2021

UATX

Pano Kanelos:

We expect to face significant resistance to this project. There are networks of donors, foundations, and activists that uphold and promote the status quo. There are parents who expect the status quo. There are students who demand it, along with even greater restrictions on academic freedom. And there are administrators and professors who will feel threatened by any disruption to the system.

We welcome their opprobrium and will regard it as vindication.

To the rest — to those of you who share our sense that something fundamental is broken — we ask that you join us in our effort to renew higher education. We welcome all who share our mission to pursue a truly liberating education — and hope that other founders follow our example.

It is time to restore the meaning to those old school mottos. Light. Truth. The wind of freedom. You will find all three at our new university in Austin.

I don’t know whether this is going to work, but I think it’s a wonderfully exciting endeavor. In the American university today, the systemic and/or emergent silencing of those who dissent from or even merely question the Successor Ideology is made possible by the belief, by all parties involved, that the dissidents have nowhere else to go. But what if they do have somewhere else to go? And what if philanthropists who wish to support higher education have a choice between institutions with long-recognized prestige — always an irresistible draw in the past — and institutions that fit the philanthropists’ ideals?

(One thing I don’t understand: the presence of Sohrab Amari on the university’s Board of Advisors. Isn’t its classical liberalism antithetical to his frequently-articulated vision of the social world as an arena for defeating your enemies in ideological combat and enjoying the spoils of your victory?)

This will be very, very interesting. A tiny bit of me wants to check Twitter to enjoy the inevitable DEFCON 1 meltdown — but all the rest of me immediately slapped down that tiny bit and I don’t think we’ll be hearing from it again.

This was a blog post, wasn’t it? Dammit.

September 19, 2021

scholars

A scholar can never become a philosopher; for even Kant was unable to do so but, the inborn pressure of his genius notwithstanding, remained to the end as it were in a chrysalis stage. He who thinks that in saying this I am doing Kant an injustice does not know what a philosopher is, namely not merely a great thinker but also a real human being; and when did a scholar ever become a real human being? He who lets concepts, opinions, past events, books, step between himself and things – he, that is to say, who is in the broadest sense born for history – will never have an immediate perception of things and will never be an immediately perceived thing himself; but both these conditions belong together in the philosopher, because most of the instruction he receives he has to acquire out of himself and because he serves himself as a reflection and brief abstract of the whole world. If a man perceives himself by means of the opinions of others, it is no wonder if he sees in himself nothing but the opinions of others! And that is how scholars are, live and see.

— Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator”

August 18, 2021

Permanent Crisis

Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon’s Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age will be on sale tomorrow, and it’s an absolutely essential book for anyone who cares about the humanities — or even just thinks about the humanities. You may read the introduction (as a PDF) here, and also read an interview with Paul and Chad here. I expect to have more to say about the book later, but just for now I want to make a couple of introductory points about what I consider to be the two chief themes of the book — themes woven together skillfully in the development of the argument.

The first key theme is obvious from the title: It is the nature of the modern humanities to be always in crisis. From the Introduction:

One of our chief claims is that the self-understanding of the modern humanities didn’t merely take shape in response to a perceived crisis; it also made crisis a core part of the project of the humanities. The humanities came into their own in late nineteenth-century Germany by being framed as, in effect, a privileged resource for resolving perceived crises of meaning and value that threatened other cultural or social goods as well. The perception of crisis, whether or not widely shared, can focus attention and provide purpose. In the case of the humanities, the sense of crisis has afforded coherence amid shifts in methods and theories and social and institutional transformations. Whether or not they are fully aware of it, for politically progressive and conservative scholars alike, crisis has played a crucial role in grounding the idea that the humanities have a special mission. Part of the story of why the modern humanities are always in crisis is that we have needed them to be.

I don’t think you could read this book with any care and come away doubting the truth of this claim. The second major claim I want to call attention to may seem at first to be rather different, but in fact is closely related to the first. From Chapter Seven:

For decades, the humanities have arrogated to themselves critique and critical thinking, and thus they asserted a privileged capacity to demystify, unmask, reveal, and, ultimately, liberate the human from history, nature, or other humans. Whether as Judith Butler’s high-theory posthumanism or Stephen Greenblatt’s historicist communion with the dead, the humanities have claimed sole possession of critique and cast themselves as custodians of human value. In order to legitimize such claims and such a self-understanding, the modern humanities needed the “disenchantment of the world” and needed as well to hold the sciences responsible for this moral catastrophe. Only then could their defenders position themselves as the final guardians of meaning, value, and human being.

The success of the sciences — and more particularly, I would say, of the technocracy that arose from the explosion of scientific knowledge over the past two hundred years — provides the entire context for understanding the character of the modern humanities: the account of the virtues and goods the humanities claim to be the unique guardians of, and the account of their guardianship as being under constant existential threat.

But this raises a crucial and uncomfortable question: Can the humanities relinquish their crisis narrative without also relinquishing their unique guardianship of humane values such as “critical thinking”? We could scarcely envy a model of humanistic learning that wasn’t in crisis only because, like Othello, it’s occupation’s gone.

In the interview linked to above, Len Gutkin asks whether the humanities can get along without a crisis narrative, and Reitter replies: “Can the humanities do without crisis talk? Probably not, unless there was some massive reorganization of society where there didn’t seem to be a fundamental tension between the pace of capitalism and the pace of humanistic thinking.” This is perhaps more bluntly pessimistic than the book itself, which tries in its Conclusion to suggest some resources that could lead to a Better Way, notably (a) Edward Said’s reading of Erich Auerbach and (b) Max Weber’s Wissenschaft als Beruf — which Reitter and Wellmon have recently edited, in a new translation by Damion Searls.

I’d like to make another suggestion, based on a theme Reitter and Wellmon contemplate early in Permanent Crisis but don’t pursue at the book’s end:

Recent efforts among scholars to establish the history of humanities as a distinct field started with a question: “How did the humanities develop from the artes liberales, via the studia humanitatis, to modern disciplines?” Our question is slightly different: Have the continuities linking the humanist scholarship of the faraway past to that of today been stretched thin? Or have they, or some of them, remained robust? These are, of course, big questions, and we won’t treat them comprehensively, let alone try to resolve them. But we do begin with the premise that the continuities between the modern, university-based disciplines collectively known as the humanities and earlier forms of humanist knowledge such as the studia humanitatis have been exaggerated. The modern humanities are not the products of an unbroken tradition reaching back to the Renaissance and, ultimately, to Greek and Roman antiquity.

I think this is correct. But I also think Reitter and Wellmon are correct when they write, elsewhere in the book, “The current institutional arrangement of university-based knowledge — with its particular norms, practices, ideals, and virtues — was not necessary; it could have been otherwise.”

So here’s what I’m getting at: It may well be that the humanities are chained permanently to their crisis narrative as long as they function within “the current institutional arrangement of university-based knowledge.” That is: If we do not get the kind of “massive reorganization of society” that Reitter mentions, it’s likely that the humanities can only have a self-understanding not dependent on a crisis narrative if they learn to operate outside the structures of the modern research university. And if that were to happen, then the old ways of the studia humanitatis might turn out to be more relevant than they have been in the past several centuries.

June 25, 2021

civil disagreement

John Rose, on classes he teaches at Duke University:

To get students to stop self-censoring, a few agreed-on classroom principles are necessary. On the first day, I tell students that no one will be canceled, meaning no social or professional penalties for students resulting from things they say inside the class. If you believe in policing your fellow students, I say, you’re in the wrong room. I insist that good will should always be assumed, and that all opinions can be voiced, provided they are offered in the spirit of humility and charity. I give students a chance to talk about the fact that they can no longer talk. I let them share their anxieties about being socially or professionally penalized for dissenting. What students discover is that they are not alone in their misgivings. […]

On the last day of class this term, several of my students thanked their counterparts for the gift of civil disagreement. Students told me of unlikely new friendships made. Some existing friendships, previously strained by political differences, were mended. All of this should give hope to those worried that polarization has made dialogue impossible in the classroom. Not only is it possible, it’s what students pine for.

Please read the whole essay. After doing so, you may be encouraged, as Rose himself is. But you also may be depressed, as I am, to reflect that what ought to be the baseline norm of all university classes should be so much of an outlier that for many of Rose’s students it’s a one-time-only exceptional experience.

Also, there’s a mystery here, an important one: Many professors say that they’re all about open dialogue and the free play of ideas, but students are really good at discerning whether or not that’s bullshit. Like card players, all of us who teach have tells, quirks of speech or facial expression that let students know what we really think as opposed to what we say we think. Obviously John was able to convince his students that his commitment to civil discourse is real. How a teacher does that is the mystery I’m talking about, but the one essential step is for you, dear professor, to ask yourself whether you actually believe in the free play of ideas. Because if you don’t, you’re definitely not going to be able to persuade your students that you do.

May 17, 2021

thick and thin

I taught for many years at Wheaton College, which has a detailed Statement of Faith that everyone on campus signs. From this detailed statement emerges what we might call a thick theological anthropology, built up from layers of Biblical interpretation and historically orthodox theological formulations. By contrast, this is what my current employer, Baylor University, asks of its faculty:

Faculty members at Baylor University are expected to be in sympathy with and supportive of the University’s primary mission: “to educate men and women for worldwide leadership and service by integrating academic excellence and Christian commitment within a caring community.” The personal and professional conduct of each faculty member should be supportive of and consistent with this mission.

That’s it. There can be a lot of debate about what it means to be “in sympathy with and supportive of the University’s primary mission”: in the Honors College, where I teach, it certainly requires open and substantive Christian commitment, but that’s not the case everywhere at Baylor, and as I have said before I think of us in the HC as Baylor’s equivalent of Tom Bombadil. Baylor talks a lot about being “unambiguously Christian,” but the statement on expectations for faculty strikes me as an ambiguous one — and surely intentionally so, because it gives to the administration a great deal of leeway in determining whether a particular candidate is, as administrators like to say, a “good institutional fit.” It would be possible to interpret it in ways that do not require from the faculty any religious belief at all.

There are eminently defensible reasons to do things Baylor’s way rather than Wheaton’s; if I didn’t think so I wouldn’t have changed jobs. But it’s obvious that thin communal commitments do not lead to, and are not even conducive to, a thick theological anthropology, and it would be foolish to expect people held together by such weak confessional ties to share views that only make sense within the robust account of human life generated by historic Christian orthodoxy.

December 7, 2020

under pressure

Technology Review has a good article on ex-Google employee Timnit Gebru, an AI researcher who recently co-authored a paper questioning the social and environmental effects of some of Google’s projects and got herself sacked for it. One specific element of the story has caught my attention.

Only one of Gebru’s co-authors talked with Technology Review about their troublesome paper: Emily Bender, a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington. From the article:

Gebru and Bender’s paper has six coauthors, four of whom are Google researchers. Bender asked to avoid disclosing their names for fear of repercussions. (Bender, by contrast, is a tenured professor: “I think this is underscoring the value of academic freedom,” she says.)

Please consider that story in light of this one from the WSJ, which describes how Medaille College and other American colleges and universities are eliminating tenure in response to financial troubles. At Medaille the word tenure is still used but, as the article makes clear, it doesn’t mean anything: “Professors remain tenured but the term no longer carries traditional protections. Tenured faculty will work on three-year renewable contracts, class loads are about 20% larger, and even they can be laid off with two months’ notice.”

Add to that the situations — some listed here — in which insufficient wokeness is cause for the dismissal of non-tenured faculty and ongoing harassment and public humiliation of the tenured. (Though I suspect that for us academics getting in trouble with the Woke Police ought to be pretty far down on our list of worries.)

Now, ask youself: When researchers in the academy are subjected to political pressures from the left and financial pressures from budget-slashing administrators — who never, by the way, slash administrative budgets: those continue to grow apace — and when researchers outside the academy are subject to immediate dismissal for speaking truths that are inconvenient to their employers, what’s the outlook for truly groundbreaking research, in any field? Spoiler: Not great.

October 20, 2020

the college experience

Ian Bogost, speaking truth to both power and powerlessness:

Without the college experience, a college education alone seems insufficient. Quietly, higher education was always quietly an excuse to justify the college lifestyle. But the pandemic has revealed that university life is far more embedded in the American idea than anyone thought. America is deeply committed to the dream of attending college. It’s far less interested in the education for which students supposedly attend. […]

The pandemic has made college frail, but it has strengthened Americans’ awareness of their attachment to the college experience. It has shown the whole nation, all at once, how invested they are in going away to school or dreaming about doing so. Facing that revelation might be the most important outcome of the pandemic for higher ed: An education may take place at college, but that’s not what colleges principally provide. Higher education survived a civil war, two world wars, the Great Depression, and the 1918 Spanish flu, the worst pandemic the U.S. has ever faced. American colleges will outlast this crisis, too, whether or not they are safe, whether or not they are affordable, and whether or not you or your children actually attend them. The pandemic offered an invitation to construe college as an education alone, because it was too dangerous to embrace it as an experience. Nobody was interested. They probably never will be.

This is certainly correct, and there’s no doubt that university administrators are paying close attention to the lessons this pandemic has taught. Chief among them, I predict, will be that full-time faculty are so marginal to “the college experience” that there’s no point in paying more than a handful of them — the research stars, primarily in the sciences. The adjunctification of the faculty will continue at an accelerated pace.

August 21, 2020

on being Bombadil

I am not privy to anything that happens in the upper reaches of Baylor University’s administration, but as far as this close observer can tell, Baylor wants to be an R1 university with successful sports teams, especially in football. There are some of us who want very different things, but those who actually make decisions about the direction of the university as a whole want that.

Except for those at the top of their category, institutions are governed by their aspirations. They look around at the institutions they admire and ask, “What must I do to be recognised as their peer?” They figure that the most likely route to such recognition is imitation.

So if you want to know where Baylor is headed, look at what R1 institutions with successful sports programs are up to. What Baylor’s aspirant peers do on Monday, Baylor will do on Wednesday. It really is as simple as that.

But Baylor is a big place, and contains several subcultures with their own priorities. For instance, I think it is fair to say — I welcome correction from my colleagues — that in the Honors College we are not opposed to becoming an R1 institution or being competitive in sports, but those achievements would not be priorities for us, and we wouldn’t want the pursuit of them to distract us from what we really care about, which is truly liberal education grounded in a deeply Christian account of the life that is good for human beings to live.

In relation to the university as a whole, then, I think we in the Honors College are rather like Tom Bombadil’s litle realm in The Lord of the Rings. Like Tom, we go about our business regardless of what conflicts are brewing, or what wars are raging, in the rest of Middle Earth. Like Tom, we consider ourselves not owners or controllers of our realm, but rather lovers and stewards of it. It requires and deserves our constant attention, so we give that attention, regardless of how peculiar our behavior may appear to the larger and more obviously ambitious lands that surround us.

Now, those of you who know that I have recently advocated the Gandalf Option may wonder if I am now discarding that in favor of the Bombadil Option. No, for on all essential matters Gandalf and Bombadil are of one mind. The words of Gandalf that I quoted as my own guideline are words that old Tom would have warmly endorsed. And after all, when the great War is over Gandalf makes a special point of visiting Tom. We should think of Gandalf as providing a model for thinking in motion and Tom as providing a model for acting in place.

In one of his letters, Tolkien says this about Bombadil:

The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. but if you have, as it were taken ‘a vow of poverty’, renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war. But the view of Rivendell seems to be that it is an excellent thing to have represented, but that there are in fact things with which it cannot cope; and upon which its existence nonetheless depends. Ultimately only the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron.

I think we in the Honors College should not expect Baylor as a whole to take our view of things; but I also think we should do what we can to encourage Baylor to think of us as Rivendell thinks of Tom. Because the alternative….

UPDATE: It occurs to me that I should connect this post, not just to others with the same tags, but to two essays of mine:

April 27, 2020

breaking habits

Reading this post by Jonathan V. Last, I find myself meditating on the role that habit plays in our choices of activity, in small things and large. Last looks at two elements of our current economy — the conglomeration of entertainment options that we call “Las Vegas” and the movie-theater industry — and asks how they can possibly survive the current economic crisis in anything like their current form.

I’ve also been reading many reflections on the future of higher education in America, most of which acknowledge that the current situation is simply accelerating the arrival of a crisis we have long known is coming: fewer American young people. “Nathan Grawe, an economist at Carleton College in Minnesota, predicts that the college-going population will drop by 15 percent between 2025 and 2029 and continue to decline by another percentage point or two thereafter.”

All of this has me wondering about the future, of course, but it also has me thinking about the role of habit in our voluntary pursuits. The biggest concern for the movie-theater companies ought to be this: What happens when people get out of the habit of going out to see first-run movies and instead develop the habit of seeing first-run movies at home? What happens when streaming a new release on your TV is the normal thing to do? My guess is that for many people going out to the movies will eventually feel like a chore, and the movie industry will need to adapt to new preferences. It seems likely to me that the theaters that will survive into the new era will be places like Alamo Drafthouse, oriented towards foodie-cinephiles. And I sure hope Alamo survives, because man do I love going there.

I tend to think that Las Vegas will bounce back, because going to Vegas is, for most people anyway, not a regular habit but an occasional festivity. But a lot will depend on how people feel, long-term, about getting on airplanes. And this is one of Last’s points: so many of our industries are entangled with other industries that it’s impossible to calculate how all the dominoes will fall. (Which isn’t stopping journalists from making confident predictions.)

But about higher education … obviously the stakes are much higher there: the choice of what university to attend is widely believed to be one of the most important a person will make in his or her life. But that assumes that you will choose one, and I find myself wondering whether attending a university at all is a practice that is subject to change in our new circumstances. That is, for many millions of American high-graduates, and for several generations now, going to college has not been perceived as a choice but rather as an inevitability. Nor “whether” but only “where.” It’s hard for me to imagine that in the coming years it won’t also become a “whether.”

Everyone assumes that this fall there will be a significant rise in high-school graduates deferring their college enrollment and taking a gap year. It is easy to imagine circumstances in which this becomes more commonplace, not just for the next year or two, but permanently. And, further, it is easy to imagine a significant number of those gap-year students finding jobs that they are not eager to give up in order to go to college. Further still, one can conceive of circumstances in which certain industries that flourish in an altered environment, industries that had previously chiefly hired people with college degrees, realize that their employees don’t really need college degrees. That is to say, it’s not hard to envision a future in which young people and employers alike realize that higher education has become a habit, and a habit one can break.

A big part of me doesn’t want to see this happen, because I have been involved in higher education since I started college at age 16, and I love this little world. Plus, I have many, many friends who are professors, or who work in other capacities in colleges and universities, and I worry about their future. But if I could set all that aside — which I can’t, quite — I believe I would think that, over the long haul, a significant lowering of the number of young Americans who attend university would be a social good. And I hope it will be, because I think that’s what’s coming.

I would love to live in a world in which higher education continues to flourish and the charms of Las Vegas wane. I think I’m living in the opposite of that world.

November 9, 2019

Fish on freedom

Stanley Fish’s new book The First consists largely of repackagings of ideas Fish has already developed: he’s covered free speech in There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech and It’s a Good Thing Too, academic freedom and academic culture in Save the World On Your Own Time and in many essays, religious freedom in a handful of essays, including a brilliant one called “Vicki Frost Objects” that’s far better than anything here. But Fish writes as sharply as ever, and The First could be a nice introduction to his writings on the issues emanating from the First Amendment.

But I want to question something that he writes about academic freedom. His argument here centers on a single crucial distinction, which he develops in response to the Chicago Statement on academic freedom:

My challenge to that popular view (the Chicago statement has been endorsed by a number of other universities) depends on a distinction between freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry. Freedom of speech is a democratic value. It says that in a democracy government should neither anoint nor stigmatize particular forms of speech but act as an honest broker providing a framework and a forum for the competition of ideas and policies. In this vision, every voice has a right to be heard, at least theoretically. (In fact, differences in resources will almost always translate into differences in the size of the audience one can reach.) In the academy, on the other hand, free inquiry, not free speech, is the reigning ethic, and academic inquiry is engaged in only by those who have been certified as competent; not every voice gets to be heard. The right to speak in the scholarly conversation does not come with membership; it is granted only to those who have survived a series of vettings and are left standing after countless others have been sent out of the room.

I think Fish knows that this might not be comforting to people worried about professors and administrators who exclude the ideas they don’t like, so he clarifies:

Academic inquiry, then, is not free in the First Amendment sense; it is free only in a very special sense: the path of inquiry is open and should not be blocked either by putting the stamp of approval on particular points of view in advance or by dismissing other points of view before they are heard and evaluated.

But why not? Why shouldn’t those who ”are left standing after countless others have been sent out of the room,” those ”who have been certified as competent,” decide that some points of view actually may (perhaps must) be dismissed before being heard and evaluated?

Fish argues that a scholar like Charles Murray should be treated differently than a provocateur like Ann Coulter, should be given a hearing in venues where she should not, but what if the certified-competent decline that distinction and treat Murray and Coulter identically? I don’t think Fish can offer them any reasons why they shouldn’t. His longstanding belief that academic life is to be regulated only internally, by people engaged professionally in the practices of that life, provides no means by which academic life can be prevented from growing narrower and narrower and narrower.

I’ve been reading Fish pretty carefully for a long time now, and I think he would reply that no such means could be provided — that you cannot write rules and guidelines in such a way that people in power will be unable to abuse them, twist the rules to their purposes, as long as their power is uncontested. (Note that when power is to some degree distributed, rules can be effective: thus the ability of the American judiciary to constrain some of Donald Trump’s impulses.) If this is indeed his view, he may well be correct. For instance, conservative and religious voices — N.B.: those are not the same thing — may alike be so tenuously present in academia that they can do nothing to soften the tyranny of the certified-competent. Certain ”paths of inquiry” are closed and on Fish’s account of the academy must remain closed, despite his lip service to the phrase.

If so, do we simply accept that state of affairs? Or do we look for broad social forces or institutions to which academic institutions might legitimately be held accountable?

October 22, 2019

against lectures

At the very heart of the academy we find a series of genres — discursive genres, which are also genres of social interaction — the mastery of which constitutes, more or less, mastery of the academic profession itself. Some of these are universal: that is, they may be found in all academic work. Others are specific to certain disciplines or disciplinary families. Some of them are performed in relation to colleagues, others in relation to students. Here are a few that I, as a professor of humanities, have had to practice:

the classroom lecture
the “job talk” lecture
the invited public lecture
the short lecture that you give when you’re on a panel at a conference
the conference-panel discussion
the “Socratic” seminar discussion
the symposium based on a paper everyone is supposed to have read
the peer-reviewed article
the book review
the peer-reviewed monograph

Some of these wear, over several decades, better than others. Some I will probably never do again (the peer-reviewed article, the job talk); others I will be doing to the end of my career (the classroom discussion, the monograph). Some I enjoy, some … not so much.

But I have one definitive and unshakeable opinion: I never want to hear, or deliver, another lecture as long as I live.

For one thing, lectures are very, very hard to do well. I’ve surely heard more than a hundred public or semi-public lectures in my life, and only one of them has been excellent: when I was a grad student at UVA I heard Stephen Greenblatt deliver a lecture that later became his famous essay “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” and it was electrifying. (I was sitting next to one of my professors, and at the end of the talk he leaned over and said to me, sotto voce, “Do you still have your wallet?”) Otherwise they have been not-crushingly-boring at best. And while I work hard to make my lectures vivid and interesting, I am always aware that there are better ways to accomplish what the lecture is supposed to accomplish.

The lecture is an unfortunate holdover from the pre-Gutenberg age. It makes no sense to have me come and talk to you on a subject in circumstances in which I could write something, send it to you, and have you read it and think about it, after which you could bring me to your institution for a conversation. That would be more intellectually productive for everyone concerned. Of course, one might reply that a lecture is not as polished as a finished, publishable essay or article. Indeed: that’s a major reason why lectures aren’t much fun to listen to. Better to embrace the tentative and unfinished character of your thoughts by having a conversation about them instead.

It is true that fewer people can participate in such a conversation than can attend a lecture. But note the difference between “participate” and “attend.” Certain kinds of intellectual exchange simply do not scale. I truly believe that if, instead of asking me to deliver a lecture at your institution, you asked me to come prepared to talk with four different groups about my published work, or even my work-in-progress, the experience would be better for all of us. (And I would be much more likely to say yes, since I wouldn’t be committing myself to all those hours of lecture-writing — a problem for me, because my conscience won’t allow me to deliver the same lecture repeatedly at different places.)

Well, one can hope. Or lose hope. But this I am sure of: When I am lying on my deathbed, I shall heave a breath and whisper to whoever is near, “Thank you, Lord. I shall never have to attend, or deliver, another lecture.”

September 5, 2019

unsure

I don’t often on this blog write from a position of professional expertise. Mainly I’m writing about things I’m not expert in, but am interested in, and am trying to think through. I post these thoughts here not because I have anything to teach anyone but because posting them to the interwebs requires me to form my thoughts with a at least a little more care and precision than they would have if they were rattling around in my brain pan. And maybe they’ll help a handful of people who, like me, are trying to figure a few things out. Which leads me to….

A great many people think they’re interested in politics when they’re only interested in news. I have in recent years grown more and more interested in politics and economics, which is to say, the whole long history of all the ways in which we human beings have tried to live together without killing one another but instead, perhaps, finding some arena of mutual benefit. I think our current obsession with news makes it far harder for us to think about politics, so I have stepped away from the daily grind of “And Now This!” to try to inquire into the principles of political economy, and politics more generally.

I don’t see any of these matters as First Things. For some people they are. For some people the ownership of firearms is not a good that may be weighed against other goods, and in that weighing perhaps found wanting, but a primal indicator of Freedom — not to be negotiated away at any price. For others inequality is not one factor among many in political economy but rather the Original Sin of our common life, and as such must be eradicated no matter how high the price. There is no political or economic consideration that rises to that level, for me. I try, instead, to think empirically about what conduces to our common welfare, and what does not. If I thought that communism did that better than other systems of political economy, I’d be a communist.

The big problem for people like me who want to look at these matters empirically is this: almost everyone who writes with expertise about political economy is a True Believer in something, and that often determines how the stories get told. For instance, Thomas Piketty’s famous book is called Capital in the Twenty-First Century, but right from the first paragraph of the book he explains that what he’s concerned with is “the distribution of wealth” and more specifically the unjust distribution of wealth. But that is only part of the story of capital and capitalism. As I commented in that post I link to above, Deirdre McCloskey thinks that wealth creation is the fundamental problem of economics and the history of economics. Piketty shows no interest in that. It’s hard for me not to think that Piketty ignores wealth creation because that would disrupt the clean lines of his story, while McCloskey largely dismisses the agitations created by inequality because that would disrupt the clean lines of her story. Though at least McCloskey has responded to Piketty’s argument, in an essay that strikes me as generous and charitable even though severely critical.

But here’s what bugs me: Can you imagine McCloskey saying, “Having read Piketty’s book, I now see that the argument I made in the two thousand pages of my Bourgeois Trilogy is fundamentally flawed, and I need quite thoroughly to reconsider my position”? I can’t. Can you imagine Piketty saying, “Now that I’ve read McCloskey’s trilogy I see that the Euro-neoliberalism that I’ve been committed to my whole career is fundamentally flawed, and I need to learn to embrace the creative powers of the free market”? Me neither. You’re not even going to hear a scholar say, “The evidence cuts both ways, but I think the preponderance of evidence is on my side.” That’s not how academic life works. That’s not how human life works, generally.

So the experts stake out their positions and defend them to the death, leaving the rest of us to try to sort out the evidence. But that sorting is hard work, and not many will willingly take it on, when it’s so much easier to pick a side and stick with it. Evan Davis of the Spectator thinks that maybe 1% of us will be willing to be confused about Piketty v. McCloskey. That estimate might be on the high side.

May 29, 2019

Middle-Aged Moralists

When C. S. Lewis gave the Memorial Address at King’s College, London in 1944 — the occasion being very like an American university commencement — he began by commenting, “When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude, however unlikely the conclusion seems, that you have a taste for middle-aged moralising. I shall do my best to gratify it.”

It was a shrewd move. Lewis himself always loathed the pompous didacticism he had found endemic to the English educational system, and expected that his audience would too. “Everyone knows what a middle-aged moralist of my type warns his juniors against. He warns them against the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.” But with a smile on his face, he declared that he would play to type: “I shall, in fact, give you advice about the world in which you are going to live.”

Let’s fast-forward about sixty years, to a commencement address at Stanford University. The speaker this time is not a professor but rather a businessman named Steve Jobs, and he makes it clear from the outset that he’ll not be doing any “middle-aged moralising.” Rather, he says, “Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.”

And yet it’s not clear, when you think about it, that Jobs’s message is any less moralistic than Lewis’s. It just bears a different moral.

Lewis warns his listeners against the power of what he calls the “Inner Ring” — the desire to belong to a certain admirable group, to be allowed to sit at the cool kids’ table — because he believes that, among all our desires, that one is the most likely to make un-wicked people do wicked things.

Jobs also warns his listeners, but warns them not to allow Death, when he knocks on their door, to find them “living someone else’s life.” Lewis points to the dangers of letting the desire to belong make you a “scoundrel,” and while Jobs too thinks others can endanger us, he frames that danger very differently: “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”

This is the permissible moralism of 2005: College graduates can be exhorted, but not to the old-fashioned virtues that Lewis implicitly appeals to, but rather to self-fulfillment: For Jobs, what is “most important” is this: “have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”

This makes a neat story, once which can be read either as emancipation from constricting rules or as a decline into egotism. But the story gets slightly more complex if we look at one more middle-aged moralist: David Foster Wallace.

Wallace was, I’d say, barely middle-aged when he delivered the commencement address at Kenyon College just a few weeks before Jobs spoke at Stanford: he was 43. (Jobs was 50, and when Lewis gave his “Inner Ring” address he was 45.) If Lewis acknowledges that the genre invites moralism and cheerfully accepts the invitation, and Jobs disavows moralism but delivers it anyway, in a new form, Wallace seems almost desperate to avoid any such thing.

Having begun with a little story about fish, he continues, “If you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish.” Then: “But please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called ‘virtues.’” And: “Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you’re ‘supposed to’ think this way.” Finally: “Obviously, you can think of [this talk] whatever you wish. But please don’t dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon.” Please.

Yet for all those disavowals, Wallace’s speech may be the most passionately moralistic of them all, though in a complex way. He tells us to be suspicious of that inner inner voice that Jobs wants us to listen to, because that voice always says the same thing: “There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of.” Consequently, our “natural, hard-wired default setting … is to be deeply and literally self-centred, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.”

And why should we want to think otherwise? Why should we turn outward? Not in order to avoid becoming scoundrels, Wallace says, but because such other-directedness can bring us freedom. “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom.”

Substantively, it seems to me, Wallace’s ethic is far closer to that of Lewis than to that of Jobs, though he and Jobs were near-contemporaries and formed by much the same culture. (Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters was one of Wallace’s favorite books.) But he could not, and knew he could not, speak as Lewis spoke — even with an ironic nod towards the inevitable clichés of the commencement-speech genre.

Universities still invite middle-aged moralists (professors rarely, writers and business leaders more often) to give speeches to their graduating students, even though those students are generally inoculated against middle-aged moralism — the moralism of self-fulfillment always excepted. What’s remarkable about Wallace’s speech, which has become the great canonical example of the genre, is that he found a way to rescue the occasion; and that he rescued it by pretending to refuse it.

May 4, 2019

#ShunTheTake

Last week I walked into one of my classes to discover fourteen students sitting in complete silence. Each one of them — I believe; there may have been a single exception — was reading or typing on a phone. I said, “Hey everybody!” No one looked up or spoke. I suppose I should be grateful that when I pulled out the day’s reading quiz they put their phones away.

If I wanted to produce a #HotTake, boy, did I have a prompt for one.

But: two hours earlier I had walked into another classroom to find the students already in animated conversation about the reading for the day. I sat and listened for several minutes, gradually realizing that I could ignore my plan for the class session because the students had, without my assistance, set the agenda for the discussion.

I’d advise all of you who read this post to remember those two moments the next time someone tries to tell you what an entire generation is like. Those two classes were occupied not only by people of the same generation, but by people who are studying in the same program (the Honors Program) in the same university. And yet, for complicated reasons, their behavior in my classes was very different.

Most things that happen happen for complicated reasons. Don’t stop looking and enquiring the moment you find an anecdote that confirms your priors.

#ShunTheTake

December 8, 2018

Mr Wellmon’s university

For the last couple of years I’ve read several essays by my friend Chad Wellmon about the state of the American university, and the place of the humanities in that university, and while I have found each of those essays enormously thought-provoking, I have also struggled to discern an overall account of the university in Chad’s writings. He seems to do a lot of “on the one hand, on the other hand” stuff. But today, listening to this talk, I think I see some pieces of the puzzle fall into place. I now discern three interrelated themes in Chad’s recent writing on these subjects.

Utopian promises lead to dystopian responses. The more dramatic the claims that university leaders make on behalf of their institutions — We create great citizens! We’ll make you rich! We have the best sports teams, and they will fill your leisure hours with delight! We’ll be a home for you better than your actual home! We are the sole source of Knowledge! — the more certainly they create a backlash that portrays universities as cynical, corrupt exploiters of its students, sold out completely to the neoliberal order or to every leftist trend — depending on your politics. (My politics are such that I suspect selling out on both sides, but that’s a story for another day.)

Proximate goods are not ultimate, but they’re still goods. The purpose of the university is not to reveal to you The Meaning of Life, or to Save the World — though some university presidents might hint at such powers — but at the university you can learn to think better, to evaluate evidence, to test hypotheses, to formulate arguments, and to do all this in daily relation with others who are developing the same skills — though perhaps not always in quite the ways, or with the results, that you’d prefer. But this too, this negotiating with imperfect partners, is a discipline and a skill.

Institutions, even deeply flawed institutions, are where the formation of persons happens. And in a society that is rapidly disempowering or dismantling so many institutions, from the family on up, do we really want to destroy one that, however inconsistently and imperfectly, does the pedagogical work described above? If there were no university, then where, in our society, would those disciplines and skills be pursued? Twitter? Facebook groups? (Clay Shirky used to think so. Not so much anymore.) Or do you expect individuals to do the necessary work themselves, asocially and non-institutionally?

In brief: If you pay attention to what universities actually do — again, however inconsistently and imperfectly — as opposed to what their PR-driven leaders promise — you might be better positioned to understand their value, and our society’s complete inability to build other institutions that might provide similar value.

Chad thinks he’s a liberal, but this sure looks like a conservative argument to me — an old-fashioned case for the wisdom of limiting one’s ambitions and expectations alike — a Chesterton’s fence kind of argument. I like it. (Assuming, that is, that I have understood Chad properly.)

August 27, 2018

the strange world of graduate study

In an article on the Avita Ronell controversy, Masha Gessen quotes a Facebook comment — apparently from a current or former student of Ronell’s — that has stuck with me. The author declined to be identified in the article, citing fear of recrimination, so nothing said in the comment can be confirmed. But I find it fascinating nonetheless:

We don’t need a conversation about sexual harassment by AR, we should instead talk about what AR and many of her generation call ‘pedagogy’ and what is still excused as ‘genius.’ When people talk about sexual harassment it’s within the logic of the symbolic order – penetration, body parts – I doubt you will find much of this here. But AR is all about manipulation and psychic violence…. AR pulls students and young faculty in by flattery, then breaks their self-esteem, goes on to humiliate them in front of others, until the only way to tell yourself and others that you have not been debased, that you have not been used by a pathological narcissist as a private slave, is that you are just so incredibly close, and that Avi is just so incredibly fragile and lonely and needs you 24/7 to do groceries, to fold her laundry, to bring her to acupuncture, to pick her up from acupuncture, to drive her to JFK, to talk to her at night, etc….

This comment brought back something that happened to me in graduate school, something that I haven’t thought about in decades.

In one of my classes I wrote my big final paper on a famous and yet almost wholly unread work, Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. The professor praised the paper very highly — indeed, I hadn’t written anything to that point in my grad-school career that had received as glowing an evaluation — and made it clear that he believed I had great potential. I was of course flattered by this, and when I saw that he was offering a seminar the following semester on a topic I was interested in, I signed up for it. At this late date I am not sure, but I think I was wondering whether this professor might make a good dissertation advisor; in any event, I very much looked forward to the course.

On the first day, he laid out the plan for the seminar. We would be studying an author of the first importance, he said, a figure fascinating and yet endlessly challenging. Writing about this author could bring out the best in us, or defeat us altogether; but in either case, it mattered — not, he concluded, like writing on something as useless as, say, Sidney’s Arcadia. And then he looked right at me.

After class I went away and thought about what had happened. It seemed to me that the professor was telling me, You are bright, young man, but you don’t know how to direct your abilities. If you take my guidance, I will set you on the right path. But if you continue on the path you are now going, I will have no respect for you. The more I thought about it the more sure I was (and for that matter still am) that this was the only plausible interpretation. So I walked over to the graduate office and dropped the course.

I saw the professor in the hall a week or two later, and he stopped me to ask what had happened to me. He seemed both concerned and wounded. I made an excuse of some kind — I think I said I had a scheduling conflict with my part-time job — and scurried away. We never spoke again.

Eventually I found a very different person to direct my dissertation, the brilliant and kind and odd Daniel Albright, God rest his soul. But just as Daniel and I began to work together, two things happened. First, I took a one-year appointment at Wheaton College — which turned into two, then three, and eventually twenty-nine; and second, a little later, Daniel went off for two years as a visiting professor in Germany. Remember, this was the 1980s and therefore pre-email (at least for most academic humanists). So I had a dissertation to write — in between bouts of grading freshman composition papers, hundreds and hundreds of freshman composition papers — and no ready way of being in touch with my advisor. So rather than writing a chapter, sending it off, waiting for a reply, getting the reply, incorporating revisions, sending it back — forget all that stuff, I thought — I just wrote the whole thing and when I was done, a couple of years later, I mailed it all to Daniel in Munich. A month or so later I got back his corrections and comments, all of them written, in a minuscule hand, on the front and back of one sheet of typing paper.

So what’s this little trip down memory lane all about? Just this: my realization that I have had none, absolutely none, of the experiences that, everyone says, are intrinsic to the career of a graduate student. (See this essay by Corey Robin, for instance, or this one by Chris Newfield.) No passive-aggressive games, no assertions of power, no building-up-and-then-tearing-down — not even anxieties about whether my advisor is writing me a strong enough job-recommendation letter. I already had a job, though I wasn’t sure that it would turn into a tenure-track one.

Moreover, I have spent my entire career teaching undergraduates, having played a role in but a handful of Masters’ and PhD theses, and even then a secondary one. So though I have been a professor of English and then Humanities for more than thirty years now, I am reading all these descriptions of what graduate study is really like with almost an anthropologist’s eye. What a strange and fascinating tribe! How peculiar their customs! I’m really, really glad not to be one of them.

August 17, 2018

going big, going small

Here’s the promised follow-up my recent post on the university. In one sense I want to think bigger than Daniel and Wellmon do, and in another sense I want to think smaller. Let’s start with “bigger.”

When Ross Douthat recently commented on my new book, he used it to turn his attention to the condition of the humanities in American universities today. I responded to that turn in a couple of tweets that probably have been deleted by the time you read this, so let me quote them here:

I think it’s important to distinguish between the humanities (intellectual disciplines located primarily in educational institutions) and humanism, or humane reading and learning (which have fuzzier and more flexible institutional placement). It is possible to renew humane learning without renewing “the humanities,” and to some extent vice versa. It’s worth remembering that only one of my five protagonists was an academic (CSL), though Auden taught for a while to make ends meet.

All of my protagonists were concerned with education, but none of them particularly with university education. By then, most of them thought — Lewis was particularly explicit about this — it was too late for major interventions into a young person’s formation. Nor were any of them especially concerned with the curricula of lower schools. Rather, what they wanted to shape was a culture in which humane learning was valued — a culture that, for at least some of my protagonists, began with the family and extended into the public sphere. On this model, what happens in schools at any level is downstream from other, more fundamental forces.

I’m attracted to this idea and think it applicable to our own moment — maybe more applicable now than it was 75 years ago. Given the tentacular infiltrations of the internet, the building of a humane culture can begin anywhere, and even if you’re a professor it’s not necessary to confine your efforts at culture-making to the inner structures of the university. You can think of culture as neuronal, branching dendritically, memetic axons carrying information and moral impulses among family, school, public sphere. Indeed it may be the case that if we want to make our universities healthier the best course might be not to aim directly at them but to nourish families and the public sphere, in order to stimulate universities from without. In that sense I am thinking a little bigger than Daniel and Wellmon do.

But cultural nourishment begins at home. While I can think of my interventions occurring along axons that link multiple cells of culture, I can rarely control my levels of access to any given cell or aggregation of cells. To take a very homely example: I am very interested in the informational culture of the institution where I work — the ways the technologies we have adopted shape our reading, our writing, and our pursuit of knowledge, and while there are several faculty committees on campus that deal with these matters, I have never managed to get myself appointed to any of them. Every year I volunteer; every year I hear nothing. (I am not sure why this is — I think it’s a product of some long-standingly perverse politics here at Baylor — but the reasons aren’t relevant to this post.) It is very difficult to see how you can directly help to shape “the university” if you can’t get appointed to the very faculty committees that a great many of your colleagues are trying to avoid having to serve on.

So, as needed, you get more local. You start with your classroom, or your personal blog (hi), or whatever is, as Heidegger might put it, zuhanden. One of my favorite scenes in Dickens’ Bleak House comes when the indefatigable Mrs. Pardiggle tries to enlist our heroine Esther Summerson in her “militant” evangelism among the poor — which is in truth not evangelism at all but rather relentless moral hectoring. Esther finds it appalling, and overcomes her characteristic diffidence sufficiently to resist:

At first I tried to excuse myself for the present on the general ground of having occupations to attend to which I must not neglect. But as this was an ineffectual protest, I then said, more particularly, that I was not sure of my qualifications. That I was inexperienced in the art of adapting my mind to minds very differently situated, and addressing them from suitable points of view. That I had not that delicate knowledge of the heart which must be essential to such a work. That I had much to learn, myself, before I could teach others, and that I could not confide in my good intentions alone. For these reasons I thought it best to be as useful as I could, and to render what kind services I could to those immediately about me, and to try to let that circle of duty gradually and naturally expand itself.

This is what I counsel in relation to fixing the university: note what is to hand, make your interventions locally, see where they take you, and “try to let that circle of duty gradually and natural expand itself.” This is not a matter of “think globally, act locally”: you are thinking and acting locally. But if you do so faithfully and consistently, then maybe over time your “local” becomes rather more expansive.

August 16, 2018

another look at Daniel, Wellmon, and the future of the university

Adam Daniel and Chad Wellmon respond to my response to their essay. (They respond to Cathy Davidson too.) Got all that?

My first thought is that if I had known that my blog post would be taken even this seriously I would have spent more than ten minutes writing it. (You live and you learn.) But now I’m digging into the subject more fully and thinking more seriously … and just getting more confused.

The stories I read about the American university just yesterday told me, with illustrative examples, that it’s a place where any dissent from leftist orthodoxy is being ruthlessly crushed; where the tyranny of deep-pocketed donors is driving out any resistance to free-market capitalism; where powerful humanities professors rake in big money for purveying pseudo-radical ideas while demanding sexual favors from younger colleagues and grad students; where soon enough there will be no humanities professors or humanities departments, and precious few humanities courses.

Again those are stories I read yesterday. Aside from the variety of the narratives, the chief thing that I would note about them all is that each claims to be saying something at least characteristic and perhaps definitive of “the University.” All tales about “the University” are morality tales, with very explicit lessons that are presumed to be transferable to any and every particular institutional context.

And that’s what makes all these narratives bullshit. It’s not that the events they describe didn’t or don’t happen; rather, it’s unsustainable imposition of definitive and universal judgments based on handfuls, at most, of anecdotal material.

I have therefore come to the conclusion that nothing of general validity can be said about “the University” – and not much about any given university in toto. Different schools and programs within the university conveyor very different purposes and characters. Even departments that seem relatively closely related, according to the taxonomy of academic disciplines, can sometimes lack a common vocabulary, common goals.

All of which means that I myself wrote too generally and abstractly in my earlier post. It is true that the people who make the biggest financial decisions tend do so along the lines I suggested, as Daniel and Wellmon agree. (Universities “have increasingly adopted the practices, technologies, and professional expertise of late capitalism…. In many places, these activities and idioms are gaining such purchase that they threaten to exert a decisive influence on what universities most basically do, to the exclusion of core academic considerations.”) But much else is going on – not all of it Good – throughout every university, and its many nooks and crannies. More on this later.

For now, though, I want to note that Daniel and Wellmon are not as afraid as I am of speaking in general terms, and make a broad recommendation: that the American university renew and intensify its (historically variable) investment in the American democratic project. “The democratic model” can offer a “normative ideal” for the university, and should be grasped as such.

My essential problem with this suggestion is that I do not know what it means. I think there are two broad possibilities:

The pedagogical: Universities should take on the responsibility toe educating students to fulfill their responsibilities as citizens in a democratic order.
The demographic: Universities should seek to serve a broader constituency than is characteristic of elite institutions, bringing in students from historically underserved populations and helping them to come into their inheritance as persons and citizens.

Maybe (probably) both of these are at work, but I suspect that the latter is the stronger emphasis. I’d appreciate clarification on this point.

I also don’t know how to understand this renewal of the democratic model as regulative ideal in relation to what Daniel and Wellmon say elsewhere in the essay about the university-as-corporation: “Too frequently, the question of how and whether they make the university a better university — by advancing teaching and research — is never seriously considered.” Does “advancing teaching and research” necessarily contribute to the democratic project? Or must teaching and research be adapted to make that happen?

Moreover: Let’s say that I sign up for this project. How do I contribute? To judge by his job title — “senior associate dean for administration and planning” at UVA — Adam Daniel may have some input into his university’s overall strategies. And Wellmon recently led a revision of UVA’s undergraduate core curriculum. But what should a teacher like me do? Try to get myself appointed to the right committees? Write essays for the Chronicle of Higher Education? Obviously I don’t expect Daniel and Wellmon to produce a blueprint. But I would like a better idea of how an academic might support a renewal of the democratic project, and how anyone might recognize the signs of such a renewal, were it to begin.

I said earlier that I would say more about the great variety of goods that are being pursued in any given university, but I’m going to save that for another post. Stay tuned.

August 3, 2018

the Clientele, the Public, the Person

Adam Daniel and Chad Wellmon:

The multiversity [Clark] Kerr described was not the result of any considered plan or coherent philosophy. Rather, it emerged inadvertently as a congeries of historical conceptions of the university. Kerr identified three salient traditions. The first was represented by Cardinal Newman, founder of the University of Dublin in the mid-19th century. Newman regarded the purpose of the university as the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, cultivating gentlemen suited to lives of erudition, taste, and intellectual refinement. The second was embodied in Abraham Flexner, an American educational reformer who, in 1930, founded the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J. He invoked a German model that defined the university as an institution devoted to specialized research.

Finally, Kerr described the “American model,” which he saw most strongly reflected in the land-grant movement of the latter half of the 19th century. This distinctly American idea of the university was born of an explicit twinning of higher education and the democratic project, opening the doors of the academy to a broader public and emphasizing such “practical” fields of study as engineering and agriculture. If Newman’s university served the generalist and Flexner’s the specialist, the American model was to serve the demos.

Kerr saw all three models as coexisting in the multiversity. The balance among them varied by institution, but, under the watchful stewardship of presidents, they remained in a general state of homeostasis. In the 55 years since Kerr’s treatise, however, the “American model” has increasingly eclipsed the other two. Regardless of what they do or how they fund and organize themselves, American universities understand themselves as institutions in service to the public.”

With all due respect to my good friend Chad and his colleague, I must disagree. It is true that universities often describe themselves in this way, but that is a smokescreen. American universities actually understand themselves as institutions in service to their clientele. They make occasional face-saving and conscience-salving gestures in the direction of the public good, but the reality is this: Universities, and especially top-tier universities, compete with one another for a shrinking pool of customers, whom they lure with promises of (a) a variety of recreational activities during their four years of undergraduate life and (b) admission to graduate school or a relatively lucrative job afterwards.

Professors and some administrators will tell a different tale, but I believe that the decisions of the people who actually run our universities clearly confirm my account. As I said in an earlier post, if you pay attention to actions rather than words the math isn’t hard to do. Just follow the money.

This is why, as Chad himself has argued, those of us who care about learning must promote and nourish the Academy that stealthily functions within the University. But I would argue that that Academy doesn’t exist “in service to the public” any more than the University does.

Many years ago, W. H. Auden wrote,

A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless.

A mob is active; it smashes, kills and sacrifices itself. The public is passive or, at most, curious. It neither murders nor sacrifices itself; it looks on, or looks away, while the mob beats up a Negro or the police round up Jews for the gas ovens.

The public is the least exclusive of clubs; anybody, rich or poor, educated or unlettered, nice or nasty, can join it….

Auden gets his notion of the Public from Kierkegaard, who said, in The Present Age, that “the public is a host, more numerous than all the peoples together, but it is a body which can never be reviewed, it cannot even be represented, because it is an abstraction. Nevertheless, when the age is reflective and passionless and destroys everything concrete, the public becomes everything and is supposed to include everything. And that again shows how the individual is thrown back upon himself.”

I want to argue that the secret function of the Academy within (and sometimes without) the University is to nurture the human formation to which the gaping maw of a Clientele and the featureless abstraction of a Public are alike inimical. And to this formation the arts are absolutely central. Auden again:

Before the phenomenon of the Public appeared in society, there existed naïve art and sophisticated art which were different from each other but only in the way that two brothers are different. The Athenian court may smile at the mechanics’ play of Pyramus and Thisbe, but they recognize it as a play. Court poetry and Folk poetry were bound by the common tie that both were made by hand and both were intended to last; the crudest ballad was as custom-built as the most esoteric sonnet. The appearance of the Public and the mass media which cater to it have destroyed naïve popular art. The sophisticated “highbrow” artist survives and can still work as he did a thousand years ago, because his audience is too small to interest the mass media. But the audience of the popular artist is the majority and this the mass media must steal from him if they are not to go bankrupt. Consequently, aside from a few comedians, the only art today is “highbrow.” What the mass media offer is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. This is bad for everyone; the majority lose all genuine taste of their own, and the minority become cultural snobs.

The purpose of the Academy should be to encourage and nourish a richly human cultural world in which one may transcend the subhuman status of Clientele and Public without succumbing to the equally dehumanizing lure of the Highbrow.

July 25, 2018

Sustainability and Solidarity

Sustainability and Solidarity – Kathleen Fitzpatrick:

There is absolutely an institutional responsibility involved in sustaining these projects, but, as I argue in Generous Thinking, individual institutions cannot manage such responsibilities on their own. Cross-institutional collaborations are required in order to keep open-source software projects sustainable, and those collaborations demand that the staff participating in them be supported in dedicating some portion of their time to the collective good, rather than strictly to local requirements.

Sustainability in open-source development thus increasingly seems to me to have solidarity as a prerequisite, a recognition that the interests of the group require commitment from its members to that group, at times over and above their own individual interests. What I’m interested in thinking about is how we foster that commitment: how, in fact, we understand that commitment itself as a crucial form of social sustainability.

Kathleen’s blog has been full of ideas recently — more than I can respond to with some travel and talking coming up — but this is an especially important idea, and applies to more realms than the one she’s discussing. Collective achievements require collective virtues; but collective achievements also encourage collective virtues. The academic world — or at least the part of it I occupy — is dominated by incentive structures that discourage this kind of positive feedback loop. Those of us at the senior level of our profession need to be doing some serious work to restructure the incentives we’re bequeathing to our junior colleagues.

June 21, 2018

viewpoint diversity and religion

Religion: A Viewpoint Diversity Blind Spot?:

How could Heterodox Academy address this lacuna? It could, for example, promote the use of surveys or studies to better understand the religious makeup of faculty, administrators, and students — and how they are affected by the lack of viewpoint diversity, the narrowing space for legitimate debate, unfair recruitment and promotion practices, and intolerance of religion on campus. It could highlight the issues affecting religious groups and individuals working or studying in universities and colleges more in its blog posts, weekly updates, and podcasts. It could make a greater effort to involve academics from theology or religious studies fields. It could publish articles parsing the differences between political conservatives and religious academics—not all of the latter are members of the former (and vice versa) —and explore how these differences affect research methods, interests and findings.

Despite the myriad challenges to protecting political viewpoint diversity and freedom of speech in academia today, HxA has boldly undertaken the challenge. Yet, it must now go one step further and also explore the limits and potential of religious belief on campus as well.

That’s Seth Kaplan of Johns Hopkins. Kaplan is right that the viewpoint-diversity movement, especially as represented by Heterodox Academy, has been focused on bringing conservative or even centrist ideas into the academic conversation rather than on finding a place for religious views. I think there are two reasons for that.

Any appeal to religious belief or doctrine as a justification for an intellectual position, or even as an explanatory matrix for cultural phenomena, is effectively ruled out by the academy’s universal commitment to methodological naturalism, whereas politically or socially conservative ideas may be articulated fully within the canons of that naturalism.
Many scholars who are serious religious believers teach at religious colleges, and those institutions have explicit commitments to certain orthodoxies — real orthodoxies, not metaphorical ones. Heterodox Academy says that “The surest sign that a community suffers from a deﬁcit of viewpoint diversity is the presence of orthodoxy, most readily apparent when members fear shame, ostracism, or any other form of social retaliation for questioning or challenging a commonly held idea.” So obviously HxA is not going to be comfortable with institutions that don’t merely “shame” people for holding the wrong ideas but may actually fire them.

If indeed members of HxA have these reservations, they are reasonable ones. All meaningful conversations happen within certain structures of constraint, and methodological naturalism has done a pretty good job of providing those structures, and has done so for so long that most academics are not even aware that they are methodological naturalists. Richard Rorty’s famous claim that religion is a conversation-stopper need not be true, but one can see why he thought it was.

So can anything be done? If there were two good reasons for the discomfort, maybe there are two possible solutions:

Methodological naturalism is an academic/scholarly component of what Charles Taylor calls living within an “immanent frame,” and, as Taylor also points out, that “frame” is not simple or obvious — not something that simply emerged when religious belief is “subtracted” from human experience — but rather a great achievement, a built structure of constraint. But like all such structures, it simultaneously enables certain conversations and disables others. (This point is best articulated, I think, by Kenneth Burke in his famous essay “Terministic Screens.”) I think it would be intellectually productive for HxA to reflect on the historical origins of its core commitments and the costs that those commitments inevitably incur — even while still maintaining the the benefits clearly outweigh the costs. These are intellectual goods that engagement with religiously-committed scholars can encourage.
HxA has emphasized viewpoint diversity within institutions, but that’s not the only way to think about these matters. There is value in intellectual diversity between institutions. That is, not all colleges or universities need to have the same intellectual mission — especially in the United States, with its rich history of both private and public universities. It is possible that religious institutions, even if they place constraints on internal intellectual diversity, may contribute to the overall diversity of American academic culture.

Whether or not I’m right about any of this, it seems to me that these are issues that viewpoint-diversity advocates need to debate.

April 3, 2018

Christians and the academic humanities

This post, describing the experience of a friend of my friend Rod Dreher, makes universal judgments about the world of the humanities based on a narrow and particular set of experiences. Take, by contrast, another friend of mine, Chad Wellmon, who commented briefly on the story here. Chad is a straight white Christian man, married with children, who, while not a conservative, has even written for the Weekly Standard — and he’s flourishing in the humanities at an elite public university. He’s not looking over his shoulder; he’s not afraid of persecution. Rod’s friend says that “the academic humanities, as a whole and at their highest levels, just are not interested in what would have been recognizable as quality scholarship even two decades ago”; okay, well, take a look at Chad’s book on the German university in the age of Enlightenment. I’ll wait.

Now: Does that look like something other than quality scholarship to you? It’s a book based heavily on archival research in a language other than English — in short, just the kind of philological scholarship that would have been recognized as such by Erich Auerbach, for heaven’s sake. But according to Rod’s friend, Chad’s kind of career ought to be impossible.

You might reply that that’s just one example of academic tolerance. Indeed — but then, Rod’s friend offers just one example of academic intolerance. Which one is the norm and which the exception? Do you think you know? If you do, does your opinion rest on any evidence?

I’m not exactly a pollyanna about these matters. I have said over and over again that, thanks to my long career at a Christian college and the specifically Christian character of much of my writing, I am almost certainly unemployable in my field (English literature) outside the world of Christian higher education. And there’s bigotry at work there — no doubt about it. On the other hand, I have been able to publish at some of the best university presses in the world, which also shouldn’t be possible if Rod’s friend’s account of the academic humanities is accurate.

What my experience — and that of several of my friends, not just Chad — tells me is that the state of the humanities in the American university is far, far more complex and variable than Rod’s friend thinks. Look at how universal his judgments are, how often he speaks of “all,” “every,” “no one,” “always.” These statements are simply incorrect. I know first-hand many exceptions to his universal judgments.

Generally speaking, Christians in the academy have a pretty tough go of it these days. But there are, occasionally, open doors for people who have the wit and the strategic nous to get through them. Rather than throw up our hands and walk away, I think we should redouble our efforts to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. There are some good examples out there for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.

One further comment: after decades of reading screeds about the turgid impenetrability of academic prose, I am somewhat bemused to learn that the real problem with scholarly writing today is that “professors of English and Sociology are able to read it.” One of the interesting thoughts that might occur to someone making a mental survey of the greatest humanistic scholars of the past hundred years or so — A. E. Housman, Karl Barth, Erich Auerbach, J. R. R. Tolkien, Fernand Braudel, Charles Norris Cochrane, Leo Spitzer — is how elegantly many of them wrote, and often in more than one language. So elegantly that even professors of English or sociology might be able to enjoy them. Perhaps they weren’t such great scholars after all.