Feelings journalism

Joyce Wadler says here exactly what I was trying to get at here, only better. The difference between sophisticated, sex-positive (Dan Savage-approved) entertainment and mainstream may be overstated. More on this later, perhaps elsewhere.

Katie Johnson, meanwhile, offers supporting evidence for the phenomenon Amanda Hess discussed, wherein the "50 Shades of Grey" franchise relies on the hate-fandom of people whose hate-enjoyment comes from setting themselves apart from the "constructed Other of the ‘vanilla’ housewife," as some "50 Shades" scholarship (cue the CCOA outrage that such a thing exists) brilliantly if jargonishly puts it.

Johnson's review of the new movie is feelings journalism taken to the extreme. Based on the fact that her fellow movie-goers were wearing sequined clothing and various observations (or stereotyped assumptions, it's unclear) about the town where she saw the film, she projects all kinds of attitudes onto the audience:

If you’re going to spend two plus hours watching one dimensional characters act out the not so nuanced fetishes of handcuffs and ass slapping, you might as well go somewhere where you can enjoy the show around you. 

In our case, that show consisted primarily of women. Most had come in groups, presumably to dilute their feelings of guilt and embarrassment, while others had their submissives – er, boyfriends – in tow.

 Emphasis mine. It continues:

We opted out of the Valentine’s Day weekend screenings because we weren’t interested in seeing conservative couples taking note on how to spice up their holy sanctioned marriages. Instead we showed up on a Thursday night, opening night, because we wanted to see the die hards; the fans who felt obliged to see their unspoken favorite series brought to the big screen, the ones who left the kids at home and told their husbands they were at book club.

These details - the spicing of marriages, the book-club evasions, are things Johnson has, by all accounts, made up. Not "made up" in the Scandal In Journalism sense, but made up in the unhelpful-speculation one. It's one thing to say something like this to set the scene (and if an author wishes to situate herself as hipper-than-thou, I mean, it can work, but it's dicey, given the YPIS accusations it invites), and another to spend an entire piece attributing views to a group of people you haven't interviewed, based on what they seemed as if they might be thinking. It makes me think of the thing in - allow me a mass-market moment here - Gone Girl, where Nick and his sister - both back home in Missouri after stints in NY - decide to call their bar The Bar, ironically, thinking their cleverness will go over the heads of the rustic locals. It does not.

But back to Johnson's review. There's more along these lines - e.g., "I spent the majority of a sex scene involving whips watching the 60-year- old man behind me stare open eyed and open mouthed as his wife held his hand" - but this was the clincher:

[J]udging by the enrapt faces of the audience members, something told me they could have cared less about the emotional complexities of Anastasia and Christian’s relationship. I looked around the room during the the film’s raciest moments and registered looks of secret acknowledgment and endearing shock. They were completely absorbed by acts that are never discussed in casual conversation, or not in Mesa anyway.

Now, one might point out that Wadler's piece, which I thought was fabulous, is also the product of the author's imagination. Both pieces are examples of fiction in journalism. But... we're not meant to actually believe Wadler had an encounter with "a young woman on an ice floe." Whereas Johnson's presenting her speculation as fact.

Long-form CCOA

Pardon the "Seinfeld" reference: Elaine turns some work in to her boss at a clothing catalogue, Mr. Peterman. His response: "That looks like a lot of words." Which is how I'd respond to this dissertation-length take-down of a liberal-arts college in Maine, one Miss Self-Important pointed me to in the comments to her post about conservative critics/critiques (which did I want this to be?) of education, or CCOAs. My complaint was/is that these critics tend to take the things that rile them (or, more to the point, that rile their readerships outside academia) out of context, giving the false impression that Dildo Studies seminars have replaced Shakespeare. So MSI pointed me to the thorough version. Which I did my best to get through.

It's not an easy read, in part because of minutiae about when students choose an advisor, or which sports are offered, and the fact that it's incredibly repetitive* (just how many times do we need to learn about that cancelled "Queer Gardens" course? or "Modern Western Prostitutes"?), and because why exactly are the presidents of Bowdoin introduced by their religions (a tragic downward spiral leading to the first Jew, one who promotes "diversity"!), but mostly because of bits like this:

“Global citizen” and its family of related terms such as “citizen of the world” are, it should be noted, metaphoric phrases. No one can be, literally, a “citizen of the world,” as the “world” is not a polity. “World citizenship” has no defined or agreed upon rights or responsibilities and, despite such institutions as the World Court, no binding law.

Or this:

Relations between Protestants and Catholics at Bowdoin seem placid.

Or my favorite:

If this sample group accurately reflects the Bowdoin student body as whole, then approximately 462 Bowdoin students had sex on that one Saturday.

One imagines them all in one heap!

Anyway. The document is a somewhat quantitative accounting of things we kind of all already knew existed at liberal-arts colleges - interdisciplinary humanities classes, bins of free condoms, a hippie-dippie social environment that's not for everyone, and programs for LGBT and minority students.

But there's virtually no engagement with the case for, say, gender studies. Or with what it even is. Like, the whole gender-is-a-construct thing. This doesn't mean there aren't biological sexes. It means, well, in part it means that transgender people exist, but it also means that gender is performed. That it isn't biology putting women in dresses and men in pants. It means that when one notes a difference between the behavior or status of men and women, boys and girls, one doesn't automatically assume it's rooted in biology, but first considers social pressures.

Meanwhile, all courses of study that look at the non-Western world are treated as political propaganda and not, you know, courses on the history, literature, or politics of various parts of the world.

And student social life is a decadent orgy, even if it's not.

Point being, while the document is indeed lengthy, and within its length there's more context, the same CCOA problems arise. The same buzzwords inspire panic, rather than inquiry. Specific examples below, by heading from the document itself:

"'Studies' Programs"

-These "were founded to advance political goals." Do these courses consist of political indoctrination, or is it "political" enough that black or gay people were deemed worthy of being studied? Like, would some other framework for studying these groups, within pre-existing disciplines, be acceptable? Unclear.

"Hooking Up at Bowdoin"

-Starts sensibly enough: "The term 'hooking up' is a bit ambiguous, as it can refer to sexual interaction on the spectrum from kissing to sexual intercourse." Indeed - people "hooked up" on dates in the 1950s. Then we get the usual discussion of sexual promiscuity, which is apparently what kissing more than one person before getting married amounts to.

-"Sometimes students who hook up do form a relationship in the sense of becoming frequent sexual partners—though without the expectation of sexual exclusivity or personal commitment." I know nothing of Bowdoin specifically, but in the world of young people generally, hookups, or whatever we're calling this, is very often the start of a long-term monogamous relationship or even a marriage. Other stats cited give the impression that students in serious relationships, or not involved with anyone, abound. Once you factor in the number of hookups that don't include anything plausibly defined as sex, things start to look a bit less libertine. 

"Queer Bowdoin"

-Bowdoin is accepting of gay people, less so of anti-gay people. That the school makes LGBT students feel comfortable is, apparently, a political agenda.

"Identity and Race: Being Different":

-Bowdoin not only has affirmative action, but goes out of its way to recruit minority students and make them comfortable once on campus. 

-Perhaps being so celebrated is awkward for minority students. 

-Belgian-inspired stew was served at a diversity workshop.

"What Students Study":

-Some vague reference to there being more non-canonical than canonical English and History classes, but no ratio. We get a list of "conspicuously nontraditional courses with fairly strong ideological overtones," although I'm having trouble ascertaining the overtones. What's the message behind "Entering Modernity: European Jewry"? That European Jews should or should not have done so? Or of "Comparative Slavery and Emancipation" - I'd imagine the prof thinks slavery's bad, but is that really ideological? And most bafflingly, "Colonial Latin America" - why is a world-history course controversial? We also hear yet again about the cancelled "Queer Gardens" course.

"Faculty Research and Publications":

-Professors sometimes teach courses related to their dissertation topics. The problem being... that students hear about a topic from an expert, along with whichever broader courses? Are any PhDs not trained in teaching fields unrelated to their topic? From the offerings shown, it seems as if there's a mix of general and specific - why is this bad? I'm not sure what the problem is, other than that some dissertations deal with gender, which is squicky, or race and gender, which is doubly squicky. The tone makes clear that we should find the sample partial CVs damning, but why?

"Conclusion":

-So Bowdoin doesn't teach a single "course on Edmund Spenser." Does every dead white male who could be included in a syllabus merit a single-author course?

-Does Bowdoin really not teach "wisdom" or "culture"? What does that even mean? How could that have been demonstrated, even with over a thousand footnotes?

-I am very nearly asleep. Not entirely the fault of that document.

*"The report as originally written was much longer," we learn. There's additional material on some website. I can't.

CCOAs, art-vs.-artists, and grocery-guilt

-Flavia, who I understand has a new book out (congrats!), also has a blog post that I, unsurprisingly, endorse in full, and not just because of the h/t at the end. (I do remain proud of that template.) She gets at two key points regarding conservative critiques of academia: 1) the CCOA-perpetuated myth that academics no longer know or care about canonical texts, and 2) well, let's just quote Flavia:

[A[s someone who works on an earlier period, I've long noticed that conservative critics who inveigh against the teaching of pop culture, ephemera, women and minority writers (and so on) do not take quite the same position when it comes to very minor writers who happen to be part of the establishment. So, early modern ballads, sermons, and the works of fifth-rate playwrights are so interesting and so worthwhile and even an important work of recovery (because: OUR HERITAGE!), but Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish--nevermind Toni Morrison, August Wilson or The Sopranos--aren't important enough or central enough to the culture.

-While I probably covered all I needed to and then some (it's upsetting, so I babble) re: the Woody Allen debacle in the post below, I will nevertheless add this: there are no Brownie points for having never really liked the work of someone who turns out to be/to do something despicable. Having never much liked Galliano's clothing designs or Michael Richards's Kramer doesn't make you some kind of amazing judge of character who just knew all along, from their art, that these people had terribleness inside just waiting to get out. This is in response to all the people chiming in, 'well I never liked his movies,' as if that's somehow relevant. If there's a moral quandary here, it's what to do if you do like the artist's work.

-Whole Foods, I know, I know. If you don't want the liberal-guilt shopping experience, why go? But it was on the way home, and there's kind of a car-oil situation, and it's Sunday, so this wasn't the moment to try anything geographically inessential like Wegmans or, where I really wanted to go, H-Mart in Edison. And this is what gets to me: they ask you at Whole Foods if you want to donate your bag refund, and ask this without specifying to what entity. Now I promise I'm not a terrible person. I went to my usual Sunday volunteering despite not knowing what that would mean for the oiliness or lack thereof of whichever internal parts of the car. And my grievance here is obviously with the company policy, not this particular cashier. But my default response to a super-vague request for a donation is always going to be no. (I could take this in a Feelings Essay direction, and hold forth on how disappointed in me this cashier surely was, how she's no doubt still thinking about this, but will leave it there.)

On Jewish women's miraculous capacity for asexual reproduction

David Schraub just alerted me to Rabbi Elianna Yolkut's op-ed, which is a response to Dennis Prager's, which is, in turn, a somewhat fish-in-a-barrel, stunningly out-of-date article blaming Jewish women (and decadent university life) for what Prager sees as an insufficient number of Jewish babies. What with WWPD's longstanding but underutilized "Jewish babies" tag, I must weigh in.

Anyway, the glaring problem with Prager's article, which Yolkut points out, is that he doesn't seem to realize that it takes two to tango, and by "tango" I mean produce a baby of the Jewish persuasion. Not necessarily two Jews, given that any child a Jewish woman gives birth to emerges in full Hasidic garb. But human reproduction being what it is, Jewish babies don't come from cultivating the tree clippings of a particularly fertile Jewish woman. That men also somehow enter into baby-making and baby-raising might seem relevant. Indeed, if the idea is that a Jewish woman can bear a child without having intercourse or otherwise involving male reproductive materials, I think we're looking at a festive December 25th chez Prager.

Prager blames fancy schmancy educated women for not wanting to be housewives, as if it's 1970 or who knows, and as if there are great numbers of men who want women with no outside income or ambitions. It's a big jumble of beyond-stale, beyond-refuted arguments about career gals and their wanton ways. But he does make one interesting, highly original point: female fertility declines with age. We women had never heard this before, so it's good he brought our attention to it.

Yolkut, meanwhile, gets it right:

We women are not our wombs. We contribute more than just children to the dilemma of Jewish continuity and growth. We are rabbis and teachers, we are synagogue presidents and we are the breadwinners and the primary volunteers.

And!

Mr. Prager, you want more Jews in the world? Stop chiding women for not having more children, and start finding ways to offer reasonable, paid and significant family leave in all Jewish communal organizations. Start working to find a solution to funding day schools and synagogues that are out of reach for so many. Try helping the rabbinical establishment figure out how to educate dynamic and engaging new leaders so they might draw more people close to Torah. But take your hands off women’s bodies. They do not belong to you, and neither do their sharp, thoughtful and complex minds.

Precisely. There are other conclusions one might draw - that we shouldn't be in the business of systematically influencing the number of X babies by any means, for example. But as an observant-Jewish refutation, it's spot-on.

From toast to waffles UPDATED

-"Into The Gloss" has a Top Shelf on Garance Doré. Like you're not going to drop what you're doing (in my case, eating a Montreal-style bagel imported from Philadelphia) to look at it. The takeaway: all things equal, find a partner who lets you eat what you'd like for breakfast. On switching to oatmeal because Mr. Sartorialist vetoed toast: "My mornings used to be a celebration of life and now it’s like, ‘Ok…’" Remember that (the already-slim) Doré has, in the past, referred to her boyfriend as her "weight-loss coach." I mean, eh, to each her own. I just ask that we not nod along when Doré refers to this as an American thing, when it's quite obviously a that relationship thing.

-While I personally have nothing against handlebar mustaches, I sure enjoyed Marc Maron's description of them.

-David Schraub endorses my definition of what anti-Semitism consists of. And, inadvertently I'm sure, reminds me of a certain conundrum that happens when a woman changes her last name.

-Miss Self-Important takes on the traditional conservative task of lamenting the decline of Western Civilization. Not the civilization itself - the UChicago Core course. There's now a Gender Studies option, which is a problem a) because Gender Studies means the teacher lectures while gesturing with a dildo and shows clips of "Real Housewives" during class because what canon? (inferred* from MSI's post title), and b) more to the point, because a civilization class needs to be rooted in a particular time-and-place, about a particular civilization, and therefore can't be about Gender and Sexuality across all of human history. (Foucault might disagree, but wouldn't he though.)

I know it's a tradition for conservative critics of academia to see Gender Studies as a proxy for a perceived decline in rigor, but my own experience of gender-as-a-lens is that it's really about introducing an integral part of the study of history that had been ignored. It's neither as sexy nor as 'oppression studies' as it's made out to be.

I'm more sympathetic to the need for a class called "X Civilization" to cover a particular area, but my guess is that they would. Which area will just depend on who's teaching the class, and because there will be multiple instructors, it won't be in the more general course description. And I think it's worth remembering (although conservatives might disagree) that even a course called Western Civ, even taught by the tweediest of instructors is going to have been edited, texts selected not according to some eternal canon, but the instructor's (or department's) interests and knowledge, which are themselves products of their own time, i.e. the time in which the class is being taught.

-If I ever have the time to spare - which I never will - I will make these.

*UPDATE - and only inferred - MSI said nothing about either of these things, merely used the word "sexy," thereby linking her critique, in my mind, to the broader conservative critique of Gender Studies.

Howdy, partner

Miss Self-Important has a humorous response to my post below. It's clever, but the point she's making seems very slippery-slope CCOA (conservative critiques of academia). Academia, as MSI presents it, is a veritable anything-goes libertine paradise. That's certainly academia as imagined in much of the right's discussion of academia, but I'm not seeing the world of academia I've experienced.

The personal, the political: I met my husband in grad school, and thus have been single, coupled, and married during my course of study thus far. I'm not in a particularly right-wing region or field - quite the contrary. And my friends and acquaintances tend to be in the same region and/or field. It's never once been my sense that there's some kind of widespread knowledge of or earnest respect for the kind of arrangements MSI tongue-in-cheek describes. If your partner (singular) is someone you can legally marry - and if you live in NY, that's the case - your relationship will be treated differently if you are married or not.

The status quo would seem freewheeling, I imagine, from the perspective of someone who views same-sex relationships as inherently decadent. But that's all that's changed, all that's been introduced, in this oh-so-radical new age. It would not be done to bring three dates to a bring-your-life-partner event, or a different date to each one. There's no feeling that this is but the first step of many, and that at next year's holiday party, an incoming first-year may bring a harem. It comes back - alas - to the Charles Murray argument - there's a certain amount of anything-goes-in-theory, but grad students are not living their lives in as interesting ways as all that. There's a difference between what might be discussed in a seminar (not that these are seminars I've been in, given my field) and how things would be treated in life.

The scenario MSI refers to - "in which someone got a spousal hire for a person to whom it turned out she was not (yet?) married" - is probably a case of, these people were engaged, whether in the shiny-ring-as-Facebook-photo sense or in the they-informed-all-relevant-parties-of-their-intentions one. Unless these were two friends, in which case everyone involved would be, I'd imagine, not thrilled. What's weird with the case I linked to before is not simply that the two aren't married, but also that there's no reason to believe they're future-oriented as a couple. The clearest way to indicate that is to, you know, get engaged/married, but there would be other ways of doing so if you can't get married in your locale, if you have principled objections, snowflake objections, etc.

But what about that "'my partner,'" an expression which, according to MSI, "is sufficiently ambiguous and politically-charged that it makes people anxious about looming discrimination claims"? I can speak from personal experience that if you refer to a partner or a spouse, different situations are assumed, and one can remain gender-neutral these days through the use of "spouse." But "partner" is there to acknowledge the existence of grown-up romantic relationships. If you refer to a "boyfriend," and you're post-college, at an age where people can perfectly well be full-on married, you're referring to the guy you've been kinda seeing lately. (There is a gender difference, such that a grown man referring to a "girlfriend" may be understood as not a bachelor, not gay, as having committed and acknowledged a commitment to a woman, and thus be viewed by those with whichever outlook as reassuringly traditional. It doesn't cut both ways, and probably stops applying if the man is over, say, 35.)

"Partner," in my experience, is used as an umbrella term, with most of what's under said umbrella consisting of... marriages, the rest being long-term presumed-monogamous cohabitations that are either on the cusp of becoming marriages or that for the reasons I've mentioned above (legal, principled, snowflake) are sticking around but not spousal. Once same-sex marriage is legal throughout the country, I suspect that "partner" will cease to be an option. Those now prevented from marrying same-sex partners would do so, the big principled objection would be gone, and what would remain would be esoteric principled objections and snowflakiness.

But for the time being, those who could be legally married but are not have a way of describing their situation. On the one hand, it's worth remembering that marriages are treated differently, and that if you want your relationship to get the respect of a marriage, you might want to think of getting married if that's an option for you, or vocalizing your desire to do so if it were. On the other, it's useful, in professional situations, that there's an efficient, generally-recognized way to describe serious relationships that differentiates them from three-month or three-date this-and-that. And while it's fair, I think, to treat relationships differently on the basis of whether a couple that could marry has gone and done so, it's not fair to treat individuals differently on the basis of marital status. The ambiguity of "partner" isn't necessarily a knock against it.

"[A]ctual fields of knowledge"

Between Obama's announcement (sometimes I'm incredibly sappy and un-cynical, and today was one of those times - no doubt there were political machinations, but I couldn't possibly know what they were, and I choose just to be thrilled) and what's discussed below, I might as well sign up officially for The Left. Quick, conservative/libertarian readers, find me something equally egregious from the progressive end of things, so that I can return to my center-left comfort zone. I'm begging you. 

******

The Phi Beta Cons are, unsurprisingly, declaring this L'Affaire Riley, in a misuse of the Dreyfus concept exceeded only (in recent memory) by Polanski's (via). George Leef, who at least seems to have read an article about the Riley controversy, which is effectively the same as having read several dissertations in Black Studies, has this to say:

Some of the comments there (and elsewhere) contend that she committed a terrible sin by offering a critical opinion about black studies based on just three dissertation titles. But blog posts are places for offering up opinions, not full-scale analyses. The dissertations sure look like the kind of extremely narrow and highly tendentious research that is common in many academic fields. I hope that someone picks up the gauntlet lying on the ground and reads, then writes a thorough critique of one or more of the dissertations. Are they scholarship that advances knowledge? Maybe so. Or are they in whole or part merely extended rants?

OK, first off, and as I'm not the first to point out (see the post below, and comments), the title of the original blog post - "The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations" - implied that Riley had "read the dissertations." Which, if she titled her own post, means she oopsed a bit, no? As for what Leef thinks these dissertations "sure look like," fine, he's making the point that a blog post is intended for weighing in on that which one knows nothing about, and is driving that home.

But what's truly amazing is his call to someone (why not Leef? isn't his job writing conservative critiques of education?) to read and tear apart these dissertations. "Are they scholarship that advances knowledge? Maybe so. Or are they in whole or part merely extended rants?" Nice way to dismiss the work, as it's not terribly ambiguous what Leef already knows - having read something about something about something about these dissertations. Nice pretense of an open mind.

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Via PBC, there's a Minding the Campus post by John S. Rosenberg, which begins by noting that the Chronicle of Higher Education "used to be the pre-eminent publication covering higher education [.]" And what, pray tell, has replaced it? Archie Bunker's thoughts on the Meathead's studies? Rosenberg completely misses why the accusation of racism came up (which is to say, he thinks it's because Riley criticized Black Studies, when it's more because her criticism was, in effect, to say that Black Studies sure sounds like a load of bunk), then defends her by pointing out that Riley's husband is black, and that Riley herself did not bring this up. OK, points to Riley for not bringing that up in this context, but Simon Doonan has a Jewish husband, and, you know... Some-of-my-best-friends is certainly worse when employed by the person defending himself from a charge of racism, but, used on someone else's behalf, it doesn't magically clear the charges. If I've learned anything in the course of writing a dissertation on Jewish intermarriage in French history, it's that joyfully coupling off with someone from Group X and having unfavorable views towards Group X are not mutually exclusive.

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Jonathan V. Last, of the Weekly Standard, offers something that might properly be viewed less as a disclaimer or disclosure and more as a reason not to take seriously anything that follows: "Naomi is a good friend of mine, a sometimes contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and a fine writer." And - science! - this means she must have been wronged.

Last excerpts part of Riley's post, adding by way of paraphrasing, "Naomi then went on to dissect two other incredibly silly 'Black Studies' dissertations." What what what? Riley didn't "dissect" any of these dissertations, what with having not read any of them, by her own admission. So on what basis might Last, who merely read Riley's interpretation of blurbs about these dissertations, deem them not only "silly" but "incredibly" so?

Last's conclusion is awfully rich, given that writing for a neoconservative (is it still? or just conservative these days?) magazine is participating in the hard sciences.

The great irony, of course, is that the whining and gnashing of teeth from the “Black Studies” crowd only reinforces Naomi’s point about the “discipline.” You’d never see chemists or physicists or mathematicians worked into a hysterical mob by a critical blog post. Because they study actual fields of knowledge—and don't simply tend the garden of their own feelings.

Where oh where oh where to begin. While I'm well aware that conservatives aren't thrilled with the current state of traditional disciplines such as English and history, what Last is effectively saying, in singling out chemistry, physics, and math, is that the humanities and social sciences are inherently nonsensical. Even studying the Great Books. Even doing so with a beard, armchair, pipe, and sycophant female grad student on the knee. 

Well, using my humanities skills, I noticed two key words - "hysterical" and "feelings" - which, along with an earlier remark in the piece about how the Chronicle's readers "generally reacted as though they were suffering from a case of the vapors," made it abundantly clear that this passage of Last calls for a bit of - get this - intersectionality. Which, in layman's terms, means that Last is calling those who rose up in defense of the-humanities-in-its-current-incarnation a bunch of women. Which, well, we the humanists of today pretty much are. This at any rate supports my longstanding theory, that much of the CCOA fervor comes less from any actual changes that the humanities have undergone, and more from the fact that the fields are now associated with/at some levels numerically dominated by women.

******

Seriously. Park Slope Food Co-op? Anything happening there these days?

An Oh, Riley job*

The laziest, and (thus) most popular, conservative critique of higher education involves listing a few course, discipline, paper, or lecture titles, remarking, to an audience of the converted, on how silly they are. There shall, of course, be no analysis of the content or rigor of the work itself. As the world's foremost expert in Conservative Criticisms of Academia Studies (no less than one of the Phi Beta Cons provided my credentials), I feel obliged to weigh in on the latest installment: Naomi Schaefer Riley's anti-Black-Studies ramblings in, and subsequent firing from, the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

It is telling, or unfortunate, or something, that the title of Riley's article was "The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations."** Given that no one reads dissertations, in Black Studies or any other field, except your committee, it would be one heck of a stretch to believe that a contrarian blogger sat down with a big stack of 'em and confronted each with an open mind before reading the thing cover to cover. What Riley did - and indeed all she herself claims she did - was read a sidebar summarizing recent dissertations in that field. But if she's allowed to comment on the quality of dissertations she has only read about, it seems a touch unfair for her to come down hard on readers who imagined - no doubt from the title of the piece, which she maybe didn't write - that she ought to have read them.

The circular argument, outlined in her Chronicle self-defense, is that her very point about these dissertations, her very critique of academia, is... let's let the woman speak:

[T]there are not enough hours in the day or money in the world to get me to read a dissertation on historical black midwifery. In fact, I’d venture to say that fewer than 20 people in the whole world will read it. And the same holds true for the others that are mentioned in the piece.

Such is the state of academic research these days. The disciplines multiply. The publication topics become more and more irrelevant and partisan. No one reads them. And the people whom we expect to offer undergraduates a broad liberal-arts education (in return for billions of dollars from parents and taxpayers) never get trained to do so. Instead the ivory tower pushes them further and further into obscurity.

In other words, she knows these dissertations are obscure and unreadable because no one, herself included, reads them.

While lacking a PhD doesn't disqualify Riley from commenting on academia, it might help to explain why she appears not to know what getting one entails. Much - most! - of my program thus far has been about keeping me away from my good friends the nineteenth-century French Jews and their frenemies, nineteenth-century French non-Jews who wrote about Jews. Why? Because, teaching. Through coursework and exams, as well as the teaching we do while in grad school, we get prepped for the wide world of people who could not care less about our research topics. 

So thus far I haven't addressed the elephants in the room: was the post/is Riley racist, and was it right for the Chronicle to fire her? 

As to the first, the post was racist in the same way that anti-Israel critiques that fail to acknowledge equal or worse wrongs in other countries are anti-Semitic. While Riley herself may simply be a CCOA, one who'd be equally annoyed at Women's Studies, and no doubt some of her best friends are women, a free-standing piece about the pointlessness of Black Studies will of course come across as racist. Riley's self-defense here is basically a don't-you-know-who-I-am-and-everything-else-I've-ever-written-or-thought-on-this-and-related-topics. She must have understood that bashing just this one incarnation of Studies would lend itself to less-than-generous interpretations. 

As to the second, Hamilton Nolan of Gawker may have said it best: "Riley may have been a victim of a mob. But the mob had a point." As Nolan points out - and I will only add that I see echoes of Walt-Mearsheimer-gate - the issue here is largely bad writing. Riley did not bravely take a controversial position on Black Studies departments. She took the CCOA shortcut of calling work she hasn't bothered to look into unworthy.

*Apologies to "Fawlty Towers."

** I see David Schraub got there first. Read his post as well. In her tepid defense, on this and this only, she perhaps didn't write the post title. But she ought to have read the post title, and thus understood where readers might have gotten the idea that her job was to read the dissertations she was declaring worthless.

Two-buck Chuck

Charles Murray, over truffles, a gin-brand-specified martini, and a $100-plus bottle o' wine, complains, “'[I]n academia their [elite 'mericans'] sense of kinship with their European counterparts as opposed to fellow Americans is incomparable.'” Yes, strange, isn't it, that people would connect most with those they actually interact with in their academic and professional lives, even if those individuals come from other countries. Never mind that academia's one of the few channels through which, for example, provincial New Yorkers meet people who grew up in small towns out in Real America. Never mind that everyone involved is probably the child of an academic, likely in the same field. I mean, there's totally a CCOA to be had, but Murray is, as the kids say, doing it wrong.

Meanwhile, if I had a martini and half a bottle of wine, it's anyone's guess what critiques of academia I might come up with. (In all likelihood, none, because critiquing academia from a coma is, I'd imagine, kind of difficult.)

On the Charles Murray op-ed

Yes.

No.

Kind of.

Kind of.

Slightly longer version: Murray suggests four ways to bridge the gap "between the professional and working classes in white America." 

His first suggestion is one I can get behind: "get rid of unpaid internships." I'm not sure he's thought through the fallout from this - even if we fixed the unpaid-internship-accessibility-issues end of things, there's also the fact that employers at "real jobs" would rather hire potential permanent employees than rich kids on "summer vacation." As I remember it, coming from an UMC family and trying to get that kind of work, one either had to lie about significant details (such as: off to college in August - how a friend of a friend was hired at a clothing chain) or to take jobs designed for college students (such as the one I ultimately ended up with: shelving books at the university library). It's not that it's impossible for kids on vacation to do stints in more working-class lines of work, and it certainly varies by locale. (Live in Manhattan? Forget it.) But with the exception of a few specifically seasonal jobs (lifeguard, camp counselor, ice-cream scooper), no one will take the kid seeking beer money over the single parent needing to make rent. But in terms of Murray's specific gap-bridging goal, the fact that some people now grow up thinking work-work isn't for people like them is, I'd think, a problem.

His second one, scrap the SAT, is problematic for reasons I also get into here, but let's first look at Murray's own language. "The test has become a symbol of new-upper-class privilege, as people assume (albeit wrongly) that high scores are purchased through the resources of private schools and expensive test preparation programs." If the SAT isn't something one simply purchases a high score on, and the public is mistaken in thinking it is, wouldn't the better approach be to raise awareness of this, thus helping to demolish the test-prep industry, whose very existence perpetuates the belief that scores can be bought? The whole point of the SAT is to compare students from different high schools, something grades alone wouldn't accomplish. The alternative Murray proposes - "achievement tests in specific subjects for which students can prepare the old-fashioned way, by hitting the books" - already exists in the form of SAT II and AP exams, and would end up being, I'd think, a measure of how good a high school is, or how well it tailored its curriculum to the tests, which would dilute its capacity to measure student achievement.

His third, "replace ethnic affirmative action with socioeconomic affirmative action," is not a "no-brainer," but is in fact something about which reasonable, intelligent, well-meaning people have been disagreeing since forever. Racial and socioeconomic disadvantage are not mutually exclusive. And there's the issue of representation - once whichever influential institution ceases to be an all-white (or zero-black) entity, it will de facto become an institution that's open to blacks. And, more to the point, if what Murray wants to do is to bring about solidarity between whites of different classes (and we'll assume he means this in a non-exclusionary sense...), it's hard to imagine that if the children of plumbers were labeled a disadvantaged category, and known to get into college with lower grades and scores, this despite any history of systematic discrimination against plumbers and their families, that this would, I suppose, go over well. And if the issue is more (as becomes apparent with the fourth point) that it should be possible to make a living with a blue-collar (which is to say, college wasn't a prerequisite) job, then why should we care if children of blue-collar families are proportionately represented at elite colleges? Why shouldn't it be enough to make sure that elite colleges are accessible to them? Why would affirmative action be needed?

Murray's final point - that the BA shouldn't be required of job applicants if the position doesn't specifically require it - sounds appealing at first, but is impractical. Most obviously, a liberal-arts education doesn't prepare you for any particular job. So if it's ridiculous to ask a plumber to have a BA, it's nearly as absurd to ask this of a journalist. Also, I'd think, obvious: entry-level jobs virtually never require the skills acquired in Philosophy 101. The BA is required because if one is to ascend whichever ladder and be in more of a decision-making position, whichever "critical thinking" skills might come into play. (As for his bit about how the BA "has become educationally meaningless," this kind of unsubstantiated nostalgia for a Golden Age of when everyone left college a distinguished Aristotle scholar, I will simply ignore.) Point being, if no job could draw a direct connection between skills needed for the position (again, not the career, the position) in question and a BA, this would mean eliminating college for all, not just opening up fields where demanding a BA feels preposterous.

Finger-painting with Derrida

For your perusal, the CCOA of the Day, a Conservative Critique of Academia that scores well on the test I have for 'em. But because I study something with "studies" in the name, I can't tell you what percentage we're talking. Math is hard! Anyway, it's about how the tweed-and-elbow-patch set have arrived at Occupy Wall Street, and how this is bad because the overeducated, underemployed humanities-types protesting should really be angry, not at banks, but at the profs themselves, who are evidently responsible for tricking wide-eyed undergraduates into majoring in things that aren't practical, or the Classics, because majors need to be practical or else what's the point, but also conservatives like Great Books so let's throw that in there without really justifying it. I mean, it's not as if even a single example is given of a professor visiting OWS.

Early in the piece, the author, Chris Tessone, inspires confidence when he reveals confusion re: who college professors these days are:

Professors and wannabe academics have flocked to the protest sites, welcomed with open arms by the poor, downtrodden BAs-turned-baristas and out of work MFAs at the movement’s core. Yet no one bears more responsibility for the dashed hopes and dreams of these overeducated, underemployed youths than America’s professorial class.

First off, who are "wannabe academics"? Is this some caste we're supposed to recognize? More likely these academic-types who are not in fact professors but want to be that are, oh, adjunct instructors and advanced grad students, or alums of grad programs now filing stuff while yearning for what might have been. Yes, the system's screwed up. Tessone gives us no reason to think anyone "academic" participating in OWS is even on the tenure track, if we are to give him the benefit of the doubt re: the presence of academic-types there. (And, thanks to Facebook and not Tessone, I know that plenty of grad students are indeed involved.)

Tessone, as per CCOA usual, mixes valid criticisms with knee-jerk and proudly ignorant attacks on academia. Does college cost too much? Yup. And maybe, as Tessone says, the "resort" aspect of some colleges is part of the problem.

But it's just a right-wing version of those coming after Joan Didion for her "privilege." He may be coming from a place of reasonable, but can't stay long, or he'd be expelled from the genre. Tessone has to be sure to gratuitously condemn "such disciplines as the performing arts, creative writing, and a myriad of 'studies' majors exploring narrow questions of ethnic, racial, and sexual identity." He has to, or else it's not a CCOA.

I am almost entirely certain Tessone has not even the slightest whiff of a clue what happens in a "studies" class. ("Decision Sciences," however...). Maybe if you make it abundantly clear you don't know what something is, you don't get to denounce it?

Anyway, as a triple offender - my dissertation is about Jews (particular!) and gender (fluffy!) and I'm in a joint program half of which includes the word "studies" (toenail-painting!) - I'm intrigued to know that what I do is "undemanding." Never mind the piles and piles of Great Books I read and was examined on to get to this point. Never mind that said Books of course inform my work. Never mind that whole doing research in a foreign language and contending with microform-induced nausea. Anything not entirely about white, Christian men, the only beings ever to walk this earth who represent The Universal, is by definition nonsense.

And it continues. Tessone informs concerned readers of "the cheapening of 'liberal arts' to mean 'any subject of study divorced from considerations of practicality or good taste.'" Kids these days! Not like in our day, when they'd all memorized all of Shakespeare, backwards, barefoot, and in the snow! "The liberal arts were once about studying how to live, informed by literary, philosophical, and historical accounts of how others conducted their lives. Students took a coherent set of core courses and immersed themselves in the Western canon.

OK, so coming from UChicago means my undergrad experiences don't count. But high school and grad school friends who went elsewhere somehow managed not to major in Silliness Studies, somehow managed to emerge having read a whole heck of a lot of "dead white males." Ah, but these were typically students at other good schools, public and private, big and small alike, fine, but not representative! Perhaps so, but where, precisely, are undergrads these days majoring in Nonsense Studies? At less-prestigious schools, undergrads may study something like "fashion merchandising" and thus not get much in the way of Great Books, but at what institution of higher ed are anyone but grad students and faculty devoting much of their work-time to the kinds of topics that inspire CCOAs? Is something like "fashion merchandising" CCOA-friendly, on account of it sure sounds vocational, or is this yet another example of college-as-fluff?

Tessone, no doubt under some kind of cosmic contractual obligation to make it over-abundantly clear how anti-"studies" he is, explains that his beef is with "programs catering to teenage sloth and narcissism, giving kids and their helicopter parents whatever they want for a buck, regardless of quality or rigor, reluctant to miss out on the student-loan-driven bubble now inflating." And if a program has "studies" in the name, it lacks quality, it lacks rigor, as rigorously demonstrated by Tessone. Oh wait, why would he waste time with that - CCOA audiences are long since converted! Does he go on? Yes, and where he goes is a place that's super-contrarian mixed with telling-it-like-it-is mixed with rah rah capitalism and banks and stuff crossed with anti-intellectualism. Well done!

The villain is not the lenders who played an incidental role in providing capital to creative writing majors, however. It’s the tenured bozos who gave them Derrida and finger painting in their formative undergraduate years instead of Plato and Aristotle (or a good course in computer-aided drafting).

Man oh man oh man. I graduated from college in 2005. I may be married and live in what may or may not count as the suburbs, but I'm in my 20s, a full-time student, and thus still "kids these days" loosely defined. And in my day, I've been assigned Plato, Aristotle, and - though it was utterly wasted on me, as it seemed to be on nearly everyone at the math and science high school where I took it, thus casting doubt, as far as I'm concerned, on its usefulness for the general population - drafting, one semester with computers, one without. No finger-painting and, more surprisingly given what I've been in school for for the past hundred years, no Derrida either.

"Outside the classroom"

This can't possibly be the first, or last, celebration of the college dropout. Like, did you know that the guy from Facebook, and Bill Gates, they never got their diplomas? Michael Ellsberg, Brown '99, has written the latest installment of 'Let's take this bit of trivia about a few who got lucky and at any rate had spent some time at elite colleges and project that onto a national population for whom dropping out would realistically mean video games and not entrepreneurship but you never know, right?' And the nugget of truth is that there are people who go to college because they're middle- or upper-class and that's what's done, but who'd be better-suited to some other endeavor. The catch is that this alternative might be lucrative and (to use the catchphrase) "job-creating," but it also might be low-level and food-service. It might be folding shirts at the Gap, or driving a cab. In other words, the controversial-ish platitude about how college isn't for everyone doesn't amount to, 'but fear not, a glamorous life awaits the drop-out.' The alternatives to college are (as conservative critics of academia sometimes sniff) often enough 'noble' pursuits (the plumber is always a favorite), but there will be a tradeoff in status and (often if not always) income. Unless what you do instead of finish college is found Facebook. But someone already did that.

So that's one problem. Another is that "college" isn't just about the coursework, something I'd think is obvious, but that Ellsberg completely ignores: "[V]ery few start-ups get off the ground without a wide, vibrant network of advisers and mentors, potential customers and clients, quality vendors and valuable talent to employ. You don’t learn how to network crouched over a desk studying for multiple-choice exams. You learn it outside the classroom, talking to fellow human beings face-to-face." Fine. But who are you meeting "outside the classroom" at Harvard, as versus "outside the classroom" at a community college in your hometown? Who are you meeting "outside the classroom" if you're not attending any school whatsoever, but are working at your local Target?

The point of college - college as social-mobility-promotor, as future-employment-boost - has never been just about grades and scores. Grades and scores are what get you into college. But elite universities in the U.S. aren't like European ones where you just show up for class (or just show up for exams) and otherwise are not connected to any college "community." After getting through how most jobs are filled via connections and so forth, Ellsberg explains,

In this informal job market, the academic requirements listed in job ads tend to be highly negotiable, and far less important than real-world results and the enthusiasm of the personal referral. Classroom skills may put you at an advantage in the formal market, but in the informal market, street-smart skills and real-world networking are infinitely more important.

Fine. But college is where this networking first happens. And that's really, really important if you're trying to break into a career for which you have no family connections. If you do that networking in the first semester and drop out, and find that you're the next Zuckerberg, if you're the exception and you know it, great. But if you don't go to college in the first place? I saw the Facebook movie, and I have my doubts that there'd be Facebook if Zuckerberg had stopped his education at high school.