"[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. 

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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.

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

A barista named Kale

I finally got my hands on Charles Murray's Coming Apart, which is to say, now that the book and all the commentary about it by those who had and hadn't read it is so two weeks ago. I read much of it, not all, at the bookstore in town this afternoon. I got a look at the full version of the infamous quiz, and learned that if your preferred method of unwinding is crap sitcoms, and not a fine Merlot, you - to borrow a phrase - might be a redneck. If I were classier, I'd only watch "The Wire" and independent films, and would pretty much be Stephen Metcalf from the Slate Culture Gabfest. But because I can immediately summon the name of the half-a-man on "Two and a Half Men," I couldn't read Murray with that smug sense of you talkin' to me that I'd expected.

What it is about - and I'm not quite done with it, but began with the intro and sections on marriage - is how there are these kids, see, and they're on Charles Murray's lawn. Well, that's the tone, but it's basically about how high-IQ elites meet at Hahvahd (and Murray holds forth somewhat self-indulgently about how the diners back when he was young and in euphemistic Boston were Americana, because this was pre-latte, or something) and reproduce, creating a high-IQ caste, and leaving the rest of 'merica drowning in a pool of its own drool.

Murray's certainly pro-marriage, but seems more interested in making sure that children are born into marriage than in whether single 20-somethings are celibate or using contraception. The only references I noticed to premarital sex were in the intro, when he's nostalgic for a time when goils were goils and didn't believe in too much heavy petting. Nor did I manage to locate the part where he urges the Fancies to patronizingly tell the Poors how to live - if anything, it seemed to be about shaming the Fancies for not eating at nationwide mid-range chain restaurants.

One of Murray's points about the elites is that they evidently eat a lot of green vegetables and whole grains. Whether they actually do this, or merely believe in it and leave farmers' markets with something green and abundant-looking poking out of their canvas totes, is another matter. But anyway, after the Murray bookstore-mooching (and for the record I buy plenty at this bookstore, but there are certain books whose sales figures I don't want to improve), it was time for a coffee. Not a latte. An Americano. Possibly more offensive.

At the coffee place, there was a sign up for something called "Eat More Kale Princeton." Not "Eat More Kale, Princeton." It's the Princeton branch of "Eat More Kale," which appears to be a t-shirt company with anti-corporate cred, from a guy who's "about eating locally, supporting local farmers, bakers, famers [sic] markets, farm stands, CSA's, community gardens and restaurants, sustainable lifestyles, social commentary and community." And why not?

Kale - a big topic and quasi-acquired taste (great in the form of shredded salad, with shallots, lemon juice, olive oil, and heaps of ricotta salata, but otherwise...) here at WWPD - is the new arugula. It's so much better a fixation than arugula, because it doesn't taste very good, because it can be grown in winter (so you can feel virtuous buying it, even if it was shipped in, as it inevitably is, from California), and because OMG the vitamins. Arugula, next to kale, is basically a Twinkie. I'm not sure which came first, but at Whole Foods in Princeton (and not, to my knowledge, in New York, Chicago...) there are what look like college-logo t-shirts - more specifically, like Yale t-shirts - but instead they say "Kale." Presumably meant to lure Princetonians into a double-take. At any rate, kale has swept through town, to the point that there is not only a "kale tasting" this Tuesday, but a barista at the local coffee shop is named Kale.

Charles Murray, this is material for your next opus. I'm thinking that back when America was great-in-your-estimation, there was nary a leafy green to be found.

How hook-up culture saved bourgeois marriage

Julian Sanchez is completely right to bring neoconservatism into the discussion of whether conservatives who want traditionalism from the masses are just fine and dandy with a more anything-goes value system among elites. I knew there was some branch of conservatism that held that different things held for elites and the rest, but I'd forgotten which one.

I'm not sure I agree with him, though, that social conservatives hide their true agenda when it comes to their stance on the Sexual Revolution's impact on the lower/working classes. I mean, there are different registers, and what's in a book geared at conservative intellectuals isn't what Santorum's going to holler at a rally. But the underlying principles are basically the same. Their line is ostensibly what this commenter says: that premarital sex (and homosexuality) represent decay wherever they're found, but that those with enough money and enough keeping them future-oriented, they're insulated from the ill effects. Social conservatives have long been in a tizzy about the so-called "hook-up culture," whose natural home is the liberal, residential four-year college, not an especially blue-collar environment. And anecdotal evidence from well-educated and socially-conservative acquaintances suggests that the judgment is not directed only at Those People There, but also at their own socially-liberal peers. As in, in my unmarried days (which, having been married for less than a year, would have been most of my days), I remember getting a decent amount of unsolicited advice about what ought not happen prior to marriage, the importance of marrying ASAP, etc. Frequently, I might add, by those who were not exactly living up to that standard themselves.

If there's hypocrisy, if there's - put another way - inconsistency, because personal hypocrisy's something else, it's in the new social-conservative demand that elites preach their lifestyle. A lifestyle they aren't, well, practicing. How are the fancy and schmancy to "preach" a particular means to an end, if they themselves required quite a different means to get there? I will need to read Coming Apart (how convenient!) to see how the man himself phrases it. As in, does he gloss over the decade-plus of premarital goings-on in that caste? I somehow doubt his answer is what mine would be - that the norm of not even considering getting pregnant until you intend to get pregnant ought to extend to segments of the population not planning on a decade of post-grad education, and that this means Pill plus condoms or similar, and not merely in some abstract sense 'access to' contraception, but frank discussions of its necessity. But we shall see.

Making sandwiches, obvs

Sometimes, a college freshman whose far-right conservatism has not yet been honed into something palatable to mainstream audiences - or who's more contrarian than conservative - will decide that the entire campus wants to hear what he (always he) thinks about the world. Somewhere at the intersection of naive and overconfident (forgivable, for a smart kid used to being a Big Deal in high school) lies a certain type of right-wing writing by the very young. This is by no means what all young conservatives write, and it's not that there aren't left-wing variants. But it's this certain way of not hearing the tone of one's own voice, of mistaking misogyny and racism for courageous anti-PC argumentation. Of thinking, 'Hey, what if I were to say that women aren't as good as men! Now wouldn't that get everyone riled up! It must be that I'm hitting a nerve! Yes, an affirmative-action bake sale sounds like a wonderful idea!'

What's baffling, then, is that James Poulos is not a college freshman. How, given that he's not 17 or 18 and about to get some real-world 'splainin' from a barely-more-informed 19-year-old opinion editor, do we explain the existence of his article, "What Are Women For?," which positively drips of that genre? What, then, are we to make of his response to his critics, one that begins with the cringe-inducing assertion, "The wave of anger and condemnation that has come from some quarters is dramatic evidence that the column’s central contention is right"? I won't generalize from this essay's example and claim it gives us insights into what men are for, but it sure gives me flashbacks to my days as "Viewpoints" editor at the college paper. 

The problem begins with the headline, which is not merely a provocative title chosen perhaps by his editors, but within - and indeed, the gist of - the piece itself. If Poulos had simply asked, "What is gender for?," and concluded that its purpose is for men to invent things, for women to scrub toilets, division of labor and all that, no one would have cared. I mean, no one would have read it. The content is the usual conserva-rant something-or-other, much 'The Liberals are like so' without much substantiation. (For example, was the liberal response to Cynthia Nixon's "choice" quote unsympathetic? Not entirely.) Just... opaque, in a way that really reminds me of those "Viewpoints" days. We are, alas, living in a uniquely decadent age, hell, handbasket, wimmin, etc., etc., except he doesn't spell it out, but that's what's between the lines. If it weren't for the title, the bloggers Ned Resnikoff mentions wouldn't have linked to it, I wouldn't have found it via his blog, and so on.

But Poulos instead asked what women are for, and that question is a mess whatever the conclusion, even if the conclusion were more Grrl Power and less June Cleaver. It takes as a starting point that male is normal, default, while female is different, Other, etc. The mindset that speaks of on the one hand lawyers, and on the other, women lawyers or, for bonus reactionary points, girl lawyers. Even if whatever Poulos was driving at (and more on that in a moment) was all kinds of wonderful, the set-up is so bad that one simply must read on.

The concept is a problem not merely because it's unapologetically (proudly, mistaking-contrarianism-for-insightfulness-ly) sexist, but also because it completely misses that the place of men in American society today is plenty up for discussion. It's something conservatives are even quite worked up about. What is masculinity? What is fatherhood? Why have men, anyway? Do we even need 'em anymore? Even for super-duper-conservatives, gender is not and long hasn't been a "woman" question.

But Poulos begins, all high-culture-like, "In a simpler time Sigmund Freud struggled to understand what women want. Today the significant battle is over what women are for." But it isn't. If anything, the culture wars have for some time now been about men. It's no longer up for debate whether it's a good thing that women work outside the home. The question is whether men are also gainfully employed, or prepared to be stay-at-home dads. To even claim to be discussing "gender" by looking at the role of women - and from the assumption that men are currently involved in Great Work - suggests such a complete aloofness from the broader conversation that, again, it's hard to believe we're reading an established-ish conservative opinion writer.

The conclusion Poulos arrives at is, I suppose, anti-PC and contrarian for insisting on an essentialized womanhood, although it's not entirely clear what the point might be. We have two options: celebrate his courage for saying what virtually no one thinks anymore (because it's wrong; bring on the contrarians who think the earth is flat), or get into a feminist huff and prove his point by not agreeing with him. (I can think of certain advantages to having that level of confidence, but certain disadvantages as well.)

I will instead take a third route, let's call it a textual analysis approach. What is his argument? What, class, do we make of this passage?

Ironically, one of the best places to look for a way out of the impasse is the strain of left feminism that insists an inherently unique female “voice” actually exists. That’s a claim about nature. Much good would come from a broader recognition that women have a privileged relationship with the natural world. That’s a relationship which must receive its social due — if masculinity in its inherent and imitative varieties (including imitation by quasi-feminized males of quasi-masculinized females!) is not to conquer the world.

-"Ironically," OK, with him so far - it's ironic that the author of a conserva-rant is directing readers to liberals, feminists.

-What "strain," though, is he referring to? Specific authors? Publications? Scholars? Activists? Maybe such a "strain" exists, but the wording is such that one is meant to understand that if only one were informed, were in the know, the relevant authors and school would be obvious. It's not obvious to me.

-Poulos's message is that social decay comes down to our refusal to acknowledge that "women have a privileged relationship with the natural world." Sounds serious! But what on earth does this mean. Women are more 'earthy'? Women require Tampax? Women enjoy the natural bacteria found in yogurt? Women shun artifice? Women prefer to live in the country? Unclear, or more likely, intentionally opaque and ambiguous. It's a way of saying 'wimmin makes the babies' but sounding sophisticated. I think. It's my best guess, but I'm too busy rolling around in the mud to be sure. (OK, from his follow-up - "Relative to men, women have a naturally privileged relationship with the process of creating and recreating human life." - this assumption is confirmed, although that doesn't change its absence from the original article.) So let's proceed to the next sentence.

-What the "social due" bit is, my best guess is, if we are to assume "nature"=baby-making, Poulos wants society-or-the-government to limit contraception-and-or-abortion-and-or-choices-women-might-make-that-don't-involve-being-pregnant-whenever-possible. Maybe? Or to celebrate fecundity? Which means what, in policy or even abstract terms? It's tough to argue against Poulos's demand that women be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, because if that's the best possible interpretation of what he might be driving at, it's not spelled out.

From the response-to-critics installment, I think Poulos is being courageous and telling it like it is by letting us know that women, and not men, are capable of giving birth. In which case perhaps I had it all wrong - this isn't Contrarian College Freshman, it's incredulous seventh grader after first day of health class.

But it isn't. What it is is a demand for what either are or are not incredibly frightening policy changes directed at embracing the female reproductive capacity. The opacity is meant to read as Thoughtful Conservative, but is ultimately more unsettling than if there were an actual agenda, actually spelled out.

"Can you name this NASCAR champion?"

Gawker points us to a Charles Murray (-inspired?) quiz that, in 20 questions, tells you how Real American you are, a kind of conserva-rants twist on Bourdieu. The questions are tilted so as not to take into account wealth or income (and as I've asked on WWPD on multiple occasions, if you're not mining your cultural capital for some tangible benefit, what good is it doing you? potential energy of sorts, in the form of brie.). They're about consumption in such a way that if your answer isn't 'not iceberg, arugula,' but 'no lettuce at all, Fritos,' you count as a Fancy American, because you think you're too good for iceberg.

But behold, because this was an easy-to-produce blog-post, my results:

1) Have you ever worked on a factory floor?

No. It would seem the better question would be whether, in an earlier generation, this is a job you might have had, but now you're unemployed/underemployed. Isn't one of the issues the country is facing that these jobs have gone overseas? My father worked on one for I believe exactly one day, and I can think of one honest-to-goodness current factory worker in my somewhat-extended family. But as with all such jobs, there's a difference between having done X as a young person, and doing X as an adult. Which brings us to...

2) Have you ever held a job that caused a part of your body to hurt at the end of the day?

I know, The Fancies are meant to answer "no" to this. But, yes.

3) Have you seen last year's mega-hit movie, "Transformers: Dark of the Moon"?

No - I only watch art films at the local cinema. Actually, I could recite the plot of maybe 30 different episodes of "Two and a Half Men," and keep checking Hulu for the latest "The Millionaire Matchmaker," but don't like going to the movies, mainstream or otherwise, because of the whole popcorn thing.

4) Can you name this NASCAR champion?

Of course not, I'm from New York. Once, in Arizona, for of all things an academic conference about French history, I was assumed to be a Nascar fan, which might count for something. (Whiteness, presumably.)

5) In the past five years, have you been fishing or hunting?

If this were an "ever" there'd be a yes re: fishing. I have, however, gone jogging and walked a miniature poodle many times recently through areas marked "No hunting," and aside from academic housing everything around here is mansions, which suggests that The Fancies do, in fact, hunt. But the answer here, for me, is no.

6) Do you have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian?

Does having a good friend who grew up evangelical count? Of course it doesn't. Next!

7) During the past year, have you stocked your own fridge with domestic mass-market beer?

Hipsters have, Mormons and Muslims haven't. I win the pretentious Ashkenazi award for having stocked my fridge with exactly six Belgian beers shortly after moving in, and either five or all six are still in there. What we do use is our SodaStream. I give up, I've failed already. But, but, I'm a well-educated Fancy! I can't fail a test!

8) Do you now have a close friend with whom you have strong and wide-ranging political disagreement?

Yeah, probably, although this depends how "close" and how "wide-ranging" we're talking. I went to UChicago, with the libertarians, and since high school, I've been the token "Republican" (center-left Democrat) in leftier social sets. But if your answer on this one amounts to 'I'm a nerdy contrarian who likes to argue about ideas,' going by the essence of what Murray is asking, you have to put "no."

9) Have you eaten at an Applebee's, TGI Friday's, or Outback Steakhouse in the past year?

Gosh. Have I eaten in a restaurant in the last year? Year, OK, yes, but last several months? I live in the woods. We cook at home. It's incredibly elitist and sophisticated, especially on the nights frozen tortellini is involved.

10) Have you or your spouse ever bought a pickup truck?

Similar answer to the one above. Neither of us has ever bought a car. Whether this makes us fancy or cheap is another question.

11) Have you ever attended a Kiwanis or Rotary Club meeting, or a gathering at a union local?

No, but I've been to some lovely events at the 92nd Street Y, such as the talk by BHL.

12) Have you ever participated in a parade that did not involve global warming, gay rights, or a war protest?

Does an Israel Day Parade count? I think I was in one with my Hebrew school class as a kid.

13) Since leaving school, have you worn a uniform as part of your job?

The post-college coffee-making stint required a special shirt with the name of the establishment (catering, as it did, more to yuppies than hipsters), so this would be a yes. But what's this "since leaving school"? I haven't left school.

14) Have you ever ridden on a Greyhound or Trailways bus?

Bolt Bus? Megabus? I also suspect I was on buses as a kid, and have no recollection of which company ran them. So let's give this answer as, 'no, I was chauffeured across the country by Niles the butler.'

15) Did you ever watch an "Oprah" show all the way through?

This is a ridiculous question, as anyone who's ever been home sick, and with a TV connection, can answer "yes, an 'Oprah' marathon." Although I do remember that this was on when I got home from school, and that 10th grade was not my most productive year. I feel as though I'd get better Realness points for admitting the amount of "Designing Women" I consumed in those days, even if that show did have a vaguely Democratic tinge. But we're going to have to go with, "yes."

16) Did you or your spouse ever serve in the armed forces?

OK, Charles Murray, I give up. My husband is from socialist, good-bread-having, nicely-dressed-man-producing Western Europe. He did not serve in the Belgian army, and I'm not even entirely sure if there is a Belgian army. As for me, I seriously considering the IDF and somehow ending up in French grad school. Not only no points here. Negative points here. Minus five.

17) Did you grow up in a family in which the chief breadwinner was not in a managerial position or high-prestige occupation (defined as dentist, physician, architect, attorney, engineer, scientist, or college professor)?

Nope. I bet this question comes as a relief to those whose childhood bread was won at places like Vogue or Chanel. Not that these families eat carbs.

18) Have you ever lived for at least a year as an adult in an American neighborhood in which the majority of your nearest 50 neighbors probably did not have college degrees?

I have no idea. Probably? Prospect Heights, 2005-2007? Currently, my nearest 50 neighbors are super-elite scientists and their families. There's probably no pocket of 50 people in the country more highly-educated than this locale. My ABD status is mildly shameful. Need I go on to Question 19?

19) Have you ever had a close friend who could seldom get better than Cs in high school even if he or she tried hard?

How would any adult possibly know this about friends met after high school? I know that as a teacher, I'm never sure whether a C student - or any student, for that matter - is trying hard, because I can't know what goes on once they leave the class. If this is a question about whether you yourself went to a public high school, why was it phrased in this roundabout way? I suspect my answer is yes, because I did go to a school that was totally OK with giving low grades, and I had friends across the academic spectrum. But even if this is technically "yes," going by the spirit of what I think Murray is asking, it's a "no."

20) During the last month, have you voluntarily hung out with people who were smoking cigarettes?

See Question 7, about domestic beer. This is about age so much that the class element makes no sense unless one controls for age. In any college or recent-grad setting, however elite, lots of people smoke. With a bunch of well-educated 40-year-olds, not as much. During the last month, I haven't much "hung out," what with the whole cloistered thing, so this hasn't come up. So I must once again give the Fancy answer: no.

*******

What this amounts to is, as with other "Real America" diversions, a lumping-together of a variety of people who don't really have anything particular in common, other than not being (a public intellectual or politician's fantasy of) a white, working-class, evangelical Midwesterner - truly wealthy sorts in liberal enclaves; PhDs raising families in West Virginia because that's where there was an academic job; anyone of any economic class/education level from the Northeast; anyone who isn't white. Oh wait, these people all tend to vote Democrat. But wouldn't it be nifty to construct this category such that anyone who falls into it counts as an "elite"? And isn't it convenient that super-WASPy old-timey Republican sorts may grow up on Park Ave., but have the exposure to good ol' country living that comes with having a second home (or fifth!) and thus know all about hunting and Walmart?

The week, it ended

-Parchment-paper fish (cod fillet, in this case, with lemon, garlic, olive oil, dried thyme, salt, pepper) really is better. Whole fish is probably better still, but I cling to some shortcuts.

-Obedience class for dogs probably falls into the category of, humanity did just fine without it (if your dog isn't aggressive, and is affectionate with you, and knows the basic commands...), but it can't hurt. But a line must be drawn, and that will probably be at the extra $10 the trainer suggests we spend each week on some kind of "adolescent-dog" meet-up. The whole point of the class was to socialize our dog. That plus what occurs without special planning (today, she met a Westie, and might have met two supermodel Golden Retrievers, if their owner hadn't turned away; there are owners of a Yorkie who sometimes want it to meet Bisou, sometimes just need to go about their business) seems as though it ought to be enough, but if she doesn't get enough socialization, it seems, disaster might ensue. The slight problem is that she was super friendly to the trainer, and has taken to kissing the one friend of ours who'd initially, and for no real reason, frightened her. The techniques are quite useful, especially the tip about needing to "run" a dog, because walks are as good as useless as exercise to prevent naughtiness later. But I'm having trouble believing that our dog is as neurotic as all that.

"I'm like a mix of Alvy Singer and Alex Portnoy, with some George Costanza thrown in."

-But Bisou does still need walking, and that Irin Carmon - Caitlin Flanagan interview was pretty amazing. (Amber, if you haven't listened already...) It brings up so many questions. For one, why did Flanagan think "Irina" was there to represent The Youth, and not as a prolific, Harvard-educated journalist there to discuss Flanagan's recently-published book about today's young girls? Why should we care if Carmon - who does not seem to be at all of the demographic social conservatives claim was destroyed by the sexual revolution - had a high school sweetheart? "Creepy condescension" indeed.

But on a more practical level, how on earth could Carmon, 28, be expected to scour her own life story for meaningful information about Girls Today? Flanagan's idée fixe - well, aside from early-adolescent fellatio - is the great danger of Internet infiltrating the haven that is the adolescent girl's bedroom. If you're 28 now, if you had any Internet in your bedroom as a youth, it might have sounded something like this. Speaking on behalf of first-world 28-year-olds, I don't even remember if there was an Internet connection in my bedroom - a computer, yes, but if there had been Internet, I wouldn't have had any idea what to do with it.

I know that we're supposed to say, of Flanagan generally and this installment in particular, that she hits a nerve. I mean, maybe? If I'm going to rate controversial books about female adolescence that I've never read, I'm putting Amy "Tiger Mom" Chua's far, far above this, both because at least that was something new ("the hook-up culture," in 2012, really?), and because as someone who was too nerdy at 15 or whatever for either the sweethearts Flanagan advocates or the hook-up culture she denounces, with what Chua describes, I can on some level relate.

-Princeton has a Trader Joe's, but this is not something the shuttle route yet acknowledges, so it was only because we had a car for the obedience class that, after dropping of Bisou, we were able to investigate. This was not a store I'd been all that impressed by in NY. Everyone would always rave about it, and I saw the advantages, as a grad student, when it came to wine, but for the rest? If I wanted a store brand, why not 365, plus produce, at Whole Foods? Then we got the chips and salsa from "Trader José." The store now suddenly makes sense. It's everything you would want to buy at a normal supermarket, minus the excess. It takes a realist approach, doesn't fool around. Much smaller than Wegman's, so less selection, but also less time at the store. As 90% of this shuttle's ridership, I'm thinking of lobbying for an extra stop.

The Republican party's anal stage

On "The Millionaire Matchmaker," participants - one millionaire (or "millionairess" - one of the show's many nods to misogyny) and one gold-digger - go on a "masterdate," a term Patti repeats as much as possible, no doubt knowing full well what the viewer mishears. Last night, my husband, our poodle, and I watched the Republican masterdebate. Dan Savage, you are the prophet of our age, or something, because it's not just that the Republicans' stance on gay issues is, well, weak. It's that they are obsessed - obsessed! - with gay sex. You'd think that images of Keanu Reeves and James Franco making out were hovering on cue cards in front of them the entire time, because without an explanation along those lines, it's hard to imagine even many gay men being that focused on gay sex during a live-broadcast political debate.

Not only was there the now-infamous WTF-moment booing of a gay active-duty soldier. (I explained to Bisou about Santorum and "Santorum" - unfortunately the only radio station that works on the radio near her crate is something far-right and super-xenophobic, and when she was a younger pup this was all she listened to, so her political views may be fixed. Fellow dog owners, what is the crucial puppy period for formation of political ideology?) There was more.

During the part at the end when the hopefuls discussed their dream picks for VP, Republican caricature Perry said something about wanting to "mate" two of the others, and neither of the two he mentioned was sole female contender Michelle Bachmann! OMG! The gay funny! Romney had a gay funny about this! The image is with him forever. And sometime about dog turds.

Meanwhile, Bisou, in schrecklichen protest of the fact that I made muffins (using our new hand mixer - life-changing, effortless baking!) and thus did something food-related but not for her, produced one right smack dab in front of the oven, whose light was on revealing the muffins within, to make a point. Point taken.

"On the streets, aside from tourists, one will see far less non-European faces than in the average European city."

After witnessing some minor but still surprising daylight street violence in Flanders (involving at least one Walloon and a very dramatically removed leather jacket - almost as though the fight had been conceived by a former "West Side Story" director - and one less-dramatically torn-apart red t-shirt), I've been following the tragic news of more serious violence in Norway. Mostly I'm just - like everyone else - upset and unnerved. What happened on the island especially is incomprehensible, and not even in a how-could-this-happen-in-such-a-peaceful-country kind of way. I'm trying to make some sense of, if not the senseless, some tangentially-related concerns.

The coverage has portrayed the killer as far-right, which is also how he himself seems to identify, but I'm confused about what that means in Europe these days. Like no doubt many other readers, I clicked on the link (NYT's in this case) to the now-notorious articulate-crazy-person manifesto, and while I did not read the whole thing (there being enough sane-person monographs in a similar layout my work requires me to go through), I saw more of a general insanity than the neo-Nazi stance I'd been told to expect. The insanity was to some extent more from the choice of genre (manifesto rather than angry online-newspaper comments) than the content, some of which is, as Ross Douthat correctly points out, fairly mainstream, and is at any rate gauged primarily by the tragedy that followed its production.

So. I searched the document for stuff about Jews, expecting the worst. Yet this racist white-supremacist murderer is apparently not even a little bit anti-Jewish. Maybe even... pro-, especially when he's holding forth on the plight of Jews from Arab lands. (With friends like these...) And he was a Freemason? As a student of 19th C French history, this confused me especially - aren't right-wing Euro nutjobs supposed to hate Freemasons, or is that so two centuries ago?

His more extreme views are as abhorrent as one would imagine, but they're not quite what I imagined they'd be when the coverage first broke and made so much of the guy being A Blond. Not just a white guy - this much might be pointed out to silence the must-have-been-al-Qaeda speculation - but blond, as though that had some great relevance to what was going on, and wasn't just a likely-enough detail given that the massacres occurred in Norway. Blond and crusading for a Christian Western Europe. I mean, when I see white-supremacist (neo-Nazi?) sorts in Heidelberg - and they do seem to be out and about, especially by the river, with special t-shirts and everything - I do tend to get this visceral sense of fear, not just on behalf of humanity or in solidarity with the city's Muslim population, but kind of like, damn, I'd better start walking faster.

Anyway, apparently racists of a different bent are making a thing of the murderer being a Zionist (whatever that means in this context), because clearly when a blond Norwegian who's racist against brown Norwegians goes and kills a bunch of other Norwegians, this is the fault of the Jews. (Google his name plus "Zionist" - not going to link to those websites.) If we're to give this situation that isn't really about Jews at all a Jewish slant (something I wish non-Jews wouldn't feel the need to do, but now that they have...), it's presumably that Jews can rest assured that at least some segment of the Euro-extreme-right isn't out to get us, which cuts against all we would expect, while we instead now have to contend with this as a presumed ally.

So I take it "opposition to multiculturalism" is now something along the lines of "criticism of Israel," insofar as some who take that stance have genuine concerns, while others use it as coded language to express bigotry, the former against Muslims, the latter Jews. For the obvious personal reasons, I've given more thought to bigotry coming from the European left, but there's no doubt more mobilization these days from the right against Muslims than from the left against Jews. There is also the unavoidable fact that there's violence in the name of Islam committed against the West in a way that there never was in the name of Judaism, but that does not of course prevent the vast peaceful majority of European Muslims from being unjustly marginalized. Pardon the banalities, but it can't hurt to point this out.

Finally, another issue this brings up is the extent to which there's a fantasy of Europe - shared by some Europeans as well as far too many Americans, sometimes dressed up as anti-Zionism, if more often these days as anti-Islamism, sometimes hiding behind legitimate criticisms of "made in China," but often just spoken outright - as a place where authenticity and terroir and all that fun stuff is not just in the food, drink, and crafts produced, but in the "purity" of the populations. In mainstream travel writing aimed at Americans, Americans who no doubt "celebrate diversity" at home, it's not especially taboo to state that a place is worth visiting because it hasn't be tainted by foreigners. Not "foreigners" as in "tourists," but as in people whose skin tone or kebab-production marks them as not being a direct descendent of Franks or Gauls. Americans go to Paris to see Catherine Deneuve clones in perfectly-tied scarves, not 19-year-old guys of Algerian descent whose dress evokes inner-city-America. Scandinavia especially, I think, gets the 'go because it's so clean' treatment. Meanwhile, at the very same time, the very same Americans who are likely to be reading travel articles about Europe in the first place will tell you that Europe's just so much more tolerant than the States. Point being, there's a level to all of this that isn't as complicated as the nuances of burqa debates and Danish cartoons might suggest.

Anyway, if you're not of a the-world-is-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket political bent, I suggest you follow up the post above with slideshows of gay marriage in NY, as a reminder that the news is, on occasion, uplifting.

CCOAdom further explained

The CCOA discussion continues. Withywindle has more thoughts; Isabel Archer and Britta promise theirs are forthcoming. I'm waiting!

In the mean time, to continue (or sum up, really) the discussion following Withywindle's post about Epstein's credentials, and apparently not to make it to Withywindle's next point, re: research, I think the important thing to take away is not whether the more rigid requirement of a PhD to teach at a university (in most, not all) fields these days is a good thing, but whether the conservatives most hot-and-bothered about academia are actually academics.

Googling the first few authors at Phi Beta Cons, for example, I find one assistant professor of marketing, and several college graduates affiliated with a conservative education think-tank (?). Now, obviously people can be journalists who cover X without being themselves participants in X. But the problem with the CCOA genre is that it tends to be more a repetition of the same old complaints, ones that someone who, for example, sat in - with an open mind - on one grad seminar about gender would be unlikely to make. What results is, people with no interest in being academics address an audience whose involvement with academia is limited to attending college and maybe professional school. Academia is generally agreed upon to be a terrible universe of liberals and libertinism; all new CCOA contributions are designed to merely confirm what everyone reading them already assumes.

My theory about this, as I've mentioned before, is that picking on academia is a real uniter for conservatives who'd otherwise have little to agree on - social conservatives can freak out about coeds on the student-insurance-subsidized Pill,  elitist-conservatives can fuss about how there's too little Plato or how too many mediocrities now attend college, and populists can roll their faux-rustic eyes at the fancy coastal book-learnin' that's never done anyone any good. It is more productive for conservatives to use academia as an entity to bash than for them to try to reform or (counter-) revolutionize it in ways that would make it more receptive to them or their ideas. So, under the guise of protesting academia's ways in order to change them, the real CCOA goal is to provide ideologically-diverse conservatives without anything to do with academia with common ground. CCOAs say they're upset that conservatives are poorly-represented and that academia tilts left. When in fact, this is something that helps their cause.

Granted, Phi Beta Cons is not everything, and it appears there are conservatives genuinely interested in altering the academy. I'm not likely to be on board with any but a fraction of their platforms, but I'd much rather see profs imposing Great Books (or, for that matter, Withywindle pondering the role of research) than yet another article about, say, a prof using rap - rap! OMG! the world is ending! - in the classroom.

Yet the trend, it seems, is to use academia as a symbol in the culture wars. For example: "NAS membership is open to all. This is a change as of October 2009. Before that NAS restricted membership to academics. We now encourage anyone who agrees with the principles we espouse to join." To be a member of the "National Association of Scholars" - a professional guild of sorts, one might think - you do not need to have diddly-squat to do with higher ed, you just have to think it's a den of iniquity. Given the timing of this shift, one suspects the economy played a role. But this is also consistent with the overall popularity of (I haven't followed this well enough to confidently add "newfound") academia as a way of generically riling up conservatives about Young People Today.

Think of the children with children

Gerry Garibaldi writes:

Within my lifetime, single parenthood has been transformed from shame to saintliness. In our society, perversely, we celebrate the unwed mother as a heroic figure, like a fireman or a police officer. During the last presidential election, much was made of Obama’s mother, who was a single parent. Movie stars and pop singers flaunt their daddy-less babies like fishing trophies.

Did you catch that? The single mom most celebrated in the 2008 election was Obama's mother. Not, oh, which was the one whose name might come to mind if we think '2008 presidential election' and 'single motherhood celebrated'? Hint: her name was tattooed as a ring on her then-fiancé baby-daddy's finger. If anyone, in that campaign season, was getting all worshipful of the single mom, it was the Republicans, with the Palin teen pregnancy such a fine example of a family doing the right thing. And now Bristol's even an aspiring pop star of sorts! Fine, fine, blame social services you dislike on libruls, but the glorification of single parenthood, when it's called "keeping the baby," is plenty right-wing. I don't remember anyone comparing Obama's mom to a police officer. Whereas I do remember B.P. becoming some kind of folksy idol.

Garibaldi, who, according to his bio, chose inner-city teaching as a second and seemingly lower-paid career for reasons I will not be cynical and suggest have to do with wanting to run for office or make a movie out of it, is right that 15-year-olds should not be having babies. And couples who have babies do well to stick together, which for straight couples and some gay ones is best accomplished/asserted through legal marriage. These are reasonable views, and it's noble of Garibaldi to throw Hollywood away and join the selfless profession he has. So far, so good.

But is the main issue for a 15-year-old who wants a baby that the father isn't prepared to marry her? More to the point, is it really a teacher's place to have students describe their future plans, then criticize them for their lack of marital aspirations? Even more to the point, there are no circumstances, none, in which a high school teacher, a male one especially, should tell a female student, pregnant, mother already, or otherwise, "'I think you would make a wonderful wife for someone.'" None.

Tossed salads and scrambled responses to the CCOA question

I've been following the comments to this post, and reposting the ones Blogger seems to eat, but had not had time to respond, on account of being in London, where men have historically been especially Great and White, then back in Paris, under the blog-inhibiting influence of running around with my mother, having an especially bad cold, and now, back in the dorm, the school's decision to pick now as the moment to demolish the empty rooms that oh just happen to be next to mine. Plans to sleep off the rest of this rhume are off, and I'm now wondering where is a good place to sleep at a French library. I think less in terms of long-term damage to my hearing and whatever may come of having inhaled whatever is in the pinkish dust, and more in terms of think-of-how-great-it-is-to-be-in-Paris, think-of-how-great-it-is-to-be-in-Paris...

So, my addled attempt at responses, below:

-I asked: "How is one college student face-to-face with Mill an education?"

Withywindle answered: "Umm ... didn’t you go to U Chicago? I think they have an answer to that question."

Umm, indeed. I did go to UChicago, where I read and enjoyed Mill, and where I encountered the one college student face-to-face with Great Book method. It has its plusses and minuses, which is why, it bears mentioning, UChicago does not exclusively use that method, even in undergraduate education. (For that, there's St. John's.) The student-and-book approach is wonderful in many ways, for college freshman especially. It's a way of letting students know that big, famous books that might have seemed dry or intimidating are actually texts that anyone capable of reading English can grapple with and learn from. And then there's the fun fact of being someone who read Mill in college, with the class and cultural-capital implications that entails. For someone who is not going to specialize in Classics or Political Theory, the rest of college is going to cover territory significantly less Great, but all for the best. Which, Withywindle, gets at the distinction you made between undergraduate education and research. Undergraduate education is, ideally, a progression, from Here Are Great Books, Go Think Critically to specialization of some kind, which is to say, no more sitting in a room with a decontextualized copy of Mill. Specialization for a college junior or senior in a liberal-arts setting is not worlds away from academic research, or else how would it occur to anyone to go to grad school in the first place? It's not that a college student has, by junior year, run out of Great Works to contemplate. It's that a (humanities/social sciences) student will generally get more out of college if the skills learned in the first couple of years are applied to something the student is particularly interested in. That topic may end up being Great Books but more specialized, or it might mean the analysis of minor/mediocre literature.

-The discussion here has, in the time I've been blog-neglectful, meandered into one about what constitutes a Great Book, whether one must wait 50, 100, or 0 years to make such an assessment. The value of a work's staying power is a fine debate to have, but I'm not sure how relevant it is to the CCOA question. The question being, after all, not whether it is possible to assess literary merit (I promise that even profs miles to the left of Withywindle think it is), not whether a core curriculum that provides a common knowledge base to those with a liberal arts education is valuable (again, find me the lefty prof who believes Glamour is an acceptable substitute for Adam Smith), but a) whether Great Books must form the whole of the college experience, at least the humanities/social sciences courses, and b) whether, once we've granted the utmost importance of providing college students only with the Greatest of the Great, we should set terms on the definition of Greatness that make it unlikely any PC slips in. (Is there anything more CCOA than criticizing Toni Morrison? No, there is not.)

-Re: Britta's point about white men as universal, Flavia's about the CCOA double-standard for obscure white-Christian-male writers... A couple things. One is that, in partial defense of the CCOAs, there has been a movement on behalf of left-leaning sorts to bring women and certain minorities into the canon, one that has sometimes, presumably, presented itself as affirmative action of sorts on behalf of authors. CCOAs suspect, correctly, that authors who fit the various criteria may have been given a boost, from which they jump, unfairly, to an assumption that artistic production by anyone other than a white Christian man is fluff being promoted only in support of a political agenda. They also miss the extent to which affirmative action of another kind had, until quite recently, given a massive boost to authors who were not black, not female, etc. In other words, the same issues brought up by affirmative action in general come up here. So that's Thing One.

Thing Two is my own experience of the universal-particular question in scholarship. Studying French Jews, it is always assumed that "Jews"="particular" or "parochial," "French"="universal." Remember that with the exception of Primo Levi, Anne Frank, or anyone else who had anything first-hand to say about the Holocaust, that an author was Jewish is unlikely to cause those on the right or the left, in the US at least, to attempt to include them from the canon; nor, in this day and age, is Jewishness viewed as cause for excluding an author from the category of Great (White) Men. This is thus an example of how "Otherness" is dealt with when the "Otherness" in question is not one it's especially PC to celebrate. The CCOA qualms about Toni Morrison do not extend to Philip Roth.

Now, considering that there were/are Jews in places other than France, and the entire world is certainly not French (a fact American scholars are aware of on account of our going to France and finding it, well, different), also given the long histories of both France and Judaism, it might seem as though universal and particular would both describe both the "French" bit and the "Jewish" one. It would seem that in a study of Jews, the French case would be "particular," and of France, the Jewish one would be, and that would settle the matter. However, when what's being studied is not France or Jews, but French Jews, those discussing the matter today tend to fall into the pattern of referring to that-which-is-French as "universal," that-which-is-Jewish as "particular." This is something I could go on about as it relates to the history of French Republican universalism, but it's also a test case of sorts of how, even in a situation in which affirmative action of topics or authors is not being suspected, that which has to do with Others gets classified as "parochial," that which has to do with unhyphenated Western Europeans as an unhyphenated example of Humanity. This is an impulse many of us have even if we see ourselves as liberal, open-minded, and above that sort of thing.

Point being, the assumption that certain subsets of humanity are default/universal/unhyphenated is ingrained, not just for CCOAs with their own particular concerns, but in us all. Political correctness in academia provides the useful service of reminding us that we are all particular, universal in our particularity. This is what the student-face-to-face-with-Mill approach misses. Writers, even Great ones, came from and were responding to specific situations.

-Withywindle wrote: "I think conservative critiques would have a bit more bite if they stated more clearly which strand of critique they endorse. But I also think that liberal defenses of academia that say 'Oh, you're being inconsistent on X and Y', by falsely assuming there is only one conservative critique, also lose a great deal of power."

To which I'd respond: First off, this discussion is not about "liberal defenses of academia." It's about CCOA-skeptics, a cohort that could well include those plenty critical of academia, from the left, from the center, or for reasons separate from the political spectrum. CCOA critics even include - or should - conservatives critical of academia. In other words, not about liberals, not about those who defend academia, but about those unhappy with the CCOA status quo.

Next, I'm not sure who's assumed there's one conservative critique. I, at least, was responding here to Epstein's article, which jumped all over the place, hitting as many talking points as possible. But this is a pattern one finds in conservative critiques - a preemptive dismissal of academia, with the assumption that the reader is coming at the topic with eyes in ready-to-roll position. While not every article or blog includes every complaint, there's generally a mix of several talking points (overall silliness and lack of rigor, classes with silly-sounding names that might be serious but why check, too many coastal elites congregating and promoting themselves, not enough Great White Men, too much Toni Morrison, radical profs, promiscuous coeds) that aren't exactly "inconsistent," but that add up to a critique more about giving conservatives of all stripes something to agree on (that is, that academia is dumb) rather than changing academia to make it more conservative or more hospitable to conservatives. The only inconsistency is that academia is faulted both for being impractical and for being too preprofessional, although here I would say it's unlikely the same conservatives are making both criticisms, or if they are, their issue is that elite (bright, good-familied, whatever) kids shouldn't major in marketing because they should be reading Hegel, while kids from the middle-class masses shouldn't major in marketing because they should be training as plumbers.

"Great Books, Great Men, Great Events, Great Discoveries"

Back to the conservative-critique-of-academia discussion. I suppose if I could sum up where I think things get/got derailed, it's that conservatives imagine those within academia who critique the conservative critics of academia (CCOAs) do so in defense of Silliness Studies, of in-class dildo demonstrations, etc. When the reality is that we-the-people-in-academia-and-not-riled-at-it agree with plenty of the individual criticisms, but object to the CCOAs' tendency a) to find ridiculousness by taking things out of context, b) to project the rare instances of genuine ridiculousness that are indeed out there on the whole of academia, and, c) above all else, to criticize academia not with the goal of reforming or even revolutionizing it, but as a way to fan the flames of the culture wars (librul elites!) or to be generally curmudgeonly (college hippies, get off my lawn!). Again, we are responding to the CCOAs not to say that they're wrong on all counts and everything is fine and dandy. We are doing so because their critiques are not substantive or, if you prefer, constructive. I say "we," but in reality, CCOAs are not really attempting a dialogue with academics in the first place, which helps explain why most academics, I suspect, give CCOAs little thought.

Withywindle's response - which is either his own critique of academia, as a conservative academic, or his summary of what he thinks the critiques out there consist of, so if you are Withywindle, please clarify - provides a bit more material to work with. This in particular: "We should not waste time on pop culture, peasant studies, black studies, womens' studies, gay studies, postmodern physics, etc."

The "etc." suggests that the list of areas of study are all of a piece, and that they are all equally ridiculous. These are two pretty big assumptions. Googling "postmodern physics," one finds conservative critiques of it far more easily than anything from this (alleged?) field. Pop culture, meanwhile, is its own thing, and there's a good chance even the leftiest of lefty profs would rather teach Shakespeare than "Two and a Half Men."

As for the rest, it's usually fuzzy whether what conservatives oppose is academic research into literature or history involving subjects with blood lines less illustrious than Louis XIV or who are of interest because we want to know about daily life in another time and place (Withywindle, this would include those chaste male Greek nomads), or the disciplinary nebulousness that "studies" can sometimes (but, ahem, does not necessarily) entail. In Withywindle's case, or in the case of Withywindle's theoretical CCOA, it seems more the latter ("We should teach Great Books, Great Men, Great Events, Great Discoveries [...]"), which I don't think is a supportable position. I mean, yes, these things should be there, but how is one college student face-to-face with Mill an education? I'm not even sure what it means to teach great men, events, or discoveries without getting into any fluff. Wouldn't we soon run out of dates of battles and such to commemorate? I mean, we can learn random things about Napoleon's childhood because the man ended up being kind of a big deal, or move on to somewhat less great men...

The latter has a bit more to it, but again, one is left with the question of how avoiding questions of race, class, or gender furthers our knowledge even of high culture. I mean, fine, let's study Proust only for representations of Art and Time, giving him the Great Man applause he so deserves, and ignore anything to do with homosexuality and Jewishness not merely in his life, but also in his oeuvre. It's surely of no academic interest whatsoever how "Jewish" was defined in salons during the Dreyfus Affair, because this would not go on to have any impact on anything of interest historically.

Or, in less roundabout terms, race, gender, and class are valid avenues of inquiry. Studying them tells us about human existence. Are students ever instructed to find a race, class, or gender angle where there is none? Sure, but then the student points this out, and problem solved. That not every topic has a strong race, class, and gender angle does not invalidate these topics for all. Nor is the correct answer on a student's part to decompensate about how PC academia is - a better (and dare I say, more conservative, in that it assumed the older person higher up on the totem pole is right) approach would be to see if perhaps there is a race, gender, or class angle, and if not, to have the intellectual get-up-and-go to explain why not. To equate all courses that deal with these issues with ones on "pop culture"... gets us at what PG commented, about how, if conservatives won't teach about the civil rights movement, someone who isn't a conservative will have to teach that class.

The broader problem, if Withywindle has summed up conservative opinion and not merely his own, is that the conservative critique ends up being less about nonsense-elimination, and more about advocating that we understand less about the world, for fear of letting the forces of PC win even a small victory. Meanwhile, whatever political sentiments may have been the impetus for the expansion of "history" to include things beyond Great Strapping Men, broadening a focus beyond Great Wars and Lightbulb Invention has been productive. Why can't conservatives just have their own approach to studying race, gender, and class? They seem happy enough to comment on these matters outside of academia. There's obviously the factor of, they don't want to feel excluded at cocktail parties. There is also the not insignificant matter of CCOAs having drilled it into the heads of young conservative college students that the academy is worthless and best avoided.

Conservatism, of course, houses a mishmash of anti-elitist suspicion of book-learning and stodgiest Great Books elitism. Conservatives are furious at the university both because it's fancy-schmancy and more challenging than Fox News and because it isn't the refined sherry-and-cigar club where Mayflower descendants can read Locke and Hobbes that it once was. Granted, not every conservative purports to speak from both seemingly contradictory vantage points simultaneously. However, the two inform each other insofar as the Great-Books critique is typically infused with a heavy dose of 'but who cares about whatever nonsense goes on in academia anyway because it's a bunch of worthlessness for women who should be making babies and men who should be working with their hands.' Add to that the general discomfort of social conservatives over the fact that college women are having The Premarital Intercourse. Basically, hating the university is a great unifier for at least three of the major kinds of conservatives. It's much more productive, I guess, for conservatives to hate on academia than for them to make academia hospitable to conservatives.

Already dreading the search-engine traffic this post will attract

Sometimes, to illustrate the point that Americans could stand to eat more fruits and vegetables and consume smaller portions, we'll see a photo or news item about some festival out in Real America where the tradition is to eat a whole deep-fried pig on a popsicle, covered in nacho-cheese sauce.

Joseph Epstein announces (thanks A&L Daily!) the End of Higher Education because some prof at Northwestern, after warning his class beforehand, went all Monty Python (NSFW of course) on his class, presenting a live sex act. (How anyone can mention this story and not "The Meaning of Life" is beyond me.) Epstein includes in his curmudgeonly rant, for extra curmudgeon points, one supposes, a letter he had written previously to the president of Northwestern, where he himself had been a prof, complaining about the choice of Stephen Colbert as commencement speaker. Because unless students fall asleep hearing someone hold forth on new developments in microbiology, it's not educational. No matter that Colbert, aside from being "in the cant phrase, a fun speaker," is a political force in our culture, someone who will likely show himself to be historically significant, and whom graduates would likely remember having heard speak for years to come, in the way they wouldn't if an especially good stand-up comic got the gig. Colbert is Pop Culture, Epstein is Team Classical-Music-and-Foreign-Films, which is all we need to know.

He goes on to fault the sex prof for... researching sex; maintaining a website about his family; writing a book that "apparently argues" something not so outlandish that Epstein couldn't be bothered to skim or have an intern look at to verify; and wearing "leisure cut" jeans, whatever that means. While there seem to be some valid complaints about the prof's ethical behavior, up to and including l'Affaire Dildo, there's no need to throw legitimate research into human sexuality out with the this-particular-prof-has-issues bathwater. Or so one might think.

Epstein, however, is prepared to dispose of the entirety of academia as it currently exists. He goes off on the question of profs sleeping with students in the name of academic freedom - a fad, if it ever was one, in the 1970s, and certainly not in today's climate of (thank god, on this issue especially) extreme professionalization. Epstein sees the post-1968 moment not as a blip, but as the beginning of a slippery slope culminating in every class as an orgy during which, in fine George Costanza manner, everyone is simultaneously eating pastrami and watching television. He then goes on to explain to the curious reader that, while he sure had opportunities, he as a prof preferred an older woman. Well, that's crucial information. This, in turn, segues into the question of 18-year-old females' virginity or lack thereof in the late 1960s...

Forgive me if I'm getting a bit lost in all this - the article is at this point hopping seemingly at random between various Conservative Critique of Education talking points. Too much fluff, not enough Shakespeare! Slutty coeds! Marxist literary criticism!

Oh, but Epstein meanders back to a point, and his point is that sex is not a valid subject for research. Not that live sex acts in a classroom are about provocation and not education, which would have been reasonable, but that sex is in some mystical realm of the unknowable:

Students don’t need universities to learn about varying tastes in sex, or about the mechanics of human sexuality. They don’t need it because, first, epistemologically, human sexuality isn’t a body of knowledge upon which there is sufficient agreement to constitute reliable conclusions, for nearly everything on the subject is still in the flux of theorizing and speculation; and because, second, given the nature of the subject, it tends to be, as the Bailey case shows, exploitative, coarsening, demeaning, and squalid.

Note again the leap from 'dildo action in class=bad' - something I'd imagine most would agree with - to a blanket condemnation of all academic study of human sexuality.

I know I told Rita that my principal objection to anti-modernity is its tendency to be barely masked nostalgia for a time when it was OK to be a bigot, and I do hold by that. But with Epstein, it's all about the curmudgeonliness, no hint of veiled anything, and it's still damaging. Academia needs thoughtful conservative critics, thoughtful critics of the new, but what we get instead is undirected, clichéd nonsense about how things sure ain't what they used to be.

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Charles Murray points out that today's elites marry in, perpetuating their elite elitism. "Three examples lifted from last Sunday's Times: a director of marketing at a biotech company (Stanford undergrad, Harvard MBA) married a consultant to the aerospace industry (Stanford undergrad, Harvard MPP). [Two more of the same idea follow.]"

The marriage part of his argument* bears a striking resemblance to (bear with me) an aspect of my dissertation. Early-nineteenth-century French Jews were faulted for marrying other Jews, as opposed to marrying 'the French.' But who were the French? Wasn't "France" just a big conglomeration of endogamous groups, groups that spoke their own languages, lived in their own worlds? Was there on the one hand a free-floating, marry-anyone majority, and on the other, the Jews, an insular, marry-in minority? If other groups - ethno-cultural, professional, regional, linguistic - were also marrying in, how was in-marriage a trait specific to Jews, proof of a unique xenophobia? Might it be that those whose chief complaint against the Jews was that they refused to marry out (ahem, Napoleon) were just accusing them of behaving like everyone else?

Back to the contemporary 'merica example. Who are the Real Americans, with whom the Ivy grads won't consider so much as a dinner date? (Reihan Salam had mentioned on Twitter he'd be addressing the question of who Murray's Americans are, and I'll add a link to that here if he does and I figure out where.) Are non-elites this homogeneous class, with Nascar fans in Kentucky marrying with residents of Chicago's South Side? And (thank you, Gawker) what about immigrants? Are they part of the monolith that is Non-Fancy-Pants America? Or does the inherent cosmopolitanness of having been to more than one country, spoken at least a few words of more than one language, make them elites, no matter how little education or money they have to their unpronounceable names. (As if "Maltz" were my family's real Old-World name.) If America is a set of insular-ish groups, how is it any more surprising that a Harvard-educated banker isn't marrying a factory worker, than it is that that factory worker isn't marrying an undocumented nanny?

Or, to put it in simpler terms, you can't blame the cheerleaders for only dating football players if the goths only date goths, the stoners only date stoners, and the preps only date preps.

People pair off within the socio-cultural-economic-linguistic-etc.-etc. limitations. All people, not just arugula-munching yoga-mat-carriers. To suggest that there's something nefarious - or particular to the present - about the Vows couples is bizarre. Don't like elites? Fine. Think there's too much of an income disparity? Suggest higher taxes for the rich. (Is this what Murray's suggesting?) But who exactly are fancy-pantses going to marry if not people they meet in the course of their fancy-pants formative years? Basically, Murray, sympathetic to those who'd have tea at their parties, has it in for the librul elites. He needs things to criticize them for, and since not watching "Oprah" isn't enough, he adds to their list of crimes their tendency to act like all other groups at all times ever.

But wait! Something has changed, but I can't quite put my finger on it... Oh oh, I know! The merging of impressive resumes is only possible when there are women with impressive resumes. (Unless the three examples Murray cites are of gay male couples, in which case we're talking about a different set of new opportunities.) Is this nostalgia for a Golden Age when brilliant men married their pretty secretaries? The only way graduates from highly selective colleges are going to stop marrying one another is if one sex simply doesn't go to college. Give it time - soon the men will stop at 10th grade, and babies of sensible levels of brains and looks can be born once again.

But yes, it's significant, it's progress, that being female or non-white and being an elite are no longer mutually exclusive. The "meritocracy" is flawed and not even close to 100% meritocratic, but the fact that massive segments of the population aren't by definition ineligible is an achievement, enough of one that any nostalgia for the elites of yesteryear deserves suspicion. (And yes, I know for what work the author is famous.)

* This was kind of a where-to-begin article. Consider the above to be my post on it, and what's below to be a disorganized array of other objections:

-The change Murray refers to at the beginning of the article isn't that the Tea Partiers insult elites, whereas David Brooks gently mocked the "bobos." It's that the Tea Party is a movement. This is organized anti-elitism. This is a bit like what one learns in Jewish Studies 101 - that sure, Jews were hated for economic and ethnic reasons prior to the 1880s, but it didn't count as anti-Semitism until there was a political force backing up the occasional pamphlet or armchair bigot. I make this comparison not to say that Tea Party anti-elitism is anti-Semitism, but to point out where Murray's gone wrong. The difference with Tea Party grumblings about elites is that it's politicized. Brooks musing about Restoration Hardware, this was Brooks contemplating fancy-pants-types who buy antique-looking doorknobs or whatever. Political only in the broadest sense of all mentions of class being political. 

-Murray picks a few examples of cultural divide - romance novels, yoga - but ignores the huge overlap brought about by something called "pop culture." If the name "Lindsay Lohan" doesn't bring to mind the word "rehab," you're not just an elite. You're part of some micro-elite that has managed to shield itself from the world outside a massive, dusty, home library. But once you reach that level of seclusion, you're more likely to be home-schooling in the woods somewhere than, I don't know, a graduate of UPenn. I'm not talking about when a politician who's gone from New England boarding school to the Ivy League suddenly pretends to care where to get the best corn dogs in Nebraska. I'm taking about highly educated types who read Perez Hilton, not to connect with the masses, but to find out which jeggings Lohan wore for her latest trial.

-A rotary phone? What what?

There so many quintessentially American things that few members of the New Elite have experienced. They probably haven't ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club or Rotary Club, or lived for at least a year in a small town (college doesn't count) or in an urban neighborhood in which most of their neighbors did not have college degrees (gentrifying neighborhoods don't count). They are unlikely to have spent at least a year with a family income less than twice the poverty line (graduate school doesn't count) or to have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian.

Murray's use of "quintessentially American" reveals his bias. Once we start getting into which activities or situations count as "real American," we're in Palin country. Is it particularly American to live below the poverty line, or in a small town? As in, are other countries all big cities and comfortable living, and if so, what's anyone doing here? And what does it even mean that the elite class is not a version of America in miniature? Why would it be? And (and we've come full circle) why are we supposed to be surprised if the experiences of any small minority of Americans differ from that of the majority?

Things start to look very circular. Yes, elites are elite, college graduates have attended college. Yes, yes, we all know that living in Bushwick in grad school isn't the same as living in East New York for 30 years. But this whole "doesn't count" business is kind of pointless. If the problem is that elites aren't living in small towns or the inner city, yet under certain circumstances they are living in these places, why are we not counting those circumstances? (Sure, college students leave after 4-6 years, but the profs stick around.) If elites were living in small towns working as gas-station attendants, or at fast-food joints in the inner city, they wouldn't be elites. If a fancy-pants lawyer is living in the inner city, the neighborhood in question is gentrifying, thanks to the lawyer and her lawyer-friends. The mere presence of elites changes environments, summons organic grocers and Lululemons.

-As always in these discussions: where's the cutoff for "elite"? Harvard or nothing? College vs. high school? What about the overeducated hovering around the poverty line? (You're broke, not poor, if you're in debt to attend Yale Law School, but what about Medieval Knitting PhD students at Obscure U?) What about the rich and red-state? What about... oh, this has gone on too long.

The "Western understanding"

I haven't read the NYT op-ed pages thoroughly for ages, and I'm reminded of why. As soon as I saw Ross Douthat's first few paragraphs explaining why the usual arguments against gay marriage don't hold up, I knew both that he was about to launch what would be the Big New Idea (but really an Old Catholic Idea) about marriage, but also that we were at a very specific moment in the op-ed formula. The moment when the conservative addressing a liberal audience plays at being swayable, wishy-washy, one-of-the-good-ones. Rare is the op-ed read to completion, so many NYT readers will go about their Mondays thinking Ross Douthat is on their side.

Then, once 99.99% of readers have set aside their coffee or emerged from the subway or been called away from nytimes.com by their work, he morphs into Bonald (see also), referring to multiple relationships over the course of a lifetime as "polygamy" and to the hetero nuclear family as a microcosm of society, and citing Judeo-Christian tradition (and may I say on behalf of the Jews, or at least some of us: don't drag us into this!).

And then, most frustratingly of all, he makes the very same error one sees in just about all defenses of "traditional marriage," namely implying (though never stating outright) that there was a Golden Age of lifelong heterosexual monogamous commitment. What about men, who were always permitted pre- and extramarital dalliances? What about the not-so-chaste women necessary for this arrangement?

The "Western understanding" Douthat laments describes was never much observed but at most an aspiration, at least something that one would say one wanted when asked about this publicly. And the ideal that's replaced it? People still aspire to lifelong commitments and child-rearing. The only difference is that there's a greater honesty about both the fact that people don't arrive as virgins at marriage (at 22 let alone 35), and that, for a small but significant part of the population, the only monogamous attachment possible of being honored is with a member of the same sex.

Is there hope for a conservative critique of academia?

Robert Weissberg has written one of the latest from-the-right essays on what's wrong with college today. The piece so perfectly exemplifies what a good conservative critique of academia could be, as well as where the genre inevitably goes wrong, that I had to respond.

Within the article are two potentially-separable strands. One is the classic, the requisite, the bitter, the Conservative Critique of Academia. We learn of colleges that "prescribe birth control devices," that through a "university-funded identity group one can reaffirm one’s homosexuality or blackness." We learn, "Instilling dependency is especially evident with academically struggling African-Americans. If there was ever a category of students who might benefit from acquiring self-reliance, it is this one." (Blacks should work harder! Gays should be more discreet! Wimmin should stop with all that premarital whup-di-do!) It is this portion of the article whose sheer predictability immediately repels 99.99% of people with anything to do with academia, including those with some conservative leanings.

Which is a shame, because if you isolate the other strand, a reasonable argument emerges. One I don't find entirely convincing, but one that merits a discussion. That argument is: How far should colleges go beyond offering courses and hosting libraries? What tragedy would befall us if dorms were replaced by students either living at home or in rooms or apartments near campus? If the parallel transportation systems some universities provide that precisely mirror existing public-transportation options were eliminated, and students were forced to take the oh-so-frightening M14 if they wanted to get from Avenue C to Union Square without exercise? (Not that riding the purple trolley isn't awesome in its way.) What if, rather than eating in dining halls, students had to learn how to procure ingredients and prepare meals? What if (and this one's my pet peeve) the ever-present landscaping services at elite universities, the ones that involve digging up and replanting what looks like the same exact thing each season, were eliminated (to be replaced by... concrete? student volunteers interested in planting an organic garden? does it matter?), and the tuition went down accordingly. Because whatever you happen to think of any individual beyond-classes expenditure (sports facilities, College Republicans, gay-identity-affirmation clubs, etc.), the end result is higher tuition, tuition beyond what many students could even think to meet on their own, without at least some parental assistance. This assistance, in turn, makes the default situation of a motivated 21-year-old "dependent." (Default, insofar as students at expensive colleges whose parents can't or won't pay any of the tuition need to alert others to this fact.)

I'm not so sure conservatives would like the results of a bare-bones university overhaul. What it would do, in effect, is shift adulthood up a couple years. College students would simply be adults living in Town X who happen to be taking classes. The safety net would be gone. (See item 2 in this post for a good explanation of the hands-off versus hands-on conservative visions of the academy.) The whole mythology of the College Experience would be gone. The insistence that students share rooms with other students so as to build character, the taboo surrounding undergrads dating anyone who isn't also an undergrad... The end result might be a conservative-friendly situation, with married, financially-independent 20-year-olds who are also getting BAs. Or maybe the very young would just enter the big, scary world prematurely, in-loco-parentis-less, and with a tougher time tracking down potential marriage partners. The "medieval" model ("When I tell my students that medieval universities only offered lectures, they are dumbfounded.") exists today, but among the less-well-off (community colleges) and residents of socialist-scary Western Europe, groups whose mores conservatives don't necessarily want middle-to-upper-middle-class Americans emulating.

But all in all, it makes sense that a more hands-off university would encourage responsibility, and that this is something that can be argued sensibly from the right, that could be a useful conservative contribution to discussions of academia. All I'm getting at here is that we have, once again, an example of a reasonable enough, definitively conservative, suggestion getting lost in a sea of knee-jerk sameness veering on offensiveness.

Red state, blue state

-My defense of Heathen America is up at Culture11. Disclaimer: no, I do not think the "Red-Blue" divide fully describes life in this country. But, as with most 'constructions,' it gets at something not entirely untrue.

-In some universe, $27 for a main course counts as a "recession special."

-Alert the presses! I actually agree with a post at Phi Beta Cons.

-In light of William Kristol's hearty praise of Joe the Plumber, I hereby suggest we remove the column from Kristol (ahem) and give it to a regular Joe. We don't need Kristol's fancy Harvard-tainted musings anymore!

-Audrey's back. Or is she? Blogroll reinstatement depends on contribution to my procrastination, that is, on further posting. Those are the rules...

Oral exams

My next big hurdle in grad school will be--you guessed it--orals. This won't be happening for nearly another year, but it's already looming large. So in true blogger-narcissist form, I was reminded of my own plight when I saw Sarah Palin struggle to come up with words to convey that the term "Bush Doctrine" rang a bell. I could imagine being nervous enough that someone would throw out, "Dreyfus Affair," and I'd say, "I've got nothing."

William Kristol (Harvard undergrad and grad alum, established journalist, and son of one of the fathers of neoconservatism) has a lot of nerve railing on about "establishments" and how thrilled he is to see them shaken up. If he's so enamored of all that is "refreshing," perhaps he'd like to offer his slot at the New York Times to one of the more promising staff members of a high school newspaper? Why should we ask less of our (vice) presidents than of our columnists?

But anyway, Kristol objected to "ABC’s Charlie Gibson, one of the most civil of the media bigwigs, unable to help himself from condescending to Palin as if he were a senior professor forced to waste time administering a Ph.D. exam to a particularly unpromising graduate student." While I of course agree with Kristol that the interview had the feel of an oral exam, the thought of what I'll soon be expected to know, versus how much Palin had to summon in order to satisfy her fans, was equally striking. And the fate of the world does not depend on how well I can explain the Damascus Affair, the 1905 French secularism law, or the works of Balzac. It does, however, rest on Palin's knowledge of the difference between the part of her body on which she sits and her elbow.

I was struck, when reading Kristol's pointless jibes at "the academic-feminist establishment," "feminist comp lit professors," and "[t]he politically correct wing of the academic establishment," by the fact that these apparent archenemies all had to pass rigorous exams, and that it can be jarring, if you're expected to know tons (about an academic topic, but also about whatever it is you do for a living, white collar or blue), to see the public conflating a demand that a job occupant have knowledge with 'elitism.' Knowledge--book-learnt or otherwise--is now presented as in and of itself a failing. (Even if Palin was unfairly depicted as ignorant, it remains frightening how many viewers of the video as it aired considered her responses satisfactory.)

I don't believe anyone's asking that Sarah Palin identify all the lettuces available at the Union Square Greenmarket, or to reflect on how accurately "Gossip Girl" depicts the lives of Manhattan private-school juniors. What's off-putting is the deification of ignorance, ignorance of material that would be central to her job if elected. It's not so much that she hasn't met foreign heads of state as that she lacks the sort of passionate knowledge of who those leaders are that you'll find among high school debaters across the country.