Fake Conservatism and the American University

Posted on by under education, in the news, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

Griping about how “tenured radicals” destroyed academia’s commitment to the humanist tradition is quite a tradition among pundits who consider themselves Conservative Intellectuals. As the general narrative goes, US colleges and universities were awesome until the 1960s, when left-wingers took the wheel and ruined everything, such that now our children are forced to study post-colonial queer Marxist avant-garde TV culture instead of the Great Books. The New Criterion is one of the coaling stations for this point of view. Now, to their credit, TNC publishes work by William Logan, one of the last good poetry critics in America. But to their discredit, they also publish appallingly stupid bullshit like this:

Academia is still a protected oasis—you can gauge just how protected by checking the astonishing price tag—but its signature purpose is no longer to pursue the scholarly life, to preserve and transmit to the next generation the riches of our cultural inheritance. On the contrary, colleges and universities have increasingly been subjugated to a leftist ideological agenda bent on dismantling that tradition. Anyone who speaks of “the riches of our cultural inheritance” would be shouted down as a reactionary whose views were not worth listening to. . . . They find willing accomplices in college administrators whose chief ambition is not to uphold standards of accomplishment and conduct but to appear ostentatiously enlightened.

Really? For the past thirty years American schools have replaced full-time professorships with an army of graduate-student TAs and adjuncts, even as the number of richly compensated corporate managers (er, Administrators) balloons, even as those administrators suddenly push for outsourced online courses, even as more lucre goes to amenities like gyms and football stadiums, even as the humanities have experienced the worst of the unnecessary and devastating cuts in public funding for higher education (even though, pace current mythology, the humanities fund the STEM fields), TNC claims this? This? Has their entire editorial staff undergone some terrible brain trauma? That’s their argument? That deviously powerful liberal intellectuals have rendered themselves broke and powerless so as to become . . . even more powerful?

Wonder what those traitors think about how things stand? Speaking as a college lecturer, I can assure you that it is easy to slide through four years of school without reading a long novel or learning anything about Plato or Gettysburg. So they are probably pretty happy, right? Consider one prof’s take on the situation:

“Here’s what matters: These and other treatments of grand trends insist that higher education is one of the last revered Western institutions to be ‘de-churched’; that is, it is one of the last to have its ideological justification recast in terms of corporatization and commodification and to become subject to serious state surveillance,” she writes. “Universities are no longer to lead the minds of students to grasp truth; to grapple with intellectual possibilities; to appreciate the best in art, music, and other forms of culture; and to work toward both enlightened politics and public service. Rather they are now to prepare students for jobs. They are not to educate, but to train.”

“Western institutions”? “The best in art”? Guiding young minds? Why, that sounds, uh, conservative. Unless you’re huffing glue, or not bothering to actually read what your supposed opponents are saying, TNC‘s pronouncements are tough to accept. Oops.

Granted, there are plenty of shrill leftist ideologues in academia, people who have proudly told me things like “I don’t teach white authors” (as if one couldn’t do Malcolm X and Henry Adams in the same course). But those people are not deans, regents, consultants, or chancellors. They aren’t running the show. Theirs is not, in fact, the dominant view of most of the American academics I’ve met. On the contrary, the majority of humanist scholars believe passionately in the idea of a Tradition of great texts and ideas. They might argue about who belongs to that tradition, but they are at heart Burkean conservatives, because they are committed to the crazy notion that thoughtful grown-ups should know something about literature, philosophy, history, and the arts (and math and science, for that matter).

Indeed, it is difficult to be an academic scholar without having a fundamentally conservative temperament. You might undertake a queer-feminist reading of Shakespeare or apply Edward Said’s theories to Impressionism, but you’re still writing about Shakespeare or Impressionism. Someone needs to remind TNC‘s hacks how much fucking training in the Western Tradition it takes to earn a PhD in the humanities, whatever one does with that education afterward.

The creepy corporatist mentality that has damaged American higher education so badly isn’t conservative in the true sense. Rather, it is a mode of Ayn Randian free-market fetishism that also contains a pronounced contempt for intellectual life, a contempt which emanates from the present-day Republican Party and its bleating lackeys. (As Andrew Sullivan has been arguing for years, the contemporary GOP is dominated by right-wing radicals, not actual conservatives, because actual conservatives don’t proudly reject science, deny gay citizens the right to marry their loved ones, attack long-standing institutions like Social Security, revile a private citizen’s right to make decisions about her own body, harbor imperialist fantasies, or try to stifle the will of the people.)

A blog post probably isn’t the best place to work this out, but in general I’m with Sullivan: ultimately, conservativism in the tradition of Burke is a framework for looking at the world, not a discrete collection of ideological convictions. It is a tool, not a dogma. Conservatism is about accepting the inevitability of change while managing and negotiating it within the context of a society’s cultural and political institutions. One can have progressive sympathies–like Barack Obama–and still be a philosophical conservative who constantly talks about things like fatherhood, marriage, and Enlightenment democracy (like Barack Obama).

Unfortunately, the word “conservative” is probably ruined in the United States, because most people with functional cerebral cortexes and a glancing familiarity with current events hear it and think of cheap-hearted thugs like George W. Bush and Ann Coulter. Maybe someday it will be reclaimed the way “liberal” is being reclaimed by young activists, but I doubt it. At the very least I’ll be moribund by the time it happens.

The dumbest thing about the supposedly pro-market worldview of the people who run our colleges and universities is that it licenses policies that hurt the free market. Just as the lack of a decent national health-care system stifles innovation because it discourages people from starting their own companies (ask a small-business owner how fun it is to purchase insurance on the open market), so too does gutting the budgets of universities, especially public ones, devastate the economy. It is difficult to invent, to innovate, to create, to re-imagine when you can’t get a decent education without taking out ruinous loans (if your broke-ass, standardized-test-riddled high school even prepared you for college in the first place).

And the band plays on. Stupid professors.

The Second Round

Posted on by under sports

So this is the most amazing picture of Steph Curry I could find. He looks like he’s 14 and is wearing the execrable late-90’s to mid-00’s Golden State Warriors uniform. And yet this poorly dressed juvenile might be one of the best five players in the NBA right now. Sure, his defense is suspect (at best). And yes, his ankles seem to be made of overcooked linguine. And I’ll even grant you that some of the passes he tries to thread to unsuspecting big men are downright stupid. But he’s probably the best shooter I have ever seen. I say this as someone who’s been a Steve Nash fan since watching him play in Toso Pavillion for Santa Clara University.

I get chest pains when I start thinking about the series of fortunate events that had to play out in order for the Warriors to get where they are now. Hasheem Thabeet AND Jonny Flynn AND the once-good Tyreke Evans (in addition to a few talented players–Griffin, Harden and Rubio) had to get picked in order for Curry to drop into the Warriors’ lap. The team had to trade Monta Ellis for Andrew Bogut, a center who was coming off one of the worst injuries I have ever seen (and what has turned out to be a string of awful ankle injuries too). They had to tank just enough last year to hang on to a lottery pick in this last year’s draft, which turned into the poised (and I think star-in-the-making) Harrison Barnes. They had to decide not to completely fold when David Lee tore his hip flexor. And they had to get lucky in hiring a coach with no experience, who just happens to be really well-suited for the job. And all of this had to happen in the wake of decades of ineptitude, terrible luck, and felonies committed by team personnel.

So forgive me if I gloat a little. The last few years have been an embarrassment of riches for Bay Area sports fans, but the Warriors succeeding might be even sweeter than the what the Giants and Niners have done. The Warriors will likely get housed by the Spurs, but I really don’t care. We will get to see Steph Curry shoot for at least another four games. Good enough.

Coming Clean

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Authors, Other Critics

While I don’t subscribe, I read Esquire sometimes. But even when the situation is a five-minute wait at Supercuts and I’m just flipping through it, I feel kind of sleazy, because Esquire is gross in multiple ways that matter, all of them tangled such that it is difficult to theorize said grossness. But, a few theses.

First, it’s that the thing is called Esquire, which sounds like an all-schoolgirls wank mag from 1950s  Britain. (Hastag, Philip Larkin.) Second, it’s the high-definition postindustrial lifestyle they sell: men’s jeans that aren’t Levi’s and cost $200, beard lube, Dwayne Wade’s bowties, a main-page tab called “Women.” Sometimes the magazine verges on Maxim territory. Third, it’s the embarrassing fact that like a lot of young professionals (stop snickering) I am insecure about stuff like my tie pin and my car, which was built during the first Clinton Administration, and so I read Esquire and worry about my abs.

The rub, at least for this coastal intellectual, is that they employ serious writers like Charles Pierce and Stephen Marche, so you end up reading them even when you aren’t at Supercuts. Come on, they are covering the death of the mighty George Jones like crazy, which is the only way to cover No Show’s shuffle off the mortal coil. They published this little ethnographic masterpiece. They put D Wade in a magazine that sort of reviews a few books from time to time. Esquire was a reasonably serious publication for fifty years during the last century, and it still carries a little of that cachet.

A favorite piece is A.J. Jacobs’s “I Think You’re Fat” (2007), which I’ve used in a number of classes. America’s children love it. Jacobs investigates the fascinating Radical Honesty movement, which espouses the unworkable but compelling idea that even little white lies constitute an existential wimping-out:

The movement was founded by a sixty-six-year-old Virginia-based psychotherapist named Brad Blanton. He says everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. This would be radical enough — a world without fibs — but Blanton goes further. He says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you’re having fantasies about your wife’s sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It’s the only path to authentic relationships. It’s the only way to smash through modernity’s soul-deadening alienation. Oversharing? No such thing.

Queasy? Me, too. Camus can do, Sartre is smartre, but Blanton is striking and Jacobs makes deft experimental use of the good doctor’s philosophy. Have at it. It will take you ten minutes. You dick.

Fitzgerald’s Ledger

Posted on by under Authors, education, guides and nudges

In this Tuesday, March 26, 2013 photo, Elizabeth Sudduth, director of the Ernest F. Hollings Library and Rare Books Collection at the University of South Carolina, points at items in a ledger owned by author F. Scott Fitzgerald, in Columbia, S.C. The university has digitized the ledger and put it online for scholars. (AP Photo/Jeffrey Collins)

A couple weeks back I wrote about the impending release of some of Willa Cather’s letters. As if that isn’t exciting enough for fans of American modernism, today I found out that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous ledger can be viewed at the University of South Carolina library website. The money-mad Fitzgerald recorded each little bit of coin he brought in through his writing and the licensing of his works between 1919 and 1938, though there isn’t a complementary ledger of his rap-mogulesque expenditures. Transcriptions of the ledger have been available for some time, most notably in Matthew Bruccoli’s excellent biography of Fitzgerald, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. Still, it’s amazing to be able to search through this document and see Fitzgerald’s lovely handwriting up close. The digital humanities should focus on this kind of preservation and facilitation, not devising ways to hold virtual meetings with students in Second Life.

Your Higher-Ed Industry at Work

Posted on by under education, The Moronic Inferno

Sorry we haven’t written for a few days; we’re both deep in the weeds of essay grading. Anyone who has taught writing knows that grading student papers is a lot of work, and it’s work mostly done by people without much job security. Yes, tenured English professors grade papers for their seminars about the globality of the phallus in late-Renaissance unpublished proto-feminist poetry, but sadly many of them aren’t marking these essays to help their students actually learn to write; they’re simply looking to see if they have some “brilliant” young mind that they can mold in their own image, sending the poor soul to grad school and the series of professional and personal failures that usually come along with it.

If the writing analysis in these kinds of hilarious English courses is bad, the teaching is often worse. Now, I had some amazing teachers at all of the institutions I attended. However, tenure-track folks are often evaluated on just about everything other than the thing most undergraduates assume they are paid to do. Worthless conference presentations and articles no one will read count more than designing courses that will help students succeed outside of the course itself. I think that most English professors would like to teach well (and some are great at it), but the tenure system really doesn’t incentivize it.

The Place Beneath is a documentary that examines the fate of a guy who was a teacher before anything else. He wasn’t a writing teacher, but his teaching was designed to help students live better lives both at and after the university. What a concept! And what was his reward for this? Getting his health insurance dropped when the school he’d worked at for years decided to hire someone else to be a traditional research professor. And then he got cancer and died, but only after going broke. This is obviously a pretty extreme example, but it highlights something we’d all be wise to remember: as much as higher ed tries to set itself apart as a noble world of inquiry and virtue, it’s mostly a business with a very bizarre set of operating procedures.

Boston

Posted on by under education, in the news, the polis

When I was a teenager, I fantasized about going to college in Boston. It started on a trip my family took to the city when I was sixteen. We had visited a bunch of random places when I was a kid (Hawaii, New Mexico, Fresno), but Boston was my first experience with what I thought of as authentic east coast culture, and I wanted to be a part of it.

Growing up in San Jose, California makes one feel detached from the big moments of American history. While San Jose dates back to the Spanish colonial days of the late eighteenth century, you don’t see much evidence of this outside the missions. What history was visible when I was growing up revealed the tension between what San Jose had been, a suburban orchard town, and what it has become, Silicon Valley, and all that that entails. I really haven’t spent much time there since I left about a decade ago, but when I visit I am still struck by the lack of aesthetic consistency of the place: bungalows from the 1920s are around the corner from run-down apartment blocks from the late 1970s, which are across town from gleaming new Shiteaus in planned communities. At the time it was hard for me to knit together a good narrative about the place, though now I understand that this is true of most places, Boston included.

Still, as a young nerd who loved American literature and history, my first trip to Boston was like walking into a novel that reconciled old and new in ways San Jose couldn’t. The buildings looked like they had been built in conversation with one another. It seemed like every other corner had a sign noting some historical event of the colonial period. And yet there were cool looking young people all around me too. Beautiful girls a few years older than me who dressed like they were going to work in art galleries even when they were just going for coffee. Dudes wore clothes that fit. Now, a part of me thought these people were tools. I was in my shoegazer/monstrously depressed singer-songwriter phase. I thought I was deeper than guys in khakis. And yet I could see myself there, walking the brick-lined streets, a college student studying literature or film, wearing sweaters, going on dates with pretty girls, maybe even getting to go back to their apartments. Things seemed possible for me in Boston in a way they didn’t in San Jose. And this was all before I set foot on the campus of Boston College.

I went to high school at an all-boys Jesuit prep school in San Jose that regularly sends dozens of kids a year to the Ivy League, Stanford, Berkeley, and other schools of this ilk. I wasn’t going to be one of those guys. For my school I was probably a little above average. I didn’t take AP classes, I only got through as much math as I had to, and I am stunned I didn’t pull C’s in French before dropping it after my junior year. My SAT scores were good though, and actually made me look like an underachiever, but as I explained to some of the college admissions people who interviewed me, I like tests. And my grades weren’t that bad. I was in the market for a college that was excellent, but not elite. And BC, the best Jesuit school for guys without the grades for Georgetown, seemed like the perfect fit.

When we wandered around the campus I was kind of numb. My folks and I had been on college campuses before, but never one that felt so, well, collegial. Most universities in California, no matter how old they are, feel like they were built in the 1960s. This is because most of them were, or at least most of the parts that we see today don’t date back much before the days of Pat Brown. Boston College felt old and important, just like the city, but it felt old and important in a way I had been trained by years of Jesuit education to recognize. I can’t describe it really. It’s a combination of stone, trimmed grass, stained glass, library books, and leather that just makes sense to me. This was the place I would have to go to college. It was the place that would get me out of San Jose and make me interesting. It was a real American city. And, hell, I didn’t have my heart set on Harvard. I was a good Jesuit boy with decent grades and great test scores. BC would have to let me in, I thought.

Of course, they didn’t. In fact, they wait-listed me in April of my senior year, and then sent me two rejection letters on the day I graduated from high school, one addressed to “Dan,” and one addressed to “Daniel.” I have no idea how that kind of clerical error happens, but it felt personal. I’d spent the year and change after my trip telling all of my smarter friends that I would be going to Boston College. It sounded almost on par with their Columbias and Yales, but also like I had chosen something different. Like I knew something they didn’t. When it became clear that I wasn’t go to BC, or even BU (I got in, but we couldn’t really afford it), a certain sense of what my life could be like kind of disappeared. I didn’t really mourn it, which actually surprises me. I was all about college radio and coffee shops, both of which, at the time anyway, promoted a culture of self-indulgent introspection. Instead, I think I simply shut a door between myself and this life I had been desperate to lead. For the next decade I moved up and down the coast of California, from LA to Santa Cruz, from Santa Cruz to Santa Barbara, from Santa Barbara to back LA, from LA back to Santa Barbara, and finally back to LA. I can’t imagine myself as anything other than a coastal Californian, and I am happy I went to college and grad school at the three places I did. I know most of the people who mean anything to me because Boston College rejected both Dan and Daniel, and I live in a city with a culture and history that strikes me as every bit as important and authentic as Boston’s did when I was sixteen.

But that door I closed thirteen years ago (!) opened a little on Monday when I heard about the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon. Even though I have never been in Boston for Patriots’ Day, I have always been aware of it because it means the Red Sox play a really early game, at least out here on the West Coast. The whole idea of a day that only means something to one city excites me. I wish LA had something similar. The fact that evil people decided to prey on a city’s desire to celebrate is not surprising. The kinds of people who would blow up a crowd of strangers can’t possibly understand love and community in the simple way Bostonians embrace a day of baseball, running, and drinking to their shared history. No doubt whoever did this has some allegedly complex grievance they think must be taken seriously. But it shouldn’t be. This was cowardice. Cowards don’t get taken seriously, and cowards ultimately can’t ruin the world for the rest of us. They may try, but they can’t if we don’t let them.

There were a lot people down at the Marathon on Monday who weren’t originally from Boston. Many, I would imagine, were even from San Jose or the dozens of other history-less suburban hubs like it around the country. People who got to go through the door at some point in their lives, and who have experienced the culture that seemed to me so essentially American when I was in high school. To them, the native Bostonians, the runners from around the world who just wanted to race, and to everyone else who was touched by these acts of cruelty perpetrated in the name of nothing of any value, I wish eventual peace. And for the people that committed these crimes, may they never know peace as long as they live.

James Baldwin on “Florida Forum” (1963)

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Authors, the polis, Visual

The video is a bit grainy, and there is some distracting superimposed text, but this is still pretty great. Wearing a suit so on-point that it could have destroyed televisions across America, Baldwin ventures into the conservative bastion of 1960s Miami and talks about the “Negro Problem” in the passionate yet measured, cerebral tones you may recognize from essays like “Notes of a Native Son” and books like The Fire Next Time. Remember when writers could be well-regarded public figures? Remember that? Me neither. Oh well. Enjoy.