Latest Article: "Studies Have Shown" Is Not Enough

 My latest opinion piece has been published in Discourse Magazine. It's titled "'Studies Have Shown' Is Not Enough." It's on the problem of people wanting to jump on edufad bandwagons as soon as a few studies supposedly show something.

I am NOT a company man! I am an empowered creative with a non-conformist outlook that is valued in our diverse workspace!

This essay in American Affairs Journal is full of insights into how educated professionals conduct themselves as corporate bureaucrats while portraying themselves as non-conformists. For instance:

A key benefit of any prestige university is the social network. In order to take full advantage of this, students must participate in party culture without losing control of their appetites. Fiction often con­fronts open secrets, and The Secret History by Donna Tartt follows a group of eccentric college students who destroy their lives after taking their professors’ Dionysian stories too seriously. This might point to obvious truths about moderation: self-control accompanies success. Yet vices and virtues are not doled out equally, and when leadership training is done in a hyper-permissive atmosphere, we narrow the type of character who emerges.

When I think back to the rituals of certain honor societies in my senior year of college, I think about various rituals that involved long, sleepless nights, hard work and hard celebration, and the bonds that were forged.  And I get it. It's a balancing act of work and play reminiscent of Daniel Bell's observations in Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Not everyone can pull it off, but it's a badge of honor for those who do.

Also, regarding why so many in the professional classes eat up the dumbest pop psychology like it's pita chips and humus from Trader Joe's:

Forty years ago, Christopher Lasch wrote that “modern industry condemns people to jobs that insult their intelligence,” and today employers rub this insult in workers’ faces with a hideously infantilizing work culture that turns the office into a permanent kindergarten classroom. Blue-chip companies reward their employees with balloons, stuffed animals, and gold stars, and an exposé detailing the stringent communication rules of the luxury brand Away Luggage revealed how many start-ups are just “live, laugh, love” sweatshops. This humiliating culture dominates America’s companies because few engage in truly productive or necessary work. Professional genre fiction, such as corporate feminism, is thus often told as a way to cope with the underwhelming reality of working a job that doesn’t con­tribute anything to the world.

There is another way to tell the story of the young career woman, however. Her commute includes inspiring podcasts about Ugandan entrepreneurs, but also a subway stranger breathing an egg sandwich into her face. Her job title is “Senior Analyst—Global Trends,” but her job is just copying and pasting between spreadsheets for ten hours. Despite all the “doing well by doing good” seminars, the closest thing she knows to a community is spin class, where a hundred similar women, and one intense man in sports goggles, listen to a spaz scream Hallmark card affirmations.

Regarding genuine non-conformity:

Trump’s antics are indicative of his different route to power. Forget everything else about him: how would you act if you never had a job outside a company with your name on the building? The world of the professional managerial class doesn’t contain many characters, and so they associate eccentricity with bohemianism or ineptitude. But it’s also reliably found somewhere else.

Indeed, the more ostensibly bohemian a professional pretends to be, the more adamant they are about the Code of Conduct. I can recall sitting in a seminar where a speaker with a distinctly "alternative" appearance was introduced, and the host made sure to mention that this speaker had been quite active in developing codes of conduct for professional organizations. I'm old enough to remember when this person would have been denouncing the Code of Conduct, not writing it. I have never been a hippie, punk, or bohemian, and the only time my skin gets pieced by metal is during medical procedures. Still, I miss the days when deviating substantially from some "normie" expectation meant a person was probably harder to offend, not easier to offend.

Now, to be sure, I think conservatives have lately drifted too far away from codes of conduct, as evidenced both by the Tweeter-in-Chief and also some chance encounters with conservatives. At the same time, I think there has to be a middle ground where we keep our hands to ourselves and avoid the dirty talk while at work, but also don't elevate the perpetually-offended to the highest moral pedestals.

I miss the days when it was the right-wingers who wanted the kids to turn down their music and stop watching those blasphemous movies. The other day I was watching Monty Python's Life of Brian, and partway through I realized that this movie would be roundly condemned for blasphemy today, but the condemnations would come from the left.  The right has (mostly) learned how to deal with jokes about religion.  Or, at least, they know they can't bankrupt a theater chain. But the left would go ballistic over the punching down, never mind that Monty Python also punched up, sideways, diagonally, and into the fifth dimension. And never mind that Eric Idle's Loretta character actually had her name and pronoun preferences respected, snide remarks from Reg not withstanding.

The conservative nature of progress

There's a common genre of articles and presentations proclaiming that everything we think we know is wrong. They often focus on our cognitive biases.  There are, of course, valid points in such articles. Human fallibility is real, and old knowledge often has to be replaced. At the same time, if everything we think we know is wrong, then what does progress mean? If we are not just fallible but incompetent then how can we make progress? If our minds are too limited to have learned anything correctly before, how are we going to learn anything correctly now.

Conservatism at its best is about the notion that we can actually have at least some degree of confidence in time-tested insights. For all its skepticism of new ideas, there's also the possibility that when genuine progress is made it can be preserved and serve as a foundation for the next advance. That is a far more progressive ideology than the premise that the next breathless enthusiast in a conference room can overturn everything (for a fee).

More on America's elites and The Restlessness

This article on political correctness and activism at Yale argues that the problem is not about speech, but about a loss of confidence by America's elites.  The writer (Natasha Dashan) starts by noting that the effectiveness of student protests were a symptom of loss of confidence:

But the appearance of bottom-up protest politics is always a bit of a false narrative.  It would be one thing if the students were polled and a majority said they wanted the name changed, or some other process was used. At least the university could say that it was making decisions based on some objective democratic process, and wasn’t just being pushed around. But this is not what happened. No polls were taken. There was no authoritative process. The school said no for a few months, then caved. If the school were actually confident in its position to resist, it could have easily pushed back on the protests.

I admit that on some level I don't understand why America's elites have lost confidence.  Yes, America has lots of problems, I disagree with its elites on lots of things, and I think they've made a lot of mistake.  But isn't that true of every era?  There's a whole lot that America does right, and a whole lot that it could still set right with sustained effort.  And plenty of other places and times have seen elites who did worse.

Maybe the problem is that America's elites know that they aren't really in charge.  I mean, yes, they control so many institutions, but they no longer control the government.  That may seem laughable on one level, with the Supreme Court being packed with Yale grads and plenty of Ivy Leaguers, rich people, etc. in Congress.  Not to mention the Ivy Leaguers packing the top of executive agencies and Congressional staff positions, i.e. the people who REALLY run the government and always have in every country ever.

On another level, consider the most intractable problem in American government:  The deficit.  You simply cannot have tax rates that are acceptable to Americans AND have the massive military that we have (and all the commitments that come with it) AND do something substantial about healthcare.  You can do any two of those, but not all three.  This isn't a matter of political ideology but rather arithmetic.  Nonetheless, it is impossible to raise taxes, impossible to cut the military, and impossible to do anything about healthcare that might threaten the bottom lines of entrenched interests.  There are too many different players with too much at stake.  And they can get the masses to vote with them.

OK, maybe all of those defense contractor executives and healthcare executives and upper-income taxpayers are elites, but (1) there are so many of them that the word "elite" gets stretched to something broader than "Top Ivy Grads", (2) they aren't the forward-thinking elites who know that some things can't go on forever (i.e. the sorts of people who are smart enough to rise to the top at Yale), and (3) these things wouldn't be politically impossible if the elites couldn't win elections while adhering to these stances, and lose elections by substantially straying from them. The people who benefit from these unsustainable contradictions have a critical mass of, well, the masses on their side. Something has slipped loose and is no longer under the control of smart old guys from New England.  It's not democracy, but it's also not an elite that's coherent enough to act together and accept short-term pain with the assurance that they know the other guys and can keep them from cheating.

Dashan seems to know this.  She says (emphasis added):

Western elites are not comfortable with their place in society and the responsibilities that come with it, and realize that there are deep structural problems with the old systems of coordination. But lacking the capacity for an orderly restructuring, or even a diagnosis of problems and needs, we dive deeper into a chaotic ideological mode of coordination that sweeps away the old structures. 

When you live with this mindset, what you end up with is not an establishment where a woke upper class rallies and advocates for the rights of minorities, the poor, and underprivileged groups. What you have is a blind and self-righteous upper class that becomes structurally unable to take coordinated responsibility. You get stuck in an ideological mode of coordination, where no one can speak the truth to correct collective mistakes and overreaches without losing position. 

This ideology is promulgated and advertised by universities, but it doesn’t start or stop at universities. All the fundraisers. All the corporate events. The Oscars. Let’s take down the Man. They say this in front of their PowerPoints. They clink champagne glasses. Let’s take down the Man! But there is no real spirit of revolution in these words. It is all in the language they understand—polite and clean, because it isn’t really real. It is a performative spectacle about their own morale and guilt.

I've written before about comfortable, well-dressed people sitting in conference rooms and nodding enthusiastically while people about them discuss TRANSFORMATION AND DISRUPTION!!!  It's not just about the federal budget.  In education the problem is the unsustainability of expanding access while preserving some modicum of excellence.  But denying access is simply not an option.  So everyone tries to look for too-good-to-be-true solutions, or at least tries to look like they're looking for them, so that they can look like they are the side of righteousness.  Because there's no politically feasible way to get off this train.  So they're all eating this shit up like it's pita chips and humus from Trader Joe's.

And then a reality TV star with a Twitter account and more loyalty to Moscow than Main Street wins the Presidency and half the country freaks out while the other half jumps on the bandwagon.  Because our elites don't know what to do.  Yeah, he's a rich guy (sort of) and a businessman, but just about all of the business elite would have preferred a more competent rich guy to sign their tax cuts and appoint people who will deregulate.  And the old-school elites, who could think long-term, would have preferred somebody with a bit more discipline.

The elites lack confidence because nobody is in charge, or at least nobody can coordinate the people who are collectively in charge.  God help us, we're sort of a democracy.

Thought Leaders vs Public Intellectuals

I like this article  in the Chronicle:  Public intellectuals, people who know a lot, are on the decline, while "thought leaders", who have one Big New Idea (that might not actually be new at all) and they evangelize for it.

I think this explains a lot.

Make a whole new religion, a falling star that you cannot live without

William Deresiewicz just published a nice essay on political correctness. It is longer than it needed to be, but it still has plenty of good stuff.  I don't have time to frame a single, cohere response, so I'll just address it in bits and pieces.

Selective private colleges have become religious schools. The religion in question is not Methodism or Catholicism but an extreme version of the belief system of the liberal elite: the liberal professional, managerial, and creative classes, which provide a large majority of students enrolled at such places and an even larger majority of faculty and administrators who work at them. To attend those institutions is to be socialized, and not infrequently, indoctrinated into that religion.

...

What does it mean to say that these institutions are religious schools? First, that they possess a dogma, unwritten but understood by all: a set of “correct” opinions and beliefs, or at best, a narrow range within which disagreement is permitted. There is a right way to think and a right way to talk, and also a right set of things to think and talk about. Secularism is taken for granted. Environmentalism is a sacred cause. Issues of identity—principally the holy trinity of race, gender, and sexuality—occupy the center of concern.

This seems accurate, though I think it's important to emphasize (as he does later) that this is to a large extent an elite phenomenon.  The viewpoints he describes go beyond the most elite institutions, but the rigidity of the code, and particularly its power over the wider student body, is not as bad everywhere as it is in the places that he's talking about.

As to this:

The presiding presence is Michel Foucault, with his theories of power, discourse, and the social construction of the self, who plays the same role on the left as Marx once did. The fundamental questions that a college education ought to raise—questions of individual and collective virtue, of what it means to be a good person and a good community—are understood to have been settled. The assumption, on elite college campuses, is that we are already in full possession of the moral truth. This is a religious attitude. It is certainly not a scholarly or intellectual attitude.

The first sentence seems wildly inaccurate.  I can't speak to humanities, but I haven't heard anyone mention Foucault (outside of a few libertarian friends with decidedly non-leftist views on power) since the 1990's.  Frankly, if today's campus identity liberalism were rooted in Foucault it would be a step up--at least Foucault is a hard read!  The writings that matter in identity liberalism on today's campuses seem to be shallow think-pieces at the level of Slate and Huffpo, emotional personal accounts, and egregiously misapplied/misinformed social science, not French intellectuals.  Indeed, the last sentence notes the unscholarly attitude of identity liberalism, further casting doubt on the assertion that it's rooted in thinkers like Foucault.  They don't want thick treatises, they want 3 Quick Tips For Implementing Best Practices!

Also, French postmodernists would have cast a disparaging eye on claims to objective truth, whereas today's identity liberalism holds that privilege blinds one to truth and oppression opens one to it.  There is an objective moral code, an idea of settled questions, as Deresiewicz notes.  French postmodernists would laugh at the idea of settled truths, let alone settled moral truths.

But of course, Scripps and its ilk are only diverse in terms of identity. In terms of ideology, they are all but homogeneous. You don’t have “different voices” on campus, as these institutions like to boast; you have different bodies, speaking with the same voice.

...

 Elite private colleges are ideologically homogenous because they are socially homogeneous, or close to it. Their student populations largely come from the liberal upper and upper-middle classes, multiracial but predominantly white, with an admixture of students from poor communities of color—two demographics with broadly similar political beliefs, as evidenced by the fact that they together constitute a large proportion of the Democratic Party base. As for faculty and managerial staff, they are even more homogenous than their students, both in their social origins and in their present milieu, which tends to be composed exclusively of other liberal professionals—if not, indeed, of other liberal academics. Unlike the campus protesters of the 1960s, today’s student activists are not expressing countercultural views. They are expressing the exact views of the culture in which they find themselves (a reason that administrators prove so ready to accede to their demands). If you want to find the counterculture on today’s elite college campuses, you need to look for the conservative students.

This I agree with 100%.

And this:

There is one category that the religion of the liberal elite does not recognize—that its purpose, one might almost conclude, is to conceal: class. Class at fancy colleges, as throughout American society, has been the unspeakable word, the great forbidden truth. And the exclusion of class on selective college campuses enables the exclusion of a class. It has long struck me in leftist or PC rhetoric how often “white” is conflated with “wealthy,” as if all white people were wealthy and all wealthy people were white. In fact, more than 40 percent of poor Americans are white. Roughly 60 percent of working-class Americans are white. Almost two-thirds of white Americans are poor or working-class. Altogether, lower-income whites make up about 40 percent of the country, yet they are almost entirely absent on elite college campuses, where they amount, at most, to a few percent and constitute, by a wide margin, the single most underrepresented group. 

We don’t acknowledge class, so there are few affirmative-action programs based on class. Not coincidentally, lower-income whites belong disproportionately to precisely those groups whom it is acceptable and even desirable, in the religion of the colleges, to demonize: conservatives, Christians, people from red states. Selective private colleges are produced by the liberal elite and reproduce it in turn. If it took an electoral catastrophe to remind this elite of the existence (and ultimately, one hopes, the humanity) of the white working class, the fact should come as no surprise. They’ve never met them, so they neither know nor care about them. In the psychic economy of the liberal elite, the white working class plays the role of the repressed. The recent presidential campaign may be understood as the return of that repressed—and the repressed, when it returns, is always monstrous. 

The exclusion of class also enables the concealment of the role that elite colleges play in perpetuating class, which they do through a system that pretends to accomplish the opposite, our so-called meritocracy. Students have as much merit, in general, as their parents can purchase (which, for example, is the reason SAT scores correlate closely with family income). The college admissions process is, as Mitchell L. Stevens writes in Creating a Class, a way of “laundering privilege.”

Here's the most important part:

The culture of political correctness, the religion of the fancy private colleges, provides the affluent white and Asian students who make up the preponderant majority of their student bodies, and the affluent white and Asian professionals who make up the preponderant majority of their tenured faculty and managerial staffs, with the ideological resources to alibi or erase their privilege. It enables them to tell themselves that they are children of the light—part of the solution to our social ills, not an integral component of the problem. It may speak about dismantling the elite, but its real purpose is to flatter it. [Emphasis added]

Exactly.  That's why people eat that shit up like pita chips and humus from Trader Joe's.

Later in the essay, Deresiewicz acknowledges the role that class plays, and the difference between elite private and non-elite public institutions:

But public schools are very different places from private ones. Their student bodies, for the most part, are far more diverse, economically and in every other way, which means these institutions do not have to deal with a large bolus of affluent, sheltered white and Asian kids who don’t know how to talk to black and brown people and need to be “educated” into “awareness” by the presence of African-American and Latino students (who are, in turn, expected to “represent” their communities). When different kinds of people grow up together, rather than being introduced to one another under artificial conditions in young adulthood, they learn to talk and play and study together honestly and unselfconsciously—which means, for adolescents, often frankly and roughly—without feeling that they have to tiptoe around sensitivities that are frequently created by the situation itself.

I'm at a non-elite public institution, and while few of the faculty were first-generation students, some definitely came from more privileged backgrounds than others.  The politics correlate pretty well with the level of parental privilege.

Post title explained:

What does it mean to be "Establishment"?

I haven't been blogging much lately because I haven't been reading much of relevance to this blog lately.  But I came across a great post by Timothy Burke that reminded me of one of my old posts on what it means to be an insider or outsider. In noting how many liberal professionals identify with the masses and think of themselves as outside agitators rather than realizing how institutionalized they are, Burke writes:

One of our great weaknesses at times has been how some of us have adopted an insistence that virtue can only derive from marginality, a view that speaking from power is always a fallen and regrettable position. Because we didn’t see our ties to the establishment as virtue and we didn’t understand that our forms of power were important for defending what we had already achieved, because we had a reflexive and attachment to the idea that we were in no way powerful, that our share of the status quo could only be found in some future progress, never even partially achieved, we were unready to wake up in the year 2016 and discover that we were not only a part of an ancien regime threatened by a mob, but that we actually wanted to defend that regime rather than rush to join the mob at the barricades. It would have been better if we’d defended it that way long before this moment. But it will help even now if we recognize that this is part of what we’re doing: defending a structure of manners, of virtues, of practices, of expectations, of constraints and outcomes, against people who either don’t recognize that this structure is important for them or from people who genuinely do not benefit from that structure. That we should not be ashamed to defend our loosely shared habitus, because it really is better for the general welfare than the brutalist, arbitrary, impoverishing alternative that the populist right is pushing forward in many nations.

I myself feel ambivalent about my institutional nature, partly because of my roots in Franciscan grade school, partly because I am a contrarian, and partly because the most institutionally respectable thing in higher ed is to position oneself as a Change Agent.  I'm unabashedly traditionalist, which feels like a very anti-institutional stance when everyone is looking for Great! Amazing! Transformation!  I'd feel more comfortably institutional in a musty old library (for my traditionalist side) with slightly uncomfortable furniture and climate control (for my guilty Catholic roots).

This may be the most controversial part of Burke's post:

Some thought that you were only the Establishment if you were wealthy, or white, or male, or held a certain set of specific political ideologies and affiliations. But you can trace the existence and continuation of a great many jobs–and life situations–to a political economy that depended on the civic, governmental and business institutions built up in the United States and around the world after 1945. The manager of a local dance company in a Midwestern city who only makes $40,000 a year and is an African-American vegan lesbian with a BA from Reed is still linked to the Establishment. That dance company doesn’t exist without the infrastructure where small trickles of revenue flow from cities, states, and nations into such organizations, without the educated professionals who donate because they believe in the arts, without the dancers themselves who chase a life of meaning through art but who also want to get paid. It’s not that there wasn’t art–or patronage of art–in the 19th Century or the early 20th Century–but there was less of it, and it was less systemically supported, and less tied to a broad consensus at the civic and social center about the value of art and education everywhere. Some of us are very powerful in the Establishment, some of us grossly misuse and abuse the power of the Establishment, some of us are the wealthy beneficiaries of its operations and others poorer and less powerful at its edges. But even out at the edges, still linked, still reliant on the system, and still in some sense believers in much of what the Establishment entails.

I'm from the middle class, which is above the lower-middle class but at the bottom of the Establishment.  We have comfort derived from norms and continuity but little room for excess.  We fool ourselves into thinking that we're commoners, but we have a level of safety that the lower-middle class doesn't (while they in turn have just enough employability to not be among the truly poor). Nonetheless, we and our compatriots above and below all insist that we're equally middle-class. This American trait of everyone insisting that they're middle class (no matter how high or low they actually are) is of old lineage, as noted by de Tocqueville.

However, when those of us from the middle class move up the ladder, and find ourselves among the children of the upper-middle class, we can see both what we had and what we didn't have, so we are massively turned off when the children of the upper-middle class (and above) put on airs of commoner status:

So you've been to school for a year or two
And you know you've seen it all,
In Daddy's car thinking you'll go far,
Back east your type don't crawl.
Play ethnicky jazz to parade your snazz,
On your five grand stereo.
Bragging that you know
How the ******* feel cold
And the slum's got so much soul!
It's time to taste
What you most fear!
Right guard will not help you here.
Brace yourself my dear,
It's a holiday in Cambodia,
It's tough kid, but it's life.
It's a holiday in Cambodia,
Don't forget to pack a wife.

There are days when those lyrics run through my head repeatedly.

However, what should be more controversial is this part:

We need to identify the necessary heart of our established systems and practices, whether it’s in a small non-profit, a government office, a university, or a corporate department, and be ready to mercilessly abandon the unnecessary procedures, processes and rules that have encrusted all of our lives like so many barnacles. Those of us who are in some sense part of the larger networks of the Establishment world, even at its edges, can endure the irrelevance of pointless training sessions, can patiently work through needless processes of measurement and assessment, can parse boring or generic forms of managerial prose to find the real message inside. We’ve let this kind of baroque apparatus grow up around the genuinely meaningful institutional systems and structures that we value because it seems like too much effort in most cases to object against it, and because much of this excess is a kind of stealthy job creation program that also magnifies the patronage opportunities for some individuals. But this spreading crud extends into the lives of people who are not primed to endure it, and who often end up victimized by it, and even for those of us who know our way around the system, there are serious costs to the core missions of our institutions, to clarity and transparency, and to goodwill. It’s time to make this simpler, more streamlined, more focused, without using austerity regimes or “disruption” as the primary way we accomplish that streamlining. We don’t need to get rid of people, we just need to get rid of the myriad ways we acquiese to the collection of more and more tolls on the roads we traverse in our lives and work.

I whole-heartedly support it, but many people in my professional class would scream bloody murder.

Click here for something that will TOTALLY CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE on reading and marketing!

After my exploration of the ways in which culture and the post-industrial economy play into the Trump phenomenon, I wasn't planning to say more about the politics of the outside world for a while.  However, this article by Rick Perlstein contains a nugget that is just too perfect. Just skip the first part (about contemporary politics) and go to the section heading titled "An Oilfield in the Placenta."  Besides being an admirably graphic metaphor, it heads a section on the fascinating history and psychology of conservative direct-marketing schemes.  That's interesting, but not terribly relevant to this blog.  However, in dissecting the ways in which direct marketers appeal to their conservative audiences, Perlstein delivers this:

This event points to another signal facet of the conservative movement’s long con: convincing its acolytes that they are the true intellectuals, that anyone to their left is the merest cognitive pretender. (“Will this 3 Minute Video Change Your Life?” you can read on FreedomFest’s website. Because three-minute videos are how intellectuals roll. Click here to learn more.)

Ooh, we've hit paydirt there.  We've just found the mirror image of the faculty lounge zeitgeist.  When my colleagues are more interested in think-pieces and life hacks than books they are mirror images of a cultural segment for which they would proclaim nothing but disdain.  Three-minute videos aren't how true intellectuals roll, but they are how too many in the Academy roll.  And that style of marketing is no less effective with a certain segment of academics than it is with the conservative base.

Perlstein, incidentally, is the author of 3 excellent books on the history of the conservative movement:  Before the Storm (about Goldwater and the 1964 Presidential campaign), Nixonland (about the rise of Richard Nixon and what it meant for American politics), and The Invisible Bridge (about the events culminating in Reagan almost but not quite winning the nomination in 1976).  Partisan politics are not an interest of this blog, but Perlstein is a master of dissecting American culture.  At some point I may re-read Nixonland just so I can blog about Franklins vs. Orthogonians, Perstein's framing of American cultural divides in terms of social clubs in Richard Nixon's college years.  It has direct parallels to the internal politics of the faculty lounge.

Trump Card

I am usually uninterested in using this blog to discuss the politics of the  non-academic world, but I will make an exception because I had an insight into an analogy between academic politics and national politics.

Everyone who reads this blog (I am generously assuming that I have multiple readers...) knows that I am mystified by academics who respond so well to thoroughly establishment figures when they talk about transformation and radical change.  How will the Director of a government-funded and foundation-funded STEM Education Initiative, a person with countless establishment awards, saying all of the buzzwords that establishment figures cherish, actually shake anything up?

Well, consider the Trump campaign.  Marvel at all of the social conservatives who are flocking to the campaign of a casino owner who is on his third marriage.  Look upon the cultural conservatives who rail against east coast elitists as they cheer for a Manhattan billionaire.  Look at the people who consider this billionaire the voice of the common man.

Now do you get it?

Institutionalizing anti-institutional ideology

I'm going to tread somewhat lightly on some of the issues around student protests, not so much to avoid offense as to focus on bigger-picture ideas that I think many people should be able to agree on despite disagreements over some of the particulars.

The recent wave of student protests largely focuses on matters of race and institutional culture.  To the extent that students are demanding that their needs be better served by institutions, I think that the classic institutional response of "We are hiring a new Diversity Coordinator and increasing the staffing of student affairs professionals to serve the needs of under-represented students" is a plausible one.  Obviously a lot hinges on the particulars, but it's at least plausible that hiring people to work with people is a good way forward when the problem was that people's needs weren't being met.

However, to the extent that the protesters' rhetoric critiques institutional racism (a useful conceptual lens for understanding a real thing) and institutional culture, and to the extent that they want accountability from administrators, Freddie deBoer makes the point that hiring an additional diversity administrator just adds one more administrator to a group that will work to protect the institution.  Protecting the institution is hardly a bad thing, but it is not the only thing, and it is certainly not the thing that the students are demanding.  It is, however, something that will probably appease them.

My goal here is certainly not to critique exactly what an administrator ought or ought do, nor is it my goal to suggest that there is something uniquely naive in students being appeased by the appointment of a new institutional figure.  To the contrary, I find a striking parallel between students who are appeased by an institutional response to anti-institutional rhetoric and faculty who sit in workshops and nod excitedly as a person with countless establishment tokens talks about fundamental transformation and reform.  Faculty eat that shit up like pita chips and humus from Trader Joe's.  They'll sit in a hotel conference room whose AC is set to "liquid nitrogen" and get creepy grins on their faces as a Director of a (government-funded) Center for STEM Learning Initiatives talks about how their latest research project resulted in a new app for online quizzes, and how this completely changes the paradigm for education from a sage on a stage to something something.  Ironically, the Director of STEM Learning Initiatives is standing on a stage, persuading his listeners that he has something sagacious to say, and they are, to all appearances, acting out the role of Good Acolyte.  It's creepy.  Do they not realize that just yesterday that same suite was being used for a presentation by the National Association of Vacuum Cleaner Marketers?

Of course, one important theme of this blog is that All Of This Has Happened Before And Will Happen Again.  Hofstadter recounted how Dewey's excited disciples earnestly set about the Sisyphusean task of institutionalizing anti-institutional educational methods.  Today the newspapers tell the tale of institutions hiring new administrators to end institutional racism.  And in the not-too-distant future that hotel suite will be used by defense contractors holding a workshop on exciting new battle drones that implement Conditional Yardsticks for Longitudinal Operational Navigation (C.Y.L.O.N.).

Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality

One point I'm coming to realize is that many of the things that drive me crazy in higher ed come, in part, from a type of restlessness.  This restlessness isn't entirely bad--we are supposed to be people seeking new knowledge, which inherently requires a certain restlessness.  Additionally, education involves hard problems, and we have an obligation to try.  Consequently, we sometimes have to act in defiance of some hard realities.  Being defiant and iconoclastic, I'm not a priori averse to defying hard realities.  To the extent that denying reality keeps you pushing forward, I think it's noble.  When it gets you chasing in a circle, it's a problem.  And when denying reality gets you rushing to embrace conventional wisdom, it's time for me to go see my headache specialist.

The progressive teaching personality

I've said a lot about the cultural roots of progressive pedagogy, and the way it intertwines with views on expert voices.  However, this article makes the interesting point that there are also personality issues that go to extroversion vs. introversion.  There's a certain personality type that just plain likes the idea of group work.  I have seen people who are only truly happy when their students are sitting in lots of small circles talking.  They throw themselves into the midst of this chatter like a pop star crowd-surfing.  You can't tell me that this preference concerning teaching styles is solely about statistical studies showing a significant difference in conceptual learning gains.  Statistically significant learning gains get you more discussion of concepts, but culture and personality get you academics eating this shit up like it's humus and pita chips from Trader Joe's.  And it's definitely true that the warmer, fuzzier stuff has been ascendant in the academy for some time, so I suppose it was inevitable that eventually the science faculty would move towards sitting in groups and smiling and saying "Thank you for sharing that."

(Academic eating tip: Eat your humus with organic baby carrots, not pita chips.  Then you get more vitamins and fewer carbs.  This food tip is subject to change when the fads change.)

However, I will surprise my readers by saying that I don't think this is solely about personality types and massive placebo/Hawthorne effects from doing things that get certain personality types fired up. It is almost certainly true that some people do better than others sitting in groups and doing worksheets. (One needn't subscribe to discredited theories of learning styles to submit that some people might be a bit better at one thing than another.) If there was little/no group work and hippy-dippy conceptual stuff in traditional teaching then introducing some of that will OF COURSE improve results.  Those who were desperately craving some sitting in circles and sharing will finally get some of it, so of course their results will improve.  Meanwhile, those who really do prefer a bit of tradition (you know, heirs to Puritan views of experts and all that) will still get plenty of that from the abundant traditionalists.  In fact, the ones who generally fare better with tradition might benefit from stepping outside their comfort zone a bit.  (There's plenty of research to suggest that stepping outside the comfort zone is probably more beneficial than catering to "learning styles" based on dubious evidence.)  However, once you reach a roughly 50-50 mix, if you continue to move away from tradition (or, perhaps more accurately, get to the point where you are now defining tradition rather than defying tradition) you will reach a point of negative returns:  The ones who would honestly rather just pay attention to an expert will get fed up with this group work nonsense and experience negative marginal returns, while the ones who love to sit in a circle and share will have already gotten enough of it.

At this point it would be easy to say that I'm being silly.  OF COURSE group work is better!  The data shows it!  Well, up to a point.  The Hake study, for instance, covered early adopters and showed gains that have been harder to replicate once "active learning" went beyond early adopters in special, early-adopter-friendly environments and became de rigeur.  I think everyone at this point agrees that a certain amount of active learning is a good component of a class, but the jury is out on mass adoption of more and more and MORE AND MORE group work.

Besides, the article that prompted this post was shared with me by a friend who made an important observation:  In the real world there are indeed meetings, but most meetings are pointless, and most people yearn for nothing more than the meeting ending early so they can get back to the cubicle, put their head down, and actually get some damn work done.  Perhaps there's a lesson in there.  Yes, a bad lecture is bad, but a very carefully-led, well-focused Q&A can be more useful than going through a worksheet with the idiot next to you.

Chapter 4 of Class Dismissed: Left psychology, right psychology, and reformer psychology

Marsh proposes in the last few pages of Chapter 4 that a nearly-exclusive focus on education as the answer to poverty and inequality arises largely because Americans want to believe that we have or can have a system where people get what they deserve.  Teaching a man to fish satisfies the liberal impulse to do something to help people, but also satisfies the conservative impulse to make the poor responsible for themselves.  (I hasten to add that that conservative impulse to favor personal responsibility is certainly not a bad one, if acted on in concert with other considerations as part of a balanced approach.)

What I find most illuminating about this simple and reasonable framing is that it sheds light on one of the stranger aspects of academic culture:  When I go to a presentation on educational reforms and improvements, the presenters usually bear fundamentally conservative tokens of establishment figures (funding, titles, the imprimatur of elite organization) yet they speak a language of social justice, equity, benevolence, transformation, and "shaking things up." These are not stereotypical lefty fringe figures lecturing in sandals or whatever; they would be completely inoffensive in the eyes of a conservative donor. Analyzed against the ruler of the political left-right axis, they exemplify the bipartisan nature of the consensus that Marsh identifies.  Left and right both agree that we can and should fix all social problems via educational reforms, so you get the weird situation of a STEM education reformer talking about social justice and equity and diversity but also saying that we need more Americans and fewer foreigners in STEM for the sake of our national defense.

I always marvel at the weird situation of sitting in a presentation by a person with countless accolades from stodgy professional organizations and a title like "Associate Vice Provost for Academic Initiatives" (or even, at one conference, "College President") speaking animatedly about completely overhauling the entire academic landscape because everything that we've ever done needs to be swept away.  I am admittedly a boring person who was born seven years after the end of the sixties, and I have attended precious few protests, but everything I've heard about shaking up establishments, rejecting the old ways, and agitating for equity tells me that you shouldn't go looking for bold, anti-establishment thinking in a hotel conference space with frigid air conditioning*, especially if the alleged reformer is wearing a suit and commanding a speaking fee.

Despite that, a great many academics come out of these events speaking in a language that at time comes close to that of a religious convert.  Many academics profess no religious faith but nonetheless offer narratives that sound tantalizingly close to conversion experiences or born-again faith when discussing their experiences with pedagogical reform efforts.  The whole thing is bizarre to me, and not just because I'm a product of Catholic grade school and a practicing** Catholic to this day, i.e. a person for whom born-again narratives are alien.  Even if I were irreligious, I think I would be suspicious that these establishment-seeming figures will actually make the world a more equitable place.

I still don't know why so many college professors eat those presentations up like they're pita chips with Trader Joe's humus***, but at least I have some context for understanding why these workshop presenters are so bizarre:  They are embodying the left-right consensus nature of educational reform, hence you get the equity and justice language of the left from somebody bearing markers that could open the doors of the most conservative establishments.  Everyone else in the room might be eating it up, but I feel like I'm staring at a bizarre alien monster that just stepped out of a flying saucer.

*Seriously, why are conference rooms and event spaces always air-conditioned to the point that there's at least one condensed matter physicist doing a superconductivity experiment in the corner?
**Well, as practicing as a typical American Catholic, which is to say that I'm not batting 1.000 on mass attendance.
***The snack food of choice for academics everywhere.