Last weekend I saw Jesus Christ Superstar for the first time. I really, really liked it. But then, as I was singing Judas' big musical number "Superstar" to myself, I realized that the lyrics can be interpreted as the words of a university administrator. To wit:
Every time I look at you I don't understand,
Why you let the things you did get so out of hand,
You'd have managed better if you'd had it planned,
Translation: "You need to engage in strategic planning."
Why'd you choose such a backwards time and such a strange land?
Academics love to talk about how horrifying it would be to live in a small town or non-coastal city.
If you'd come today you could have reached a whole nation,
Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication.
Translation: "We could solve all of our problems if we jumped onto the latest digital fads and offered more online classes."
Don't you get me wrong! Don't you get me wrong!
Don't you get me wrong! Don't you get me wrong!
I only wanna know! I only wanna know!
I only wanna know! I only wanna know!
Translation: "Please submit reports. We need to know that you are spending your time on teaching, not wasting your time on irrelevant busywork."
Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ,
Who are you? What have you sacrificed?
Translation: "In this time of tightened budgets (for everything except ballooning administrative ranks), we need to see evidence of shared sacrifice. Are you doing more with less? Can you submit a report on that?"
Jesus Christ, Superstar,
Do you think you're what they say you are?
Translation: "We've reviewed your student evaluations. Please submit a self-reflection in response, so that we can put it in your file."
Tell me what you think about your friends at the top,
Who'd you think (besides yourself) was the pick of the crop?
Translation: "These performance reviews needed to be done yesterday. We'll need you to work on them. Please fill out the rubrics I'm attaching."
Buddha: Was he where it's at? Is he where you are?
Could Mohammed move a mountain? Or was that just PR?
Translation: "We are pleased to announce our new diversity initiative."
Did you mean to die like that? Was that a mistake?
Translation: "Could it be that your problems are a result of lack of proper strategic planning on your part?"
Or did you know your messy death would be a record breaker?
Translation: "Or could it be that your budgetary problems were a deliberate sabotage that you'd use to demonstrate need when requesting more resources?"
I have the song "Common People" by Pulp in my head. Time to parody it and rant about the anti-intellectualism of the upper classes:
They're from back east,
They have no thirst for knowledge.
But they want to sculpt the kids in college,
That's where I
Caught their eye.
They told me that their grant was funded,
I said "In that case we'll bring you to our department."
They said "Fine"
And then in thirty seconds' time
They said:
"I want to teach the common people,
I want to help the common people learn,
I want to teach with common people,
I want to teach with common people
Like you."
Well, what else could I do?
I said "Huh. I'll see what I can do."
I took them to a freshman classroom,
I don't know why but I had to start it somewhere,
So it started there.
I said "Pretend your grants aren't funded."
They just laughed and said
"You're so funny!"
I said "Yeah?
I can't see anyone else smiling here."
Are you sure
You want to teach the common people?
You want to teach whatever common people need?
You want to teach with common people?
You want to teach with common people like me?
But they didn't understand.
They just smiled and spent their grant.
Teach a class at six o'clock,
Thank your chair you have a job,
Grade some labs written by fools,
Pretend you liked to go to school,
Still you'll never get it right,
Cuz when you're working late at night,
Writing lecture notes for fall,
If you called your Dean they could stop it all, yeah,
You'll never teach like common people,
You'll never teach whatever common people need,
You'll never fail the common people,
You'll never watch your career slide out of view,
And then rant and drink
Because there's nothing else to do.
I went to a decent high school. Not fancy, not lousy. Science labs were OK but we weren't putting out national science fair competitors. Most kids weren't poor but most weren't upper-middle-class either. Not particularly disadvantaged but not a lot of affluent kids either. Pretty much in the middle. Which is fine. We had college-prep classes but we also had a lot of vocational classes. It was a decent school in the middle of the class hierarchy. I was more privileged than a lot of the US but less privileged than a lot of the people I later met in college.
One thing that was repeatedly driven home to me by my teachers was that we would be on our own in college, and that there would be no hand-holding. It was repeatedly said that we would have to figure it out, that they wouldn't patiently explain to us how much we should be reading and reminding us to study and reminding us to do our homework and turn it in on time. It would be hard and we would be on our own. This was repeatedly said to me and my middle-class friends.
And, to a large extent, that was true. College was a bit more structured and supportive than my high school teachers made it sound, but only a bit. Ultimately, it was on me. I accepted that from day one, and it felt utterly unsurprising to me that I was doing well because I studied all the time. It felt utterly unsurprising when friends and dorm-mates who studied less didn't do as well. It's the natural order of the world. Likewise, in grad school I felt a bit more burned out, a bit more interested in my own life, and I didn't do as well as I did in college. I still got through, but I was not on top, and that was no surprise to me because I didn't put as much in. Then I became a professor and buckled down more and published more and got decent student evaluations because I put in a ton of prep and none of this seemed at all surprising to me.
So you can imagine how strange it seems to me when people keep saying that we need to do more for students who don't know how to study, how to take notes, how to manage their time, etc. It baffles me that we are supposed to be responsible for their success. Why would we be? Why would it be my problem that people who never put much effort into mastering freshman material are now doing poorly with advanced material? Why is it my duty to fix this? It's not like I could actually do anything about it (you only get the benefit of years of effort by putting in years of effort--there are no secret tricks), so why is it my responsibility?
Likewise, it seems strange to me when people say that it's so unfair that we attach weight to grades and test scores. I got into a college with people who were way above me in the class hierarchy, people whose parents had more money and more degrees, people who had attended prep schools and magnet schools. I was there because I had done at least as well as they had done on the SAT (among other things). I got better grades than them in college. I out-studied them, out-performed them in the academic arena, and moved ahead academically. Isn't that how it's supposed to be?
I've spent more than two years reading and blogging about the cultural currents that underlie the notions that seem so strange to me, but I'll be honest: To this day there's still a part of me that thinks "Well, duh, I studied my ass off because my teachers all told me that that's what I'd have to do to succeed in college. What else were you expecting?"
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.
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.
This is how it works
You're young until you're not
You love until you don't
You try until you can't
You laugh until you cry
You cry until you laugh
And everyone must breathe
Until their dying breath
No, this is how it works
You peer inside yourself
You take the things you like
And try to love the things you took
And then you take that love you made
And stick it into some
Someone else's heart
Pumping someone else's blood
And walking arm in arm
You hope it don't get harmed
But even if it does
You'll just do it all again
First, I like this bit from Dean Dad about comparing American higher ed with Norwegian higher ed. After extolling the virtues of Norwegian higher ed and safety nets and all the things that well-educated, right-thinking liberal-minded Americans know to extol, he then extols something that we try to leave out of our right-thinking discourse because it's harder to fix:
Second, though -- and to me, this is the smoking gun -- in Norway,
it’s still relatively easy to make a decent living in a blue-collar
occupation. College is free, yes, but it’s also truly optional.
If we want to talk intelligently about higher education, we can’t
separate it from the larger political economy. If we do, we’ll miss the
point.
Centrist-minded educated professionals would rather not ask certain questions about our "service economy" and the policy decisions that got us there, so we decree that all class mobility problems will be handed off to higher education. Well, higher education can't fix all of these problems, but nobody wants to hear that. People want to hear that there are quick fixes, and that one way or another we will hand everyone a diploma and ask no questions about the inflationary consequences.
Second, I am nostalgic for the music of an earlier era, so I give you this song about quick fixes:
Now I know there are no secret tricks,
No correct politics,
Just liars and lunatics.
I'm an associate professor of physics at Cal Poly Pomona. My research interests are mostly in biomedical applications of optics (especially theoretical limits to superresolution, and also light scattering calculations), with some side interests in percolation theory.
I am using this blog to chronicle my responses to books that I'm reading, particularly books about higher education issues. It's a way to work out issues in my mind.
