Elite paradoxes

 I just don't have the blogging bug these days, for a whole bunch of reasons. But I very much appreciate this article about elite education by Jonny Thakkar at Swarthmore. Some choice quotes:

...Swarthmore educates around 1,600 students per year at a cost of something like $110,000 per student. (I find it hard to believe it could be so expensive, but the figures are what they are and apparently the explanation is just that the facilities and support services are first class, the faculty are well paid, and the student-faculty ratio is extremely low.) By comparison, the annual per-student spending of Southern Connecticut State University is about $13,000. Surely there is no credible theory of social justice, or at least no view that would attract Swarthmore professors, according to which it could count as just to spend so much more on educating our students than on the rest of their cohort. In a just world, a college like Swarthmore simply wouldn’t exist. The mere possibility would be regarded as obscene.

This makes faculty radicalism at elite colleges largely phantasmagoric. Professors campaigning for something like divestment from fossil fuels typically take themselves to be fighting the man in the form of an inscrutable board of managers — or should that be board of donors? — whom they picture as bourgeois reactionaries. But if a college like Swarthmore is necessarily and essentially complicit in injustice, its faculty members are necessarily and essentially complicit as well, and campaigns to invest our billions more responsibly are mostly window dressing.

Everyone in academia agrees that our paramount task is to dismantle power structures. To that end, we will select administrators committed to dismantling power structures, and promote the career advancement of those committed to ending inequality.

In arguing that faculty radicalism is often illusory, I do not mean to suggest that it doesn’t matter. On the contrary, it probably matters more than we generally think, just because elites probably matter more than we generally think. One of the dogmas of contemporary academe is that history gets made from below and that any attempt to argue otherwise robs ordinary people of their agency. But it is true by definition, or near enough, that elites have more power than nonelites. It follows that what elites think and do should be of concern to everybody, and hence that a society should care a great deal about the political education its elites receive.

Much like the Keynes quote about "practical men" being slaves of dead economists and philosophers.

Of course, the committed anti-elitists will never leave their elite schools.  Thakkar offers some good reasons why:

In a funny way, though, I actually agree that conservatism is better represented on campus than is often assumed. Those who argued that the Chamberlain Project was antithetical to the college’s history of peace activism, for example, were clearly offering a conservative reason in the form of an appeal to tradition. And lately I’ve been wondering whether the decision to teach at an elite college doesn’t necessarily commit you to respecting a conservative consideration of a different kind, one emphasized by thinkers as disparate as Michael Oakeshott and G. A. Cohen, namely the thought that we have reason to cherish the value that already exists in the world even if the things that bear that value would not exist in a better world.

...

One characteristic of a desirable elite, it seems to me, is that its members be self-aware. Each needs to recognize that they are the recipient of a golden ticket, not so they can engage in pointless rituals of self-denunciation but so they can reckon with the question of which responsibilities follow from the privilege that has been unfairly bestowed upon them. What is needed, as conservatives such as Helen Andrews and Ross Douthat have rightly argued, is something like the old ethos of noblesse oblige, according to which a golden ticket comes with the unavoidable obligation to make what Christopher Lasch called “a direct and personal contribution to the public good.” The difficulty is knowing how to teach with this in mind, given that career decisions are generally considered private.

However, he makes one assertion which is common but I have lately heard is contested:

But America will not be just any time soon; even its public-education system devotes vastly greater resources to well-off children than to those from poorer backgrounds.

I have no doubt that spending disparities exist, but I have heard knowledge people contest the magnitude of the alleged disparities. I suspect, however, that affluent districts actually operate with less overhead and more spending on in-the-classroom things, like science equipment and smaller classes and sports facilities and whatnot, i.e. stuff that kids actually see and experience directly. Poorer districts probably have more bureaucracies overseeing the efforts to allegedly help poor kids. Because poor kids allegedly need case managers and assessments and whatnot, instead of, you know, science equipment and small classes and sports facilities and all that.

Piece on Diversity Statements at Heterodox Academy

The Heterodox Academy blog just posted a commentary piece by me, critiquing the use of Diversity Statements in academic hiring. I'm pleased that I was able to work in a Ghostbusters quote.

I want to read some cancelled books. The scolds? They scare me more than crooks!

The estate of Dr. Seuss has decided to cease publication of 6 books because they carry images that offend modern sensibilities, and perhaps for good reason. It's an easy decision to criticize, but also an easy one to defend. After all, the book was not censored by a government, and there are no penalties to anyone who already owns a copy. Besides, some books really aren't appropriate for kids. And books go out of print all the time if nobody buys enough copies to justify continued printing.

All of these things are true, and yet. And yet.

And yet there's a difference between choosing some other book and condemning a particular book as dangerous. In a culture that values books, people laud the ones that they choose to read rather than condemning the ones they choose not to read. Every time that I go into a library or bookstore and walk out with a book, I have decided that all of the other books in there are, in one way or another, not as suitable for my current needs. But I do not tell people that there's something wrong with the other books. Every time I decide which book to assign for a class, I have implicitly decided that other books are, in some way, not as good, but I do not spend (much) class time critiquing the other books.

Some of Seuss's books probably are not the best choices for young children. They probably should not be emphasized over other Seuss books, or children's books by other authors. There's nothing illiberal about drawing up a list that happens to include some wonderful children's books but doesn't include And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. And if this means too few buyers to justify further printing costs, well, then some of Seuss's books will go out of print, like so many books before.

And yet. 

Libraries with finite shelf space, publishers with finite budgets, and schools with finite time for reading instruction should all be in the business of exploring and celebrating that which is valuable in the books on their rosters. That is different from announcing and critiquing the harm of other books. The world has more than enough puritans and preachers telling us why books are harmful. Why would a book lover join their ranks when quiet omission is an option?

More importantly, I do not believe that there is such a thing as a truly dangerous book. There are certainly books that one could misread (e.g. all of them), books that small children are not yet ready to examine (e.g. most of them), and books that might challenge our values (e.g. the best ones), but there is no such a thing as an inherently poisonous page. A book that blends a joyous children's tale with the less savory norms of an earlier era is a cultural artifact well worthy of examination. It might not belong in the typical kindergarten syllabus, but I would hope it continues to attract enough attention to stay on the market. If not, I hope we could wave goodbye to it with sorrow rather than smugness. Maybe the best parts of it will move a future author to write an inspired work.

It would be easy to tar my stance as reactionary, defending dead white males whose works offend a more diverse society. However, I still remember the 80's and 90's. I remember when the people trying to get art and literature pulled from the market were conservatives. It used to be the fundamentalist preachers who wanted to banish art from the public eye if they thought it might corrupt the youth. Indeed, in many places it still is the religious conservatives who occupy that role, and not just in foreign countries. America has no shortage of conservative religious types who would gladly censor art if given the chance. Every argument that I make now about the complexity of art and literature, the value of examining morally complex characters and ambiguous themes, applied at least as well to the conservative censors of previous decades. Dee Snyder's arguments are timeless.

I want a society that finds joy in books. I want a society where the books that discomfit us are examined for lessons when possible and treated with benign neglect otherwise. I want a society where we respond to apparently offensive literature with a simple "That's nice, but here's another book that might be more useful in this lesson plan" rather than "No! That book is dangerous! It will pollute minds!"

New Medium post

 I decided that my thoughts on less-academic matters should go to Medium.com, so here's a post on my frustration with COVID pessimists and vaccine discourse.

An article on ass-essment

 I don't have time for an in-depth review of this article on assessment, but I do enjoy it. I never thought I'd read an article that approvingly quotes both Dewey and Hofstadter. 

I want to quote two things. First:

As Michael Bennett and Jacqueline Brady point out in their 2014 article “A Radical Critique of the Learning Outcomes Assessment Movement,” learning outcomes is only a different term for lesson plans or course content. 

Yep. It's about asking us to restate something we already know (we'd better show up to class with an idea of what we're doing) with a word that they control, because they can always accuse us of not understanding their buzzword well enough.

Second, there are many great points about the pointlessness of "learning goals" but I will quote this one:

Trevor Hussey and Patrick Smith, in their 2008 article “Learning Outcomes,” distinguish between and among learning goals written for a lesson, for a course, and for a program, and the authors point out that the more remote the learning goals are from the classroom itself, the more irrelevant learning outcomes become. Robert Shireman, in his 2016 op-ed “SLO Madness,” amusingly labels student learning outcomes as “gibberish,” capturing Dewey’s point that for a learning goal to be an intellectual one it has to arise from the intelligence and experience of the teacher; otherwise it is meaningless. Similarly, one cannot function as a true scholar or an intellectual while being told what to do. Moreover, the sheer number of classes that need to be certified necessitates that learning goals be written in categories that may or may not be relevant to the material taught. For example, in the general education category at San José State University (SJSU), where I teach, a single learning goal can apply to ten to twenty different disciplines.

This machine-like nature stands in stark contrast to the ass-essment movement's commitment to "innovation." If I'm constantly doing new things then the goals will inevitably be shifting, at least in part. Yes, at the end of the day I still want them to learn optics or mechanics or whatever, but if I try new assignments then the details change, and the details of the assignment matter! The details of the project matter! Two classes can cover the same basic idea in such different ways that all you can really say is "Well, both classes talked about lenses."

Posting elsewhere

 I'm occasionally putting some of my more polished writing at Medium.com. Here's an essay on why I don't like using education jargon.

Stillborn God: Rest of chapter 5

 He spends some time discussing various liberal theologians, particularly in 19th century Germany. They were so sure that they'd come up with rational ways to reconcile modern society and religion and steer Europe away from the passions of the religious wars.

And then World War 1 happened. Oops. Even if WW2 had never happened, the first World War is more than enough to show that Christian Europe had not really sorted out its problems.

Near the end (page 248) Lilla gets at something that had been hinted at since the start of the book: Once you have a modern system of ideas that doesn't really require God, why have God?

Once the liberal theologians had succeeded, as they did, in portraying biblical faith as the highest expression of moral consciousness and the precondition of modern life, they were unable to explain why modern men and women should still consider themselves to be Christians and Jews rather than simply modern men and women.

Indeed. Religion was measured against its ability to help people express and live by modern values, not by its access to truth that would otherwise be unavailable.

I'm coming more and more to believe that everyone needs religion. Or, at least, they need religion when locked inside and fearing death, which has been the condition of our world since March 2020. From the confessional rites of penitent white liberals during the summer of 2020 to the idiots screaming about freedom while rampaging inside the US Capitol (and nearly rampaging inside the Michigan state capitol last year) everyone is invoking the sacred. Yes, many of the right-wingers are Christians, but I think the Christian faith of the hard right is over-estimated. Whether talking about the more libertarian-leaning elements of the right, or the definitely-not-religious Steve Bannon faction, not everyone on the right is high on Christianity. But that doesn't mean they aren't religious. I mean, they brought a shaman in furs to the Senate chamber with them.