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Monday, March 14, 2005

Renard News:  nous rapportons, vous décidez

Over the weekend I came across an essay posted on Campus Watch’s website.  You all remember Campus Watch: long before there was “Discover the Network,” there was Campus Watch’s “Solidarity with Apologists” page (the page has since been taken down, but you can learn about it here).  “Solidarity with Apologists” featured the names of over one hundred professors (myself included) who had written to protest Campus Watch’s targeting of individuals, programs, and entire universities they deemed insufficiently patriotic or pro-Israel.  But it didn’t have pictures and it didn’t have Katie Couric or Roger Ebert, so it just wasn’t as much fun as the Discover the Network.

The essay, “Confronting Anti-Israel Attitudes on Contemporary College Campuses,” wasn’t originally written for Campus Watch– it had appeared late last year in Midstream, a monthly Jewish review, and was picked up by “Campus Watch in the Media,” a kind of clipping service for CW fans.  But the concluding paragraphs of the essay leave no doubt that it fits quite well in the Campus Watch repertoire:

[S]tudents, whether working through groups such as Students for Academic Freedom or contributing to websites such as No Indoctrination or Campus Watch, can have enormous influence, by exposing in-class bias that otherwise never would see the light of day. Faculty members, in turn, need to support students in these efforts. Finally, academic administrators should add intellectual diversity– an especially needed element in Middle East Studies programs– to the panoply of diversity-related measures that they regularly support.

Faculty and administrators need to support students in these efforts, no question.  On some campuses, faculty and administrators should help students distribute red stars for the office doors of anti-American professors; on other campuses, they should institute intellectual diversity programs so that conservative students will feel more comfortable in class and have higher self-esteem.  And how can you help at home?  Why, with constant, vigorous oversight, particularly with regard to commencement speakers whose remarks about George Bush or Iraq suggest that they are contributing to anti-Israel attitudes on campus:

[T]his issue will require constant, vigorous oversight, as events at Hofstra University’s 2004 commencement suggested. The commencement speaker, author E. L. Doctorow, bitterly condemned the war in Iraq and effectively called President George Bush a liar, drawing vigorous boos from the crowd and many students. In a stark illustration, however, of the ideological gap between today’s professoriate and the undergraduates that they teach, most of the faculty gave Doctorow a standing ovation. As Alan Dershowitz cautioned, as long as many professors see Israel as a proxy for their opposition to U.S. foreign policy, faculty members like those who applauded Doctorow are likely to contribute to rather than resolve the problem of anti-Israel attitudes on contemporary college campuses.

By this point, I imagine, some of you are saying, “all right already with all the Horowitz Hackwork, Michael– get off the case, it’s been a month or more now, and really, everything that can possibly be said about the man and his organization has been said.” But this isn’t David Horowitz, folks.  It’s Robert David (KC) Johnson, professor of history at Brooklyn College, and one of the most outspoken and (sometimes) thoughtful conservatives in the business.  (He’s currently a visiting professor at Harvard.) And the reason his essay came to my attention is that it popped up in the course of a Technorati search.  Because somewhere in the middle of the essay, there’s a very strange passage that has nothing to do with Middle East Studies:

In most social sciences and humanities departments, registered Democrats overwhelmingly outnumber registered Republicans; in an extreme example, Duke’s History Department contains 32 Democrats and zero Republicans.

An almost comical hostility to perceived conservatives heightens the impact of this imbalance. To cite a few examples from the 2003-2004 academic year alone, the nation’s leading academic journal, the Chronicle of Higher Education, published an essay by Penn State English professor Michael Bérubé advising professors to treat conservative students as they would students with learning disabilities or who exhibited aberrant behavior.

Some of you might remember that essay and the short-term shitstorm it provoked over in Wingnut Alley in late 2003, but you might not remember that I advised professors to treat conservative students as they would students with learning disabilities or who exhibited aberrant behavior.  And that’s because . . . amazing but true . . . I said no such thing!

But back in 2003 before I had a proper blog and my very own nightly one-hour show on the Renard News Channel, if I wanted to reply to mischief like this, I would have to write an actual e-mail to the author or to Midstream or to Campus Watch, explaining that my essay’s only reference to “disability” comes in the final paragraph:

Over twenty years I’ve had many conservatives in my classes.  I think I’ve even had a few Stalinists, too.  I’ve had many intelligent, articulate students who behaved as if they had a right to speak more often and at greater length than anyone else in the room; I’ve had versions of Reese Witherspoon in Election and Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series, who knew the answers to every question ever asked; I’ve had my share of blurters with very little sense of social boundaries, a few of whom may genuinely have had some degree of Asperger’s Syndrome, with various autistic or antisocial symptoms.  To all such students– indeed, to all students, those with disabilities and those without– I try to apply the standard of disability law: I make reasonable accommodation for them.  The challenge, though, lies in making reasonable accommodations for students whose standards of “reasonableness” are significantly different from yours.  Few aspects of teaching are so difficult– and, I think, so rarely acknowledged by people who don’t teach for a living.

You know what, though?  That Old Media method of responding to unscrupulous critics sucked.  Now, however, I can simply utilize the famously self-correcting features of the blogosphere– noting, for instance, that Professor KC Johnson does his very own blogging at the widely-respected Cliopatria and the somewhat less widely-respected National Association of Scholars Online Forum– in order to call attention to the fact that Professor Johnson did something here that real professors, or at least honest ones, really shouldn’t do.

So welcome to The Bérubé Factor, KC!  Glad you could make it.  Here at the Renard News Channel, we know you’re a busy guy, so to save you time and trouble, we’ve prepared for you some possible answers to our first two questions:

Q.  Why did you try to claim that my Chronicle essay advised professors to treat conservative students as if they were people with disabilities?

__ Actually, Michael, sometimes I’m not a very careful reader.  I completely missed the bit about making reasonable accommodations for all students, and I didn’t realize that you weren’t “advising” anyone to do anything.  It won’t happen again– I’ll be sure to slow down and read every word in the future.

__ Listen, Michael, I’m sorry I tried to get away with this nonsense.  Please forgive me.  I’m really not always unethical– only when I’m writing for journals where I don’t expect to run into anyone who’ll call me on stuff like this.  It will happen again, but only when I need to tell a few stretchers in order to smear liberal academics.  Always business, never personal, you know!

__ Golly, Michael, I just don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote this.  I’d completely forgotten that you have (a) a widely-read blog, (b) a nationally-televised talk show on a fictional network, and (c) a well-known tendency to visit the offices of conservative academics, fly into violent frothing frenzies, and nail people’s heads to the floor.  Please don’t nail my head to the floor, Michael!  If you promise to keep my head one hundred percent nail-free, I’ll promise to use it more wisely in the future!

Q.  Thank you for your candor.  But still, Professor Johnson, how can we institute programs of constant, vigorous oversight to keep track of faculty members who applaud E. L. Doctorow?

__ That is an unfair question, Michael.  Applauding E. L. Doctorow is not the problem.  The problem is that E. L. Doctorow criticized George Bush and the war in Iraq.  This form of leftist indoctrination on college campuses must be stopped.

__ Michael, that is precisely the kind of slanted, perverse interpretation of my work that I’d expect from the Renard News Network.  My essay made it quite clear that applauding Doctorow is just a “gateway” phenomenon:  faculty members who applaud Doctorow, as I carefully pointed out, are associated– indeed, in my very next sentence, which makes the connection extremely logical– with professors who “see Israel as a proxy for their opposition to U.S. foreign policy,” and these professors are “likely to contribute to rather than resolve the problem of anti-Israel attitudes on contemporary college campuses.” Moreover, I explicitly said that we need to focus on “faculty members like those who applauded Doctorow.” The chain of inference is clear; you just need to follow the steps.

__ You’re kidding me, right, Michael?  We already have those programs. 

Reader/viewer poll: which answers do you think Professor Johnson will choose?  Vote as often as you like, or make up entirely new replies!

Posted by Michael on 03/14 at 08:25 AM
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Friday, March 11, 2005

In a just world

How was my “spring” “break”?  Great!  Thanks for asking.  Wednesday morning:  air temp 18, wind chill 5.  Today:  four inches of snow.  And I did the first read-through and edit of the chapters I wrote last week.  Then again, I did go skiing.  Not that I know how to ski!  People say that if you can skate, then you can ski.  People are wrong.

Now, back to business-- namely, catching up on Wingnuts in the News.  It looks like Time magazine has noticed the long march of Horowitz’s “Academic Bill of Rights” through state legislatures all over our fair land:

Minnesota lawmakers last week became the latest to rally to the cause of conservative activist David Horowitz, whose Academic Bill of Rights is meant to rescue students from what the legislators perceive as rampant liberal bias.

Over the past two months, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Rhode Island and Tennessee have also started considering bills that would codify Horowitz’s ideas by, say, not allowing students to be punished with a bad grade for their views. Georgia’s senate passed a similar nonbinding resolution last year, while Colorado’s version was withdrawn after state-university administrators signed a pledge to ensure that “political diversity is explicitly recognized and protected.”

Legislators wield one potent weapon: money. In January, Utah state senators quietly red-lined funding for a $37 million digital-learning center at Utah Valley State College.

The senators were worried about “the drift of the campus,” says UVSC president Bill Sederburg, who fielded complaints from them about an Oct. 20 campus speech by Michael Moore, a student production of The Vagina Monologues and a course on queer theory in literature. “The legislators are saying ‘We don’t want the college to go too far and lose touch with the community.’ But we have an obligation to protect academic freedom.”

That’s the way it goes in Orem, Utah, folks.  You hit the trifecta-- Michael Moore, Eve Ensler, and god knows who else, maybe some queer literary person like Henry James or Walt Whitman-- and you lose your digital-learning center.  But then, maybe “the community” doesn’t need a digital learning center any more than it needs a vagina monologue.  After all, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young didn’t have a digital learning center, either, and they spread the Good News just fine.

“If the system were fair,” says Larry Mumper, sponsor of the Ohio bill, “Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity would be tenured professors somewhere.”

I don’t know why some people are so upset by this line.  Are you kidding me?  Talk about a perfect world!  Please, please let Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity be tenured professors somewhere.  Let the system be fair, and let the country look like this:

Utah Valley State College Faculty News:  Professor Hannity of the Department of Kicking Bespectacled Liberals’ Butts will be holding extended office hours on Thursday to meet with students to discuss their upcoming midterms and paper drafts.  Professor Hannity has also been appointed to the College’s Adjunct Faculty Grievance Committee, which will meet Fridays 9-10:30, and to the Curriculum Revision Committee, which meets Tuesdays and Thursdays 10-12 from now through the end of the semester.

Professor Limbaugh of the Department of Advanced Psychotropic Research has announced that he will not be able to turn in midterm grades by the end of this week because of unexpected overenrollment in all four of his courses.  Professor Limbaugh also chairs the College’s Strategic Planning Committee, which meets Wednesdays and Thursdays from 3-5, and is conducting a semester-long Faculty Senate review of Utah Valley State’s drug-testing policy.

Meanwhile, here’s tonight’s lineup on the Renard News Channel:

7 pm The Bérubé Factor
8 pm “Informed Comment” with Juan Cole
9 pm “Phun with Pharyngula” with P. Z. Myers
10 pm “Scribbling Woman” with Miriam Jones
11 pm “Preposterous Universe” with Sean Carroll

Looks good to me!  I just need some suggestions for guests on the Factor.  Perhaps I could draw on this handy guide to the right-- but should I invite Tom DeLay, Zod, or the Glove?

Posted by Michael on 03/11 at 07:57 AM
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Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Open thread

Because I stopped by this morning and learned that the previous post had somehow provoked 140 comments.  Holy jumping Hathor!  What a lot of should- have- been- one- hit- wonders we’ve got here!  --enough, certainly, to foreshorten dozens of pop music careers and change the history of commercial radio.  But I’ve got to get back to being on “spring” “break,” so I won’t intervene just yet.  Anyway, here’s another thread for the next few days.  Use it wisely--

And as for David Bowie and Elton John:  we’ll talk.  I just happen to have a theory about David Bowie and Elton John.

Posted by Michael on 03/08 at 10:30 AM
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Monday, March 07, 2005

“Spring” “Break”

In my house we speak of spring break the way we speak of the Holy Roman Empire:  for just as the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman (nor, for that matter, an empire), so it is with Penn State’s spring break: it usually occurs at a time of year when the high temp is around 35 and there’s a nice comfy blanket of snow on the ground (as there is now), and it certainly doesn’t constitute a “break.”

But this year, we’re actually taking a break chez Bérubé!  All four of us are headed off to– where else would you go for spring break?– New England, and I probably won’t be anywhere near an Internets connection for four days.  Imagine that.  And it really is something of a break for me, because this week I finished reading and evaluating those fellowship applications, I finished a short essay on I can’t remember what, I finished an introduction to that dang “special issue” I’ve been editing for– hmmmm, let me think– about two years or so, and best of all, I finished a complete first draft of Liberal Arts, the book I’ve been talking about and not producing for roughly as long as I’ve had a blog.  (And yes, I’ve backed it up in two undisclosed locations, and I have hard copies too.) So for the next few days, I believe I will begin doing extensive research into some of the fine, fine suggestions all of you have made with regard to the new Ministry of Culture and Beer.

Now, in the past I wouldn’t bother to make an announcement about a tiny hiatus of three or four days, but then again, in the past I wasn’t averaging four to five thousand readers a day.  And to thank you all for your patronage of (and infinite patience with) this humble but sometimes technologically precarious and excessively self-referential blog, I have a Brand New Game to offer everyone.

You’re all familiar with “One-Hit Wonder” contests and radio programs, and you know they always involve the usual suspects.  Yes, yes, “Brandy” by Looking Glass; OK, “96 Tears” by ? and the Mysterians; “Smoke of a Distant Fire” by the Sanford-Townshend Band, but of course; “Ring My Bell” by Anita Ward, “Too Shy” by Kajagoogoo, “Tubthumping” by Chumbawumba, “Funkytown” by Lipps Inc., and so on.  The list is as long as it is tedious.  And without fail, someone will propose Mister Mister or Golden Earring or the Human League as one-hit wonders, when in fact these people were two-hit wonders who lived in mortal terror of being one-hit wonders-- though in the case of the Human League, not enough terror, because they decided to follow “Don’t You Want Me” with “(Keep Feeling) Fascination,” one of the worst songs written since the retreat of the global ice sheets circa 10,000 B.C.E.

But I’m not going to ask you to name one- or two-hit wonders.  I have another question entirely.  Which musical “artists,” in your learned opinions, should have been one-hit wonders?  To put this another way: what hideous, ubiquitous person-or-group has produced years or decades of dreck except for that one song you can’t entirely dismiss and– gulp– might even like?  You know, such that your opinion of him/ her/ them would be utterly different if he/ she/ they had produced only that one song?

I’ll kick this off with three suggestions.  God and all her competitor dieties know how much I despise Billy Joel, how I utter vile imprecations when “Piano Man” or “Only the Good Die Young” or “Just the Way You Are” or “My Life” suddenly intrudes upon my car radio, never mind his stomach-turning minor compositions like “River of Dreams” or “Big Shot” or “Second Wind” (a song written to persuade depressed teens not to commit suicide, and which would have pushed me right off the precipice had I heard it when I was nineteen), and let’s not even bother with his early period, with its intolerable Captain Jacks and Angry Young Men who’ve “passed the age/ of consciousness and righteous rage.” (Who knew that Mr. Joel had had a socially conscious period, sometime between lunch and dinner on a balmy afternoon in May 1970?) But I can’t manage to hate “Say Goodbye to Hollywood,” no matter how I try.  By contrast, I have no trouble consigning the entire Phil Collins songbook to the nethermost reaches of Gehenna, for I break out in the full-body cold sweats every time I hear the whiny, pompous, one-hundred-percent-talent-free old gasbag, no matter what he’s singing.  And Billy’s in the same boat, which is why these guys dominate Lite Rock.  But still– if he’d been a one-hit wonder with “Hollywood,” I wouldn’t despise him at all.  Likewise with the far more innocuous (and more recent) Smashmouth, who in a just world would have shuffled off this mortal coil after “Walking on the Sun,” a reasonably enjoyable middle-of-the-road number with a semblance of something like a groove, as opposed to the garbage they’ve written since, which serves only to betray the fact that these guys couldn’t connect a verse to a chorus or a chorus to a middle eight if they were given EZ-DIY songwriting software.  Lenny Kravitz is another obvious case, having managed not to be boring beyond description just once, on the single, “Are You Gonna Go My Way?”

Further suggestions welcome.  My only request, before I head off into the Northeastern tundra, is that you confine the suggestions to hideous and ubiquitous people who’ve written only one good song, as opposed to the Eric Claptons and Neil Diamonds of the world, who’ve written about three or four.

Posted by Michael on 03/07 at 01:36 AM
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Sunday, March 06, 2005

Three things about other blogs

Thing One

The indispensable Dave Neiwert (he of Orcinus) is having a fundraiser.  He says he’s making his Koufax-Award-winning series, “The Rise of Pseudo-Fascism” (hey, I voted for it, you know), available as a PDF as a bonus for any donations, and he says that Michelle Malkin has already put up $5 for it.  He surely wouldn’t kid us about a thing like that, now, would he?  So let’s help out Dave’s fund drive by driving him some funds.  We can’t let Michelle do all the good works around here.

Thing Two

The intrepid Sean Carroll (he of Preposterous Universe) is not having a fundraiser.  But you should stop by and read his blog anyway, because it’s just occurred to me that (a) he’s recently had a blog anniversary and (b) he did not– and this is more mind-boggling than the very idea of a quantum theory of gravity– get a Koufax nomination for Best Expert Blog even though he’s far and away the best cosmology/ physics blogger in this quadrant of the galaxy.  WTF?  This is the very heart of the matter of the universe, people– compared to this stuff, even pharyngula are ephemera.  (Nothing personal, P.Z., just a remark about how God created physics on the first day and didn’t get around to doing biology until the third day.) So wish Sean a happy anniversary, and go learn a thing or two about dark matter and dark energy.

Thing Three

The indefatigable Alex (he of Buck Hill), lately responsible for some of the most inventive and bizarre comments on the Internets, has written two brief one-act plays that are sure to become this year’s smash hits.  Swing on by and check out David Horowitz and Christopher Hitchens in a dazzling reinterpretation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The NRO Corner Players in a new production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.  In the headnote to the latter, Alex describes himself as “a (rapidly failing) theater student.” So go tell him that whatever his mission is, he must not fail.  When the Apocalypse arrives, we are going to need all the inventive-bizarre blog commenters and Neo-Bolshevist reinterpretations of modern drama we can get.

Posted by Michael on 03/06 at 01:46 PM
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Friday, March 04, 2005

Ministry of Culture and Beer

My apologies, Madame President-for-Life Sheelzebub, for not acknowledging your beneficence earlier.  I am truly grateful to have been appointed Minister of Culture and Beer.

My first act as your Minister is this:  I will-- and hereby do-- ask my readers whether the nations of France and Italy should continue producing beer at all.  Their hearts are clearly not in it; the French “soixante” (or “1664,” as the label actually says) tastes more or less what beer brewed with chalk, and that Italian Peroni simply isn’t fooling anyone.  I therefore submit that the French and Italians devote themselves exclusively to consumer goods they really care about, like food and wine and shoes and haute couture and fast cars, and leave the beer to the English and Germans and maybe the Dutch.  Let the People of the Guttural Languages have their hops and the People of the Mellifluous Languages have their grapes.  Readers?

Posted by Michael on 03/04 at 09:37 AM
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