Liberal Thursday III
OK, so at least a couple of you are already aware that What’s Liberal got itself a substantial and kinda condescending and dismissive review in the New York Observer. It was written by Jonathan Liu, a senior at Harvard, and from what I can gather in yesterday’s comments section, some of you were put off by the review’s closing move:
On issues like race and class, he writes, “my classes contain plenty of students who are more outspokenly ‘liberal’ and/or left-leaning than myself …. [It] doesn’t occur to [conservatives] that some of their demonized liberal faculty members have our share of undergraduates who find us not liberal enough for their tastes.”
What never occurs to Michael Bérubé is that these “more outspoken” students might finally be objecting to the same impulse as the conservatives, the same “procedural liberalism” that results in a tenured professor like Mr. Bérubé constantly worrying about offending his students. The truth is, college liberal-arts students aren’t much impressed with friendly professors who talk about popular music and are adept at playing devil’s advocate. To the contrary, we seek out those—liberal, conservative or otherwise—with passion, who will fight and intimidate and humiliate us in order to impart their scholarly revelations, who don’t treat us like the equals we aren’t, who will leave us defeated but challenged and finally emboldened.
So let me set you all straight about two things before anyone comes rushing to my defense or running up with a crying towel to assuage my hurt feelings. One, the premise of this passage is entirely true. This is my twenty-second year of teaching, and it never has occurred to me that my more outspoken students are objecting to my liberal-proceduralist m.o. because they prefer being fought and intimidated and humiliated, defeated and challenged and finally emboldened. In fact, not a single one of my thousand-plus students has ever faulted me for not being challenging enough. So this is a new one on me. Live and learn.
Two, having said that, let me add that I wish I had a whole mess of students like Mr. Liu. He didn’t much care for my book: so what? He’s smart and energetic and sounds like a great interlocutor. Though his review is dismissive in places—particularly in its last paragraph, which weighs me in the balance and finds me “overwhelmed by self-doubt” and “caring, fastidious and totally forgettable”—it’s one of the more interesting dismissals I’ve come across. And I don’t actually think it’s possible to argue people into liking my work, anyway. I believe Flannery O’Connor put it best when she wrote:
“Everybody is different,” Mrs. Hopewell said.
“Yes, most people is,” Mrs. Freeman said.
“It takes all kinds to make the world.”
“I always said it did myself.”
So I wouldn’t use this here blog to try to persuade Mr. Liu himself that he is mistaken, or to demonstrate that when I’m not being caring, fastidious, and totally forgettable, I’m actually being rude, snarky, and thuggish—often right here on this very blog! I’m simply going to point out two or three ways in which Mr. Liu mischaracterizes the book’s actual contents.
Thing one:
Mr. Bérubé—both a committed Democrat and a committed democrat, not to mention a former rock musician and a current blogger—is never quite able to describe what exactly he’s defending.
Well, it’s prima facie true that I was unable to describe what I’m defending in such a way as to convince Mr. Liu that I had done so. But I think it all depends on just how carefully you read my brief for participatory parity and pragmatist pluralism in chapter six, or my brief for the intellectual independence of universities in a pluralist civil society in chapters one and seven. If, like Mr. Liu, you write off chapter six in half of a subordinate clause as dealing with “the anti-foundationalist possibilities of postmodernism,” then you’ll very likely write off my entire argument about antifoundationalism as a basis (though much depends on what one means by a “basis”) for belief and action. Eric Rauchway got this point, I’m greatly relieved to say, as did Aaron Barlow. Mr. Liu is well within his rights to say that I didn’t make it well, or didn’t make it convincingly; that’s entirely possible. But I don’t think he’s justified in claiming that I didn’t make it at all.
But then, much of the review is devoted to claims that I didn’t make this or that argument. For instance, Mr. Liu writes:
having divided conservatives into the “extreme” and the “thoughtful,” it seems plainly bizarre for Mr. Bérubé not to engage more fully—or at all—with the allegations of the latter group. Mr. Douthat’s recent memoir Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class would have been a good place to start; his scathing portrait of his alma mater (he’s class of ’02) belongs to a critical tradition that began with William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951) and reached its apotheosis with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987).
The deep conservative grievance—repeated with generational variations in each of those three volumes—is simple: In an environment dominated by “electives” and binge-drinking, American higher education is no longer a force that gives students meaning. Young adults stumble out of colleges bewildered and strangely unfulfilled, and what the eminently likable Mr. Bérubé fails to appreciate is that this melancholy is in no way limited to the conservatives.
I’ll admit that when the book’s publication date loomed near, I was afraid I’d get reviews like this: Bérubé says nothing about how college athletics have eroded our moral fiber, Bérubé says nothing about the rapacious student-loan industry, Bérubé never once addresses the demand for ‘accountability’ in educational outcomes. Because it’s true, I don’t address any of those things (two of which are worth addressing), and people who open my book thinking that it is my obligation to write about them if I’m writing about higher education will surely find me to be a coward or a failure. And when it comes to those stumbling, unfulfilled college graduates, I explicitly wrote that I have a “profound distrust” of “professors (and dapper seventy-something novelists) who speak as if they know all about students’ lives, spiritual strivings, personal habits, and complicated family dramas.” So I’m no help on that score, either.
But what am I to say about binge drinking? I do mention it in the book, and I say that all the awful things you’ve heard about drinking on campus are true. I honestly don’t know what to do about it. And as for the elective system: Mr. Liu writes, “We regrettably never learn what Mr. Bérubé thinks about conservative concerns over ‘grade inflation’ or the calls to adopt ‘Great Books’ core curricula. Both are nuanced issues, ones that might attract a surprising number of Marxists or even Derrideans over to the ‘right-wing’ side.” Fair enough. I did not enfold my various defenses of Western Civ courses into What’s Liberal?, and in retrospect I think this was a mistake. I’ve written in favor of core curricula in Dissent, the Common Review, Slate, and a couple of other places, and I guess I didn’t think I needed to stump for them again—or to make the point (obvious on campus, but almost always obscured by the anti-academic right) that Great Books and Western Civ courses are most strenuously resisted, on campuses like mine, not by the feral multicultural Theory Left but by the engineering, preprofessional, and business administration wings of the enterprise. This was a missed opportunity, I think.
But there’s something tonally awry about Mr. Liu’s complaint that I should have tried to appeal to conservatives on this count, because the most serious charge in his review is that I “haphazardly triangulate” by distinguishing myself from all conservatives and a handful of leftists. And to try to make that charge stick, Mr. Liu has to contort the book a bit—but only a bit, because, as you all know very well, I really do distinguish myself from a handful of leftists. I disagree with them, and they disagree with me. It takes all kinds to make the world!
Let’s get back to Mr. Liu’s description of my descriptions of my courses:
On topics ranging from Willa Cather’s supposed “queer[ing] of the prairie” to the anti-foundationalist possibilities of postmodernism, Mr. Bérubé reveals himself to be an easy-going pedagogue, always ready to play devil’s advocate—even, he loves pointing out, to the liberal students.
Well, if I love pointing this out, you’d think that I might do it more than once. But I don’t. The passage Mr. Liu is referring to here, oddly enough, is the same passage he refers to at the end of his review, when he quotes me saying that “my classes contain plenty of students who are more outspokenly ‘liberal’ and/or left-leaning than myself.” The episode involved a student who said to me, after a class in which I’d jump-started a discussion of James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by talking about Rush Limbaugh’s remarks about Donovan McNabb, that I should have said in so many words that Limbaugh’s remarks were racist.
That’s it. That’s the one time I mention an encounter with a liberal student who wanted me to be more “outspoken” than I was. It takes up two paragraphs in chapter five, in which I write,
Sometimes, when I read conservatives’ accounts of campus life and classroom “intimidation,” I wonder, what’s happening with the liberal students on American campuses? Don’t they ever feel uncomfortable? Don’t they ever make their professors uncomfortable? I’ve begun to suspect that for some critics on the right, it’s a mystery why liberals exist at all: they sometimes speak as if no one, left to his or her devices, would wind up as a liberal but for professorial indoctrination and brainwashing.
In the rest of the book, I narrate at much greater length my dealings with two students who were, for very different reasons, deeply antagonistic to me: John, to whose defense of the WW2 internment camps I responded by reminding him that when we’d discussed black nationalism he’d insisted that we’re all Americans first and hyphenated-Americans second; and Stan, who responded passionately and combatively to the Rorty-and-pragmatism part of the postmodernism class, believing that antifoundationalism licensed precisely the kind of moral relativism that had corrupted our society. I’m kind of surprised that someone like Mr. Liu, who clearly favors professors who antagonize and challenge their students, would ignore these whole stretches of the book in favor of the one moment in which a student told me I should have been more emphatically anti-Rush.
One more thing while we’re talking about triangulation. Because I know I’m going to hear a lot more about this from people to my left, oh yes.
Some of his colleagues, he’s appalled to admit, are so far to the left that they don’t even like being associated with the thoughtful liberals; regarding l’affaire Churchill, he writes of “a smattering of academics [who] decided that because the ‘academic freedom’ defense was a ‘liberal’ position, they needed to go further and defend the specific content of the ‘little Eichmanns’ line …. [M]ost of them, I am now convinced, took this vile position chiefly in order to distinguish themselves from the mere ‘liberals’ to their right.”
There seems to be a bit of, as they say in academia, projection going on here. Because, of course, all the talk of “vile positions” is finally chiefly a way for Mr. Bérubé to distinguish himself from the despicables to his left. Sure, comparing 9/11 victims to the architect of the Holocaust is viscerally repellent, and there might be no other way for the general public to take it. But academics who defended the content of Mr. Churchill’s argument might have had any number of reasons to do so—anyone who has read Hannah Arendt’s haunting, ambiguous Eichmann in Jerusalem, for instance, would immediately find an allusive depth to the now-infamous Churchill quote that perhaps even its author never intended. Mr. Bérubé, however, seems to believe that any such “extreme” position is just so much grandstanding vis-à-vis his own common sense, free-speech-even-for-the- repellent liberalism.
When I read this yesterday, my first, visceral response was this: far from using the Churchill fans as a foil for my sensible liberalism, I sometimes do way too much covering for the Churchill fans, on whatever point of our multiple orthogonal axes they might be. In this case, I didn’t reproduce any textual evidence of some of the many online discussions I had with people in the course of 2005 (including professional committee discussions I can’t divulge here), discussions in which they made precisely the argument I attribute to them: the liberal defense of Ward Churchill did not go far enough because it allowed those craven liberals to defend Churchill’s right to speak without endorsing the specific content of his remarks, so therefore we need to endorse the specific content of his remarks in order to make this a “teaching moment” for our fellow Americans, to stand up against Bill O’Reilly, to applaud Churchill’s heroism, etc.
But my second, more reflective response was this: you know, I probably did botch this one. I thought my book parsed Churchill’s remarks reasonably carefully, in that milquetoasty liberal way I have. I agreed that
the blowback argument, by itself, is an intellectually legitimate argument; there is no doubt that the US funded the Afghan mujahideen in their struggle against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, just as there is no question that U.S. support for Israel has generated a great deal of anti-American sentiment in the Arab world.
And I pointed out, riffing off of Sidney Hook, that
academic freedom covers even the most noxious heresies when they stem from honest pursuit of an inquiry or argument (and grotesque as it may sound to some ears, the question of whether there can be such a thing as “collective guilt” among the citizens of a superpower is indeed an inquiry).
But I didn’t make it clear that the “academic freedom” defense of Churchill is indeed more specific and robust than the “freedom of speech” defense, insofar as it speaks to the legitimacy of his remarks as a matter of professional principle rather than as a general right to say vile things in an open society. Churchill was and is, in other words, entitled as an academic—quite apart from his rights as a citizen—to make the claim that all Americans share in the responsibility for the crimes our nation commits abroad (except, as he helpfully explained later, “the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by.” They’re off the hook). I happen to believe that he answered the question of collective national responsibility so reductively as to undermine the inquiry, but still, I should have explained the difference between academic freedom and freedom of speech more clearly.
Anyway, let’s end on a happy note, because it’s been a crazy week so far.
What’s Liberal fails to answer (or even to pose) the broader question: Why is Mr. Horowitz—himself a New York Jew, a former New Leftist with degrees from Columbia and Berkeley—more appealing to backwoods citizens and lawmakers than the friendly neighborhood academics among them?
This is an elegant misframing of the question. For the funny thing is that Mr. Horowitz himself is not very appealing: the reason the Georgia legislature didn’t pass his Academic Bill of Rights, after all, was that Horowitz made the mistake of showing up in person and convincing Georgia lawmakers “they were dealing with a crazy man.” The real question is why hatred and distrust of American universities is so pervasive on the right wing as a whole, and I humbly submit that my book does indeed attempt to pose—and answer—that one. Though not, I (liberally) admit, to everyone’s satisfaction.
Arrggg, the Liu factor stimulates my abhorrent reaction to your closing paragraphs’ mention of that person for whom reality has ceased to exist. Vile taste in mouth, yuck.
Mr. Liu needed to have attended the US Naval Academy, thence a couple of years of Fleet Tug service, before being reassigned to the War College and then the Naval Post Graduate school. He would have been happily surrounded by people who think “exactly” as he does; and would have been ridiculed, humiliated, chastized, and intimidated (hell, beaten to a pulp regularly) by all of his professors. His poor choice of academic training does not excuse his failure to understand his responsibility to find someone (perhaps that nameless demon) to dominate him appropriately at this time.
Posted by on 10/05 at 02:40 PMI wonder why he thinks he’s qualified to review Micheal’s work. Isn’t he then treating himself like the equal he isn’t?
Posted by on 10/05 at 02:44 PMLiu says:
In an environment dominated by “electives” and binge-drinking, American higher education is no longer a force that gives students meaning
I think I’m fair in placing an “increasingly” between “environment” and “dominated” and perhaps even between “is” and “no.” So there’s a question that necessarily follows: is there in fact more binge drinking (say: more than 5 drinks in a sitting) among American college students per capita than there was in the lost glory days--however Liu wants to date this--of American higher education?
I doubt it. But it certainly fits the expected narrative. What would conservatives be without dystopian nostalgia?
And I have no idea at all what he means by “gives students meaning,” except, I suppose, gives them some authoritorian frame around which they can construct their identity.
I’m also unclear--to snark on another sentence--why Liu recommends you begin your tour of thoughtful conservatives with Douthat when the tradition “reached its apotheosis” with Bloom: why start a tour in the twilight of the tradition rather than with its apex? Or did Bloom’s excellence proleptically (er) drag all subsequent conserative manifesto-cum-memoirs into the Empyrean? How mighty Bloom must be!
Posted by on 10/05 at 02:44 PMTo the contrary, we seek out those—liberal, conservative or otherwise—with passion, who will fight and intimidate and humiliate us in order to impart their scholarly revelations, who don’t treat us like the equals we aren’t, who will leave us defeated but challenged and finally emboldened.
Oh, yeah, that too. Some of my evaluations for last semester said I was too nasty and that I cared about commas too much. I suppose rather than trying harder to sprinkle praise among my critiques, I should just track down the unhappy students to tell them they’re just not quite college liberal-arts students. Maybe I should bring a Turing test with me.
Posted by on 10/05 at 02:47 PMI’m also unclear—to snark on another sentence—why Liu recommends you begin your tour of thoughtful conservatives with Douthat when the tradition “reached its apotheosis” with Bloom: why start a tour in the twilight of the tradition rather than with its apex?
Well, Karl, I think Mr. Liu is saying that I borrowed from Mr. Douthat on the cheap, so to speak, by citing his New Republic essay on Horowitz’s ABOR rather than his book about Harvard. A reasonable criticism, but a strange one, too—coming in a review that opens with the backhanded compliment,
it’s nice to see a professor in the arena who’s not perched among the Ivy League or its elite brethren. Mr. Bérubé’s position at Penn State (and the University of Illinois before that) isn’t glamorous, and it gives his work a relevance no what’s-wrong-with-Harvard tome can match.
So I get points for being a Man of the People, but I still should have read one of the what’s-wrong-with-Harvard tomes, all the same.
Posted by on 10/05 at 02:51 PMHow about some Stanley Cup predictions?
As a properly indoctrinated lefty, I can only consider victories by teams in blue states.
The Cup must be seized from the grips of North Carolina!
When a properly liberal team wins the Cup we will fill it with espresso and drive it through the politically righteous gentrified loft district atop a Volvo (past a Kandinsky mural, of course)!
But which city will it be?
/snark
Posted by on 10/05 at 03:01 PMJon, the Cup will indeed be liberated from North Carolina by means of a humanitarian intervention (and yes, Ms. Xeno/ Alsis, white gloves will be involved! they always handle the Cup with white gloves). The question is whether it will be liberated by the revanchist regime of Anaheim or the working-class unionism of Buffalo. Though I have some hope that San Jose will finally get over the hump, too.
Posted by on 10/05 at 03:08 PMGo Sabres! And I’m still waiting for a V for Vendetta moment from Michael. Clearly Liu’s notions of good pedagogy are derived from the torture scene in the movie....
Posted by The Constructivist on 10/05 at 03:17 PMthe Cup will indeed be liberated from North Carolina by means of a humanitarian intervention
You don’t think the Department of Liberal Nutrition’s ban on trans-fats in Chicago and New York will make Comrade Jagr or Comrade Havlat fast enough to win it all?
Posted by on 10/05 at 03:33 PMI hate this trope that universities are “NO LONGER a force that gives students meaning.” When was it ever? Read Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. You will find that a century ago university students were mostly concerned with football, getting into the right fraternities, and binge drinking. So, during the conservative “golden age” of the univerity, they were roughly what they are today, except without minorities or women.
Horowitz uses the appeal to the good old days all the time: he claims that universities are “no longer” centers of learning like they were in his day. Has anyone pointed out to him (or to Liu) that, since the conservative critique is now over a half-century old (at least) that the the appeal to how great things “used to be” should be out of bounds unless they want to date it to, say, before the founding of Johns Hopkins?Pretty soon we’ll be reduced to listening to a Monty Python pepperpot saying, “All the kids were like that then, they didn’t have their heads stuffed with all this Cartesian dualism.”
Posted by on 10/05 at 03:41 PMI’ve always been in pretty general agreement with Paul Fussell, in that an author responding to critics is the Author’s Big Mistake. But damn, this stuff is so entertaining that I can’t find the will to carp about it.
I will also note that, in my own experience at least, quite often when I thought I was objecting to a teacher’s “procedural liberalism” is was merely being a twit.
Posted by James Killus on 10/05 at 03:53 PMI’ve always been in pretty general agreement with Paul Fussell, in that an author responding to critics is the Author’s Big Mistake.
The funny thing is that I agree with this too. But . . . can’t . . . stop . . . myself. . . . Must . . . reply . . . again. . . .
Posted by Michael on 10/05 at 03:59 PMI do mention it in the book, and I say that all the awful things you’ve heard about drinking on campus are true.
Sure it’s true that kids in college drink heavily, but the implied causal link is nonsense. Kids who don’t go to college drink heavily as well. The better question would be why 18 - 22 year olds in our culture drimk so heavily.
Posted by on 10/05 at 04:02 PMMichael, I havn’t read your book yet. But I will. It’s on my ever-growing shrinking list. But just considering his review, and what you’ve written here…
I’ve been under the impression that your intention was to dispel the myth that there is a united malevolent Liberal conspiracy within academia. Liu seems to be holding you to task for not mounting a complete point by point defence of all academic phenomenon, when your defence seems to be that academia is too diverse to be defended from just about anything other than an accusation of conspiracy.
I want to hear more about “basis” though (not that this compels an answer by any means). It seems to me that deliberation is self-referencial (or recursive), in that it is its own basis. It isn’t foundational (or self-evident) because even though deliberation can’t falsify itself (it can’t resolve with the conclusion that deliberation doesn’t work without entering paradox), it *can* fail to reach any answer at all. Of course, non-resolution is the main weakness of deliberation. My ponderings aside, what do *you* mean by basis?
I know, I know… read the book.
Posted by Central Content Publisher on 10/05 at 04:11 PMAll your basis belong to us.
Posted by on 10/05 at 04:31 PMLiu doesn’t mean he wants to get into an S/M relationship with a teacher. I guess after reading Foucault and not much else many of you think that’s what he means.
Liu means a teacher who has a deep taproot into classical knowledge and can stand for that in spite of current fashions and fads like Michel Foucault and NAMBLA.
I had one teacher like that in graduate school (Hazard Adams) and at the time he irritated me. He thought Plato was an important and powerful writer for creating and thinking about standards. Most of the rest of us were for Gorgias and Thrasymachus and Alfred Jarry’s joke about Socrates.
It’s nice to have someone for a teacher with a spine and another sensibility other than that held by the current circle jerk of conformist pinheads.
At any rate, that’s what I took Liu to mean. Acquaintance with the foundation of the culture can give a student a sense of hope and mission that will guide them through life. They don’t have much other chance to get this than in college unless they are attending a decent church or synagogue.
Michel Foucault can’t do that is what Liu is saying. He was a mere fashion plate.
Hannah Arendt can. She’s something more than a fashion plate, and she has a taproot into something other than sex. She even argues that sex is not political. But then you’d have to read something unfashionable and even unsexy to get what Liu’s getting at.
The Human Condition is a formidable book and makes the postmodernists look like a circle jerk.
Posted by Kirby Olson on 10/05 at 04:36 PMWho is this “Foucault”? And does he have a trust fund?
CCP, I’ll come back to you. Right now I’m running out the door. If I find a basis while I’m out, I’ll let you know. . . .
Captcha: running.
Posted by Michael on 10/05 at 04:50 PMWow, Kirby. To think that “culture” has a stabl and knowable foundation is quite the thing. I had for so long been thinking that culture included so much more than the figures and ideas that had been reproduced over centuries by power (but then, you’d have to read Foucault to know what I mean by power in this sense) and handed to me.
Man, what was I thinking when I held Gorgias and Thasymachus to be totally unchallenging to the idea of a hegemonic Western canon that serves to reproduce certain ways of thinking and being (in service to power)? Now I can see that there is a stable “cultural foundation” and that by adding Gorgias and Thasymachus to it I’ve come up with an accurate representation of all the ideas and expressions that my culture is made up of!
Oh, and by the way, S&M is not what Foucault meant by discipline.
Posted by on 10/05 at 05:01 PM-
Posted by Bill Benzon on 10/05 at 05:01 PM
"The Human Condition is a formidable book and makes the postmodernists look like a circle jerk.” - KO
A circle jerk? I refuse to acknowledge the relevence of any post nineteenth century transgression.
Posted by Central Content Publisher on 10/05 at 05:10 PMEnough with the Foucault already Kirby! Your superior argumentation has convinced all of us never to teach him again, let alone read him, or, after this post, even type his name again. That privilege is yours alone.
Now who is this “Hannah Arendt” of whom you speak?
Posted by John Protevi on 10/05 at 05:13 PMhe doesn’t say it, but what Liu’s nostalgia is for (copped from the dead guys he’s read) is a campus with the St. John’s curriculum, but also as a (perhaps non-denominational) religious orientation. and no science majoring. there is an affinity between these screeds about the corruption of academia and (with all due respect to grads from it here) an idealized version of the University of Chicago.
you know, there are just so few fashions for young rightists. you think they would get mad about it, and do something so that they could come to resemble the entertaining but occasional internecine (fraticidal, soricidal, sibling sidal?) liberal left.
captcha “change” change of love…
Posted by Rob Crowe on 10/05 at 05:14 PMKirby, you are, of course, going to inform others of their mistake in reading F, aren’t you? You’ll be starting, I imagine, with fashion-addeld Princeton, where at least two people could benefit from your insight.
In the Philosophy Department, there’s the poor deluded Alexander Nehamas. Without your help he went and wasted a chapter of this book of his on F.
Then a quick stop at the History Department to correct that noted naif Peter Brown,who, without the benefit of your counsel, made the mistake of forming an “intellectual friendship” with him.
Oh, and Kirby, you’ll tell us of their replies to you, won’t you? Thanks in advance.
Posted by John Protevi on 10/05 at 05:56 PMBut What’s Liberal fails to answer (or even to pose) the broader question: Why is Mr. Horowitz—himself a New York Jew, a former New Leftist with degrees from Columbia and Berkeley—more appealing to backwoods citizens and lawmakers than the friendly neighborhood academics among them?
Because he can get them national attention in conservative political circles and lots of them think that government shouldn’t be in the business of education to begin with?
It’s sort of a Harvard question, really.
Posted by julia on 10/05 at 06:29 PMMichael, I’m sorry I didn’t follow your implicitly passionate and vigorous advice here:
But . . . can’t . . . stop . . . myself. . . . Must . . . reply . . . again. . . .
regarding you know who. No, not U. No. who, but you know who. You know?
Anyway, thanks for making the point about Western Civ courses. I’m extremely happy that I got to teach Western Civ for some 10 years of my career so far, and hope to get back to it some time soon. Why is it that certain types—you know who I’m talking about—always assume that because you read X, Y, or Z, all born in the 20th century, that you don’t like reading and teaching teh classics?
Posted by John Protevi on 10/05 at 06:31 PMit’s nice to see a professor in the arena who’s not perched among the Ivy League or its elite brethren. Mr. Bérubé’s position at Penn State (and the University of Illinois before that) isn’t glamorous, and it gives his work a relevance no what’s-wrong-with-Harvard tome can match.
Sweet jeebus that’s funny. Relevant to what? The lived experience of the little people? Let me amend my previous comment on the necessity of dystopian nostalgia to conservativism: what would conservatism be without the unholy hybrid of pecksniffery, NIMBY populism, and snobbishness?
Chimeras of their age indeed!
Acquaintance with the foundation of the culture can give a student a sense of hope and mission that will guide them through life
My culture begins and ends with the one-two punch of Zardoz and Joachim of Fiore? Zow! How about yours?
Posted by on 10/05 at 06:48 PMWhen I hear the phrase “the one-two punch of Zardoz and Joachim of Fiore,” I reach for my copy of Revolver.
Posted by Chris Clarke on 10/05 at 06:50 PMMichael,
Foucault (D-FL) is the Democratic congressman from Florida who recently got involved in a naughty-bits scandal.
Hope that helps.
Posted by on 10/05 at 06:51 PMI thought it was Maurice Florence.
Posted by John Protevi on 10/05 at 06:55 PMWhen I hear the phrase “the one-two punch of Zardoz and Joachim of Fiore,” I reach for my copy of Revolver.
Which is when I reach for my copy of Mission of Burma’s Signals, Calls, and Marches.
Is it ABF yet? All this grading I’m doing is causing the kind of bit chomping that gives a poor ABD some serious TMJ.
Posted by on 10/05 at 07:05 PMMichael,
I find it difficult making a real commitment to such concepts as participatory parity and pragmatist pluralism. I am more energized by a concept like distributive justice but that does tend to presuppose a value system beyond the individual which I think can be embodied in a number of cultures and actions (Ghandi, Havel etc.)I can see a plurality in this sense. So in the academic arena, I can admire your work and that of say Cary Nelson but probably for what you would consider the wrong reasons.Posted by on 10/05 at 07:44 PMI’m puzzled by the litany of works that includes Buckley, Bloom, etc. Buckley’s book (I believe) came out in 1951, so just when did this transition to the elective system come in? The only curriculum from 1951 I know the details of is the Amherst curriculum adopted in the big educational reform movement after the war, and few curricula have ever been less focused on, or tolerant of, electives.
Again, binge drinking and related phenomena have not advanced on a steady line—I strongly suspect they were higher in elite colleges in 1920-1935. I remember voting when I was on the Amherst inter-fraternity council in the beloved sixties to eliminate language banning various practices from the by-laws. No student on the committee knew what any of these terms referred to, although I suspect F Scott Fitzgerald would have. The only one I can recall is “cabin party,” but I think they were all between the wars practices involving drinking yourself half to death and mindfree (heterosexual) sex.
By the way, is there any reason to doubt my strong sense that The Closing of the American Mind is a piece of crap?
Finally, Ross Douthat gives me a pain. He sneers at the Harvard Classics Department (also stupidly criticized by Larry Summers) on the basis of a course called “Heros for Zeros.” I can assure him that if he had had the energy or the intelligence to try two years of Latin or Greek he could have read (exempli gratia) two dialogues of Plato and a play of Sophocles or two books of Virgil and a book of Tacitus in the original (speaking at a minimum) with quite capable scholars who would most likely have been glad to have another student in the class—of course at Harvard that might not have been as true as elsewhere. Might have wrecked his reputation with the boys, tho.
Posted by on 10/05 at 08:19 PMLiu doesn’t mean he wants to get into an S/M relationship with a teacher. I guess after reading Foucault and not much else many of you think that’s what he means.
I guess that Lehrer was correct, and that satire, parody, et al are obsolete, dead, defunct, cease to exist. Terrible shame that; it would be so nice to use some of it once in a while. But obviously there are those who are incapable of recognizing it, even at its most absurd.
Posted by on 10/05 at 09:27 PMGene I get the sense that if Classics is only an option, these folks will sneer at it as one more humanity. It’s no good, apparently, unless someone forces you to do it. The longing for a master, for the lash of discipline in the quoted passages of Liu’s review is beyond parody: “we seek out those ... with passion, who will fight and intimidate and humiliate us.”
I have never understood how it is conservative to blame one’s own choices, like drinking or taking easy courses, on someone else. Like in page scandals, people switch between the status of adult and child depending on the purpose of the argument.
But it’s a tribute to Michael that he’s persuasive enough in presenting his pedagogy as non-coercive that a critic has to take the opposite tack and accuse him of not being coercive enough.
I have a sneaking affection for Bloom’s book. The social sciencey parts are doubtful but the guy had a vision.
Posted by on 10/05 at 09:46 PMFoucault (D-FL) is the Democratic congressman from Florida who recently got involved in a naughty-bits scandal.
Now I hear that Canguilhem (D-IL) knew about it for years and did nothing.
I can admire your work and that of say Cary Nelson but probably for what you would consider the wrong reasons.
Not good enough, Jim! Here we demand that Cary and I be admired only for the right reasons.
More seriously, I don’t think you can have participatory parity without a scheme of distributive justice. Nancy Fraser has the details in Justice Interruptus. So we may be on the same page, or at least in the same book, after all—even though I don’t presuppose any value systems.
I’m puzzled by the litany of works that includes Buckley, Bloom, etc. Buckley’s book (I believe) came out in 1951, so just when did this transition to the elective system come in?
When Charles Norton Eliot became president of Harvard in the late 19th century, Gene. Before that, though, things were just great—as Henry Adams says in the Education.
By the way, is there any reason to doubt my strong sense that The Closing of the American Mind is a piece of crap?
Yes and no. The first half is the part that got all the attention, and it’s one crazy-ass rant about sex and drugs and relativism. And Margaret Mead. The second half is quite sinuous and interesting and darkly Straussian, so nobody read that part, except Colin here.
And as for me, when I hear “when I hear the phrase ‘the one-two punch of Zardoz and Joachim of Fiore,’ I reach for my copy of Revolver,” I reach for my copy of The Wretched of the Earth.
Posted by Michael on 10/05 at 09:55 PMI would have suggested a different title to him: “The opening of American Arrogance”.
Because really, there are two kinds of arrogance: the arrogance of indifference, and the arrogance of certitude.
Posted by Central Content Publisher on 10/05 at 09:55 PMIsn’t Fanon in trouble for IMing underage pages or something?
Posted by Chris Clarke on 10/05 at 10:35 PMOh, and CCP, there is another: the arrogance of nuance. But it’s much more complex and subtle than the others.
Posted by Chris Clarke on 10/05 at 10:37 PMyeah, he keeps offering to show them his
“two kingdoms.” It’s digsgusting, repulsive, abhorrent, and disgusting.Butt what can you expect from someone who’s been dead for awhile and is still IMing underage pages?
Posted by on 10/05 at 10:41 PMNot to give even more attention to Kirby’s rantings, but didn’t Hazard Adams edit a bunch of Critical Theory samplers, ones which presumably contain works by Foucault?
Posted by on 10/05 at 10:42 PMYou will find that a century ago university students were mostly concerned with football, getting into the right fraternities, and binge drinking.
You will find that in 12th Century Europe university students were mostly concerned with fighting, sucking up to peers who could afford books, and binge drinking. So apparently the conservative golden age of the university actually predates universities. Which, come to think of it, doesn’t really surprise me.
I always considered Zardoz less a component of a punch combination, and more of an icepick up the nose. And isn’t Joachim of Fiore implicated in this Congressional scandal, too? I seem to recall him commenting enthusiastically about “three pages.”
Posted by on 10/05 at 11:11 PMFoucault (D-FL) “So we may be on the same page, or at least in the same book, after all—even though I don’t presuppose any value systems.”
Not much impressed with friendly liberal professors who won’t name their pages.
And wasn’t Zardoz where the foley artist followed the best boy, and not the other way around?
Posted by on 10/05 at 11:41 PMFoucault (D-FL) is the Democratic congressman from Florida who recently got involved in a naughty-bits scandal.
No surprise, evidently he was a real swinger.
Posted by on 10/05 at 11:51 PMWell, I’ve just annihilated my learned and cogent comment, so I’ll have to try to reproduce a defective substitute from memory.
I know a little bit about what actually went on in American higher education before Charles Eliot Norton is said to have corrupted it, albeit from a very Amhersty and Latin and Greeky perspective, and those who look back at it as a golden age are delusional. It might, of course have been fun to have a college president who dug up fossils and edited Demosthenes, but I think few people realize the role of religion (a not unattractive version of a Protestant Christianity that I do not myself profess) in American higher education of that era. It’s like the proverbial textbook account of the Civil Rights movement that neglects to mention MLK’s chosen profession.
If anyone has access to that fundamental document of American culture, the autobiography of Calvin Coolidge, they might want to check out Coolidge’s reasons why you should learn Greek—and perhaps be impressed on his very unDouthatish insistence on the modesty of his learning (he read at least three foreign languages proficiently). But then this was the time when editors of college texts of Demosthenes felt that they needed to inform their pupils that “gennaiotes” (a word I wouldn’t have thought required glossing) meant “manliness.”
Again, it may be that my mind was warped or my soul destroyed by coming in on the end of the Amherst 1946 New Curriculum, but it was certainly my impression that the higher education reforms of the post-WWII era moved away from the excessive reliance on electives. Is anyone familiar with the Harvard report, associated I believe with Conant? At all events it’s all preferable to what the Gerhard and Condi tagteam pulled at Stanford —at least Casper brought in Derrida to give what was apparently a pretty good lecture.
Apologies for the increased incoherence of this post—I forgot the little word at the bottom the first time, so no duck.
Posted by on 10/06 at 12:09 AMYou will find that in 12th Century Europe university students were mostly concerned with fighting, sucking up to peers who could afford books, and binge drinking.
Not to mention witnessing periodic quodlibital free for alls where their masters would suffer questions like: “Whether the flesh of a cannibal family subsisting entirely on human fetuses, even growing fat from their meals, could be called their own flesh in the Resurrection.” Talk about frivolous studies (theirs is just a floor down from Dangeral Studies)! Not a lot of relevance there, boy. And it strikes me that most of the humiliation of between students, not between students and masters. Which is not to say there wasn’t enough humiliation to go around: one of the little statues on Chartres, iirc, is the master of grammar, a personified Donatus, beating the bejeezus out of his little charges.
...and mds: your Joachim joke made me spit my bedtime toothpaste out with more than my customary vigor, which, as my wife could tell you, is prodigious.
--
And as for me, when I hear “when I hear the phrase ‘the one-two punch of Zardoz and Joachim of Fiore,’ I reach for my copy of Revolver,” I reach for my copy of The Wretched of the Earth.
Is anyone else reminded of the driving game “I’m going on a trip...” Back when I took road trips, we’d play this a lot. Sometimes it was alphabetical (Me: “I’m going on a trip, and I’m taking Alcibiades.” Next guy: “I’m going on a traip, and I’m taking Alcibiades and Bulgakov..."), but more often than not, not. Free hint for winning if you’re disinclined towards popularity and friendship: try this: “I’m going on a trip, and I’m taking (etc.), and the following poem”: insert whatever you like.
--
Clearly I’ve stopped engaging with the actual topic of the thread: justice, &c. Don’t let me stop you. I assure you I’m doing plenty of thinking elsewhere.
Posted by on 10/06 at 12:23 AMNuance *is* arrogant. How are we to pierce through the muddied film of mediocrity like a golden spire of human triumph while the trivial reigns? How, while the lure of nuance flattens us out upon the ground like so many discarded cups after Carrabanna? Does a millennium of corpses lye beneath our feet so that they could rise from the grave to engulf us in their dying details? No! They have fallen so that we could rise!
Cause I believe that I can rise up high.
And I believe that I can touch the sky.
…[music and vocals fade as a ghostly Berubesque head flaps flag-like in the wind, lording above a crowd of crying school-children]
Posted by Central Content Publisher on 10/06 at 12:27 AMMichael,
I wouldn’t worry over Liu’s review. He winds up defending Ward Churchill from the right--did he mix up Ward with Winston?--and is endorsing authoritarian professors who will tell students precisely what to think, as opposed to procedural liberals who want people to think about a host of things, make comparisons and analysis, etc. Liu doesn’t get that he just proved your point!
It was also amusing to read Liu’s wonderment as to where you stood on the Great Books and grade inflation. Let’s see. You teach a course which includes a book by William Dean Howells, a white male who is very, very dead (but who I also adore!). And early on in your book, you speak of giving quizes to ensure the students are actually reading the books and thinking about them (Plus giving out some bad grades to boot!). I guess Liu wants his books to make every conceivable point WRIT LARGE, which is, after all, consistent with the authoritarian mindset.
Oh well, at least the review started out nice…
Posted by Mitchell Freedman on 10/06 at 01:48 AMBy the way, is there any reason to doubt my strong sense that The Closing of the American Mind is a piece of crap?
Yes and no. The first half is the part that got all the attention, and it’s one crazy-ass rant about sex and drugs and relativism. And Margaret Mead. The second half is quite sinuous and interesting and darkly Straussian, so nobody read that part, except Colin here.
DingDingDingDingDing!!!! Right you are, Michael! (and I’m not just saying that to suck up to the perfesser....)
Just to clarify two important points that you allude to here (or that I think you’re alluding to):
1) Everybody bought The Closing of the American Mind, but virtually nobody read it, which is why it was regularly lumped in with E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, which came out at roughly the same time. Closing is a much weirder book in many ways.
2) There’s a spectre haunting this thread - the spectre of Leo Strauss. All this talk about foundational texts, professors who passionately believe things, St. Johns College, idealized versions of the University of Chicago, learning from Plato, Allan Bloom...yet nobody’s mentioned the man himself. It’s like having a conversation in which folks are discussing class conflict, surplus value, communism, revolution, the Gotha Program, and alienation, but nobody mentions Karl Marx. The pedagogical virtues that Liu describes very closely resemble what many students seem to find attractive about professors trained in the Straussian tradition. And, judging from his article in The Atlantic (I haven’t read the book), Ross Douthat’s model of a professor who does things the right way is Harvey Mansfield.
On the other hand, having said this, bringing Leo Strauss into any conversation these days (even where it’s actually appropriate to do so) is likely to generate more heat than light…
Posted by on 10/06 at 02:39 AMFor what it’s worth, an old buddy of mine who attended St. Johns back in, like, the late 50s or early 60s said he was asked this question in his senior-year oral exam: “If Augustine had read Hamlet, would he have laughed in the right places?” As Satchmo was fond of saying, one of those old-time good ones.
Seems to me that there’s an ABFF in coming up with comparable questions, or answers to same.
Posted by Bill Benzon on 10/06 at 05:38 AMThose shrill Harvard kids...shouldn’t they be in Paris learning how to make brioche instead of lowering themselves to critiquing the works of modern intellectuals? And this particular intellectual teaches at Penn State, for heaven’s sake! How utterly gauche! Harvard kids are just too pure and perfect to engage in such, how shall I say, yeoman-like discourse, which should be left to those wannabe kids at Wisconsin or Oregon State.
Is this Liu kid on dope? He must be. Get with the Harvard program, Liu. Learn cheese making in Tuscany. Or spend a year mastering basket weaving with the Ugga-Mugga tribe in some Mozambique rain forest.
Posted by mat on 10/06 at 06:00 AMMitchell: Howells was white? Damn. Off the syllabus he goes, then.
There’s a spectre haunting this thread—the spectre of Leo Strauss.
Great point, Ben, though that ringing hurts my ears. And I did wonder, upon reading Liu’s review, whether the minor spectre of the manly manly man, Harvey C. Mansfield, was hovering somewhere around here too. (He’s kinda obsessed about grade inflation, which he blames—I kid you not—on the admission of black students to Harvard.)
But you didn’t answer the question. If Marx had read The Closing of the American Mind, would he have laughed in the right places?
Captcha: one—the number of truths in human affairs.
Posted by Michael on 10/06 at 08:17 AMNo surprise, evidently he was a real swinger.
Oh, gad! That was the joke I should have made, irrespective of Mr. Medievalist’s kind words. What a way to point out my inadequacies. If you ever set foot in my classroom, Stormcrow, you’re humiliated. You hear me?
Hmm, the Straussian angle does seem plausible. Especially since ineffectual instructors such as Professor Bérubé seem to espouse what they actually believe about subjects, all while attempting to instill critical thinking in their students. Liu’s ideal imposes the true knowledge from above, with no implied guarantee that the professor believes it, but merely that it is what the students are supposed to believe. Perhaps I’m being too unfair to Liu, and to ol’ Leo. But hey, it’s hot here, hot and dark.
Posted by on 10/06 at 08:18 AMyeoman-like discourse, which should be left to those wannabe kids at Wisconsin or Oregon State.
Ah, but the actual Oberlin College Yeoman - as Lord Jeff and Eph wannabes - would dispute that the badgering and beavering of those wannabes rise to the level of yeomanship.
As a non-academic, my observation is that the implied prestige and status of the discoursers is the third rail of dispassionate academic discourse. (actually of any dispassionate discourse) - and one that Mr. Liu’s precious bodily fluids certainly come in contact with in this review. It makes it hard to evaluate on its merits - which as Michael notes, are quite impressive for the work of an undergrad - and the backdrop of the demographics of the NYO readership don’t help either. Mr. Liu appears to be somewhat overly immersed in the worldview evident in a place like this college admissions discussion board.
[Yet another topic Michael can cover in his next book - working title I am Through Warming Up, Now I Deal with the Really Important Stuff. And if you do good on it, maybe when you get to your dotage, Harvard will have something like a Daniel Okrent Adjunct Professorship for Washed-up Old White Guys that you can aspire to.]
Posted by on 10/06 at 09:17 AMinstructors such as Professor Bérubé seem to espouse what they actually believe about subjects, all while attempting to instill critical thinking in their students.
I don’t know if Michael does this, because I’ve neither taken a class with him nor read What’s Liberal (yet), but it wouldn’t surprise me a whit. And more power/knowledge to him if so. I’m bugged by the teacher (and I’ve been that teacher) who, when a student says something wrong-headed, pauses, grunts, whistles, sighs, moans, shifts uncomfortably, removes the pen from behind the ear and uses it to scratch a meditative cheek, then emits a doubtful “Well, yesss . . . “ I suppose the “Can you expand on that?” gambit is slightly better, but only if it eventually results in a “Nope, sorry, gotta disagree with ya on that one, sport.”
I actually took the same Intro to Theory course with E. D. Hirsch (author of the aforementioned Cultural Literacy, which I thought was pretty good) that Michael took at UVa (though a few years later), and I was refreshed by the way Hirsch taught. He wasn’t at all the repugnant tyrant that Liu wists for, but the structure of his class was basically to say what he thought about whatever we had read, then invite us to throw water balloons at him.
It was a lot of fun, and sometimes I do the same thing in my classes now--when I’m not being nurturing and facilitating, that is. But I’m still working on it, because somehow my opinions aren’t provocative enough. I tend to go into class and say, “I think there’s an underlying homoeroticism in ‘In Memoriam A. H. H.’! Go on, y’all, take me down, I dare ya!” And the students nod, and go, “Yeah, we think so too.” At which point I wind up arguing the other side, “No, well, see, some people think that’s a ridiculous notion, because ...” I can’t keep up.
See, now I’ve given the Right fodder to say that I’m brainwashed and brainwashing! Dang it.
Posted by on 10/06 at 09:49 AMHarvard’s been a lost cause since about 1850 according to the book The Crisis of the Standing Order by Peter Field, which examines the loss of Harvard to the Unitarian sensibility. It had been a Congregationalist stronghold but the wealth of Boston made them unwilling to listen to hellfire preachers talking against riches and for the poor, and slowly the Unitarians took over and finally banished God from Harvard.
I’m not even sure where you could get a solid classical education these days. It’s all basket weaving and masturbation studies at the elite schools. Perhaps if one were young it would be best to just go into a trade school and take up plumbing or electrical engineering and study books that haven’t yet been burned on the side with a quiet group.
Some of my old friends tease me that I should go to Liberty University (Falwell’s campus) but I am not Reformed enough. I am a Lutheran liberal, but as I go through the remaining 42 “Lutheran” campuses they too appear to be all transformed into reeducation centers. Muhlenberg college is ostensibly Lutheran and has 108 faculty members but only 3 of them are actually Lutheran, and they are hated and scorned by the dominant secular liberals (some of whom are brilliant Marxists, but are not not Lutheran).
I think Lutheran students have to form underground education rings sort of the way the Christians had to go underground in pagan Rome and worship in the catacombs to avoid crucifixion. There are still some good churches around if you look carefully.
Foucault is the Mao of higher education. His face is everywhere. No one can survive the new Grand Inquisitor who understood so well how to set up a Panopticon and call it such and such Studies.
Posted by Kirby Olson on 10/06 at 10:31 AMYeah, Kirby, I hear you. I named my semester-project basket “Hellina Hand.” Just so the professor gets the fact that things just haven’t been the same since they’re now the way they are. Oh how I pine for the days before I lived!
Captcha word: Simple. I kid you not.
Posted by on 10/06 at 10:46 AMKirby, books are no longer burned; they are recycled into basket-fibers by the Department of Eco-Terrorism.
Posted by on 10/06 at 11:03 AMEducation has been in the crapper since WAY before 1850. No one has gotten a real education since the invention of the printing press. Kids today are just lazy.
Now excuse me, I have to go teach my masturbation class. (God I hate lab days.....)
Posted by on 10/06 at 11:25 AMKirby, you sound like a very sincere guy; really you do. I’m certain that you honestly feel marginalized, and to some degree persecuted. Growing up as the only atheist child in a small religious town, I can understand where you’re coming from. But there are some unescapable facts you have to face up to.
There is no good in Christian teachings that can’t be found elsewhere, but there’s plenty of bad that can’t be extracted from it. As a moral guide, the bible is one of the most intolerant documents devised by man. You have to realize that asking for intolerance to be tolerated, is… well… perverse.
Even the serenity poem you posted. You can find the same sentiment in many places, even much older writings, but like all Christian teachings it’s little more than a transparent attempt to piggy God on the back of a reasonable idea. It’s dishonest. It’s sinister. It’s not even original.
As an excercise, spend a couple weeks honestly asking yourself what’s bad about Lutheranism. Christianity was immoral long before Foucault came into existance.
Posted by Central Content Publisher on 10/06 at 11:48 AMI tend to go into class and say, “I think there’s an underlying homoeroticism in ‘In Memoriam A. H. H.’! Go on, y’all, take me down, I dare ya!”
You know, I try to be “liberal” about pedagogy and shit, but Amanda, this is just wrong. There is no underlying homoeroticism anywhere. I mean, read literally for a change, will you, and stop being all paranoid and hermeneutics-of-suspiciony. Because where will it stop? You find homoeroticism in Tennyson, soon you’ll be finding it in Whitman and Crane.
One of the more curious things about the last 20 years of teaching undergraduates, by the way, is that they seem far more capable of picking up on homoerotic/ homosocial dynamics than were their counterparts in 1986. To the point at which it’s not at all queer to hear a student ask you whether Cather queers the prairie in My Antonia.
But I’m sure most conservatives are OK with that. The thoughtful ones, anyway. The ones who love Eve Sedgwick, Michael Warner, etc.
As a non-academic, my observation is that the implied prestige and status of the discoursers is the third rail of dispassionate academic discourse.
DingDingDingDingDing, as Ben would say, JP. It saturates Liu’s review, which opens with the strange assumption that no one from the sticks has even spoken up before on the subject of American higher education, and it was as obvious as homoeroticism in “In Memoriam” during the Velvet et alia blogspat as well. There, however, it took the disingenuous form of claiming that so-called “academic celebrities” can’t get pissed at people who take vicious pot shots at them. (Even if they teach at Penn State!) The fact that the claim was made anonymously rendered it all the more, as they say in academia, problematic. Because when I find out that “et alia” is really Stephen Greenblatt’s sockpuppet. . . .
For more on the subject, see my essay, “Working for the U.: On the Rhetoric of ‘Affiliation,’” in Rhetorical Occasions, in which I talk about academic prestige and ice hockey.
Foucault is the Mao of higher education. His face is everywhere.
Quite true! And his Lidless Eye sees all. Hey, does anyone know if it’s true that the Chinese call their Wall of Heroes (Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao) “the history of shaving”? Because Foucault (D-Beijing) would fit right in.
Posted by on 10/06 at 12:35 PMInterestingly enough, Harvard released a draft of their new general education requirements, not yet approved by the faculty of A&S.
“Most of the objectives of general education are addressed by courses offered in five
areas of inquiry and experience: Cultural Traditions and Cultural Change; The Ethical
Life; The United States and the World; Reason and Faith; and Science and Technology.
Students are required to take a total of seven courses in these areas: two courses in The
United States and the World (one focusing on the United States and one on another society),
two in Science and Technology (one in life science and one in physical science), and one
course in each of the other three areas.”Link to PDF:
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~secfas/Gen_Ed_Prelim_Report.pdf
Posted by on 10/06 at 12:43 PMKirby O. cursed the commonplace
And scorned Karl Marx and all his species:
Luther would corporate greed embrace
Like Mitsubishi’s.Posted by Chris Clarke on 10/06 at 12:53 PMFoucault is the Mao of higher education. His face is everywhere.
How well I remember the famous photo of Foucault shaking hands with Noam Chomsky!
Posted by John Protevi on 10/06 at 01:04 PMOne of the more curious things about the last 20 years of teaching undergraduates, by the way, is that they seem far more capable of picking up on homoerotic/ homosocial dynamics than were their counterparts in 1986.
I blame Xena.
Posted by on 10/06 at 01:10 PMIn my Rush to Attempted Cleverness in #53 above, I neglected to get to one of my main points.
Reviewers review as they will. As discussed earlier re: The Times review, it is generally the editorial choice of reviewer (or to publish an “unsolicited” review) that is generally of more interest. I have not seen it remarked on here (though I am guessing not unthought about, nor even unremarked upon by alternate channel(s).) that it is the choice by the NYO of this reviewer/review that is most noteworthy. [Or maybe they were just looking to give David Brooks some competition in the “illuminating how things are in Red states like Illinois and Pennsylvania to the Upper East Side - dare I say it - Elite” sweepstakes.]
So:
Shorter Jonathan Liu:
Affable professor slays David Horowitz; Nobody I care about, cares.
Shorter NYO:
Nor should they. or it might in fact be
Actually we don’t even really pay attention to the Book Reviews< MB noting coverage of earlier point in Rhetorical Occasions>
My copies seems to be stuck in some form of backlog purgatory. I was seduced by the clever Amazon ploy of offering a second book in addition to the first at exactly the same price as if you had bought them both independently. And it worked!Posted by on 10/06 at 01:20 PMIsn’t Fanon in trouble for IMing underage pages or something
I believe it was Falun Gong’s spambotting email programs that were part of the ritual hazing of higher ended Ivy loggers. FG being the lutheran/straussian version of confuzo-budishita thought, in a manner* of speaking.If Monsieur Bérubé’s proper name was Jacques would we talk more about Derrida than Foucault???
*captcha word
Posted by on 10/06 at 03:05 PMYa’ll love to hear yourselves wax histrionic, don’t ya?
Yes, the typical university Arts/Humanities course is often a psuedo-intellectual circle-jerk, though I never minded so long as no one hid behind false claims of objectivity.
That, Mr. Berube, is why I admire you.
You stick with your mantra, “We Are Right!”
And that’s all right.
It usually has nothing to do with the professor anyhow, anyone who pays attention will tell you the students do the driving.
Though your mileage may vary.
While often I am accused of conservatism, it should be noted that I am, in fact, an Absolute Monarchist.
One gets more pomp and circumstance for their tax dollars that way, I think.Posted by on 10/07 at 12:54 AM`The longing for a master, for the lash of discipline in the quoted passages of Liu’s review is beyond parody: “we seek out those ... with passion, who will fight and intimidate and humiliate us.”’
Yes, but perhaps not beyond snark.
Poor Liu’s problem was that he didn’t understand that Professor B was doing all that (and with vigor) implicitly.
Posted by Porlock Junior on 10/07 at 04:15 AM“we seek out those ... with passion, who will fight and intimidate and humiliate us.”
I hear that when students leave Berube’s class room they have their heads high and placards on their backs proclaiming:
In the fell clutch of P R S U
We have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the teachings of Berube
Our heads are bloody, but unbowed.They are, of course, singing the Internationale at the same time.
Captcha: “labor”—YES!
Posted by Bill Benzon on 10/07 at 06:50 AMAm I really writing to someone called Central Content Publisher? I checked the name twice and it seems to be the case.
I think the great virtue of Christianity is that it admits that it is evil. That we are fallen, and are hopelessly addicted to our own pleasures. This is what Luther said endlessly: there shall be no saints in the Lutheran church because we are all equally fallen including the stinking sinner called the Pope.
(There has been a bizarre trend in recent years for Lutherans to respect and honor the Popes but I think the doctrines of infallibility and ex cathedra are insane.)
If only the left weren’t so cheerful about its own saintliness I could perhaps stomach it again. But even law now is left on the cutting room floor. Walking with an old leftist friend in Seattle he decided that he had the right to run a rusty nail through the new paint of an SUV, inscribing the term “Sinner,” on the paint. I felt that he was the sinner. You can’t break the law in protesting against those who break the law.
But I feel that leaving law behind (as they did the other night at Columbia University when the socialists rushed the podium screeching epithets against the African American militia member) is to leave humanity itself behind.
The equation since Darwin is not only that we are sinners, but that we are animals. Well, we are if we act without reference to any kind of conscience or universal law.
For me the intervention here on this blog has no personal dimension. It’s about principles. Today most in the left believe that the only principle is raw power. I do not agree with that. This is why I think that NAMBLA and Jeffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson and Stalin and Pot and Foucault are all completely wrong.
We need objective and universal principles and that is why Locke is key to any future worth having. We must go beyond the personal pique into the realm of standards. I think the Ten commandments are a pretty good start, followed by the Bill of Rights.
I see nothing in Foucault except Animal House fornication and bestiality and child molesting.
I think that Liu sees that, too.
I can’t understand why the left doesn’t see that.
Auden did. I’m reading the newish book Auden and Christianity (Yale UP, 2005), and it seems that the main thing Auden wanted to be remembered as was as a good Christian.
When you compare Christianity and Communism, the former has to be preferred to the latter simply on the basis of numbers murdered by the latter. Communism destroys law and becomes matriarchal tyranny where desire is the only prevalent law.
Look into the sky, into the beyond. Your God is there, ready to forgive you.
Posted by Kirby Olson on 10/07 at 01:28 PMI see nothing in Foucault except Animal House fornication and bestiality and child molesting.
Here’s the key! Kirby is Flounder! He’s taken Dean Wormer’s advice that “fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son” to heart, and now has two of the three licked.
Posted by John Protevi on 10/07 at 01:45 PMRe-reading #71, it comes off entirely too harshly. Kirby, I don’t know what it is about your comments, but I’m not usually as mean-spirited in other parts of my life as I am in replying to you. I just can’t figure it out.
Anyway, here’s my do-over:
“Silly Kirby, everyone knows Foucault was an Omega and not a Delta!”
Less hurtful, and funnier (which isn’t hard to do, given the obvious nature of #71).
Posted by John Protevi on 10/07 at 03:02 PMWhen you compare Christianity and Communism, the former has to be preferred to the latter simply on the basis of numbers murdered by the latter.
Usually i leave well enough alone: but this remark must be one of the more idiotic, historically speaking, yet provided by the lutheran apologist. Comparing numbers murdered is not just some cheap syllogistic trick on par with: don’t we all agree that such and such is true? When you compare Communism with Christianity one must define these constructs first. Then begin to assemble lists of those particular massacres and executions that are associated with the specific regimes that comprised the two. For example, the power of the churches in late 1880’s US with regard to Indian Affairs dictating and controlling the policy of the US government, clearly establishes a link between Christianity and the killing of thousands of indigenous native americans. To try, as i can only surmise our illustrious apologist does, to separate the slaughters of much of the planet’s population by Europeans leadership from their established links to christianity, serves no one except the apologist’s ken. Likewise, Stalin adopted the catch phrase “socialism in one country” as the basis for his regime, contradicting earlier Marxist doctrine of communism. Thus one could just as easily suggest that Stalinist socialism killed more than Leninist communism using LS/KC’s sort of rubric. Certainly the US has been remarkable in its avoidance of responsibility in massive body counts created by its actionable offenses, and so it continues ever onward.
I do ponder if a “reader” in middle 20th century postmodernist philosophy might help, given that this love affair between the surrealist and the Foucault avoids so many of the other leading heroes of our anarcho-radical-commie party. Where is Lacan, Adorno, Derrida, Habermas, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Quine, Bourdieu, et al??? Maybe, as a proud and happy citizen of the US, he might benefit from discoursing on Donald Davidson, or the other CA (dreaded left coasters) contemporary philosophers (Richard Rorty, Jacob Needleman, etc.).
Posted by on 10/07 at 05:09 PMChristianity, in is various forms, doctrines, and branches, has had a influential hand in millions of deaths and atrocities. Which isn’t to say Christ and his immediate followers are necessarily responsible for them, anymore than Marx. States and institutions reach for religious doctrine and political orthodoxy as needed to justify their own policies.
The corpse counting has always been the worst kind of sophistry, all rhetorical bluster minus any historical or substantive content. It’s like arguing that Pogroms and medieval massacres of Jews are not so bad because they didn’t kill the high numbers seen in the Holocaust. In the end, murder is murer is murder.
Posted by James Slone on 10/07 at 07:21 PMThe equation since Darwin is not only that we are sinners, but that we are animals. Well, we are if we act without reference to any kind of conscience or universal law.
Kirby,
I am genuinely curious about your answers to the following:
Do you believe that you are an animal?
Do you think that human beings are members of the mammalian species homo sapiens?As for myself, I am honored to be an animal. In fact, it is my belief that if every person, woke up every morning, and said to themselves I am an animal, and it’s OK!, that the world would be a far more congenial, collegial and spiritually satisfying place to live.
Posted by on 10/07 at 08:36 PMThe equation since Darwin is not only that we are sinners, but that we are animals. Well, we are if we act without reference to any kind of conscience or universal law.
I’m not qualified to say if your literary judgments fail as badly as the way you present them, but this is blatant twaddle.
Origin of Species describes the process of species individuation. It doesn’t discuss sin, because sin is not anywhere within the scope of scientific discussion of species individuation. It does, however, posit universal laws, just not the ones you presumably prefer.
“Darwinism,” on the other hand, is a strawman invented by know-nothings, and is well-known for not acknowledging that there’s such a thing as sin.
If you’re not a troll, you’re a terribly confused young man.
Posted by julia on 10/07 at 11:22 PMStalin’s murders alone account for 30 million deaths.
That’s in a 25-year period.
If you take the entirety of murders you can lay at the feet of Lutherans you could never come anywhere close to that number. There were 8 witchcraft related deaths in Sweden in the 1600s.
There was the reprisal led by the electors of Germany against the Anabaptists (Luther was remorseful over this massacre) which possible accounts for half a million deaths.
But Luther was remorseful over those deaths. He didn’t like Anabaptism.
Stalin was never remorseful over the mass deaths of the Soviet Union.
I’m not sure what is meant by Julia’s remarks. Something’s missing in my grammar or in hers.
Am I an animal? Stormcrow asks. Perhaps in terms of DNA I am linked. I share 30% of my DNA with daisies, for instance. That doesn’t make me a daisy.
Kenneth Burke (a communist) wrote that humanity and animals are very separate in that humanity invented yellow journalism. No other animal has it.
So there’s been a qualitative leap into a symbol-using (Burke) mentality that no other animal has made. Only we have wedding rings. They are perfect circles representing eternity.
Animals work only along the lines of desire (try to teach a mountain lion about ethics some time and see how far you get).
Human beings can think further (although the postmodernists were animalistic and gave up their humanity it doesn’t mean that the rest of us did).
Posted by Kirby Olson on 10/08 at 02:14 PMOh, John, wouldn’t Foucault and Jung and everyone say that the reason you are so harsh in responding to me is that the Christian side of yourself is something you’ve savagely repressed.
Are you possibly a closet Christian?
Posted by Kirby Olson on 10/08 at 02:19 PMmake that a troll or a bot.
Posted by julia on 10/08 at 02:19 PMOh, John, wouldn’t Foucault and Jung and everyone say that the reason you are so harsh in responding to me is that the Christian side of yourself is something you’ve savagely repressed.
Are you possibly a closet Christian?
More like it’s the residual Christian in me that is lashing out: my Jesuit teachers could never suffer fools kindly, and that must have rubbed off on me.
Posted by John Protevi on 10/08 at 02:45 PMI share 30% of my DNA with daisies, for instance. That doesn’t make me a daisy.
You’re right it doesn’t. It makes both of you multi-celled organisms.So there’s been a qualitative leap into a symbol-using (Burke) mentality that no other animal has made.
Good, so we agree - man is a symbol-using animal.
Animals work only along the lines of desire (try to teach a mountain lion about ethics some time and see how far you get).
Right again, the last time I tried to teach one, he replied that “He had no need of that hypothesis.” (And I did not get very far in the scraping lesson either.)
I’m wondering if the reason you are so befuddled is that the (non symbol-using) animal side of yourself is something you’ve savagely repressed.
Are you possibly a closet Hominid?
Gotta go. Time to mark my territory - cya.
Posted by on 10/08 at 03:36 PMGreat Books and Western Civ courses are most strenuously resisted, on campuses like mine, not by the feral multicultural Theory Left but by the engineering, preprofessional, and business administration wings of the enterprise
Thanks for reiterating this--I’m sure it will go unheard, but it’s so, so true. All those squishy things like literature and languages and history are hated and feared by people who are convinced they have better things (advanced math, MBA prep) to do with their academic time.
And Mr. Liu sounds like he watched The Paper Chase at a young and impressionable age. Challenge one’s students? Absolutely. “[F]ight and intimidate and humilitate” them? That’s what a bully does; it’s fine if the professor’s main goal is to teach students who’s boss (as if they didn’t know) and to convince them to pick some other area of study, where perhaps their faculty advisors won’t have Napoleon complexes. “I’ll show HIM, even if he does control my grades and has power issues” is not a motivation for everyone, even if it is for Mr. Liu.
Posted by on 10/08 at 04:29 PMWhen I was an undergraduate, it was always the business, marketing, and communications majors who didn’t want to read “canonical” works, or anything else for that matter. Liberal arts majors on the left and the right always seemed ok with tackling canonical works and newer literature, and discussing them, albeit critically and in context. This idea that leftwing multiculturalists want to burn “Moby-Dick” because it was written by a white male in the nineteenth century is about the dumbest assumption ever and usually made by people who’ve never ready “Moby-Dick” themselves. Oh sure, a chicano feminist or a gay indigenous American might treat it critically, but if they’re english majors they’ll at least make an effort to read the book. Unlike most advertising majors on the left and the right.
Posted by James Slone on 10/08 at 05:16 PMThe chief advantage Protestant Christianity has over many other religions is that you can stop any time you want.
Posted by on 10/08 at 05:18 PMI think that guy reviewed the two new Walter Benjamin books in the Harvard Book Review (undergrad publication), the review was pretty annoying, as I recall.
Posted by ersatz on 10/08 at 07:29 PMI’m really not picky about such things, ersatz. I’m all in favor of undergraduates who write pretty annoying reviews of things involving Walter Benjamin. They’re infinitely preferable to undergraduates who do the binge drinking of which Mr. Liu rightly complains.
Posted by Michael on 10/08 at 11:16 PMHey, I did some binge drinking in college and still found time to write meticulously researched papers on obscure topics (there’s more to know about slave revolts in Haiti during the 1740s than I ever would have thought possible). I’m guessing binge drinking is more of a problem at a place like Penn State than the urban, non-fraternity-oriented school I attended, though.
Posted by ersatz on 10/09 at 02:16 PMI breezed Derek Bok’s book yesterday in a bookstore. He’s the new prez at Harvard taking over after Summers’ was kicked out for making his non-PC remarks about women’s math & science skills being substandard due to feminine brain functions. It seemed to me at least to be a legitimate question. But now there are many questions that can’t be asked.
Bok takes a different tack fro his predecessor and claims that both the far left and the far right are wrong (the book is called something like Our UnderAchieving Colleges), and his argument is that professors should open up questions, and students should partake in the tackling of those questions in seminar style and we’d all be a lot more learned and chipper.
In lieu of Liu, I’d like to say that this seems right to me, but the problem is we have to be open to all the data coming in, not just that which accords with our blueprint for a Marxist-feminist utopia.
The quality of the questions asked determines the quality of the teaching and learning.
The Jesuits in their desperate attempt to mimic Lutheran knowledge-seeking always seemed esp. bad about truly opening up to the questions to the questions, and the answers to the answers. They got all burned up too easily, but I don’t want to roast them too easily. The Jesuits are basically finished. It’s the Marxists I’d like to roast until more tender than they’ve been.
Let a hundred flowers go boom boom boom boom boom until millions of people are dead.
Go figure.
Posted by Kirby Olson on 10/09 at 02:41 PM"I will believe that the white that I see is black if the hierarchical Church so defines it.” - Ignatius.
Ditto for Marxists under Stalin, Hoxha, Kim Jong Mentally Ill, you name it.
Luther got rid of the middle men and hierarchy and instituted Democracy in one fell swoop.
Hurray for Luther! Hip hip Hurray!
This is the reason that Scandinavian democracies are the envy of the world and always come out on top in every kind of universal misery index.
Thank you, Luther!
Posted by Kirby Olson on 10/09 at 03:41 PMWow Kirby, it just keeps coming like a broken record of protestant self-aggrandizement. Keep taking the happy pills! Hip hip hooray!
Posted by James Slone on 10/09 at 05:17 PMYes, I’m trying to change the tune from Marxist self-aggrandizement to let people know how it sounds from where I sit as a protestant of the Catholics gone crypto-Jesuitical Marxist.
Hee hee.
Hooray for Karl Marx who had it all right! Hooray!
Let’s butcher them conservatives. Hooray! They’re so stupid and we’re so smart! Hooray. Hooray. Hooray.
It IS tiresome, isn’t it?
But I’m only beginning.
Posted by Kirby Olson on 10/10 at 12:59 PMAt least I’m not a grouchy Presbyterian.
Thank God for that.
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