Home | Away

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Emergent new feature:  Liberal Thursday!

Welcome, everyone, to Liberal Thursday!  On Liberal Thursday, we’ll look at what people are saying about What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? (Those of you who have already heard enough on the subject can give this blog a pass on Liberal Thursdays and wait for Arbitrary But Fun Fridays, which, I promise, will be 100 percent free of my-book-this and my-book-that.  And also fun.) We’ll be sure to take note whenever someone says something that is inaccurate and/or unfair, and we’ll try to learn a few things along the way as well, because we know the Internets are full of people who have helped to shape (or change) our thinking on any number of subjects.  And we’ll stop referring to ourselves in the third person second person fourth person first person plural right now!

This week I’m pleased to find that renowned libertarian economist Tyler Cowen recently posted some comments about the book.  Professor Cowen is the author of, among other things, In Praise of Commercial Culture (2000), What Price Fame? (2002), Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures (2004), and, most recently, Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding (2006).  His remarks on Liberal Arts start off like this:

Having been pilloried by The Weekly Standard for praising American universities and their diversity, I feel I have the liberal credentials to take a sideways whack at this new book…

OK, so this isn’t a book review so much as Fun with a Piñata.  But so what?  I’m a big guy, I can take a sideways whack or two.

I did enjoy and indeed finish it.  The book defends the liberal nature of the university but more importantly it has an excellent discussion of “the postmodern novel” (the author’s field, apparently), including a brilliant take on William Dean Howells and a good discussion of The Great Gatsby.

This is very sweet, and I’m quite flattered.  It’s too kind, actually. About 40 percent too kind (I have a meter in my office).  My reading of William Dean Howells is merely careful—really garden-variety stuff for any literature professor with a sense of historical context.  But I’m especially glad that Professor Cowen liked those parts of the book that deal with literature, and I’m truly grateful that he read them.  Literary criticism is my specialty, after all.

Its portrait of the American university, however flawed, is closer to the truth than what one finds in the right-wing scaremongers.

I’ll take this faint praise—I’m not proud about such things.  And now we get to the flaws:

But reading this book shows me—contrary to the author’s intentions—why so many college students have turned to the so-called “Right.” Michael Bérubé, the author:

1. Believes that David Horowitz is a very powerful man.

2. Claims that libertarians are simply ignorant of poverty and therefore wrong.  At least libertarians are “quite smart now and then” and yes that is a quotation.

3. Repeatedly rejects political views by citing the (supposed) moral failings of their undergraduate proponents.

4. Claims conservatives hate social security “because it works.” By the way, that is also why conservatives hate universities.

5. Argues that “the real scandal of public universities is that they have become increasingly beholden to right-wing demogoguery...”

6. Believes that he is holding genuine dialogue with alternative political views.

Ouch!  Those six sideways whacks hurt.  I’m gonna hafta handle them one by one.  I’ll leave aside the claim about students turning to the “so-called ‘Right,’” because survey says Professor Cowen doesn’t actually have any evidence for that one.

1. Believes that David Horowitz is a very powerful man.

Well, that’s not quite right.  My book actually says this:

Though many mainstream pundits and commentators consider Horowitz a fringe figure, a former far-left ideologue turned far-right ideologue, his Academic Bill of Rights is no joke, and has won him audiences with sympathetic state lawmakers like Ohio’s [Larry] Mumper, Minnesota’s Republican state senator Michele Bachmann, and Colorado’s Republican governor Bill Owens.

These days, Horowitz also has the ear of John Boehner, Majority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, and, as you probably know, his book The Art of Political War and Other Radical Pursuits is among Karl Rove’s very favorite things.  Whether that makes Horowitz “very powerful” or not is your call, of course. 

But you know, I’ve run into this kind of thing before—and almost always from smart academic conservatives.  “David Horowho?” they say.  “Dinesh D’Somebody?  Never heard of them.  Fringe figures, really, my boy—seriously, it’s not as if these people have any influence on public discourse.  Quite frankly, you do yourself and your work a disservice by attending to them.”

So no, I do not believe that David Horowitz is a very powerful man.  I do not say such a thing in my book.  But I believe that his criticisms of American universities and certain “dangerous professors” are pernicious and influential (though notoriously slipshod and factually challenged), and must be dealt with.

2. Claims that libertarians are simply ignorant of poverty and therefore wrong.  At least libertarians are “quite smart now and then” and yes that is a quotation.

OK, this falls into the “inaccurate and/or unfair” category.  Because yes, it’s a quotation, but it’s not a very responsible one.  In chapter 4, I talk about students of all political persuasions (and not, say, famous libertarian economists), and here’s some of what I say about those post-adolescent libertarians:

The libertarians are, for me, the most peculiar assortment in the mix.  They’re usually well-informed on civil liberties, abortion, gay rights, and the sheer cruelty and foolishness of America’s drug laws (and no, it’s not just a matter of keeping your laws off my bong).  They’re generally confused but nonetheless rigidly dogmatic on economic issues, having little or no understanding what unregulated, scorched-earth capitalism actually entails and little or no concern about poverty or disability.  They’re quite smart now and then about the intrusive, in loco parentis style of campus management that they identify with what I call the aggressive Lutheran liberalism I encountered in the midwest (the kind in which your public-spirited but nosy neighbors pull over your car to make sure you’re wearing your seatbelt, because it’s good for you) and that they consider the local version of the so-called “nanny state”; but they’re reflexively and sometimes ignorantly opposed to any regulatory or redistributive scheme whatsoever, as if tainted soup, securities fraud, defective automobiles and toxic-waste dumping will all get sorted out by the wisdom of the market and the work of many invisible hands.

So why do I say that they’re only quite smart “now and then” about campus policies?  Because right now, for example, their biggest concern is Penn State’s banning of the consumption of alcohol in the football parking lot during games, that’s why.  They’re treating this as if it constituted a human-rights offense on the order of Mao’s cultural revolution.  So yeah, sometimes college libertarians are quite smart.  Sometimes they’re not.  That’s the way it goes.  (Whereas if I’d wanted to be all snarky and dismissive about young libertarians, I would have cited Kieran Healy’s immortal line, “Ayn Rand. Fourteen year olds of the world unite! The car keys shall be yours by sheer force of will! Objectivism requires it!”)

And as for Cowen’s line about how “libertarians are simply ignorant of poverty and therefore wrong”: note that I actually said they have little or no concern about poverty or disability.  Indeed, I might add that some libertarians can’t even bring themselves to type the word “disability.” But that would be mean.

3.  Repeatedly rejects political views by citing the (supposed) moral failings of their undergraduate proponents.

You know, I think this is about the dang libertarians again.  Because in reality, chapter 4 criticizes the campus left and the campus right too, and argues that certain forms of campus leftism provide “a powerful device for driving young independents and libertarians straight into the arms of the College Republicans.” So it’s kinda ironic in a post-postmodern way that Professor Cowen claims that my book does the same thing.

4. Claims conservatives hate social security “because it works.” By the way, that is also why conservatives hate universities.

Guilty as charged!  Though I note that some conservatives also hate universities because they don’t like those areas of cultural life that don’t answer directly to the state.  And some of them hate that gay-and-lesbian studies thing we got goin’ on.

As for Social Security, I think the history of conservative opposition to the program bears me out pretty well.  But then, I would think that, wouldn’t I? 

5. Argues that “the real scandal of public universities is that they have become increasingly beholden to right-wing demogoguery...”

Penalty on the offense, fifteen yards, illegal ellipsis.  (We’ll decline the five-yard misspelling penalty.) Here, Professor Cowen makes it sound as if I’m talking about right-wing demagoguery on campus (and how ridiculous that would be!), when in fact the passage makes it quite clear that I am doing no such thing:

The real scandal of Social Security is that the truly rich are largely exempt from contributing to it; the real scandal of public universities is that they have become increasingly beholden to right-wing demagoguery with respect to “the public” (as in, “why should your taxes pay the salaries of these America-hating liberals”) even as right-wing demagogues in elected office have managed to cut our public funding from the states.  The result is a weird and thoroughly dishonest political two-step, whereby your local Republican state legislator or Democratic (but not that tax-and-spend kind of Democratic) governor alternates between (1) cutting funds for public colleges, demanding that State U. find ways of “doing more with less” in the name of fiscal austerity, and (2) crying that it is an outrage that State U. staged “The Vagina Monologues” with the tax money of the good God-fearing people of upper Appalachia or rural Oklahoma, regardless of whether that venerable Eve Ensler standby was sponsored by any public funds.  It’s a neat trick, invoking the public with one hand and privatizing the enterprise with the other.  But it works, and as a result, tuitions are indeed higher than they should be.  That’s what “partial privatization” is all about: passing the social costs of public goods onto individuals, leaving students and families to fend for themselves as best they can.  If this is fine with you, so be it: you’re a conservative or a libertarian.  If you think this is a suspect or foolhardy enterprise, you may already be a liberal or progressive.  In that case, more power to you.

6. Believes that he is holding genuine dialogue with alternative political views.

This item, preceded as it is by the first five, suggests that I am self-undermining—if not a simple hypocrite.  But for the record, when I wrote What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? I did not think I was holding genuine dialogue with alternative political views.  Actually, I thought I was writing a book with an argument, and disagreeing with any number of other people’s books and essays along the way. 

Cowen concludes:

If we bundle this all up and put it against the “...the world is a fragile place and liberty is dear.  Let us start with an ethic of individual responsibility, family values, strong national defense, low taxes, and a deep belief in the sacred nature of mankind, and no we cannot elevate every injustice,” I know which vision the American people—including their undergraduates—will choose.  (For new MR readers, I should note that those are not exactly my views, it is just one shorthand description of parts of the American right.)

Bérubé, by the way, has a brilliant performance art-worthy fantasy segment on why 50 percent tax rates would not (should not?) deter anyone from working or producing.  Excerpt:  “I find it hard to imagine a Clever Entrepreneur who thinks, “Well, I’ve made ten million this year, but if I make another two million I only get to keep one million of it, so I’m going to stop developing and promoting my product right now."” (p.286).  Ah, if only all taxes fell on pure profit.  It is even sadder to learn that many wealthy people are “hoarding it [their money],” rather than creating jobs with it.

Well, we’re all about brilliant performance-art on this humble blog, so, second thing first: it really and truly is the case that conservatives and libertarians argue that high marginal tax rates on income discourage “growth,” by which they means the amassing of wealth by individuals.  I don’t understand that at all, and though I freely admit that I’m out of my depth on this one, Professor Cowen’s sniffy dismissal does not enlighten me.  (Later in the very paragraph Cowen cites, I wrote, “dammit, Jim, I’m a literature professor, not a tax specialist,” though my editor forced me to delete the first two words in page proofs.) But my point was that I don’t believe that all the ultra-ultrawealthy are really creating jobs with their profits (and yes, I was talking only of income taxes, even though I know that other taxes do exist; for the record, I favor taxes on investments and inherited wealth, too), and that I don’t see why a tax code in a democracy shouldn’t try to discourage the hoarding of great wealth by individuals.

But I do thank Professor Cowen for reading my book, for liking the discussions of literature, and for disagreeing openly with me on those matters about which we disagree. 

And now first thing last.  As for the fragile world and its unelevatable injustices and the vision the American people will choose, well, I’m tempted to remind readers of Professor Cowen’s vision of New New Orleans, free, free at last from the shackles of building codes (“the city should help create cheap housing by reducing legal restrictions on building quality, building safety, and required insurance”). As he wrote in Slate this past April, the construction of post-Katrina shantytowns might be a good thing for music lovers:

Shantytowns might well be more creative than a dead city core. Some of the best Brazilian music came from the favelas of Salvador and Rio. The slums of Kingston, Jamaica, bred reggae. New Orleans experienced its greatest cultural blossoming in the early 20th century, when it was full of shanties. . . .  Just imagine the chant: Shantytowns for New Orleans now.

I have indeed imagined that chant, as it happens.  And if you bundle up those shantytowns and contrast them with a fair and balanced representation of the vision of America I offer in my book, I think I know which vision the American people—including their undergraduates—will choose.

Posted by Michael on 09/14 at 07:58 AM
(68) Comments • (1) Trackbacks • Permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages