ACTA's Must-Reads

Herb London says:

"Moreover, if evolution infers progress, there is something fundamentally wrong"

It seems there is something fundamentally wrong with the former dean's use of the English language. Perhaps he could use a brush-up course at Yale?

Heh, heh, very droll, "Mike". Care to parse Professor London's manifold grammatical or syntactical errors here for us? And then, care to address the SUBSTANCE of his charges?

Couldn't let a story about Yale go without one of my own. When I applied for a professorship there many years ago, this dignified, esteemed and extremely well-endowed institution of higher earning informed me I'd been rejected, unlike any other application rejection I'd received and have received . . . on a POSTCARD! It's only decades later now I realised that if I'd been a TALIBAN MAN, I coudda bin uh contenduh!

Well, there's not much real substance there to address. London's evidence? A larger course catalog than over one hundred years ago. Now, a vastly larger student population will mean a lot more junior and senior level seminar courses, which means a separate description of each. Several new majors -- and not just in the sciences -- will also mean a lot more.

But sure, the explosion in course catalogues speaks to one huge concern: the increasingly privatization and commodification of education. Professors must compete for enrollment; departments as a whole also compete. Funding and hiring lines are contingent on enrollment. So professors -- especially adjuncts and part-time teachers -- are forced "to sell" their courses to students. One way is through a sexy course name and a long, involved description.

Students are then asked "to shop around" for courses each semester. This means that the drop/add period gets longer and longer, which in turn means that the first two weeks or so of each semester are times when students don't really have to attend classes. You cannot penalize a student for adding your course after the first four sessions; you can only ask that they make up the work. Students then seek out the easiest, most appealing courses with the most entertaining faculty. Competition for enrollment means that professors with difficult standards or demanding syllabi have to "undersell" their co-workers by reducing the reading load, cutting exams, etc.

None of this has anything to do with some left-wing attack on the core curriculum. It's the free-market ideology applied to higher education that's taking such a huge toll. All the core courses are still taught -- provided a department has the hiring lines to ensure coverage. They're just not required. Colleges too are forced to compete for enrollment with other colleges, and students (and parents) will choose the school that allows for maximum "freedom." Brown used to be the odd-man out, with its compete lack of majors and requirements. More and more schools are heading in that direction, not because of their lefty professors but because of their business-minded administrators, trustees, alumni, and presidents.

When you complain to a free-marketeer about the crap of our culture, he'll simply reply, "If there were money in it, it would be available." If good books sold, they be more easily available and more widely published. If good movies sold, there'd be more art cinemas.

So the same reply goes for the core curriculum folks. Don't blame the faculty. If more parents and teachers wanted St. Johns, more college administrators would adapt their programs to the market demand. Likewise, if core curricula ensured a better education, those doing the job hiring would adapt and only hire candidates with degrees from colleges with such a core.

Jacques: No, I don't really care to address in depth Herb's possible shortcomings as a scribbler. I don't really find that many outright errors. Perhaps you could fill us in?

As to the SUBSTANCE, I will just comment on one statement: "the present catalog is 620 pages. Some of that additional content can be attributed to relatively recent developments in the sciences such as neurolinguistics and computer science."

A hell of a lot has happened in the sciences since 1894. A lot more than "neurolinguistics and computer science", and not all of it "relatively recent". I'll bet that 1894 catalog has very few courses in quantum mechanics, biochemistry, plate tectonics, molecular biology, organic synthesis ... In 1894, Yale had one well-known scientist that I know of, the estimable J. Willard Gibbs. Now it has several Nobel prize winners. (To be sure, the Nobel prize didn't exist back in 1894.)

The point is, while there may be a lot not to like about much of the stuff that's offered these days, much perhaps not to like about the incoherence of the curriculum, Herb's tale of wandering in the stacks and coming across the old catalog and having this revelation just doesn't get very far with me!

To feign not to realise that Professor London's charges, repeated idem in alio in so many academic venues, that the higher education "humanities" curricula in the States is puerile, trivial and heavily politically biased is dishonest tout court. What
"[I]ncreasingly privatization" means is to me and perhaps other readers yet a mystery, not for its ungrammatical construction, but for its turgidity: Does this mean, Professor Thompson, that taxpayer-financed schools are due for privatisation? And must elite schools like Yale really "market" themselves or face a dearth of applicants? Must private and public institutions of "higher earning" really show a profit or go under?

It's curious that conservatives generally (I'm not one myself) seem to be more interested in promoting traditional humanistic learning than liberals or radicals. As for Professor Thompson's touting of the almighty profit motive (while falsely accusing conservatives of promoting it) in higher education, I answer with the story of Euclid and the nobleman, familiar to most students of Greek. A nobleman once went to the famous geometer Euclid and told him he'd heard of this branch of study called "geometry" and desired to be instructed in it, whereupon Euclid accommodated him. After the nobleman's first lesson, he thanked Euclid, but said he had to ask what the USE of all this geometry might be, whereupon Euclid turned to his servant and said: "This man wants to profit from learning--give him an obol". Will you take a check, Professor?

Also not to acknowledge that since the disloyal, self-indulgent, Vietnam-era sixties humanities departments and humanities organisations generally have become shills for Marxism, Fraudianism (sic) and other antinomian perversions is again, affected and reeks of fausse naivete. Add to this leftist coups in traditional branches of study the creation of whole bogus disciplines like ethnic (read: socio-political advocacy), "gender" (ditto, and actually a GRAMMATICAL term), peace (read: anti-military), disability, "critical" (read: amateurishly philosophical), post-colonial (read: "anti-Western"), etc. "studies", all of which in turn have mortally infected the traditional disciplines.

Involving parents, alumni, donors, legislators and taxpayers generally in higher education seems to be the mission of reformers like the ACTA editors and David Horowitz, in contrast to craven mandarin administrators and radical "live-high/talk-low" "post-human" faculties, who want the public to "pay without a say" for the privilege of radicalising students.

First, I am not a professor, and I never will be.

Second, Jacques own post is full of its own false naivete. There an increasingly vast body of work on what I called "the privatization of the university." This is *not* about profit motives (universities need the cultural capital -- and tax breaks -- that come with non-profit status), but about importing the business-model into running higher education. Discourses of competition for students and "shopping around" for courses, majors, and advisers is rampant.

Third: if left-wing professors are wholly responsible for the lack of a core curriculum, how do you explain that they still teach all the core courses on a regular basis? It's not the availability of core courses that has changed but the institutional requirements that students take a certain core set of courses.

Fourth: Jacques' identification of post-colonial studies with anti-Western thought is facile and simply incorrect.

Fifth: Gender is *not* only a grammatical term. The good ole KJV Bible's version of Leviticus reads: "Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind." Gender was already a word describing -- as from the start -- types, kinds, sorts. Wikipedia goes on to suggest that gender has referred to masculine or feminine traits since the 14th century. There was a backlash against this common usage in the early 20th century. But that's a little too late to start telling people how to use a word. Finally, what a word meant originally is not grounds for controlling its meaning today. In the 1950s, scholars needed a word to describe acquired rather than inborn differences between the sexes. So they picked up on this older use of the word "gender."

Sixth: Even a cursory glance at the pioneering work of Henry Louis Gates will show Jacques that ethnic studies is *not* simply a political advocacy movement.

Seventh: Jacques has a problem with the issue of identity. He claims that it's not conservatives promoting privatization in the universities, as if one is or is not a conservative prior to one's beliefs and practices. But as anyone who thinks about the subject knows, *being* a conservative means nothing more than having and/or promoting conservative beliefs and practices. The privatizing of the university is, by definition, a conservative practice today. So adherents to this idea are conservative. For the same reason, Jacques' assertion that he is not a conservative is simply wrong. Every position he's ever held at this or other blogs has been conservative. He may hate being pigeonholed, but facts is facts. If all of one's views are conservative, one is a conservative. If it has feathers and quacks and tastes good in a stew with venison and rabbit, it must be a duck.

I'll answer LT's compendium of errors at greater length after my bachelor party.

Nevertheless, for a start, try replacing "conservative" (for there's little I'd conserve in current humanities "education") with "reactionary" (NOT for me synonymous with something generally not desirable, LT) and you'd be closer to the mark (i.e., a sound curriculum grounded in the classics, mathematics, natural sciences, foreign languages, traditional liberal arts, medicine, law, theology, etc. and VERY little else). Sorry for the honourific "Professor"--how about "professor" then (for you do profess, LT, do you not?)? LT does have a point about metaphorical profit (just another word for competition, which has been around at least since Achilles and Hector, I suppose) except when big-sports schools and their semi-literate capos and unctuous adminocrat mouthpieces falsely claim profits to the university as a whole from this seedy and often criminal entertainment racket that has absolutely nothing to do with any higher education mission known to me. Further, Stanley Fish used to use LT's tired old dodge that core courses are all covered at "good" schools, but that rubbish has been outed long ago. Again, a course in "Queer Shakespeare" is not really a course in Shakespeare in my book. Further, the most influential shill for "post-colonial" anti-Western ideological screed was the pampered personal and professional fraud, Edward Said, (of "Orientalism" notoriety), late head of the MLA. Professor Stephen Greenblatt ("Renaissance Self-Fashioning") used to dabble in this Marxist "new historicist" rubbish but seems some time ago (gratias Deo!) to have left it behind in later works. (I'll take up the etymology of "gender" later, but suffice to say that LT's example is a verb synonymous with "engender" like the verb "breed"). On Professor Gates: after professing that his Harvard department seeks political diversity, he was asked who was the token "conservative" or two in his department. His laughing response was "of course, none". MULTA CETERA DESUNT . . .

Jacques, as I wrote before, I'm not a professor, and I don't profess anything.

You're point about competition is wrong-headed. No one is claiming that competition is, across the board, bad. I love boxing as much as the next guy. The problem is when competition enters fields in which the competitive mentality blocks, rather than advances, the field's goals. Competition for resources via competition for enrollment is not good for universities.

Next, show me a university of any quality in which the canonical courses are only variations on your own ridiculous "Queer Shakespeare" example. I've been associated with a variety of colleges in my years, and all of them offered relatively basic survey and major authors courses in the canon. That said, ACTA's main panty-bunching objection is that students aren't being assigned Shakespeare -- so even a Queer Shakespeare course would mean more students reading Willie Shakes.

On Said: you'll have to offer me some proof that Said is anti-Western. Everything I've read of his -- *Beginnings*, *Orientalism*, and *Culture and Imperialism*, along with some of his writings on classical music -- is markedly in the Western tradition. *Orientalism* uses Western thinkers such as Foucault to consider how seemingly objective knowledge is used to advance colonial policies. *Culture and Imperialism* deals only with Western literature, and throughout it, Said shows only the greatest respect for the canon. You might object to his reading of, say, *Mansfield Park*, but at least he's one of the few critics who take Jane Austen seriously. Many conservatives want to write off her choice of "Mansfield" for the title and her choice of a slave plantation as a referenced setting, as if Austen didn't think long and hard about every decision she made artistically. And Said's defense of *Heart of Darkness*, along with his criticism of Achebe's reading, is thoughtful and complex. Finally, Said's own engagement with classical music displays his love of Western culture. As a critic of imperialism, Said insists that the West rise to its best rather than defend or attempt to elide its worst. He's no more anti-Western than, say, Martin Luther King, Jr.

And your flippant comment about Gates simply begs the question. His attitude about conservatives has nothing to do with his work as a literary critic.

LT: I'll direct you to three works analysing Said's bias, lies, errors and lack of competence to treat Middle Eastern languages, politics and culture: First, for a refutation of Said's anti-Western thesis about European Orientalists preparing the way for colonialist rule, Robert Irwin's Dangerous Knowledge, written by a real scholar (and proud Orientalist, I might add) of Middle Eastern languages; second, the historian Keith Windschuttle's article on Said in The New Criterion several years ago, for shorter examples and analyses of Said's anti-Western animus, bias and dubious selectivity in presenting his thesis; third, for an expose' of Said as a liar (e.g., his false claim that he and his family were Palestinian refugees) and fabricator of his past, see Jon Wiener's long articles in Commentary several years ago. FOR A START. Said spent much ink and air trashing real scholars like the venerable Bernard Lewis, but given his "literary" background, he might have turned to a writer like Sir Vidia Naipaul for sound sense about European colonialism. Or the Bengali historian and defender of the British Empire, Nirad Chaudhuri (Biography of an Unknown Indian, Thy Hand! Great Anarch! India: 1921-1952, A Passage to England, etc.). Incidentally, Chaudhuri credits British, French and German Orientalists with revitalising Sanskrit studies in India.

As for LT's comment about Said being one of the few critics to take Jane Austen seriously, anyone with even a casual knowledge of Austen scholarship will quickly discount such callow nonsense.

LT's point that ANY Shakespeare course--queer, feminist, post-colonial, Fraudian, etc. will do for presenting our language's greatest writer might have a go at Brian Vickers's Appropriating Shakespeare (1994). Again, LT, a callow and indefencible remark.

I'll leave the jocular Professor Gates and his work to LT, but the malignant influence of the profoundly anti-humanist Maoist Foucault is well-analysed (and deplored) in various critical and historical works of Dr Raymond Tallis (e.g., Not Saussure and Enemies of Hope), John Ellis (Against Deconstruction), Keith Windschuttle (The Killing of History) et multi alii.

A final concession to LT: Said WAS a gifted amateur pianist, and in light of that, at least I can praise him for SOMETHING. . . .

Parvum addendum: The flippancy in telling the above anecdote seems to rest more with Professor Gates's professed "committment" to departmental diversity that he expressed to Charlie Rose, who's ever the top-shelf name-dropper and celebrity suck-up. They had a good laugh over it, I remember.

One factual quibble.

The inventory of Prof. Said's three decade excercise in biographical fabrication was written by Justus Reid Wiener, not Jon Wiener.

Jon Wiener is a history professor one of whose more recent exercises was an attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of Michael Bellesiles. Confounding the two is most unfair to Justus Reid Wiener.

Thanks for the correction, AD. How I confused the names, I don't know--I've never read Jon Wiener . . .